The Braintrust Complete Series Omnibus

3. First Coins in the Fountain-1

3

First Coins in the Fountain

To find something better you have to try something new.

—Joe Quirk and Patri Friedman, SeaSteading

“Dr. Ambarawati, you may go in now.” The admin smiled and nodded toward the door.

Dash entered the inner sanctum of the Director of Research for the Chiron isle ship. The white-haired woman she had seen on the screen in the middle of her emergency childbirth procedure rose from her desk and came around it to greet her. Dash spoke first. “Dr. Copeland, nice to meet you in person.”

“Hopefully we won’t get disconnected this time,” Amanda Copeland said as they shook hands. Dr. Copeland pointed Dash to a chair on one side of a small mahogany table while taking the chair on the adjacent side. The screen embedded in the table lit up, showing the terms of a contract. “Call me Amanda, please” she continued.

“And I am Dash.”

A soft smile lit Amanda’s face. “So I’m told.” She turned serious. “I need to make sure you understand the contract. You’ll be working halftime as a surgeon for normal patients who come to the BrainTrust as medical tourists, and halftime on your telomere research.”

“I read the contract quite carefully,” Dash confirmed.

“Good. Let’s skip to the cool part that isn’t in the contract.”

Dash raised an eyebrow.

“One of the reasons your research proposal was reviewed more favorably here than anywhere else is that we have a prototype machine that should be able to accelerate your work. It uses techniques derived from CRISPR to build viral factories that manufacture nonreplicating pseudoviruses, which in turn implement a molecular splicing process of one’s own design. Of course, none of the literature we publish refers to it as a virus builder—bad press, you know. We call our machine the CRISPIER.” She chuckled. “With proper programming, it should be able to produce your telomere manipulators. It’s all quite safe. The factories replicate in concentrated hydrogen peroxide, then you add the ingredients for your pseudovirus, and they start producing. Neither the factories nor their products can reproduce outside the peroxide bath. You extract your products from the solution and inject them into the bloodstream, where they then start performing the function you’ve specified in their design.” She tapped the tabletop screen, brought up a picture of the CRISPIER, and gave Dash a brief description of what it could do.

Dash’s eyes widened. “This is extraordinary.” Her face wore a contemplative smile as she considered the consequences. “If I understand correctly, I could start human trials almost immediately, if I were able to design the factories easily.”

Amanda gave her a smug look. “I think you’ll find designing pretty straightforward. I already have your intern working on it —Byron Schultz, you’ll meet him later today.” She looked away, not quite blushing. “The CRISPIER is my own project, so I couldn’t help getting started a little bit ahead of time.”

Dash laughed. “An ulterior motive. I can see why you accepted my proposal and invited me here.”

Amanda pursed her lips and answered slowly, “I’m happy to have you here working with my own research, but I need to be honest. When the Board reviewed your proposal, I voted against inviting you.”

Dash’s expression shifted to surprise.

“Dash, I’m not sure the world is ready for your work. To oversimplify—to put it the way the press will spin it when word gets out—you’re about to invent the Fountain of Youth.”

Dash giggled briefly, then stopped; she hated it when she giggled. “It most certainly is not a Fountain of Youth, Bu Amanda.” She shook her head. “Even if we could repair the telomere chains perfectly and the cells began dividing and replacing themselves with renewed versions, we still would have to devise a way to fix the aging mitochondria to give people the energy they had in their youth. And a host of other problems would need to be fixed as well.”

Amanda sat back and waved her hand. “Yes, yes, you’re very careful with your claims. You’re a very good researcher: ever so cautious, no assertion without a thousand detailed caveats. But make no mistake, the proverbial Fountain lies at the end of the path you’re walking.”

“If you are opposed to my research, why am I here?”

Amanda turned her head and gazed out the window at the bright blue sea as she remembered her first conversation about Dash, her hopes, and her dreams.

She had been sitting in this same office at this same table. Amanda had had her thumbs pressed into her temples, her eyes closed. “Why are you so nuts about this girl, Colin?”

Colin spoke softly. “She’s a polymath, Amanda, a full-fledged, full-blooded polymath. You saw the resume.”

“I saw the list of things she’s interested in. But just because she’s interested in all those things doesn’t mean she can make contributions in any of those fields. Every grad student in our history has presented a plateful of different kinds of research he wanted to do. We always have to force them to pick one thing, one thing only, and do it well. You know that. Dyah is a medical specialist, not a polymath.”

Colin laughed. “You haven’t looked closely at the list of publications she put at the end. Did you see the note she had written for improving the neutronics in molten salt nuclear reactors? Or the questions she asked leading to a proposal for a better sintering process for 3D printers?” He snorted. “She was a surgeon by day. She worked on telomeres by night. She worked in a hospital with no research facilities to speak of, and still she made progress. You understand how remarkable that is?” He sighed, then gave her a wicked smile. “You have the resume there? Let me show you a link you may not have read.” He borrowed her tablet and flipped pages. “Read.”

Amanda started reading. At first she was puzzled, but then her eyes widened. “She’s…she’s reinventing my own gene splicer.”

Colin laughed. “Yes! And that is why I want her here.” He paused. “Polymaths—there are so few of them, Amanda. Anybody with a top-range intellect dirtside gets browbeaten into a specialty. You know that, you’ve seen it even with our first investors. It’s hardly better on the BrainTrust, right here in your own research complex. Heck, you just admitted you’re part of the problem.”

Amanda drew herself up. “Colin, I don’t drive anyone to be a one-trick pony. I just want them to focus on one thing long enough to get their degree. Once their degree is done, if they stop expanding their horizons and just continue to do what they’ve been doing, that’s their choice. Don’t blame me for this.”

Colin waved his hand. “Ancient battles, with people who aren’t even alive any more. Sorry I got sidetracked.”

“Don’t try to fool me on this. If you want her here just because she’s a polymath, bring her in to work on our reactors. But not telomeres, Colin! If you let her work on telomeres, she’ll become the nexus of the crisis—the crisis we’ve been dodging for sixteen years now—very successfully I might add, and all because of you, if I can say that without swelling your i***t head beyond recognition. Why are you dead-set on kicking off the crisis now? We still aren’t strong enough to fight them all.”

Colin’s gaze went to the window and he looked into the clear, unbound sky. “I won’t deny I wouldn’t mind waiting another ten years while they got weaker and we got stronger, but… Amanda, Dyah is going to bring on the crisis whether we help her or not. She’s going to pursue her goal, and she’s going to succeed. If she’s here, we have a better chance of bringing everyone safely through. And by ‘everyone,’ I mean everyone including Dyah herself. Her research will get her killed, though I doubt she understands that.” He shook his head. “The balance is about to shift. That’s not a question any longer. When it shifts, we need to be able to choose the direction we’ll leap as we fall.” He smiled. “Besides, I have a plan.”

Amanda growled, “We aren’t your puppets, Colin.”

Colin’s smile turned sour. “You think I don’t know that? Does anyone ever let me forget it for even one minute?”

Amanda shook her head, returning to the present. Apparently reminiscing had not taken too long, because Dash was not looking at her like she was having a seizure just yet. “Have you given any thought to who your first patients will be?”

Dash nodded. “A little. Obviously they will be quite old, preferably with no special ailments. And since the therapy will be quite expensive at first, I expect they will be wealthy.”

“Will they be powerful?”

Dash looked at her in puzzlement.

Amanda reached over and touched her hand. “The world’s aging and decrepit dictators will be first in line, my dear unpolitical friend. Some of them will not take no for an answer.”

Dash shook her head emphatically. “It’s still experimental. In the first trials it will be at least as likely to kill them as increase the ability of their aging cells to divide and create fresh replacements.”

“Those who are near death anyway will not care.”

Dash frowned. “Then they are fools. This is not the Fountain of Youth—it’s just telomeres.”

He sat in the big chair with his feet on the desk. It was always calming for him to sit here, looking around the curves of the room and seeing the bright powerful seal on the floor. When you thought about it, the room was impractical. You couldn’t really use the space in an oval room efficiently. Where did you put the stuff that should have gone in the corners?

But the room and its symbols of power were not sufficiently calming today. As he listened to the disagreeable voice at the other end of the phone, he lifted his legs off the desk and slammed his feet down on the floor. It was a futile gesture. The plush carpet silently soaked up the impact.

How could he, the most powerful man on earth, be denied?

The Chief Advisor gripped his cell phone like he was about to throw it across the room and repeated his main point. "I'm making this request on behalf of the President-for-Life of the most important country in the world! This is an opportunity to receive your doctor as an honored guest and allow her to perform her therapy on the President himself! I should be met with a 'Yes, sir, thank you, sir!' I should not be greeted with a traitorous 'No!' You're still a United States citizen, let me remind you, and this is treason!"

The voice on the phone seemed quite unaffected by his rant. It was as if the speaker were himself so formidable that he could talk down to the most powerful man in the world...which, the Advisor had to acknowledge, was not as crazy as it sounded. Sure, the guy was stuck on a defenseless slug of a ship, but despite being defenseless, the speaker controlled a significant asset. Very significant—at least as significant as owning a country. And that asset was the one thing, as it happened, that the Advisor needed rather desperately.

The voice spoke. "You're accusing me of treason? Isn't that the black hole calling the kettle dark?" The Advisor spluttered as the voice continued, "But let us not get sidetracked. I'm perfectly happy to let you talk to her and let her make up her own mind."

The Advisor smiled. It lasted only a moment before the voice spoke again. "Before she commits, however, I am optimistic that she will let me highlight a few points for her."

The Advisor closed his eyes.

"Let me be certain I understand the honor being bestowed here. She is to be flown to the Capital secretly, she is to set up her facility in a secret wing of Walter Reed Hospital, she is to rejuvenate the President-for-Life in secret, and then, if everything goes as hoped, she will be flown back to us here on the BrainTrust, again secretly. Correct?"