CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
INTERLUDE
The fact that my biological simulator worked so well for Reptilian is less circumstantial than it might seem.
After things ended with Jane, I’d poured myself into my thesis project. Initially, I’d started simple, with the genome of a tiny bacterium that only needed a handful of essential genes to survive. Once it worked on that, I expanded the simulator to more complex bacteria, then multicellular organisms. Many of the essential functions worked the same way in mice, fish, and chickens as they did in humans. Over the next two years, I continued expanding and testing its capabilities.
With each new advance came a cost, though: the computational power required to run it. Modeling the vast complexity of living creatures didn’t scale in linear fashion, but exponentially, as the genes and their products interacted in ever more sophisticated manners. I got about as far as frogs before I hit the limits of ASU’s computing resources.
That brought me to the office of my thesis advisor on a Wednesday morning in late spring, when the oleander bushes along Thunderbird Road were in full bloom. Dr. Sato sat in his swivel chair, nodding off over an actual book spread open on the desk in front of him. His ancient coffee maker spat and hissed, drizzling dark brown liquid into the waiting carafe. The place always smelled of those two things: old books and fresh coffee.
“Morning,” I said.
“Oh!” Dr. Sato reared back, his eyes wide. “Hello, Noah.”
“Sorry to startle you.” I kept forgetting to make a noisier entrance, so he’d rouse before I came in. It was early enough yet that he hadn’t had his two cups.
“No apology necessary.” He gestured to the threadbare chair just inside the door. “I suppose you’re here to ask for more compute.”
I sank into the chair, which had to be older than I was. “How did you know?”
“Call it a lucky guess.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in luck.”
“It’s not that I don’t believe in it. I just prefer hard data. Case in point.” He shuffled the papers on his desk and came up with a grey-and-white striped sheet with a university letterhead. “Would you care to guess which software package consumed the lion’s share of our department’s computing resources in the past month?”
I grinned. “The porn filter?”
“That was number three. Ahead of it by a significant margin were two processes, ‘NPsim’ and ‘NPdesign.’”
Damn. I really should have come up some more creative names for my programs. “Well, those could be anyone’s.”
“The initials give it away. You do love making your mark on things,” Dr. Sato said.
“You’ve got me there.”
“I just got off the phone with the department chair. There’s good news and bad news.”
“Okay.” I tried to ignore the lump in my throat. Maybe I’d finally crossed a line with the computing power. But my simulator was a hungry beast, and each more complex genome brought me tantalizingly closer to human. Just a few more months.
“The bad news is that you’ll have to find a new place to run your simulator. We can’t allow you unfettered access to the university computing resources any longer.”
Oh, no. A cold uncertainty welled up in my stomach. “Well, where am I supposed to run it?”
“That brings us to the good news,” Dr. Sato said. “I met with the rest of your thesis committee met yesterday to review your dissertation. You’ve made incredible progress.”
“Oh.” I hadn’t given any thought to defending my thesis and finishing my PhD. “Thanks, I guess.”
“We think you’re ready to defend.”
The words hit me like a physical blow. “So you’re not just cutting me off, but you’re kicking me out, too?”
Dr. Sato set his coffee down and brought the full weight of his gaze on me. “It’s time for you to move on, Noah. Ideally, to somewhere with significantly more resources.”
“I-I . . .” Words failed me for a moment. I sighed. “I wouldn’t even know where to start.”
He harrumphed and plucked another sheet from a pile on his desk, seemingly at random. “I’ve taken the liberty of compiling a list of research institutions with top genetic engineering programs.”
For a career scientist, this was the traditional path—you moved to anew institution at nearly every stage, to maximize your network of collaborators and find the right academic home—but I didn’t think of this as a career. This was a means to a very specific end. I took the sheet and scanned it. Stanford, Michigan, UC Davis, Emory. Great programs and solid reputations. But they were so far away from Connor and Mom. A tightness formed in my chest, squeezing away the comfort I normally felt in Dr. Sato’s cozy office. “Is there nothing closer?”
“Not with the resources that you’re likely to need.”
“Oh.”
“You look like you swallowed a lemon,” Dr. Sato said.
“Sorry. It’s a lot to take in.” I forced a calmer expression onto my face. “I just don’t want to have to move away.”
“A change of scenery might be good for you.”
I gave him a side-look. “What makes you say that?”
“You’ve worked hard for this. Especially in the last two years.”
Since Jane, I thought. “You make it sound like that’s a bad thing.”
“That’s not what I meant. But you should take some time to enjoy life, Noah. Before you look up and realize most of it has gone by.”
“There will be time for that when the simulator is done.”
“When will you call it done?”
“When it can scale up to human.”
“And presumably, there’s one particular human at the top of your list.”
His directness caught me off guard. He knew about Connor’s situation, of course, but we hadn’t had the open conversation about the connection to my work. “Is it that obvious?”
“To me, yes. But it raises an important question about your eventual goal. What is it that you hope to do?”
I did know that part. “Prove that my brother’s mutation is the cause of his disease. Then he can qualify for gene therapy trials.” Spinal muscular atrophy had been an early success for gene therapy, and I knew for a fact that the BICD2 study was still enrolling. We’d tried to get Connor in, of course, but they wouldn’t accept anyone with a Variant of Uncertain Significance. The stakes of the trial were too high.
“You’re convinced that it is,” Dr. Sato said.
“Absolutely.”
“Let’s say your simulator supports the idea. Do you plan to call his doctor and tell them to change medical records?”
“Well, not exactly.” This was the fuzzy front end of my plan, the part I felt less certain of. “I guess I’ll present them with the evidence and try to get them on board.”
Dr. Sato chuckled. “You haven’t been around a lot of medical doctors, have you?”
I bristled. “Actually, I’ve met quite a few.” Mostly when I’d tagged along to Connor’s appointments.
“Yes, but you saw the patient-facing doctor. Now we’re talking about engaging them as a professional.”
“I am a professional.” Or I would be, at least, by the time this happened.
“Your project is research, which gives you a lot more freedom. When it comes to patient care, however, the clinical guidelines are much stricter.”
A touch of anger bubbled up inside of me. “So they’ll just ignore what I say, because it’s research?”
“If all you have is a computer program, yes. Clinicians want experimental evidence, not just computational predictions.”
“I’d love to experiment on him, but he continues to refuse that idea.”
Dr. Sato smiled. “As he probably should. But I was thinking more about animal testing.”
“Aren’t animal models pretty much locked down?”
“The classic ones are tightly regulated, yes, ever since the canine epidemic.”
Not for the first time, I cursed the name of CFTD. No one had proved that it was artificially created, but there were strong suspicions. It not only robbed the world of dogs but ushered in a boatload of legal restrictions on genetic modifications of animals. Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees had existed before the outbreak, but now they held as much power as the review boards for human research. “Getting all the approvals would take a long time.” Which Connor doesn’t necessarily have.
“What about a synthetic model?”
I wrinkled my nose. Synthetic biology was a relatively new branch of biomedical research, the kind that created new animal and plant species by engineering their genomes from scratch. Because they didn’t exist naturally on Earth, researchers had a lot more leeway on genetic research. A number of commercial firms had come in and tried to make a profit from synthetic organisms. “Oh, is Unicorns-R-Us still in business?”
“No, they closed up shop last year,” he said.
“What about Custom Chimeras?”
“Just filed for bankruptcy.”
“Damn. What’s happening to all of them?”
“The same thing that happens to many startups. They each have a wonderful idea, but no way to make money from it.” He tilted his head, as if a new thought had just intruded. “Have you heard of Reptilian Corporation?”
I had, of course. It was impossible to live in Arizona and not hear about the hog-hunting dragons. “Oh yeah,” I deadpanned. “Those are the guys who do identity testing on dog poop, so you can sue your neighbors when they don’t clean it up.”
“That’s Doo-doo Digital, as you very well know.”
I couldn’t fight the grin. “I just wanted to hear you say it.”
Dr. Sato frowned. “Maybe I was mistaken about your readiness to defend.”
I held up my hands in mock surrender. “All right, all right! Tell me about this Reptilian Company.”
“Reptilian Corporation.” He found a glossy magazine beneath one of the stacks of paper on his desk—Southwest Business Journal, one of the few magazines still doing print—and flipped it open to a two-page spread about the company. The white-haired man in the feature photo looked familiar.
“Is that Simon Redwood?” I asked.
“It’s his company. Number thirteen, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Well, that’s one selling point.”
“Are you a Redwood believer?” Dr. Sato asked.
“Oh, absolutely. I couldn’t even tell you why.” I shook my head. “There’s just something about him.”
“I really thought his space elevator was going to work.”
“Yeah, that was a shame. He’s got some killer ideas.”
“That’s not all.” Dr. Sato tapped his finger on the photo and drew my attention to the backdrop. It was a server room, with tidy grids of dark gray servers. The LED patterns on them were arranged in a distinctive double-X pattern.
I gasped. “Are those Switchblades?” The next-gen computers weren’t due to hit the market for another month. Rumor had it, the waiting list was already a year long. Redwood must have gotten early access. And God, he had dozens of them.
“Reptilian raised a lot of capital.”
“Why don’t they just do it all in the cloud?”
“That’s a good question.” Coming from Dr. Sato, this was a real compliment. He loved good questions.
“Maybe they have something proprietary that they don’t want anyone to know about.”
“Lots of VCs are still under Redwood’s spell. And they’re in Phoenix.”
“Shut up,” I said.
“Right in the downtown. They’re not hiring, but a former student of mine, Evelyn Chang, heads their design department.”
“The Evelyn Chang?”
“Yes.” He smiled fondly. “She’s done well for herself.”
I stared at the photo, wondering what in the hell this Reptilian Corporation did with all that computing firepower. If I worked there, I could not only run my simulator, but maybe put Connor’s mutation into a living organism. Two birds with one stone. “I would love access to a place like that.”
“I would strongly recommend you call it a career opportunity, rather than access. A next step for you and your career.”
I tapped the magazine. “Get me an interview there, and I’ll call it whatever you want.”
Dr. Sato sighed. “I suppose I could put in a good word, but I want you to do something for me in return.”
“Anything.”
“I want you to remember that you’re entering the private sector.”
I rolled my shoulders, feeling defensive. “I know that.”
“Corporate America is a different world, Noah. A less forgiving world. You’ll have to learn to play their game if you want to last long enough to achieve your goals. You need to make yourself indispensable.”
“Okay. How do I do that?”
“Oh, that’s easy.” He smiled. “Figure out what they need, and make sure you’re the person who can give it to them.”