Forever and Ever

by Dan A. Baker

  “We could take Roy down there, pick up his stem cells from Will on the way, treat him, and get in a little vacation,” Jasmine said.

  Marjorie smiled, “and a little Samba time.”

  The point of no return loomed up like an invisible animal. This was it. They could still delay; still decide against this. Jasmine was calm. The burst of insight from her drowning experience instilled an unshakable confidence within her. There was no decision for her. The years of watching children like Roy die, and the burning resentment of Victor’s refusal to cooperate steeled Earl’s resolve beyond any further debate. They both looked at Marjorie.

  “Let’s get to work,” Marjorie said. “The telomerase inducer has been ready for some time. I have been in contact with Doug Cahill at Nano Cellular in Cleveland. They are showing a six-thousand percent increase in gene expression with their new peptide nano balls. They should infuse the cells of the lining of Roy’s arteries and large blood vessels, most of the heart muscle and most of the capillary beds.”

  “Are you sure these cells won’t become cancerous?” Jasmine asked, as the tempo increased.

  Marjorie flipped open her battered red leather lab book. “We’ve added double P-53 checkpoints. If any of his cells have picked up DNA damage the APOP-61 will kill them. I predict about a 2% apoptosis rate in the endothelial lining.”

  Earl smiled, looking over at Jasmine, “If we did have about sixty-million ES stem cells and delivered them at the same time we treat his circulatory system, they might migrate to the damaged valves in his heart and stay in his major vessels, which should dramatically increase his survival rate.” Marjorie nodded her head.

  “That would buy us some time, time to finish the gene therapy,” Jasmine said, feeling light headed from the excitement. “By the way, Will needs about two-hundred hours run time on the rockcrusher,” she finished.

  “We don’t even know if they’ll let us pick up the lease,” Earl said.

  “If it will save Victor sixty-thousand a month, they’ll do it,” Marjorie said.

  “We should think of a way to replace it if they don’t,” Jasmine said.

  “Not going to be easy. Every super computer cluster I know of is booked up at least a year in advance,” Marjorie said, sullenly. “And, the 9900 is absolutely beautiful for modeling.”

  “We’ll just hope Victor likes the idea of letting us pay down the lease,” Jasmine said, suddenly aware of just how fundamental the 9900 was to the almost terrifying task they were embarking on.

  “So much for the easy stuff,” Earl said.

  “Have you talked to Jonelle?” Marjorie asked.

  “I went over everything with her,” Earl said. “She’s scared, but she knows she is going to lose him if we don’t do this. Roy asked her how he could help other children who were like him. He said that after he came home from the Progeric kids gathering in Seattle. She is aboard all the way. They are both aboard all the way. “

  “What do we do if Roy gets better, I mean a lot better?” Marjorie asked.

  “I talked to Jonelle about that. We’ll keep him out of school for awhile. Outside guess is we can keep a lid on it for about three years, tops. By then we’ll know if we’ve done our homework,” Earl said.

  “And we’ll be far, far away,” Marjorie said, with her impish smile.

  “So do we start a company? Jasmine asked.

  “That’s what everyone else in this field does,” Earl said.

  “Let’s wait,” Marjorie said.

  Jasmine nodded her approval. “Once we have Roy stabilized, I’ll start on the regenerative gene cluster. About half of them are natural, I’ll need to design about thirty synthetic genes, build the regulators and signaling networks. I am very encouraged by the success O’Neil is having with radiation-modulated genes in mice. I plan to use about ten, to control the rate of liver and bone regeneration. I have some concerns about connective tissue,” Jasmine stated.

  “I wonder what’ll kill him,” Earl said out-loud, picking up the staccato beat of the conversation.

  “Probably hormonal imbalance, insulin shock, or the apoptosis gene will miss some pre-cancerous cells, probably in the skin,” Marjorie said.

  “Rockcrusher can’t model that,” Earl said.

  “Not yet,” Jasmine said.

  “I’ll go to San Diego tomorrow and talk to Synsequence guys. I’ll get them started on the synthetic genes,” Earl said quickly.

  The pieces are all there. The pieces are all there. The pieces are all there. Jasmine kept thinking as they looked at Earl’s suite of genes.

  “That’s magnificent, Earl,” Marjorie said at last, as he finished describing the elegant self-modulation loops in the regulation phase.

  Jasmine felt a warm familiar feeling when she saw the entire gene program displayed on the big teak table. The blinding perfection of the revelation of Roy’s treatment during her drowning came back to her now. It seemed as if the large sheet of butcher paper actually glowed.

  “There it is,” she said softly.

  “There it is,” Earl said, gently tracing the list with his long finger.

  “There it is,” Marjorie said, leaning into the display on the table.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Sunahara Corporation has accelerated the shut down phase of the acquisition for several reasons. All personal items are boxed in the company’s receiving area. All due compensation may be picked up from the company’s accounting firm at the following address. The building will be closed in 48 hours. Thank you all for your contribution to a very successful company.

  Victor Magnusson

  Jasmine flew down the stairs to the bioinformatics lab. It was completely empty. The 9900 was gone, and so was the large data library.

  “It went back to Fujitsu,” Victor said, standing behind Jasmine.

  “Victor! They shut down, and took everything,” Jasmine blurted.

  “They’re in a hurry.”

  “I guess this means they aren’t interested in a sub-lease,” Jasmine said, slowly beginning to realize how big a hurdle this was going to be. “Why, Victor?” she asked.

  “It’s because of cost and IP issues. These guys like a clean break, and they’re anxious to get started with PIES in Singapore. And frankly, they were a little pissed off you wouldn’t stay with the company, especially since they just put twenty-million dollars in your pocket.” Victor was wearing a gym suit, which struck Jasmine as unusual.

  “Well, I guess this is goodbye, then,” she said, still shocked at the sudden shut down.

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Victor said, warily.

  “What IP issues?” Jasmine asked suddenly.

  “Codes, modeling, and others,” Victor replied.

  “So they just loaded the entire company up in containers and sent it off to Singapore?” she said.

  “Air freight containers,” Victor corrected.

  “I feel a little violated,” Jasmine said.

  “Don’t do it Jasmine. Do not get involved in any illegal IP issues. Don’t violate Sunahara’s patent on telomerase, or you’ll end up living in a trailer house,” Victor said, looking straight at her.

  “Why would I do that?” Jasmine said.

  “Just don’t,” Victor said, walking away. He stopped at the corner and looked back.

  “Victor, what’s really going on?” Jasmine asked, looking straight at him.

  “Big stuff, big stakes, big players,” he said, and walked away.

  Jasmine quickly looked in on the protein purification lab, and the cold storage rooms. Everything was gone.

  In the parking lot she looked at the small mini-tower that had been a second home for almost five years. Two Singapore Airlines airfreight containers stood by the door. Suddenly she realized she had been seeing these on trucks in Menlo Park for months, not really knowing what they were.

  The short drive to the airport was a silent blur. Things were moving so fast, she was actually breathless. Earl came up the jet way smiling broadly. “
The synthetic gene guys in San Diego are much farther along than I thought!” he said, holding up two data DVD’s. “Here’re your protocols. Maybe we can run them on the rockcrusher,” Earl said.

  “It’s gone. Sunahara packed up the entire company, and closed the building,” Jasmine said.

  “Why’d they do that? Earl asked.

  “Victor said they just wanted a clean break, and that they were concerned about some vague IP problem,” she said, just beginning to realize that they were now on their own.

  “Maybe it’s a good thing. I’m ready. I like the feeling already,” he said, as they came off the elevator.

  “The synthetic gene guys have almost completed the assembly of the first cluster! It’s hard to believe! We should have the synthetic component in three weeks,” Earl said, putting his bag down, turning to hold Jasmine.

  “I wish I knew where this was all going,” she said, almost crying.

  “So do I, but it feels right. Hey, we are free! We can do whatever we want. If it stops feeling right, we’ll stop,” Earl said, starting the car.

  “We could develop this treatment, treat Roy, and then publish.”

  “No, I think we’ll develop the treatment, treat Roy, then just keep it quiet for a few years. Maybe things will change in this country,” Earl said.

  “Somehow, I don’t think that’s going to work,” Jasmine replied.

  “Let’s go buy a boat. That will take our minds of this monster for a few days. I found an almost new Farr 58 at Pier 40!”

  “I have to find a very fast supercomputer cluster, before my better judgment takes over and I come to my senses,” Jasmine said, suddenly laughing.

  “Maybe you should talk to Rammy. He knows the super computing scene in the Bay Area better than anyone else,” Earl said.

  “Good idea,” Jasmine said, shaking her head slowly. “I don’t know where he lives, and I don’t want to talk about this on the phone.”

  “I’ll take you down there. We’ll go to Santa Cruz, then go look at the boat.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  As they pulled into the boathouse parking lot in Santa Cruz the strangeness began. “Are you sure this is the right place?” Jasmine said, “It looks like a junkyard.” All along one side of the big gravel parking lot was a row of wrecked Porsches sitting on jack stands, all painted with bizarre images and partially torn apart. Earl found a place to park next to a Subaru Outback that was converted to a pickup truck. “It gets weirder,” Earl said, locking the car.

  The boathouse was a big old gray wooden building, badly weathered and sagging gently. Jasmine pulled the big sliding door back slowly, since no one answered her knock. Inside was a huge room with at least ten large couches. The Return of the King was playing on a huge flat panel display hanging on one wall. About ten people were sleeping on the couches, although it was almost noon. Jasmine hesitated, wondering if they should come back later. Rammy suddenly rounded a corner in a bright red kimono, holding his finger over his lips.

  “It’s nap time,” he said softly. “Let’s go out to the Porsche porch.”

  Rammy was huge by any estimate, but he had a barreling, vigorous walk and eyes that twinkled constantly. Jasmine wondered how he ever got into the sports cars in the parking lot.

  A long covered porch opened out on a backyard littered with computer server cabinets and a weird collection of day glow painted mannequins covered with rhinestones. Seats from Rammy’s wrecked Porsches sat on crudely welded frames like giant office chairs. “You like the sculpture garden?” he asked. “I got the idea from Stanford.”

  “Is this your Rhinestone period?” Jasmine asked.

  “Early rhinestone period,” he said, slowly kissing Jasmine’s hand, then reaching over to shake Earl’s hand. “What brings you to Santa Cruz?” he asked.

  “Genetechna was bought out and shut down, rather suddenly, and I’ve decided to stay in protein modeling. Earl and I are designing a rather large gene-based therapy, and I need to encode models for about sixty proteins. Including a suite of control and modulation genes and I need your help,” Jasmine said.

  “You don’t have access to the mean 9900?” Rammy asked.

  “They wouldn’t let me sublease it,” Jasmine said.

  “So, Fujitsu picked it up? I mean, where is it?” Rammy asked.

  “I don’t know, but I need access to a machine in that class, for about two-hundred hours, maybe more,” Jasmine said.

  “Not going to be easy. The Feds are really touchy about who’s using hot supercomputer clusters, and you can’t just go buy one,” he said.

  “What do you have here, now?” Earl asked.

  “The Monkey, but it would take us, two, maybe three years to run what you’re talking about on the Monkey,” he said, rubbing his eyes.

  “What’s the Monkey?” Jasmine asked.

  “My first born,” he said. “Want to see it?”

  He walked down the porch to a small door that opened into the old boat shed. Before he flipped on the light, Jasmine could just make out thousands of blinking green lights. When the loudly buzzing fluorescent lights went on, Jasmine’s mouth dropped open. Stacked on three thirty foot rows of banquet tables were hundreds and hundreds of PC’s all cabled together with a jungle of wires, and painted in bizarre oranges and reds and revolting greens.

  “A PC Supercomputer cluster for the unwashed,” Rammy said walking down the rows of PC’s. “We hit seven megaflops last week! It’s a new record for Homegrowns!” Rammy shouted, grabbing a battery-operated child’s wand and throwing himself into a huge pea green Lazy Boy chair. “Life, life I tell you! My creature has life!” he shouted as he touched a keyboard with the wand and all the PCs blinked on. The dusty fluorescent lights dimmed and buzzed as the rows of PCs started. A huge flat screen with rusty chains suspended from the ceiling, snapped as it came out of standby mode.

  “What are you running on it now?” Earl asked.

  “I’m screwing around, mostly. We ran a continuous live 3D model of Trestles for almost a week on the cable channel. Rammy leaped up and pressed a DVD player. Video of a large ocean wave breaking suddenly dissolved into a computer view of the wave in green framework, displaying the forward velocity, mass, exact shape, and a number. “Real time, we ran that in real time! I mean, it was huge!”

  “What’s the number?” Jasmine asked.

  “Santa Cruz Ocean Watching Society Certification number,” Rammy replied, trying to sound serious.

  Jasmine, Earl, and Rammy all burst into laughter. “Everything has to have a number, and everything has to be serious, or hey, we’re not Americans,” he said.

  “Did you say you hit seven megaflops?” Earl said.

  “Yes, unless it rains!”

  “I wonder if that would be enough for Marjorie to use in her work,” Earl asked Jasmine.

  “I’ll ask her,” Jasmine said.

  “You never answered my question,” he said out of the blue.

  “What was that?” Jasmine asked.

  “Did Fujitsu pick up the 9900, or is it still at Genetechna?”

  “It’s definitely not at Genetechna,” Jasmine said.

  “Then Fujitsu picked it up, they had to. It can only be at that site or in their warehouse,” he said.

  “What will they do with it?” Jasmine asked.

  “Sit on it. Wait till the security certificate expires, then sell it overseas, to the Chinese or the Israelis,” he said dryly.

  “It was a real surprise to me. I had hoped to sublease it from Sunahara.”

  “I was too. I had a tiny favor to ask you, if you had the rockcrusher.”

  “A favor,” Jasmine replied.

  “Yes, a small one, too small to mention. It involves a couple of pet molecules of mine,” he said, looking away.

  “Rammy, Earl, Marjorie and I have decided to…,” Jasmine said.

  “Go underground and treat the little old kids with Telomerase; then build a gene based therapy that will reverse the aging process
in them and everyone else who wants to look like Brittany Spears,” he said.

  “How did you know?” Jasmine asked, rattled.

  “The biotech underground is small. News travels fast,” he said, “Will Behlen said you’d be down. He wanted to know if you were able to use the rockcrusher, that’s all. Too bad the ‘greedheads’ wouldn’t play ball.”

  “We’ll make out somehow. I can read the protein diffractions at the Advanced Light Source in Berkeley, and if we can run Marjorie’s prelims here, that would help. The gene design and protein modeling work will be much harder,” Jasmine said.

  “How are you going to get diffraction runs at Berkeley?” Rammy asked.

  “One of Marjorie’s grad students just started up there. We should be able to squeeze in a few proteins at the end of the big runs,” Jasmine said.

  “That’s handy. It’s always nice to have a friend with a cyclotron, especially if you need family photos of your proteins,” he said.

  “She just started and she’s an Israeli girl,” Jasmine said. “I helped her get the job.”

  “Way cool. So Fujitsu picked it up, huh?” Rammy asked again.

  “I’m sure they did,” Jasmine answered, wondering why he kept asking.

  “I have a list of Marjorie’s runs. Do you think the Monkey can handle them?” Jasmine asked.

  “Let’s see, yeah, I can run these, but it will take a few weeks, and you know the Monkey is hungry,” he said.

  “Money isn’t a problem,” Jasmine said.

  “The Monkey doesn’t eat money,” he said.

  Jasmine looked at Rammy briefly, remembering what Will had told her about money not existing in the underground.

  “What does the Monkey eat?” Jasmine asked.

  “Favors,” he replied, turning his Super Computer off with his sparkling toy wand. “Tell Auntie Margie to bring me some cookies.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “It’s hell, pure hell! That’s what it is! Every time I move, the pain is pure hell!” Herbert yelled. His voice was so hoarse and frail that Jasmine had trouble hearing him.