Trade Secrets

by Kathleen Knowles

  One of the first problems they were attempting to solve was ensuring that the entire blood sample could be used. The original volume was miniscule, and nothing could be wasted. Erica wouldn’t hear of any increase, not even a doubling of what was essentially a drop of blood. The protocol called for two drops. Period. A finger stick would easily yield more, but they were limited to two squeezes of a pricked finger. This was supposed to be enough for all sorts of tests, which meant any loss had a big impact. Gordon was tweaking Leonardo’s pipette mechanism so it would suck up the entire blood sample.

  Leonardo’s cover was removed, and they could see its innards. The robot pipette arm whirred as it went through its movements, exactly as though it was attached to the arm of a lab scientist working at a bench. They all watched its progress. The robot arm inserted the pipette tip into the microcap, and a pump aspirated the blood. Clearly a tiny amount was still left over. Tony and her lab cohorts knew that was inevitable. It wasn’t possible to get to zero, but the trick was to get as much as possible. Tony estimated waste was no more than one microliter, one fiftieth of the original volume.

  The pipette robot swiveled and attempted to expel the blood into the test chamber. It missed, and blood dripped all over the frame holding the test chamber.

  “Oops,” Gordon said. “I had that under control, but it must have drifted again when I was fiddling with the pump.”

  Tony shuddered. She caught the gazes of Jack and Martha, who mirrored her dismay. According to basic lab safety protocol, you couldn’t have blood splashes all over the place. All human blood was treated as potentially infectious. Spills and contamination had to be cleaned up right away and basically couldn’t happen inside Leonardo. The evidence of the frequency of blood spillage was visible everywhere. Tony took comfort in the fact that they used only their own blood, but still, her ingrained training made her freak out quietly every time this occurred. And it absolutely could not happen when they were testing patient samples whose infectious status was unknown. All that spilled blood would turn each Leonardo into a giant metal and plastic biohazard and expose whoever had to open it to fix it to pathogens like hepatitis and HIV. And these devices were to be sent to pharmaceutical companies and other places and put in the hands of customers.

  As an engineer, Gordon knew nothing about blood safety. Tony thought about how to go about training him when the time came, because it surely would. Leonardo would require adjustment and calibration, and he’d be the one to have to perform those tasks.

  “What do you think?” Gordon asked, meaning what did they think of the “dead” volume, as the leftover was called.

  Martha said, echoing Tony’s thoughts, “I think it’s the best we can hope for.”

  “Dynamite. Let me get the aim problem back under control,” Gordon said. “And then we can progress to the next step.”

  Tony and the other lab folks exchanged congratulations with Gordon, and they discussed which part of the system would be best to tackle next. Many components were involved. A centrifuge spun the blood and separated cells and plasma. A cytometer would count various types of white blood cells, and Tony’s special concern was a photomultiplier tube that measured the amount of material that would bind to the antigens in their little sample wells and translate that into numbers. Each testing apparatus was a complex piece of equipment on its own, and if any one of them malfunctioned, the test results would be inaccurate. Commercial lab equipment was prone to fail, as all of them knew only too well. The Leonardo was a whole other level of unreliable.

  This was going to a be long and painstaking process of trial and error and testing—not just of the assay itself, but of Leonardo. And Erica was waiting, metaphorically tapping her foot.

  When Tony had a break and called her back, Erica summoned her to her office. Tony, remembering what Sheila had said, tamped her fear down. She didn’t need to be defensive or offer explanations, Tony sternly told herself as she climbed the stairs to carpet land.

  “Thanks for coming up,” Erica said right away. “I really appreciate you taking the time to see me.”

  What was this? The boss calls, you go. That was basic employee behavior.

  “Now, I don’t want to dictate your private life, but I wanted to remind you of our need for discretion. If anything gets out about Leonardo, some other company might find out about it, and we’re sunk. We have to be very protective of all our trade secrets.”

  “Yes. I understand.” Tony thought she detected an implied threat somewhere in that statement, but maybe she was the paranoid one. Who’s this “we”? This was all Erica, it seemed. The royal “we.”

  “Oh, good. I just wanted to be sure you were okay.” Again, her syrupy, faux-concerned tone put Tony off.

  “Yep. Though I need to get back to work.” Tony was sure Erica could relate to that.

  As she walked downstairs back to the lab, it occurred to Tony that Erica’s worries didn’t even make sense. Tony, as an employee, and Sheila, as an investor, both had a profound interest in seeing GHS be successful. Neither of them had an incentive to blab company secrets to anyone. Tony wasn’t sure why Erica would see their relationship as threatening. It was a puzzle she wouldn’t likely solve, so she shoved it out of her head because she had to focus on a bigger problem Sheila and her father had had their blood tested on Leonardo 1.0, and Tony got the impression from Gordon that he was busy trying to make a working prototype.

  She found him alone in the engineering lab, sitting by Leonardo with several of its pieces scattered around as he frowned at them.

  “Hi, Gordo. How’s it going?”

  He turned and smiled sadly at her. “Oh, so very slowly. You know the drill.”

  “I sure do. You change one thing in a process, and then you have tweak something else. That’s how it works in labs, and I’m guessing it’s the same with robotics.”

  “Probably worse,” he said.

  “Hey, can I ask you a question?”

  He put down the screwdriver he’d been fiddling with and focused on her.

  “Yep. Fire away.”

  “Way before we started this project, Erica used to have Leonardo as a show-and-tell for investors and everybody, right?”

  “Right.” Gordon wasn’t making eye contact with her and had stiffened.

  “How did Erica use the old Leonardo to produce testing results, when it couldn’t actually do anything yet?”

  “Eamon would make it look like the blood was being tested by Leonardo, but the printout of the result was actually from a commercial blood analyzer.” Eamon was the engineer Gordon had replaced.

  “Oh. Isn’t that a little bit of a fake-out?” Tony asked. “And what commercial blood analyzer? Do we have one?”

  “Yeah. Erica wanted to show off to people like the president of Graff Drugs and other big investors. Yes, we have an Advia. You’ve never seen it because it’s behind a locked door that you don’t have card-key access to. Eamon had to turn over his stuff to me when he was canned.”

  “Right. I see.” This was becoming stranger and stranger, but Tony could see the utility of having an Advia. It was one of the standard commercial blood analyzers hospital clinical labs used. GHS could compare the results of Leonardo to those rendered by the Advia to see how close they were. The twist was the Advia analyzer required a whole lot more blood.

  “How did that work?” Tony asked, “Advias need a five-cc blood sample.”

  “Eamon and his team modified the Advia to work with smaller volumes.”

  “But…”

  “We have a diluter, and we can use the Advia in case we can’t get Leonardo working so we can generate data.”

  “But…?” Tony was thoroughly confused.

  Gordon’s long face was a blank. “We have to have backup. In case, you know, Leonardo 2.0 craps out, but we’re going to get Leonardo working.”

  “But that means the test results that Erica got for show-and-tell were from another device altogether.”

  Gordon beca
me visibly tense. “Yeah, so?”

  “Well, people got the actual results of blood tests that were supposedly done in Leonardo. How could that be?”

  “You’re a smart chick. Can I say chick?”

  “Not really, but I’ll ignore it this time.” He was clearly stalling. “Come on. What’s the story?”

  “As a smart woman, you would know that sometimes it pays to not ask too many questions around here.”

  Well, that was ridiculous. Research people like them were paid to ask a lot of questions and to provide answers to them.

  “I’m just curious. It’s kind of weird.”

  “Okay,” he said, swiveling on his stool. “You could find out from someone else. It’s not that big of a deal. Just don’t go around talking about it.”

  “I promise,” Tony said, sincerely.

  “Erica needed to have something to show, as you said. What Eamon did was make it look like the Leonardo did the test, but he programmed it with the result, and that’s what was shown on the printout. It all looked impressive, and the investors oohed and ahhed, and Erica was able to raise money.”

  “I see.” Tony was uneasy. That sure sounded underhanded and deceitful.

  “Yeah. That was the way it went. Eamon couldn’t actually make Leonardo work, but Erica needed something.”

  “Right. Well. Thanks for the information. I can tell you don’t like to talk about it.”

  “Not only that, Tony, but we truly can’t talk about it. If anything gets back to Erica, she pitches a huge fit and then fires the guy who talks. I know you’re a trustworthy person, so I wanted to answer your question, but I’m telling you, be careful.”

  “I will. Guess we better step up our game. We want Erica to really have something to show the outside investors.”

  “Yeah. Better get cracking,” he said, morosely.

  Tony left the engineering lab and decided to have lunch at her desk instead of in the cafeteria. She felt burdened by the secret Gordon had shared with her, along with gratified by his trust. She wanted to believe that Erica must have her reasons for doing what she did. Money must be it. They had to have money to keep the company in business. Research, testing, and perfecting a complex technology took time and scads of people and piles of money, and there were no shortcuts. Nor were there any guarantees that any of it would ultimately work, as Tony had discovered when she’d worked for the now-defunct biotech company.

  But that company, as far as she could tell, had never misled anyone. She didn’t know for sure, but she thought their investors must have a good idea of what was going on. Then she thought about the amounts of money involved. The investment figure Sheila had told her, along with the what might be the potential future worth of the company, staggered her. She felt nauseated. What if Leonardo didn’t work?

  It wasn’t until she’d almost finished her tuna sandwich that she realized that Gordon’s secret tale was one she ought not to share with Sheila. She was under an NDA, a non-disclosure agreement, and she wasn’t supposed to talk about anything to do with GHS. She wasn’t even allowed to put the name of the company where she worked in her LinkedIn profile. But Sheila had asked her a question, and something told her that Sheila would remember and ask her again.

  * * *

  Tony and her dad were having their usual Friday chat, except it was by phone, and it was nine thirty at night. Tony had just gotten home and was exhausted.

  She had stayed at work for twelve hours every day, including Friday. She’d finally concluded it wasn’t worthwhile to show up at seven a.m. only to have to wait for other people and then stay late into the evening. She started later, and that helped, a little bit. Not only was Tony not able to make her regular Friday visit with her dad, but worse, she had to keep putting Sheila off. Sheila was sad, but by some miracle she was tolerant of Tony’s insane work hours. Sheila had been traveling part of the time as well.

  She only said, “We’ll get together when you can. I’m not going anywhere.”

  Tony was reassured and hoped the opportunity for another date would come soon.

  “Sorry this is so late, Dad.”

  “Sure honey. How’s work?” he asked.

  How was work? Tony wasn’t sure how to answer that question. It was hard, for sure. Did she like it? Yes. But it was interfering with the progress of her relationship with Sheila. And Tony was eager to make progress, even as she feared the unknown future. She also thought about the secret she carried. Trying to decide whether to tell Sheila about Gordon’s little tidbit about Leonardo wasn’t helpful to her psyche.

  “It’s fine. How about you?”

  “I’m good.” He talked about trivia from his workplace.

  Listening to him actually soothed Tony, and she began to doze off. “Dad, I have to get off the phone and get some sleep.”

  “Sure, sure, sweetie. Talk to you soon.”

  Chapter Seven

  They’d not made any plans after the breakfast date that Erica Sanders had interrupted because work at the lab continued at its ruthless pace. Tony wanted very much not to lose her momentum with Sheila, and she feared Sheila would lose interest, but that didn’t appear to be happening.

  Whenever they talked, Sheila was sympathetic to Tony’s plight, and all she said was, “I can wait.” Tony and Sheila began a routine of texting back and forth when Tony was commuting, and they shared a phone call every few days.

  Between the mental and temporal demands of her work and her anxieties about the Leonardo and whether to tell Sheila her secret, Tony was able to justify her avoidance of making plans. But at the same time, she wanted to see Sheila and, if she could manage, sleep with her. They were headed down that path, but the toxic brain cloud of her secret complicated matters. Tony wanted to come clean before they had sex, but at the same time, if she did, it might not happen at all. In any case, she wasn’t yet able to be in the same actual space as Sheila, so neither sex nor spilling a secret was going to happen.

  When she walked into the lab on Friday morning, Erica was there, lab coat on, leaning against the table while she talked with the development group, as they’d been named. Before this moment, Gordon was the only one seeing and interacting with Erica.

  “How nice you could join us, Tony,” Erica said with an edge to her voice. Tony’s cohorts all wore shell-shocked expressions, and her own shoulders tensed immediately. She couldn’t be that late because it was only nine fifteen.

  Explanations about her whereabouts were out of the question, and she nodded briefly, waiting to hear what was going on.

  “We have to step up the pace with Leonardo,” Erica said. “Gordon thinks you can get one of the tests to work—the immunoassay. I’m going to Europe next week, and I want to show the Swiss something that is actually real. I need this done by next Tuesday. Tony, this is your baby. Can you do it?”

  Tony froze. She’d have to oversee every moment that Gordon spent working on Leonardo to make sure it would produce real results. They were, at that moment, not even close to having the Leonardo perform any of the assays properly.

  “Okay.” She spoke with far more confidence than she felt.

  “Dynamite,” Erica said. “I knew I could depend on you. I’ll check in later.” With that, she strode out of the lab without a single backward look.

  Gordon was pale, but Jack and Martha looked relieved. Their tests were not chosen. Tony wondered why Erica had picked her assay. Was this some sort of trial by fire?

  Jack said, “Look, whatever we can do to help. We’ll hang in with you.”

  “Thanks.” But Tony didn’t say they really couldn’t do anything. It was all going to be up to her and Gordon.

  Luckily, Gordon had managed to make the robot arm functional, and the group was about to go forward with reagent-fluid handling. The last step of Tony’s assay was the spectrophotometer reading that rendered the actual numbers. She hoped that piece of the Leonardo operations would be straightforward. Gordon had managed to install a small but functional spec af
ter he’d torn apart a full-size spec and rebuilt it in miniature. But nothing about R and D was ever easy or straightforward. Neither Gordon nor Tony was an expert on the technology of specs. Tony treated it as she treated all lab equipment—as a means to an end. She couldn’t even troubleshoot the spec if it malfunctioned.

  Tony supposed the paring down of Erica’s expectations from three assays to just one was good, but then she had drastically shortened the deadline.

  Gordon grinned without humor and said, “Alrighty then, Tony. Please write up the protocol, and we can get this monster programmed.”

  Tony had already worked out the volumes of the reagents. She hoped that Gordon could get the Leonardo’s robots to execute the fluid transfers properly.

  At seven p.m., Tony said, “You know, if I don’t get something to eat soon, I’m going to faint, and that’s that.”

  Gordon looked at her. “We don’t have time to go out to dinner. Let me call Erica.”

  He got off the phone and said, “She says not to worry. She’ll have some Mexican catered in. Half an hour.”

  “Fine,” Tony said. “I’ll be back in fifteen.” She’d barely gone to the bathroom in the last five hours. She didn’t know if Sheila had ever called back. She was certain she was going to miss the last train back to SF at this rate, and she didn’t relish spending the night in her desk chair. She knew if she asked, Sheila would come pick her up and take her home. What happened after that, she wasn’t sure.

  Tony went to her desk, and her phone said Sheila had called. She found a pack of Keebler crackers in her desk and munched on them while she formed what she wanted to say to Sheila.

  Hearing Sheila’s mellow, friendly tone on her voice mail made her feel a bit more grounded, and excited in spite of how tired she was.

  “Hi there. It’s Tony.”

  Sheila laughed and said archly, “Hi, this is Sheila, and I know it’s you. What’s happening?”