MIND FIELDS (4 page)

Anderson had really wanted to hire Sandi, but he was satisfied to settle for Paul, who joined BNI.  Sandi remained at Hopkins as interim lab director, eventually taking over the official directorship three years later in, 2048.

Chapter four

Five years later —

Washington D.C., April 21, 2050

  “I can’t stand this,” Sandi said to Sam as she waited to testify before the Senate Subcommittee on Nanotechnology.   “I’m a scientist, for God’s sake, not an administrator.  Why don’t the suits take care of this stuff?”

  Dr. Sam Collier had been working with Sandi on the nanobot project for almost two years now.  He was a big fan of her work, and he had approached her during the last year of his neurology residency about developing neuronanobots specifically engineered to treat the devastating effects of stroke or traumatic brain injury.  He was sure that the pathophysiology of these neurological conditions lent themselves perfectly to nanobotic therapy, and he managed to convince Sandi of it.  He joined her team shortly thereafter.  The more Sandi investigated, the more she became convinced that this would be the perfect prototype for organic nanobots in the treatment of human illness.  For the past two years, all of her time and energy had been focused on the neuronanobot project.  They had made great strides, but funding was running low, and they desperately needed this grant that hinged on the approval of the Senate subcommittee.  The project was not without controversy.  Anything that could influence the workings of the human brain was rich fodder for social disputation.

 
Sandi Fletcher was waiting nervously on a bench outside the committee room.  She had asked Sam to come along for emotional support.  He had a knack for taking life’s twists and turns in stride, and Sandi was hoping that some of that calm demeanor would rub off on her.

  Sam could sense the tension.  “Relax, Sandi.  It’s not like you haven’t done this before.  Remember what you told me about the first meeting a couple of years back?  ‘Like taking candy from a baby,’ you said.”

  Sandi forced a smile.  “I was only trying to impress you.  You were new back then, and I wanted you.”

  Sam looked up with a grin.

  “Oh, no no no,” Sandi said, “not like that.  I didn’t
want
you, I wanted you.  You know, for the lab.”

  Sam looked disappointed.  Sandi thought it was cute, but tried hard not to laugh.    “Not that you aren’t an attractive guy, Sam, but I wanted you for your brains.”  This time she did laugh.  “That still doesn’t sound right, does it?”  It was a nervous laugh.  “Not wanted…needed, yeah, I needed you for your brains. I needed you to take neuronanobotics to the next level.  If you’d gone into private practice, I never would have been able to make this work.”  Sandi had no problem talking with Sam about science, but romance was another story.  She could feel a blush washing up over her face.

  Sam smiled.  “It’s OK, Sandi.  I know what you mean.”

  “Thanks.”  She was relieved.

  It had taken a long time for Sandi to get over Paul.  In fact, she wasn’t really sure that she ever had.  She was determined to keep romance as far from the lab as possible.  A few months after she had left Paul, her friend Janice took her down to a club near the harbor to listen to a folk guitar player named Guy Andrews.  Janice had talked her into going on the pretense of having a girls’ night out, but it turned out that Guy was Janice’s cousin, and she figured that he was just what Sandi needed to forget about Paul. Much to Sandi’s surprise, Janice was right.  Guy was no rocket scientist, but he was a fairly bright guy who had just decided that music was more fun than a desk job, and much to his parents’ dismay, had dropped out of college after his third year to pursue his music career.  It hadn’t taken him very far.  At first, that didn’t really matter to him; he didn’t need much.  But as his friends moved into their careers, they gradually distanced themselves from him.  He was starting to doubt his career choice when he met Sandi, but she took his mind off all that, at least for a while.  They had been living together for about a year now.  Sandi wasn’t quite sure why, but she felt good when she was with him.

  From the moment they met, Sandi was convinced that they were soul mates.  He seemed to always know what she wanted, what she
needed.
  When he took her out to dinner, he managed to find her favorite restaurants without ever asking her so much as what kind of foods she liked.  He instinctively knew her favorite drink, her favorite flowers, her favorite color.   It was uncanny.  As she discovered much sooner than she would have ever imagined, he even knew her favorite erogenous zones.

  Sometimes he would seem so distant that she found herself wondering just what it was that she saw in him, and then he would do something subtle, but so special that all doubts were erased.  When she had a great day at the lab, he wanted to hear all about it, even though she was pretty sure he didn’t understand too much of what she had to say.  And when things weren’t going well, he always knew exactly what to say.  He seemed to know her almost as well as Paul had, but what had taken Paul years of experience seemed to come naturally to Guy.  It was as if he had a guidebook to her soul.  He was perfect, except … she could never quite put her finger on it; maybe it was just that he was not Paul.

__

  A man in a pinstripe suit emerged from the door of the committee room.  “They’re ready for you, Dr. Fletcher.”

  Sandi stood, smoothed her suit and looked to Sam for approval.  He nodded ever so slightly and smiled, giving her the thumbs up.  Sandi turned and hurried to follow the man into the committee room.  It was a small but formally furnished chamber, with a slightly elevated stage at one end on which the committee members sat behind a semicircular mahogany desk.  Senator Stanton Cole, the chairman of the committee, sat in the center with a small podium on the desk in front of him.  To his right, sat the vice-chairman, Senator Russell Stetson.  Each of the seven senators had a microphone in front of them, which seemed an absurdity to Sandi given the small size of the room. 
Whatever makes them feel powerful
, she thought with disdain, trying not to feel intimidated.

  Senator Cole motioned her to a chair behind the front row table, which also supported a microphone.  She took her seat and pushed the microphone aside.

  “If you will, Dr. Fletcher,” Senator Stetson said, pointing at the microphone.  “I realize that it seems a bit silly in such close quarters, but all committee hearings are recorded.  I’m sure you understand.”

  Sandi nodded sheepishly.

  “We’ve read your brief, Doctor, but I for one didn’t follow it too well.  We’ve asked you here in the hope that you can translate some of this technojargon for us so we can make an intelligent recommendation to the full senate regarding your request.

  “Of course, Senator.”  She paused and took a deep breath.  “As you know, nanobots have already been approved for some uses in medical care, but we’ve barely scratched the surface of their potential.  Four years ago
,
my lab at Hopkins embarked on a project to develop a nanobot treatment to cure diseases of the central nervous system such as stroke or brain injury.  The idea is to minimize the damage that occurs immediately after the injury, and then to replace the damaged nerve cells, known as neurons, with specialized artificial cells called neuronanobots.  What I proposed was a two-step process.  The first step is to inject Phase One nanobots into the body, which are programmed to go to the area of damage and clean it up.  They get rid of blood and chemicals that accumulate when nerve cells are injured.  The second step is to inject nanobots that will go to the area of damage and turn into neurons, nerve cells that can replace the ones lost in the initial injury.”

  Sandi paused to peruse the faces of the senators.  She was relieved to see that they were all awake and there were only one or two blank stares.  Although the information she was presenting was quite technical, the younger senators in this group had grown up with at least some robotic and nanobotic theory ingrained into them in school.  Even the older senators, perhaps
especially
the older senators, knew about nanobots from personal experience, as these tiny robots were now the primary treatment for cleaning out clogged arteries in the heart or other areas of the body.  She felt it was safe to continue at this technical level without too much risk of losing anyone in this room.

  “We developed the Phase One neuronanobots fairly quickly.  Their function was relatively basic, mechanical in some ways.  The hardest part was getting them to go to the right place in the body once we injected them.  We solved this problem by having them maintain their motility until they find an area with a large concentration of certain chemicals that we know occur when brain tissue is injured.  Once they arrive in this area, they stop moving and they activate themselves to clean up the surrounding chemicals.

“Our emphasis over the past two years has been in the development of Phase Two bots.  We inject these bots into a vein in the arm and they find their way into the brain within a matter of hours.  When they come near the Phase One bots, they synapse with…that is, they attach themselves to… these Phase One bots.  This way they are right where we want them — in the area where the injured brain cells used to be.  The really tricky part comes next.  In order to get these bots to take over the job of the nerve cells that have died, we had to figure out how to sequence their DNA so they would develop into nerve cells after they attached to the Phase One bots.  We recently found the answer to our dilemma; we now know how to get the Phase Two bots to turn into nerve cells at the site of injury,
and
how to get them to attach to other healthy nerve cells in the area.  Once they do this, they can completely restore the function of the damaged brain.

Sandi looked up at the peanut gallery again.  Their eyes were all glued to her … now she had them.

“We’ve done it in monkeys.  We’ve taken monkeys that have suffered traumatic brain injuries and restored them to normal function in less than three weeks.  We have shortened the recovery time from traumatic brain injury from years to days, and improved the completeness of the recovery one hundred percent … no residual weakness, no cognitive problems, no seizures.”

Sandi paused for dramatic effect.  “The only thing that remains, gentlemen,” she looked each of them in the eye with a growing confidence, “is to do this for people.  I need your authorization for human trials.  If I can get that, stroke and traumatic brain injury will be as curable as a cataract.  I’ve done my part, senators.  It’s up to you now.”

A few minutes later Sandi came out of the room drained of energy and slumped down on the bench next to Sam.  As she dropped her head down into her hands, her thick brown hair fell around her face.

“Man!” Sam gasped.  “I can’t believe it.  What happened in there?  Why didn’t they go for it?  It seems like a no-brainer.  How could they
not
green light us on this one?”

Sandi slumped back against the wall and ran her hands through her hair, pulling it back behind her neck.  “Relax, Doc,” she said, “I was great.”  All of the tension had melted from her face.

Sam was beet red.  “Jeez, Sandi!  How could you do that to me?”

She giggled.  “Let’s get some coffee and celebrate.”

__

Baltimore, Maryland. April 24, 2050

Poe Towers stretched high above the Baltimore skyline overlooking the city’s famous downtown harbor area.  It was the most prestigious residence in the downtown area with a spectacular view of Harbor Place, Oriole Park at Camden Yards and Baltimore Ravens Stadium.  It was exactly the kind of place Paul Hingston had dreamed of when JT Anderson approached him on that day nearly five years ago, and his lucrative contract at BNI made it all possible,

On a beautiful Sunday morning like this, Paul loved to get up late, put up a pot of coffee and read the paper out on the terrace of his penthouse apartment suite.  Every other day of the week he would catch the morning news on the Internet monitor at his kitchen table, but on Sunday he liked to be old fashioned.  He loved to rustle the newspaper and peruse the week’s top stories with an occasional glance over at his mug to dip a donut in the steaming coffee.  The sports section was always first; he prided himself in knowing the stats of all the O’s players, and he looked forward to the start of the baseball season each spring.  After a slow march through his favorite comics, he would eventually meander over to the front section.  Today was one of those days. 

Paul neatly folded the sports and comics and walked in to pour a second cup of coffee.  He then returned to the porch and took a deep breath of the fresh springtime air as he admired the view.  He could hardly believe that he was really living this life.  It was times like this that he could forget, ever so briefly, just how lonely he really had been since he let Sandi slip out of his life; no one else before her, or since, had ever felt so right.  He nestled into a lounge chair, placed his mug on a small chair-side table and began to read the news.  He wearily flipped through as he glanced at the happenings of the world around him; if it wasn’t in the US, he was not particularly interested.  He took a long, slow sip, and turned to page eighteen.  At the top of the page was the title
For Your Health
.  He skimmed the latest human-interest stories.  One was about how a child from a poor South American country was flown up to the University of Maryland Hospital to repair a horrible birth defect.  There was the usual pre-summer article about the importance of wearing sunscreen as the season approached when everyone would be spending more of their leisure time outside under the ozone-starved, sun-drenched atmosphere.  His eyes scanned down to the next blurb:  ‘Congress Authorizes Human Trial of Artificial Brain Cells.’

Paul’s gaze froze on the headline for a moment, and then he began to read the article describing the new neuronanobots developed by Dr. Sandra Fletcher at Johns Hopkins.

“Shit!”  He crumpled the paper and slammed it down on the coffee table.  He jumped up, looking at the paper unfolding itself and falling to the floor.  “Shit!” he yelled again, a bit louder this time.  He was so angry that he couldn’t think of anything else to say.  He paced quickly back and forth along the length of the terrace, and then stormed inside.

“Computer,” he sniped toward the monitor on his kitchen table, “phone Dr. Sandra Fletcher, home address.”

“Dialing,” the synthesized voice of the computer responded dutifully.

After a brief pause, the phone rang three times before Sandi picked up.  “Hello?”

“How in the hell did you pull it off, Sandi?”  Sandi had just come back from her morning jog, and rushed in to answer the phone that she heard ringing from the doorway. “Paul?  Is that you, Paul?”  she asked, wiping the moisture from her forehead with the hand towel that was slung around her shoulders.  She hadn’t heard from Paul in nearly two years.  “You saw the article, huh?  Just call to congratulate me?”

“Congratulate you?” he said angrily.  “What in the hell do you think you’re doing?  Who did the dirty work for you, Sandi, huh?  Who swiped the data from my lab?”

Sandi couldn’t believe what she was hearing.  “Is that what you’re calling for, to accuse me of stealing your work?  You’ve got a hell of a nerve, Paul Hingston.  What audacity.  So you think you are the only one capable of programming bots?  I didn’t even know you were working on neuronanobots.”

“Didn’t know I …bullshit!  Do you think I’m an idiot?”

“I guess so.  I can’t believe that you really think I would do such a thing.  This was
my
work Paul.  It was mine and I’m damned proud of it.  If you were too slow to get there first, that’s your problem.  Heck, if you really were working on the same thing and I beat you to the punch, then I’m even more proud of it.”

“How did you do it, Sandi?  Who’s the mole in my lab?”