by Andrea Ring
I smile at her. “It’s okay. I’m glad you came.”
Dr. Kenneth leans forward. “We have questions, of course,” he says. “Lots of questions.”
I settle back against the couch and rub my sweaty hands on my jeans. “Shoot.”
He looks at Kate, and she nods at him. “Where did you get that protein sequence?”
“My body manufactures the protein. If I’d had the right equipment, I probably could have sequenced it myself, but it was done for me by the Attic.”
They exchange a quick glance. “So the Attic knows the sequence?”
“You know about the Attic?” I ask him.
“We’ve heard about it, but we don’t know anyone who works there, or who is connected to it.”
“My dad is the director,” I say. “He sequenced the protein himself. Exactly one other member of the Attic has had access to it. No one else.”
“You mean, the Attic’s not researching it?” Kate asks, surprised.
“No. My dad won’t let them.”
“Why the three-day deadline?” Kenneth asks. “You had to know we couldn’t do much in three days.”
“You did enough that you sought me out,” I say. “That was my goal. I want to work with you.”
“Why?” Kate says. “I mean, if you can do what you say you can do, and that’s a big if…you could get funding on your own. I could name fifty donors that would build you your own lab. Why us?”
I blow out a breath. “I know the human body, yeah, and I know the theory behind the research, but I’ve never worked in a lab. I don’t want to run things, I want to experiment. I want to bring what I can do to other people. I’m not in it for the money.” And then I remember Tessa and Erica, and I have to backtrack. “Actually, I could use some money right now, but that has nothing to do with my long-term goals. Long-term, I want to change medicine. Short-term, I have to learn how to protect myself. My abilities have physical consequences, and I have to be able to counter them. My dad also thinks there are people or entities that already want me, and they might take extreme measures to get at the knowledge I have. I need a safe place to develop my abilities further.”
“Why us?” she repeats.
“I read that you do those surgeries, to help sick kids. I like that.”
Kate smiles and shakes her head. “Thomas, we appreciate that, a lot, but I’m not sure we’re the best fit for you.”
Kenneth frowns at her. “Why not?” I ask.
“We don’t have a lot of funding yet. We’re new and untried. You say you need money…our budget can’t help you right now. Of course, the research will pay off in the long run, but for now…you might be better off going somewhere bigger and more established.”
“Where others will dictate what I do and how I do it. Where word could get out about my abilities before I’m ready. No,” I say. “I want to work with you.”
Kate opens her mouth to speak again, but Kenneth squeezes her knee and she closes it.
“This discussion is a little premature,” Kenneth says. “How do we know you’re telling the truth?”
“You want me to demonstrate?”
“If you can,” he says.
The first thought that pops into my head is Dacey. I hold out my hand in front of me. “Watch.”
I activate the stem cells under my fingernails, blah, blah, blah…and my middle fingernail grows as they watch.
Kate gives a small squeak. Kenneth leans forward to get a good look.
In ten seconds, my nail has curved into a two-foot long unicorn horn.
Kenneth takes my hand in his, turning it over and around, examining the nail from every angle.
“Can you show us something with living cells?”
“Sure.” I break the nail off my finger and place it on the coffee table. I stand up and fish my knife out of my pocket.
“Wait!” Kate says. “Do you have a towel? You’ll get blood all over the floor.”
“Don’t need it,” I say. “I’ll clot the blood immediately. Minimal mess.”`
I slash my palm open and hold it in front of them. I heal it while they watch.
“Cool,” Kate whispers under her breath.
“What if you cut off your finger?” Kenneth asks.
Kate slaps at his arm. “Kenneth! You want him to cut off his finger? That’s torture!”
I smile and sit back down. “I’ve never actually done that, but I know I could. We’ll try that in the lab.”
“I’m not going to condone torture in my lab,” she says.
“It’s not torture,” I say. “I just cut off the nerve signals. I don’t feel a thing.”
Kenneth squeezes Kate’s knee again, probably his signal for her to be quiet. “So you…you said you need to learn to protect yourself. What does that involve?” he asks.
“Well, after healing, my body shuts down and forces me to sleep. I need to be able to fight that. And I burn up a huge amount of calories. One time, I lost 15% of my body weight in under an hour. On the fantastic side, if someone drugs me, can I counter the drug’s effects. If someone renders me unconscious, can I bring myself out of it. If someone deprives me of sleep, can I take it. That sort of thing.” I look at Kate. “I guess I do want you to torture me.”
***
We talk for another thirty minutes, discussing my abilities and the initial tests they want to perform. I tell them that I can devote myself to their lab full time for no pay, and they insist on paying me $20 an hour. It won’t pay Erica’s bills, but it’s a start.
As they’re leaving, Kate says, “You know, we get requests almost every day from people who want us to consult on certain cases. We don’t have the time to answer all of them, and some of them pay pretty well. Maybe you could have a look and see if there’s something you could help with. It might generate some extra money.”
I agree that that sounds promising, and I shake their hands goodbye.
“See you Monday at eight,” I say.
***
“Thomas?”
I hear the front door slam shut and Tessa’s unhurried steps in the kitchen. I grab my empty orange juice cup from the coffee table and meet her with a hug.
“I don’t think life could get much crappier,” she says into my chest.
My stomach flips. I’m about to make it a whole lot crappier.
“You guys okay?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “Everything. He took everything! How could he do that?”
I don’t have an answer, so I just hold her and stroke her hair.
Tessa finally lifts her head and looks at me. “We might move,” she whispers, her voice quivering.
I nod. “I heard. But Tessa, I’m gonna do everything I can to keep that from happening.”
“What do you mean?”
I blow out a breath. “I got a job.”
She smiles sadly. “Thomas, I appreciate that, but I don’t think an after-school job is going to help.”
“I know,” I say. “I know you need big money, and I’m still working on that, I have a few ideas, but…I didn’t get an after-school job. I…I got a full-time job.”
She gasps. “You mean…”
I nod.
Tessa drops her arms from around my waist. “Full time?”
I nod again.
“You mean, no more school, no more tests, you’re really gonna work at the Planarian Institute and heal people, for real?”
I sigh, bite my lip, and nod.
Tessa grins and throws her arms back around me. “Finally!”
Chapter Twenty
“Coffee?” Kate asks when I walk in the front door of the Planarian Institute the next morning. She’s pouring herself a cup, and I think my first experiment should probably be finding a way to hook her up to the pot intravenously.
“Thanks,” I say, “but I can pour my own.”
“Ever after,” she says, “but the first day, for my very first employee, I’m pouring the coffee.”
I smile gratefully and take the mug s
he holds out to me. “So what happens first?”
She waves her hand. “Well, there’s paperwork, but let’s leave it ’til later. Let me show you around.”
We walk through the lab. Kate points out various machines, and I’m excited to get my hands on them. She senses this, I think, because she says, “Everything’s off limits. We have to train you extensively before you touch anything. It’s not personal, it’s just the rules.”
“Got it,” I say, instinctively stuffing my coffee-free hand in my pocket.
“Let me get you a notebook,” she says. “You should take notes.”
“I have perfect recall, Kate,” I remind her. “If you tell me, I’ll remember.”
She surveys the room. “What was the first thing I said to you this morning?”
“‘Coffee?’” I say. “I said, ‘Thanks, but I can pour my own.’ You said, ‘Ever after, but the first day, for my very first employee, I’m pouring the coffee.’”
Kate laughs. “Okay. No notes. Got it.”
She goes over protocol, cleanliness, personal protective gear, chain of custody and documentation, blah, blah, blah. It’s info I need to know, but I’ll spare you the details.
Kate shows me her office, where she has an extra desk set up for me. I get a new MacBook Air and iPad, on loan from Apple, Kate says, as some kind of program they have to move their products into the medical field. Sweet. She asks if she needs to show me how they work, and I just raise an eyebrow at her.
Kenneth comes out then from his office. He shakes my hand. “Thomas.”
“Hello, Kenneth. Nice to see you.”
He glances at Kate. “He catching on?” he asks her.
“Do you know how annoying it is to say something once and have it understood?”
Kenneth laughs. “So I got something I think we should look at it. Can we shift gears for a minute?”
“Sure,” she says, glancing at me. “What’s up?”
He hands her a letter, and Kate motions me over. We stand side by side, reading it.
My sixteen-year-old daughter, Olivia, was thrown from her horse on May 4th of this year. She was racing across the pasture at our home when a neighbor’s dog got loose and spooked the horse. She was thrown twenty feet and landed directly on her head.
She has been in a coma since, with doctors claiming little brain function and littler chance of recovery. I am desperate, a father in daily agony. I ask for your assistance for my beautiful daughter.
Included in this package are Olivia’s medical records, scans, everything her doctors have compiled these past months. Perhaps something will jump out at you that others have missed.
I’m looking for a miracle—I know that. As pastor of the Sinners Way Church, though, I also know the power of prayer and the power of faith. I have that faith that, together, we can bring Olivia back.
I’m enclosing a check. Please keep it as a donation to your facility for your time in reading this letter.
May God be with us all.
Pastor Cyrus Brooks
“Wow,” I say. “Sixteen.”
“It’s why we do what we do,” Kate says, then she fixes on Kenneth. “How much is the check for?”
“Ten large,” he says, and I blink.
“He gave you $10,000 for reading the letter?”
“Let’s look at the records,” she says, ignoring me.
No less than twelve doctors have reviewed her case. They all come to the same conclusion:
Diffuse axonal injury—basically head trauma from extreme deceleration (her fall), where the nerves in her brain were stretched. Those nerves are no longer functioning.
Depressed skull fracture with bone fragments piercing the brain caused both swelling and bleeding in the brain.
Cerebral anoxia (lack of oxygen to the brain) for approximately ten minutes compounded the injury. Brain cells die from lack of oxygen.
Patient is being kept alive with a ventilator—her lungs don’t work on their own. She is completely unresponsive.
“Well,” Kenneth says, removing his glasses and rubbing his eyes, “I guess I’ll take this check to the bank.”
“No, you won’t,” Kate says, snatching it from his hands. “We can’t help her. It wouldn’t be right.”
Kenneth sighs but doesn’t argue.
“I can help her,” I say.
Kenneth replaces his glasses and considers me. “At what cost to you?”
“Honestly, I don’t know. I grow neurons routinely at little cost, and I’ve grown new brain cells in response to injury exactly twice. Once, when I brought a woman out of a coma and had to re-grow some cells, and once when I fell off a jungle gym when I was six and had a small bleed in the frontal lobe. I didn’t even have to think about healing it, really. No-brainer.”
“Ha, ha,” Kate says with a frown.
“This would be more difficult, of course. I know that. But I also know I can do it.”
“This would be an experiment,” she says. “You can’t experiment on a sixteen-year-old girl.”
“She’s basically dead,” Kenneth says. “Who better to experiment on?”
Kate gapes at him. “Really?”
“Okay, no, not really,” he says, “but we can work on this. Pastor Cyrus won’t be pulling the plug on his daughter any time soon.”
Kate turns her back on us. “If someone has a functioning brain, but suffers isolated trauma, I’m on board. That’s what we’re here to study. Someone like Olivia…she’s gone, Kenneth. Her memory is wiped. Personality obliterated.” She turns back to us. “You may be able to bring her back to life, Thomas, but she won’t be Olivia. She’ll be a newborn, starting from scratch. Even after therapy…she won’t be the same old Olivia.”
I rummage through Olivia’s records and pull out a few sheets of paper.
“So, here,” I say, pointing, “we have an EEG showing no rhythms in the hippocampi. The neurons there are not firing. But if you look here,” and I pull out a CT scan of Olivia’s brain, “you can see that the hippocampi are largely unharmed, even after the oxygen deprivation. That means her long-term memory is fairly intact. The problem is here, with the medial septal nucleus. It’s damaged. And since it’s responsible for neuron activity in the hippocampi, all we have to do is repair it, and I believe her long-term memory will be restored.”
“What about her personality?” Kate asks.
“You’re just testing me,” I say with a smile. “You already know that personality can be affected by even the smallest head injury. Environment, genetics, and experience all affect personality. Neurons built over a lifetime affect personality and alter it as we go through life. Of course, she’s lost a lot of those neural connections, so her personality may change significantly. But maybe not.”
“Maybe not?” Kenneth says.
I take a few seconds to feel inside myself and search my brain. In the hippocampus, the long-term memory center, I find the “blueprint” of my body that I access all the time to tell me the status of things, like how many neural connections I have and where they’re located. “The hippocampus records all the information on the body. I can tell how many neurons I have in the brain, for example, and where they are. If I can access that portion of Olivia’s brain, if it’s intact, I can re-create those exact connections for her. Her personality should be relatively unchanged.”
Kate’s and Kenneth’s mouths drop open.
“And, there’s an experiment going on in the Attic…basically, I know that memory and information can be transferred to newly grown brain cells. I’m not sure how it works, but I know it can be done. So I could potentially start Olivia off with all the basics—how to walk, talk, read, write—if those parts of her brain are damaged beyond repair. She wouldn’t have to start from scratch.”
Kate lets out a choked sob, and both Kenneth and I startle. We stare at her, and tears start rolling down her cheeks. Kenneth puts his arm over her shoulders.
“What’s wrong?” he asks gently.
&nb
sp; Kate sniffs, swiping the back of her hand across her nose. “This is…do you realize…so many people can be helped. So many…so many lives saved.” She grabs my hand and holds it to her chest. “You’re a miracle. And the fact that we get to witness it, to be a part of it…” She dislodges herself from Kenneth and throws herself at my chest, crushing me in a bear hug.
I hug her back. It means so much to me that they’ve invited me here, that they’re listening, that they’re believing me.
Kenneth just gives me a shrug and a smile behind her back.
Chapter Twenty-One
I get home a little before six o’clock, and find Dad hovering over Grandma near the stove.
“Hello, Grandma, “ I say, kissing her cheek. She leans into the kiss and blows me one into the air.
“Where have you been?” she asks.
This is so familiar that tears prick my eyes. I glance at Dad, and he smiles at me.
“Work. I started a new job today.”
The teakettle whistles, and Dad and Grandma reach for it at the same moment.
“I can do it, Michael,” she says.
“It’s hot, Mom. Let me.”
They wrestle for a moment, but Dad wins. He pours the scalding water into her teacup while she glares at him.
“I’m not helpless, you know,” she says.
“You’re on vacation, Grandma,” I tell her, and I pull out a kitchen chair and wave at her to sit. “You’ve taken care of us for years. Let us take care of you.”
“And who are you?” she says, reluctantly sitting.
“Here’s your tea, Mom,” Dad says, setting the cup in front of her. She picks it up daintily with a trembling hand. “Careful now.”
Grandma gives Dad the evil eye. And like a five-year-old defying her father, she takes a big gulp of tea and gasps. The teacup falls to the floor in a steaming puddle of splintery china shards.
“Grandma!” I say, squatting beside her. “Did you burn yourself?”
She nods and her face goes blank.
“Did you…how’s your tongue?” I ask.
She shakes her head, as though clearing it. “My tongue? It’s fine. Why wouldn’t it be?”
“You burned yourself, Mom,” Dad says. “Is your mouth okay?”
