Syndrome

by Thomas Hoover

  "My, my, we're looking well," she declared ignoring Grant. "I'm glad you're finally awake. He told us to call him the minute. . They're all saying you and your mother must have special genes. You've both been such terrific patients. He'd been keeping you sedated but he discontinued that medication this afternoon. He wanted you to wake up with your mind clear."

  "Well, I'd really like to get up and go to the bathroom and get something to eat," Ally said "Mainly, I just want to get out of this bed for a stretch before I start developing bedsores. I'm feeling strong, for now at least. Can you unhook some of these wires and suction cups? And I certainly don't need that IV. I'm so hungry I could inhale a quart of ice cream in one gulp."

  "Yes, of course," Marion said and began dismantling the intravenous tubes. "We only monitor you and hydrate you when you're not conscious. The standard procedure is to let you get up and start getting some exercise as soon as possible. You should be careful, though, because at this point you're not as strong as you think. Changes are taking place in your body that require a lot of your energy. If you feel up to it, you could walk around for a couple of minutes, but you shouldn't let yourself get tired."

  As Marion continued now removing the taped-on sensors, Ally looked up and saw another uniformed nurse standing in the doorway. She also was middle-aged, with prematurely gray hair, and she was holding a syringe.

  "May I come in?" she asked. "At this stage he needs a blood sample every three hours. Just twenty cc's."

  Ally watched as the new nurse quickly and deftly took a small sample of blood. Then she capped it off and turned to leave.

  "I need to centrifuge this immediately."

  And she was gone.

  Then Marion finished removing the IV tube and catheter and all the taped-on electrodes.

  "If you want to get up and use the bathroom and walk around a little, I'm sure it would be all right. I'll come back in a few minutes and bring you a tray with a nice healthy bowl of broth."

  The moment she was out the door, Ally turned to Grant.

  "I want to see Kristen. Now."

  "I thought the first thing you wanted was to go to the bathroom."

  "I'll get to that. You said she was downstairs somewhere. How do I get there?"

  "It's in the security zone," he said. "You're not authorized-"

  "You're a big shot around here. Winston Bartlett's right-hand flunky. So why don't you authorize me yourself."

  "Ally, you know I can't do that."

  "Thentakeme there."

  "I don't want to see Kristen anymore," he declared, biting his lip. "She's completely lost. . everything. I could deal with it until I saw her this morning. It's just too much."

  "Has he let her mother see her?"

  "Are you kidding? Letting that psycho anywhere near her is the last thing anybody's going to do."

  "Then get mein, dammit."

  "Ally, forget about it."

  "Why?"

  He hesitated, as though marshaling his thoughts.

  "Sis," he said finally, "there're only so many risks I can take for you, and they have to be about something that matters. Forget about Kristen. Nothing can save her now. But I'm offering to help you get out of here before they go any further. I can't be seen helping you, but they've started you down a road that you don't want to go, believe me. I got you into this, but if there's still time, I want to try to help get you out."

  She didn't know what was going on, but if Grant of all people was freaked about what Karl Van de Vliet had in store for her, then maybe she'd better take it seriously.

  But she was through relying on him for anything.

  "Okay, but I want to call somebody to come and get me."

  "Are you referring to that reporter, by any chance?" he asked. "The guy who drove you here? W.B. hates him."

  "Yes." She was puzzled that he would know about Stone. "How do you-"

  "Bartlett has him."

  "What do you mean?"

  "He's radioactive now. I actually kicked him out of here myself yesterday. This is not a moment for press freedom. He could screw up everything. W.B. said he's doing a book. No way is that guy going to be allowed human contact with anybody till the sale of Gerex is in the bank. He had a run-in with Bartlett in the city and they took him somewhere. I don't know the location. And I don't want to know."

  "Oh my God."

  "He's most likely okay. It's just temporary safekeeping."

  "All the more reason I'm not leaving till I see Kristen."

  "There's no way you're going to get into where they're keeping her, Ally."

  "All right." There was no arguing with him when he was this freaked. "What do you want me to do?"

  He pulled a plastic card out of his jacket pocket. It was white, withthe gerex corporationembossed on one side and a magnetic strip on the other.

  "This is a master key to this place. Because of security, you can't just go out the front, through the lobby. But if you take the elevator down to the first floor of the basement, where the lab is, there's a fire exit there, in the back, that opens onto a path down to the lake. If you'll go out that door and wait right there, I'll come around and get you to the parking lot. I know a way that will miss their surveillance cameras. I'm scheduled to go back to the city now and I'll take you with me."

  "But if I wanted to see Kristen?"

  "You'd have to go into the laboratory and then take the elevator that's inside there. Don't even think about it. It's way too risky."

  She looked at him, trying to gauge his sincerity. Had he become a new man, finally caring about somebody other than himself? Or had a glimpse of whatever had happened to Kristen scared the hell out him and awakened the specter of being part of a felonious enterprise?

  "Why are you doing this?"

  "To make up for a few things," he said, turning to leave.

  With that, he walked out and quietly closed the door.

  That remains to be seen,she told herself.

  She went to the bathroom, then put on a bathrobe and headed out into the hallway. The nurse's station was not occupied. Marion was still in the kitchen on the first floor, presumably.

  Good.

  She was feeling shaky, not nearly as strong as she'd initially thought she was, but she pressed on, taking the elevator, her first use of Grant's Gerex master key. She bypassed the first floor and an instant later she was stepping into the basement's laboratory area.

  At the moment it appeared to be entirely deserted, though the fluorescent lights bathed the space in a stark, pitiless light. Down the hall was Dr. Van de Vliet's office and the examining room, where she and her mother had gone when they were being admitted. At this time of night, everything was closed and probably locked.

  She turned and looked at the forbidding entryway to the glass-enclosed laboratory. Through the transparent walls she could see the dim glow of CRT screens and incubators filled with petri dishes. And there at the back was-could her eyes be trusted? — the outline of an elevator door. She hadn't noticed it until this minute. It seemed to be built with a nod toward camouflage.

  It could lead to Kristen, she told herself. Find out what Grant is so freaked about. He can wait a couple of minutes.

  She was starting to feel even weaker, but she pressed on. Next to the heavy steel, high-security air lock leading into the laboratory was a card reader and she swiped the white card through the slot.

  The air lock opened silent and perfunctory. When she went through, the door behind her automatically closed and then the hermetically sealed door in front of her opened. She was in.

  Next a bright fluorescent light clicked on, all by itself.

  "Jesus!"

  Maybe it was connected to a motion sensor. Or on a timer.

  Then she looked around.This, she thought,is the place where the Gerex Corporation has supposedly changed medical history.What was created in this very room had, if Grant was telling the truth, saved her mother's sanity. And if she could believe the monitors she had looked at i
n her room, her own heart condition had begun to be reversed after a lifetime of progressive decline.

  Yet something about it had been pushed too far. Somewhere in the midst of this miracle, the Gerex Corporation had done something so obscene no one could even talk about it.

  She looked around the laboratory, wishing she could understand what she was seeing. It smelled like solvent, acetone, with a mingling of more pungent fumes. The black slate laboratory workbenches were spotlessly hygienic and equipped with several large microscopes that featured flat-panel screens. She noticed a heavy server computer at the back, presumably networked to all the terminals in the building, and then she remembered that Van de Vliet had once spoken of computer simulations.

  Someday soon, she told herself, she was going to understand what really was going on here, but for now she headed for the elevator.

  Another zip of Grant's white card and the door opened. There was indeed a floor below the laboratory, and she pushed the button. The Dorian Institute was all about security, but this subbasement area was doubly secure.

  After a quick trip down, the elevator door opened onto another air lock chamber, this an exit from the pressurized environment of the laboratory.

  Why, she wondered, had no one spotted her yet? Perhaps this part of the clinic was such a lockdown that nurses and guards weren't necessary.

  As she stepped from the air lock, she was in a hallway. She walked down and tried the first unmarked door. It was locked, but then she saw the slot for her card. She slipped it in and the door opened automatically.

  The room she entered had a row of beds, each shrouded in a curtain. As she walked down the center aisle, she realized that only one of the beds was occupied.

  And, yes, it was Kristen. She was lying there and when Ally slid back the curtain, her eyes clicked open, startled.

  "Hi, don't be afraid. I'm a friend." She quietly finished drawing the curtain aside.

  Now the once-breezy Kristen Starr was staring at her with angry eyes, the false bravado of a frightened child. And she looked much younger than she had in the head shot she'd attached to the walls of her town house with steak knives. She said nothing for a moment; then she mouthed, "Who are you?"

  "I talked to you on the phone a couple of days ago," Ally said, not sure herself exactly when it was, "when you went down to your place on West Eleventh Street."

  "I don't know you," she mouthed again, this time with a slight whisper.

  "My name is Ally Hampton." She moved next to her so she could keep her voice down. "I'm an interior designer. I once did an apartment for you in Chelsea."

  "I'm about to go on a journey," she whispered. "I don't remember you, but maybe you're the one who's going with me.

  There was something otherworldly and chilling about her voice.

  "What journey do you-"

  "We were going to go away. That's what he promised. Just us two. Well, I'm ready. I want to go out and play. But he doesn't care anymore. He just wants me to disappear. So that's what I'll do. Only we'll do it together, you and me." She reached up from her bed and ran a finger across Ally's face. "Will you take me out of here? He promised me everything, that I could get it all back. But now I know he didn't care. He was just using me." She stopped, then gave a cruel laugh from the back of her throat. "But now it's going to happen to him too. I can tell. That's why he doesn't want to see me anymore. He doesn't want to see what's in store forhim."

  What has happened?Ally wondered.It sounds like some kind of bizarre experiment gone wrong.

  "Won't you come with me?" Kristen went on. "We'll go to a place nobody has ever been to before. It'll be just us."

  Her seductive eyes, at once plaintive and demanding, would have lured anyone toward wherever she wanted to go. For a careless moment Ally found herself wanting to follow them.

  No, this is madness.

  Or, Ally thought with horror,is she seeing something in me that I can't see?

  "Kristen, listen to me. Please. I think it's very possible I've just had a stem cell procedure. For my heart. I don't know if it's like what you had, but I want to know what happened to you."

  "Don't do it," she mumbled, seeming to come back to a kind of reality. "Just get out of here now. After. . it starts, he gives you shots and things, but nothing works."

  Ally felt her consciousness start to wobble. She reached out and seized the edge of the bed for support.

  "Kristen, talk to me."

  Her eyes went blank again, and Ally could just barely make out what she mumbled next. In fact, all she could catch were random words, words that only drifted through her consciousness and failed to stick or make any sense. It was as though Kristen were in a stance and sleepwalking among the words of some alien language.

  "Young," Kristen seemed to say. "You want to be. . to stay. Old is so horrible. Time. You're young and then suddenly you're old and it turns out you can't. ."

  Ally heard the words, but they didn't make any sense.

  "I'm sorry, Kristen. I'm feeling a little dizzy."

  "It's started," she said, abruptly coherent again and focusing in on Ally. "That's how it began with me. At first they said everything was okay and then it wasn't."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "It's happening throughout my body." She sobbed. "I've stopped having periods and I'm getting acne. Everything is. . changing."

  The words drifted through space, and Ally felt like she was hallucinating, in a place where time was sliding sideways. The images were all retro, things from her past that floated through her vision in reverse chronological order.

  That was it. In her mind, time was going backwards. But was it just in her mind? She looked again at Kristen and gasped. Finally,finallyshe understood the horror of what was really happening. .

  Oh my God.

  "I got here as soon as I could after they called me," came a voice from the doorway. She turned and saw Karl Van de Vliet, together with the nurse Marion. "You really shouldn't be down here. I don't know who gave you a card. But we've brought a wheelchair. You really should be resting."

  Marion rolled the chair through the door and expertly plucked the card from the reader.

  "Now, please sit down," she said. "We all just want to be on the safe side, don't we? I'll need to give you a sedative."

  Ally looked at Van de Vliet, wanting to strangle him.

  "No, you're not giving me a damned sedative. I don't want to be on the 'safe side.' I want the truth. And I want itnow."

  Chapter 30

  Thursday, April 9

  11:16 P.M.

  "Let's go into the lab to talk," Van de Vliet said. "I'm very sorry I wasn't here when you came out of sedation. But Marion called me at home, as I'd told her to do, and I came in as quickly as I could. I've got a place on the lake, just down the road, so I'm never far away."

  He was rolling her through the air lock door, Marion behind them. Then they took the elevator up. She was furious that Kristen was being left behind like an abandoned casualty of war.

  Ally also was reminding herself about her appointment with Grant to get the hell out. But her mind was having trouble holding a lot of thoughts at once.

  He pushed her wheelchair into the section of the laboratory where a line of computer terminals was stationed. After he'd fluffed a pillow behind her head and turned off some of the glaring fluorescents, he began.

  "Alexa, this is a delicate time for you. We need to get you upstairs as quickly as possible and feed you some broth and put you back to bed. However, I want very much to give you an update on the status of your treatment. The headline is, it's going very well. We fused some of the telomerase enzyme with your existing stem cells and your response was immediate. In fact, it appears the new heart tissue has reached critical mass and has already begun replicating itself. We've learned to expect the unexpected around here, but your response has significantly exceeded our simulations."

  He turned to Marion and asked her to go up and make sure Alexa's bedding
had been changed. "We'll be up in a second. And please make sure that bowl of broth is ready and waiting."

  After she departed through the air lock, he walked over to a lab bench and checked the numbers that were scrolling on a CRT screen.

  "All right," Ally said "talk to me. I just saw Kristen. I'm still not sure if I believe what I think is happening, but I want the real story and I want it now."

  "That's part of what I need to discuss with you." He glanced away for a long moment, a pained expression on his face, seeming to collect his thoughts. Finally he turned back. "You see, the clinical trials have demonstrated that we can use the telomerase enzyme to 'immortalize' a patient's own stem cells and then rejuvenate their brain or liver or even their heart. So thenextquestion that's hanging out there in space is obvious. What would happen if we could find a way to generalize the enzyme and disperse it throughout someone's entire body, not restricting it to just one organ? And not just rejuvenate-regenerate."

  This question had actually passed fleetingly through her consciousness, though not fully articulated. It had taken the form of wondering where the use of these "immortal" cells could eventually lead.

  "The trick would be to have just enough enzyme in your bloodstream to replace senescent cells as they are about to the, but not so much that healthy cells are replaced." He paused searching for a metaphor. "If we thought of the process of cell senescence as something inexorable and steady, like a treadmill, then what we want to do is run just fast enough to stay in one place."

  "This whole thing does sound likeAlice in Wonderland."

  "Yes, well. . if we could do that, then it's possible, just possible, that one's entire body would simply begin regenerating itself instead of aging. Not just your skin. All of you. That's the theory behind what we've called the Beta procedure."

  "But is that something you ethically ought to be doing?" she said, feeling a sense of dismay, of playing God. "Isn't that going too far?"

  "Frankly, I'm beginning to agree with you, but there are others who ask,how far is too far? Half the medicines we now have are intended to trick the body's responses somehow-or to meddle in some other way, turning off stop-and- go signals at the cellular level. For example, some birth control pills make your bodythinkyou're already pregnant. They trick our natural mechanisms. That kind of thing is commonplace in medicine today. But our research is poised for the next level, to answer the question of how long we can actually live. So here's the argument. There's no reason the human life span has to be what it is. In some unhealthy nations the average citizen doesn't even reach sixty. Whereas in others, like the United States and Japan, the mean is already well past three score and ten. So what is right? What is reasonable? A hundred? Two hundred? It's entirely possible to believe we could live productive lives at least twice as long as we do now."