Page 54 of Heart of Danger
“Yes. It is a terrible disease. I wanted to have a hand in helping to do something about it.”
“So, you have the patients for how long?”
“Six months. We test various drug protocols. We were very excited about a new drug. It recreated new neuronal connections that bypassed the damaged areas of the brain and was definitely in line with the latest hypotheses of the brain as a connectome. Management believed we might be onto a miracle drug. We’d tested it on chimpanzees and their problem-solving abilities shot up.” She stopped, remembering the chimpanzee massacre with a shudder. “Unfortunately, one iteration was a major fail. We were drawing up protocols for human trials when it emerged that after about a month of treatment, the prototype drug drove the chimpanzees insane. There was an uprising. An entire generation of chimps had to be put down. They were highly aggressive, out of control. It was a disaster.”
“Move on.” His jaw muscles clenched. “Patient Nine.”
Yeah. Happy to move on, very happy.
The massacre of the chimps had been a dark cloud hovering over the lab for months.
“Of course. Patients are switched out on June 30 and December 31. So, on December 31 we had a new intake, 20 patients. I started work in the new year on January 2 and took the original anamneses. Patients one through twenty, suffering from severe dementia. I assessed them all, going over their medical records. Everything had to be impeccable because if the new drug with the new molecule worked, we had to have a baseline. So—though the patients’ medical records were complete, we started again from scratch. They were too advanced to do the usual mini mental exams but we did everything else. Fundoscopy to measure intracranial pressure, EMGs to measure fasciculation, the Barré test for pronator drift…the lot. Then each patient had a complete blood workup and a functional MRI.”
He hadn’t looked lost and his eyes hadn’t glazed over. He’d had medic training. Clearly, he was familiar with medical terminology.
“Immediately I saw that there was something…different about Patient Nine.”
“Different how?”
She shrugged. “I couldn’t put my finger on it until the (f)MRI came back. Functional MRIs in dementia patients show completely different patterns than in normal patients. And they show inactive areas. Did you ever see those maps of internet connections in North Korea before the Uprising and the founding of the Korean Republic? Where South Korea was lit up and North Korea was dark?”
He nodded.
“It’s like that in dementia patients. Entirely blank areas, in human brains that have more connections than there are stars in the Milky Way. Patient Nine’s scan was completely different. Clinically, he showed signs of very advanced dementia. But his scan—it was, well, it was of the most unusual scans I’d ever seen. It was as if—as if his mental faculties had been artificially suppressed, but underneath there was cognitive function. Highly unusual.”
“What did he look like?” His eyes had sharpened, narrowed. He seemed to be listening to her with his ears, but also with his eyes and his skin, attention completely focused on her.
“Tall,” she answered. “Even bedridden. His charts put him at one meter ninety-five, weight sixty-five kg, down from probably one ten. He was emaciated. He’d once been a muscular man, but now his skin hung off his bones. That is usual in advanced dementia cases. Patients lose their appetite, sometimes they even forget what food is for, or they mistake objects for food. Everything is haywire. Patient Nine was completely bald and his head was criss-crossed with scars. No current probes, no implants, otherwise he would have been unable to have a magnetic resonance, but he’d had probes. He was, to use a layman’s term, a mess.”
“Did you have background information?”
“No.” she shook her head. “I told you, they were referred to by numbers. Everything except their medical background was redacted from the file so our observations would be unbiased. But—I think he was in the military.”
“If you have no info on him and he was bedridden, how could you assess that?”
“I touched him.”
“Touch…touch?”
“Yes. I don’t use my ability—”curse, “for research purposes. There’s no way I can corroborate what I learn. It’s untested, unscientific. Misleading, even. I never know when I can trust it.”
“Have you ever made a mistake?” His voice was quiet.
“Mistake?”
“Yeah. You ever get a bad reading? Think someone was real happy but turns out was suicidal? Think someone was in love and he stabbed the girl instead? Get it really really wrong?”
“No.” she shook her head. “Not that I know of.”
He digested that while she just looked at him. She was finding it hard to concentrate because he was this huge…distraction, sitting right across from her. Filling her field of vision, sucking all of the oxygen out of the room, taking up all of her head space.
He was fascinating to look at, a magnet for the eyes. Her eyes, at least.
She’d spent almost her entire life in school. Three years ago she’d left the confines of graduate school only to move directly into a research lab which was virtually indistinguishable from her university lab, except the equipment was better and more expensive.
And every step of the way, the men were clones of each other.
The only variables were height, otherwise the men she’d spent all her grad student and working life with were virtually the same. Thin, because science nerds don’t have time to eat. With glasses, old fashioned as that was. Surgically enhanced eyes still had trouble coping with the close work required of someone staring into the small screens of electron microscopes all day and since nerds weren’t vain, it was just easier to wear glasses. In a world where no one wore glasses any more, it was like a sign, right there on their faces.I am a nerd.
