by Dan A. Baker
“Rammy just called and said someone took both containers while he was away,” Will said.
“Oh dear, and I wanted to run one more subset,” she said. “How are the patients doing?
“I’m horny!” Easton blurted. Marjorie walked over and looked at him closely. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
“Like I’m seventeen,” Easton said, standing up straight. “I have to slam this damn thing in a drawer to get any work done!”
“Well, well,” Marjorie said, smiling broadly.
“We almost lost Darla last week,” Jasmine said flatly.
“Was it a stroke?” Marjorie asked.
“We don’t know, she, she…”
“Went wild,” Darla said.
“Marjorie turned to look at Darla, gasping loudly. “What the hell happened to you?”
“I stayed too long at the fair,” Darla said, not quite managing a smile.
“She, for some reason, reacted to the severe sunburn when a cardiac signal shutdown. We can’t figure it out. It’s just not possible that the genes we built could affect her cardiac function,” Jasmine said.
“It would have been nice to make another few runs on the 9900 to see if there’s any cross-reactivity,” Marjorie said.
“How are you feeling, Marjorie?” Jasmine asked.
“Fine, I miss my new lover though. He’s late as usual,” she said, opening the door slightly listening.
“Nielsen?” Jasmine asked.
“He said he’d be here. Dr. Easton, can I see you in the light?”
“You show me yours and I’ll show you mine!” he said, jumping up.
Marjorie looked at him for a long time, asking him to turn around.
“This is incredible, truly incredible,” she kept saying.
“We’ve only modulated one gene suite, and that was a minor correction,” Will said. “The feedback loops seem to work perfectly. He’s at a sixty six days post treatment, and everything is right on schedule, even his red blood cell count.”
“I get a lot of pain in my joints, though,” Easton said.
“Which joint?” Marjorie asked in a flash.
Easton looked at her and laughed. “Get your coat! Let’s go start a new civilization!” he roared.
“You’re on,” Marjorie said, high-fiving Easton.
They unloaded the big medical cooler carefully, and put the five sets of IV bags in the refrigerator. “This was all I could do. I waited as long as I could, as I was sure you would have some coding corrections,” she said, looking at Jasmine.
“We’ve diffracted all but six of the signaling proteins at Berkeley. So far, perfect. The 9900 has been giving us exactly what was predicted,” Jasmine said. “The dog regression data will be complete in another month. That will tell us how the system is working in vitro. So far, they’re all doing beautifully. Wait until you see Barney!
“Barney?” Marjorie asked.
“Wait until you see him,” Jasmine said.
“And I know that the crime in the city is getting worse, so I’m goin’ on down to the gun sale at the Church.” Will’s cell phone tune blared from his shirt pocket. He stepped out of the trailer and returned just a few minutes later.
“Nielsen’s not coming. He’s in Europe, but he wants to know if you’ll attend a party at his house next week,” Will said, eating a green apple.
“Stood up,” Marjorie said softly, “twice today.”
The big monsoon storms had passed and the weather was clear and very humid. Marjorie loved the big house and asked how much it was. She walked through the kitchen and past the pool to the dog enclosure. “That’s Barney?”
Barney jumped up on Marjorie so high he knocked her down, and then tried to mount her. “I can’t believe its Barney!” she said, getting up.
The big old Lab looked like a kid in his father’s overcoat.
“We’re not sure how long the skin will take to reshape, but he’s doing beautifully. They all get their final MRI’s next week. Then we do the DNA arrays. Mitzi was the first treated, and she’s the farthest along in regression,” Jasmine said.
“I love it out here,” Marjorie said, looking out across the bleak valley. “I just love the space and the clean air. I get ideas out here,” she said.
“What’s new in the genius bowl?” Jasmine asked, feeling a sudden pang of homesickness.
“It’s just the usual. The good scientists are leaving academia, there’re lots of buyouts, and I hear your PIES technology is creating quite a stir in London. It seems as though the Europeans have an interest in avoiding grotesque single gene diseases. The in vitro clinics are lining up to join the human trials, but Sunahara is stalling for some reason.” Marjorie rambled on for a few minutes, catching Jasmine up on the gossip.
“Will has one of his new hotrod stem cell organs for you,” Jasmine said.
“How do you like becoming a young woman again?” Marjorie asked.
“The stem cells are marvelous. I feel twenty years younger and…”
“And…”
“The sex is out of this world,” Jasmine finished.
“You can say that again,” Marjorie said. “I can’t wait for the implant! I’ve only had sixty-million cells in three infusions, so I can well imagine what a daily supply feels like.”
“Roy is doing beautifully. Every one of Earl’s constructs is working exactly the way he hoped they would. We’ll show you the Mir’s tomorrow, but until then, here comes the real thing.”
Nielsen’s bright blue chopper flew in from the north, settling down in a dust cloud a few hundred feet from the house. Will and Roy ran in from the desert.
“We saw scalps, real scalps from dead people!” Roy said to everyone at once. “And we saw real bows and real arrows that killed people from a long time ago.”
Marjorie’s jaw actually dropped. Roy was glowing. He had filled out completely, and looked like any normal eight-year-old boy.
“I’m not sick anymore, Marjorie,” he said sweetly.
“I can see that!” Marjorie said. She looked at Jasmine and at Will in the warm late afternoon light, and then slowly turned Roy around. Every field has its rewards, she thought, but was there anything better than seeing a healthy, strong young boy covered in dust and splattered with chocolate ice cream, where a frail, pathetic living thing had been before?
“You can see why he has so many girlfriends,” Jonelle said as she walked out on the deck. Marjorie hadn’t seen her for some time, and she looked like a new person. The fatigue lines were gone and she was beaming.
“It’s nice to see some product,” Marjorie said.
“We do good work around here,” Jasmine added, feeling the same rush of intense gratification.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
The next three weeks passed in such a pleasurable way that no one wanted the days to end. Getting the dogs down to the campus for their Mir’s was so difficult Will bought a divider for Jasmine’s Volvo. The dogs had eaten almost the entire interior and had to be heavily sedated for their long MRI sessions. Will took them out for a daily run in the desert, where they chased sticks as long as he would throw them.
The good news was the complete absence of pre-cancerous cells. With a steady supply of embryonic stem cells, and double P-53 checkpoints, the senescent cells with DNA damage went into apoptosis and died. This created a tremendous amount of cellular debris for the kidneys and liver to process, but in some of the dogs, this process was almost complete. Their tissue samples and cell samples were indistinguishable from young tissue. They were regressed to a body age that would be about young adulthood in the human.
“It works Marjorie! They’re healthy, cancer free, at a body age of about thirty human years, and they should stay that way until something kills them. What you’re looking at are the first living things in which aging has been reversed, and will be prevented,” he said triumphantly.
“I wonder what will kill them,” Marjorie said.
“Probably a car,�
�� Will said, getting up to stretch.
Easton had bought a house just up the street and came blasting down on his ATV every day. He looked like a normal sixty-year old retiree, except for his glittering eyes and huge smile.
Will and Easton had long discussions every night about how best to get American science back on track, and Easton shocked them all with the best of his ideas.
“I’ll just run for President,” he said one night. “Then I’ll show you a country that knows how to deal with religious Mullahs, IP lawyers, corporate overreaching, blanket patents, and runaway ethics boards,” he was almost completely caught up with the biotech world now, and astonished all of them with his unique insights and ideas.
The mornings were the best. Will and Jasmine swam together and dried off on two lounges that Will had wired together. They were just slipping into an impromptu nap when Roy brought the phone out.
“Someone from Berkeley,” he said and jumped into the pool.
Jasmine listened intently, and made several quick notes on the newspaper.
“Well?” Will asked.
“They’re all perfect. They’re emailing the final data tonight, but they are the exact proteins the genes encoded for. I can’t believe it,” Jasmine walked out onto the deck, slowly processing her feelings. The twenty-seven key signaling proteins in the treatment were exactly right. She felt let down, somehow, expecting variations or problems, and there was her premonition.
Easton understood the significance of the data implicitly. “You mean I might live? I might really live?” he asked.
Marjorie came in from the garage as the group was high filing. “You’re not serious!” she shouted. “All twenty-seven are perfect?”
Jasmine turned to her and smiled. “The data will be in tonight. The last six were perfect, with no ROMS anomalies,” Jasmine said.
“And this is for openers,” Easton said.
“What do you mean?” Will asked.
“We’re truly engineers now. We can create, manage and tweak any part of life we want, and be certain that it will behave in nature the way we think it will. The guesswork is over!” he said, suddenly picking Jasmine up and throwing her in the pool.
The party lasted until about two a.m. They started with freestyle races in the pool, which became a moonlight skinny dipping party when Roy went to sleep. Even Jonelle joined in and got tipsy on the champagne.
“I never thought I would see my son the way he is now. To think that he might live a full life and have a family. It’s all just too much; too much to hope for,” she blubbered, and then passed out.
“I don’t know why you’re so surprised it works,” Easton said. “Hell, you’ve been working towards this for over ten years, with computers and technology that we could only dream of. I’ll tell you one thing, Earl must have been one hell of a genius, and he perfectly understood how life gets things done,” he said, kicking his legs in the pool.
Jasmine could just see the great man returning. His face now looked like it did in the pictures of him during the human genome project. He had regressed from a body age of over ninety to about fifty-five. His skin tightly stretched around his body as his muscles and bones regenerated, growing back to their original size, but the face was unmistakable. The world was going to have this fine mind around for a very long time Jasmine thought.
Darla was subdued for the first time that Jasmine could remember. The brush with death had changed her in the same way it had changed Jasmine. She began to read and asked to borrow the little book on Buddhism. “Should I be meaningful?” she asked, looking at the group who started to laugh, but didn’t.
“You are meaningful,” Jasmine said for all of them.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Jasmine could never quite figure out why Will had a Jeep with a fiberglass enclosure and air conditioning until they made the long trip to the Brianna copper mine in the Hialeah Mountains. She rolled the window down while they were blasting along one of the long straight stretches of dirt road, and the dust suddenly filled the entire Jeep. “Now I get it,” she said, lamely, as Will looked over at her, sneezing.
“Windows, another adaptation to environment,” he said, pulling over to let the dust settle in the Jeep. They went for a short walk out onto a big rock overlook. The heat was just beginning to return in early May, and the heat waves were already rising off the desert floor below them. The winter had passed so fast she could scarcely believe it was spring.
“This is about what the world looked like when life first started,” Will said. “There was nothing but sun, wind, dust, and heat. It still amazes me that life made it at all,” he said.
“I don’t know what life is,” Jasmine said.
“Neither do I.”
Jasmine sat on the rock ledge looking out at the desert floor while Will went back to the Jeep. They were at the two-thousand foot level, which was noticeably cooler, and a pleasant little breeze dried the sweat under her shirt. Will came back with a small black nylon bag.
“Here’s a little adaptation to a hostile environment,” he said, unzipping the bag and slowly pulling out a black automatic pistol. Jasmine had never seen a gun up close.
“You have a gun?” she asked.
“You have to own a gun to get a driver’s license in Arizona,” Will joked.
He handed the compact automatic to Jasmine, who held it with both hands while turning it over and reading the printing on the gun.
“What does CAL .40 mean?” she asked, as he loaded a magazine.
“Well, it’s not CAL Berkeley, I can tell you that much,” he said.
“That’s the size of the bullet?” Jasmine asked.
“Yeah, a Smith and Wesson forty, as the gun nuts say,” he said, handing her a bright brass round. “That round evolved from about six-hundred years of shooting people,” Will said.
“What are you doing with a gun?” she asked.
“My dad used to take me hunting. It’s surprising how much cellular memory is still there. After two-million years of chasing animals, we have a lot of skill sets in our conserved behavior clusters, and it’s enjoyable to use them once in awhile,” he said, sliding the magazine into the gun.
“It must be a guy thing,” Jasmine said.
“This is what you call non-verbal communication,” he said, standing up and firing the gun. The blast hurt Jasmine’s ears.
“It’s too loud for me,” she answered, her ears ringing.
“Yeah, they tend to speak up in meetings,” as he fired the gun again.
Jasmine stood behind him as he fired the rest of the magazine, holding her ears. “That’s just horribly loud!” she yelled.
“That’s why you never see anyone talking in combat footage. No one can hear,” he said, smiling.
“Now it’s your turn,” as he pulled the magazine out of the gun.
“I’ve never shot a gun before,” Jasmine said.
“It’s one of the communication skills they don’t teach at Stanford,” he said, putting the gun in her hand. “You center the gun on the target, decide carefully if a strong letter might work instead, and then fire,” Will said, laughing his crazy laugh.
“Are these real bullets?” Jasmine asked.
“Yes, they’re real.”
Jasmine’s hand fit the compact gun perfectly. “Will it hurt my hand?”
“Hold it tightly and let your arm go up in the air when it goes off,” as he put one round in the magazine.
“I’ll just shoot one,” Jasmine said, fumbling with the magazine. The slide was hard to pull back. “Are they all this heavy?” she asked.
“All guns are heavy. Take a deep breath, and…”
Jasmine fired the gun and turned toward Will. “It hurts.”
“Point it down! Punching a hole in the sand is a lot better than punching a hole in the nice man,” Will said.
Will got a plastic water container from the Jeep and set it out in the desert. Jasmine, much to her surprise enjoyed shooting while hitting the g
allon jug several times.
“Do you think things could get rough for us?” she asked Will.
“If we get between some powerful people and what they want, yeah, it could get rough,” he said in the soft voice that Jasmine loved so much.
“Is that what this is for?” she asked.
Will nodded slowly, handing her a full magazine.
“What should we do to make sure that doesn’t happen?” she asked.
“Practice writing strong letters,” Will said.
The Jeep road began to climb steeply, and was almost impassable in several places. Huge rocks and nasty ruts slammed the Jeep to a halt several times. As they rounded a particularly rough section, Jasmine was startled to see pine trees.
“Not exactly Redwoods, but hey, they’re still trees,” Will said, pulling over in a little meadow. “It’s hard to believe we’re still in the desert,” he said, laying a sleeping bag down, and pulling a cooler from the Jeep.
“This is a lovely little meadow,” Jasmine said, walking around, picking the tiny yellow wildflowers.
“That’s what the word Las Vegas means,” Will said.
“Las Vegas?”
“The meadows, that’s what the words mean. There used to be little meadows around the springs up there, before the mob paved it all.”
Will pulled a green bean bag chair out of the Jeep, and spread the big dark blue blanket out on the new grass. They lay against the bean bag, looking down at the desert below, eating chicken sandwiches. The bluish haze from the heat extended for what looked like a hundred miles over the brutal harsh desert.
“How far did you go?” Jasmine asked Will as he handed her a sandwich.
Will didn’t answer the question until he finished the first half of the sandwich.
“We designed a mind,” he said.
A thousand little details fell into place in an instant. She was used to being shocked by the limitless reach of Will’s vision, but now, in an instant, she understood, and everything made perfect sense.
“Designer children?” she asked.
“Yeah, we were there almost ten years ago. Your work helped a lot. However, Walter wanted something else. He wanted to reliably design a human personality; a good one, and we did that,” Will said. “Earl’s work helped with that.”
