MIND FIELDS (2 page)

“By the way,” she said, “Ryan Taylor’s coming up for a ride at noon.  Why don’t you take him up to Maroon Bells?  He doesn’t know the area too well. He’ll need a guide.”

“Ryan Taylor!  You’re just telling me this now?”  She spun to look at the clock.  “God, it’s almost eight o’clock.  Why didn’t you tell me last night?”

Darcy laughed.  “Relax and eat your breakfast.  You’ve got plenty of time.”

“Just look at me!” Sandi grabbed at her long, wavy, brown hair with both hands and pulled it out to the sides.  It was so thick that it almost stayed out there by itself as she let go, even in the dry mountain air.

Darcy laughed at the sight.  She just couldn’t help herself.  “Sorry,” she giggled.  “A brush will fix that.  Don’t you worry, now. You’re beautiful.  You’re like a part of nature.”

“Ugh,” Sandy gasped.  She hated that.  People were always telling her she looked “earthy,” or “natural,” things like that.  She couldn’t stand it.  The glamour girls who graced the covers of teen magazines made her sick, but she envied them at times like this.  She rushed through breakfast, and then ran upstairs to shower.

Ryan Taylor was every bit as handsome and charming as Sandi had expected.  As she walked into the barn, she could hardly get the words out.  “Aunt Darcy said I should guide you up to Maroon Bells.”

As he spun around to look at her, she turned beet red. 
God, Sandi!  Is that the best you could come up with?  You made it sound like a chore,
she scolded herself, wishing that she knew the right thing to say
.

Ryan had hoped to ride alone that day, but when he saw the innocence in Sandi’s eyes, he didn’t have the heart to turn her down.  “Sure,” he smiled, “why not.”

Sandi was speechless.  She turned away to avoid further embarrassment, and mounted Feather.  She headed out of the stable, Feather’s hooves pounding rhythmically against the dry clay, which swirled into the air with each beat.  Ryan followed closely behind, and soon was at her side. It was a typical summer day, warm and dry, the air filled with the wisps of cotton-like puffs of seeds from the cottonwood trees.  It almost looked like an Aspen snowfall.  When they first caught a glimpse of the Bells, Ryan galloped ahead.  Sandi frowned as he blew by her, and she spurred Feather on, squinting to shield her eyes from the cotton that filled the air.  She giggled as she whisked past Ryan, and turned back to taunt him with a smile.

That was the moment.  It was as if life itself suddenly shifted into slow motion as she slipped out of the saddle.  Feather could sense that something was wrong as he felt Sandi slipping from his back.  He reared up in panic.  Sandi saw him, seemingly frozen in the air, as she floated up and away from the comfort of Feather’s back.  She saw the ground growing slowly closer, and the gray boulder growing ever larger.  She first felt panic, and then an eerie calm, resolved to the inevitable landing that fate guided her towards.

With a sudden thud, it all ended.  The dream turned to black.  There was stillness all around her: no sight, no sound, no smell.  A deepness enveloped her and she was caught between panic and placidness.

Slowly she sensed Ryan kneeling over her.  All that she could see was the blackness in her inner eyelids, but she knew he was there.

Then, she heard his voice, soft and distant.  “Sandi?”

She smiled. The first rays of the morning sun seemed to break upon her face, and the darkness of her inner eyelids turned to bright crimson.

  “Sandi,” he repeated gently, but more firmly this time.

  She smiled and sighed serenely as she stretched out in the soft, green grass. 

  “Sandi!”  This time the voice was loud and harsh. He took her by the shoulder and gently shook her restful body.

  She frowned, not comprehending why Ryan was so angry with her.

  She slowly peered out from under her heavy eyelids, and tried to focus through the bright morning light.  She rubbed the sand from her eyes, and as she focused, she felt a strong sense of annoyance.  She did not want to leave this wonderful place.

  “Hey,” Paul said, “don’t you have that presentation to give at nine o’clock this morning?”

  Sandi Fletcher bolted upright in bed.  “Shit!  What time is it?  Did you turn my alarm off again?”

  “No way.  I know better than to risk the wrath of Dr. Sandra Fletcher.”  Paul Hingston had been known to turn the alarm clocks off now and again.  He wasn’t quite as obsessive-compulsive about work as Sandi, and a good night’s sleep was sometimes worth paying the price of showing up late at the lab.  Besides, it was
his
lab anyway.  Who would know?  But this morning was too important to screw up, too important for both of them.  “The power went out last night.  The sun woke me up about fifteen minutes ago, and I figured I might as well let you sleep until I was done with the shower.  I’m done.”

  Sandi glanced at the clock: 07:45.  “Shit!” she shouted again. She jumped out of bed, still a bit disoriented from being torn out of her dream so abruptly.  “Put up the coffee,” she snapped at Paul as she ran to take a quick shower.

  “You got it,” he said, turning to admire her shapely, young body.  He liked that she preferred to sleep in the nude.

  Paul went to put some coffee in the Mr. Coffee machine, and pulled a couple of donuts out of the refrigerator.  He looked around at the well-organized kitchen.  He liked what Sandi had done to his life.  Paul had bought the house on Maryland Avenue the year before he met Sandi.  The small two-story row house was close to his biotechnology lab at Hopkins, and plenty big enough for his needs.  He was young and the mortgage was a tough pill to swallow, but Hopkins had given him a pretty sweet deal to stay on after his graduation as the new biotech lab director for the nanotechnology project.

  He didn’t do much besides work and sleep that first year, and the place had been pretty much a mess all the time until he met Sandi.  She was a grad student, and although he knew that it was frowned upon by the university, he couldn’t help himself.  He fell in love the fist time he laid eyes on her.  Fortunately, it was her final year, and he somehow had managed to restrain himself until she graduated.  He called her the night of graduation and asked her out.  She wasn’t too surprised.  In fact the only thing that she
was
surprised about was how much she enjoyed his company. He was a different man outside the lab.

  He soon talked her into staying on at Hopkins to assist him in his research.  Before long, they decided that she might as well give up her apartment, since she only went there to pick up the mail anyway.  Nearly all of her time was spent either at the lab or at his house, but Sunday mornings were her special time.  Sandi loved to get up early and sit on the porch out front sipping her coffee until the Sunday paper came.  Hardly a car passed by that time of day, and the stillness of the morning was broken only by the paperboy riding past on his bike. She decided to buy herself a housewarming gift the day she officially moved in – a new Mr. Coffee coffeemaker.   She’d had it with that instant stuff Paul seemed to accept for its convenience.

  “Coffee ready yet?” Sandi asked as she came into the kitchen rubbing her hair dry with a towel.

  Paul smiled as he nodded toward the fresh pot of coffee on the counter.

Chapter three

  Paul and Sandi hurried into the auditorium at a few minutes after nine, and a much-relieved dean of graduate studies introduced Dr. Sandra Fletcher to the eager audience.  Her presentation on organic nanobionics promised to turn the field upside down, and there were as many reporters present as there were scientists. 

  Sandi felt the sweat bead up on her brow as she took the stage.  She was accustomed to pressure, but not to crowds, and this crowd was intimidating.  She shielded her eyes against the camera flashes coming from the press corps.  The dean of grad studies at Hopkins had giddily leaked the story of Dr. Fletcher’s success to a reporter friend of his from the Baltimore Sun.  The story made the front page of the Sunday paper, giving Hopkins the publicity that the dean had hoped for, but for which Sandi was not prepared.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” she started out nervously, “thank you for coming today.”  She wasn’t sure that she really meant it.

  The room darkened, and the DLP projectors lit up the screen that dropped down behind her.  The Hopkins logo was emblazoned in the center of the screen.

  “Imagine a world without surgery.  Not a world without the technology to perform surgery, but a world without the
need
to perform surgery.  Imagine the ability to analyze and repair damage to the human body without making a single incision.  Imagine the ability to build new body parts, completely compatible with their hosts, and assemble them inside the body.  No pain, no rejection by the host, no recuperation time.”

  The first image appeared on the screen, a digital rendering of a miniature computer.  “You are imagining a nanobot, a programmable computer about the size of a single human cell,” the image of the nanobot began to shrink and elongate, “one that can be programmed to mimic any cell function in the body, even one as complex as a neuron in the human brain.  A group of these cells,” the video on the screen brought to life her description as several nanobots coalesced to form a brain, “can theoretically be built into a new body part, a bionic replacement for a damaged brain in this case.  I refer to this as nanobionics.”

As the lights dimmed, a forty-something year old man in jeans and a well-pressed plaid shirt slipped quietly into the auditorium, taking a seat in the last row of the upper left corner of the room.  He pulled his Orioles cap down slightly in front, and nestled inconspicuously down into his seat.  JT Anderson had been a campus prodigy himself here a couple of decades back.  His early work on nanotechnology proved to be the breakthrough that catapulted the application of silicon-based nanobots from the lab to the hospital, making the procedure clinically viable.  He had anticipated the breakthrough early enough to leave Hopkins and start his own private lab.  When the patents came, he owned them outright, and he became one of the wealthiest men in the country in a few short months.  The Baltimore Nanotechnology Institute (BNI) quickly dwarfed Johns Hopkins in both name and wealth, a fact resented by more than a few at the university.

  He smiled as Dr. Fletcher continued.  “As most of you know, the groundbreaking work in nanotechnology was done right here in Baltimore about a decade ago.  The first nanobots were constructed of a silicon-based material.  They were essentially miniature computers programmed to perform a single task.  The first clinical use, of course, was in the treatment of vascular disease.  The nanobots were injected through a catheter, which was threaded up through the arteries until it approached the area of the blood clot.  The bots were then injected directly into the area of the clot and were programmed to dissolve it by releasing an enzyme that interacted directly with the clotted blood.”

  A classic video clip of the first successful case graphically displayed the clearing of a clogged blood vessel. 

  “The problem with these early nanobots was that they were foreign particles within the human body.  If not removed, they could cause severe host rejection reactions or they could get caught up in the kidneys, resulting in renal failure.  This is where the work of Dr. Paul Hingston revolutionized nanotechnology.”  She smiled at Paul, who was sitting in the front row.  “The brilliant work by Dr. Hingston, done right here at Johns Hopkins, led to the technique we now use to manufacture organic nanobots.  Human cells are grown in culture, and then the DNA is removed.  This creates a ready supply of blank cells that can be custom tailored to any task by introducing designer DNA strands created in our lab.  The cells can then be programmed to turn certain DNA sequences on or off, causing them to differentiate into different types of cells designed to perform different tasks.  In effect, Dr. Hingston created a programmable single-cell computer.”

  “Organic nanobots degrade naturally within the body much like many other organic cells do, without causing any damage to the host, and since they can be tailor-made for each host, the risk of rejection is minimal.  The big problem with these organic bots is that they have a life of fifteen to thirty minutes once within the host before they start to break down.  This short life severely limits their usefulness.  Therefore, medical science has continued to employ inorganic bots for many clinical procedures, despite the expense and potential dangers that accompany them.”

  Up until now all the information Sandi presented had been a review of the last fifteen years of advances in nanobotic research.  The grad students in the audience were getting antsy, but Sandi was keenly aware that the reporters in the crowd knew virtually nothing of nanotechnology, other than for the propaganda stories leaked by BNI periodically to push up the price of their stock.  It was critical that they understand the basic principles of nanobotics if they were to grasp the true significance of her work, and so she had led them gingerly up this path with a description that was as basic as she could muster up.

Sandi Fletcher took a deep breath.  “And now, this is what I think you’ve all been waiting for.”  A pair of video clips began to play side by side on the screen behind her.  “On the left is a clip of a clot-busting organic nanobot treatment, and on the right a clip of a similar procedure using the new type II organic bots.  The video clips displayed the bots being injected via an angiocatheter just upstream from an arterial clot.  Both videos showed time-accelerated views of the clots dissolving and restoring blood flow through the previously blocked artery.  As the video clips proceeded, the vessel on the left remained unchanged, with the clot dissolved, but the blood flow still blocked by additional clots further along the artery, while the video on the right showed blood flow through the artery continuing to be restored as the additional clots were sequentially dissolved by the nanobots.