Authors: J. Manuel
Spring 2015:
After a long afternoon of toiling with Hail Mary solutions, William left the Syracuse lab on a trip to see Eckert. William was old-fashioned; he believed that bad news should be delivered in person. It showed character. Being able to accept blame was more important than being able to accept praise, he told Manny repeatedly. Manny stewed for an hour longer in the lab and headed home for what would surely be a night of fruitless research.
He arrived at his studio apartment, grabbed a beer from the fridge, turned on the coffee pot, ordered himself a pizza, and settled in for his long night. It was just after midnight when his vision began to flutter and his temples began to throb. He had been staring at the screen of his laptop for nearly six hours and doubted if he had even blinked in that time. Manny pounded the flimsy breakfast table in his kitchenette, which sent his coffee mug teetering over the edge and shattering to the floor. The thick, syrupy brew blotched the floor in brown pools. He was jittery, and his stomach was upset from lack of sleep and the immense amount of caffeine he had ingested. Reluctantly, he cleaned up the mess and poured himself another cup.
He was just about to break from his research when he came across a short paper, one discussing the possibility of creating a
synthetic cloak
that could act as a delivery device for pharmaceutical treatments. The author, a young researcher from MIT, had shown some tantalizing results in her early stage research and though it was intriguing, she stated that she had undertaken the work out of pure scientific curiosity and not with a goal in mind, other than to see if it could be done. Her paper concluded with the hope that someone in the future might discover a useful application for her research, but that she currently saw none.
Manny was now wide awake! He found Dr. Mayfield on her social media accounts and messaged her at 1 a.m. To his surprise, Dr. Mayfield was awake in Boston and responded immediately. Within minutes, Manny was speaking to her about his problem and how he believed that her research could prove useful.
Karen Mayfield held three PhD’s in Bioengineering, Computational & Systems Biology, and Computational Science & Engineering from MIT. She was twenty-five years old and feeling a little long in the tooth. She’d spent the last two years working on the same problem, but had not come close to its solution. Though she had achieved success on her other research during that time, which had resulted in some thirty patents, and a few pharmaceuticals that had sold like gangbusters, she was not satisfied. Her employer was pleased with her production, and so she was given ample latitude to crack the nut of her pet project. She was living any young researcher’s dream, having a lab of her very own, at an unheard of age. Her work was so revolutionary that she’d hardly had time to finish her dissertations. The university’s administration was forgiving. They loved that one of their own was so lucrative. They bestowed the degrees anyway. Karen’s
bona fides
were undeniable, so degrees didn’t matter. To her, they were worthless pieces of fancy paper and she treated them as such. They were probably crammed somewhere with her other junk occupying the dusty boxes in her one-bedroom, Cambridge apartment closet. Problems and their solutions were the only things that occupied her mind—and her butterflies of course.
Today, her mind spun circles around her greatest challenge, one she’d been working on for over a year since Manny had first contacted her. The solution was somewhere here, but she could not figure it out. It was always somewhere just out of her grasp. The coding was wrong. Her algorithms were wrong. The conventional wisdom had been to let the computers code it themselves, but she could not let it go. She pushed herself to find the solution. She blamed herself for not being able to find it. She knew that scientific successes were oftentimes the product of dumb luck and randomness, but she refused to believe that she could be outdone by a bunch of processors that randomly spit out
solutions
, created through trial and error permutations at nanosecond speeds. It was evolution at a blinding pace and yet nothing positive had come of it. There had been some near-successes over the last year, but the processes had always broken down when Karen and her team had attempted to take the designs from computer simulation to real-world application. Though they looked theoretically possible, they were always wholly impractical. They were always too complex to withstand the rigors of the molecular-biological world, which was a place of constant turmoil among warring forces: membranes, enzymes, polarized lipids, protein coats, and activation sites. Karen needed to find something simpler. Nature lent itself to simplicity. Complexity in organisms was illusory. Her colleagues, and the field of molecular biology as a whole, conjured it to compensate for their lack of understanding of life’s fundamental building blocks. Occam’s razor, (the simplest explanation being most often the correct one) was Karen’s mantra.
Of course her brilliant mind was going up against the thousands of processors contained within the latest supercomputer that the university had spent untold amounts of taxpayer dollars engineering and developing. The machine was a wonderfully oversold research tool. It was lovingly referred to by researchers as HAL 1950s due to its size and resemblance to a 1950s vacuum tube computer. There was also the joking worry that it would sabotage their research. The machine was capable of performing 40,000 trillion calculations, or 40 petaflops, per second, but its effort, however fast, was without design.
Karen, on the other hand, was focused in her relentless determination. She understood that the problem lay with the way that the graphene sheets tended to stick together when passed along the surface of the substrate gel. This was a material characteristic of molecular carbon structures and thus they proved incredibly difficult to bend into useful designs. If she could manage to fold them in a manner that would maintain the symmetry and strength of the native carbon nanotubes, but add to them the design necessary to carry the bonding sites for Manny’s schematic, the key system would be solved, and auto-replication would be feasible.
Karen glanced quickly through the latest batch of potential, algorithmically-created candidates and dismissed them. “Same crap as before,” she sighed. She had committed all of the patterns to memory and she could spot a slight permutation of an old design immediately. Frustrated, she turned from her laptop and yelled for Miles. No answer. She was about to yell again when Christine, her omnipresent assistant, leaned in and reminded her that Miles hadn’t come in again today.
“Fucking asshole!” Karen cursed and glared at Christine. “Seriously. Why the hell do I keep that idiot around?” Christine was ready to answer, but Karen waved her off. She did sleep with him those couple of times, before she became his boss. It had been awkward, not only the sex, but the work situation as well. Karen would have fired him, but she felt pity. He was brilliant but so socially awkward that he wouldn’t have been able to land a job. She didn’t want that for him no matter how much of an ass he’d become lately. He’d probably stroll in sometime in the late afternoon with a typical, bullshit excuse and then work for 24 hours straight or more if she didn’t force him to go home, another unnecessary frustration.
Karen sighed angrily. When she hit walls like the one she’d been slamming into repeatedly over the last few weeks she had to jump on her bike to clear her mind. Burning, physical pain helped her escape. It was the bike, the miles of road, and the lactic acidosis, that reminded her that she was alive. Karen grabbed her riding jacket from the back of her chair, zipped it up, pulled her bike helmet over her fiery red hair, tightened her chinstrap, hoisted her featherweight carbon-fiber road bike over her shoulder, and jogged out of her office, past several lab-techs who were busily huddled around their benches. Karen hit the stairwell in stride, prancing down the stairs as she went. Her endorphins were already kicking into overdrive at the thought of the pain to come. She had planned a trip around the Charles River, nothing too strenuous by her standards, but she’d push it anyways. She liked to ride fast even in the not-so-bike-friendly confines of Boston’s ever-changing, winding streets, which prominently featured their colonial idiosyncrasies with endless one-ways, rotaries, and dead-ends. The rush of danger excited her tingly bits as she straddled her bike and peddled those first few miles. Her muscular legs pounded the pedals, and the motion of the gears belted a rhythm harmonious with her allegro tempo. They danced, each gear handing off to another, partner to partner, in quickstep, sweeping swiftly across the dance floor.
Karen peddled faster, yet the dance remained constant, as effortless and serene as before. Then, the moment came, like the ones before, always amid a trance. The ideas would spark from the darkness, then burn like an all-consuming conflagration to the detriment of family, friends, hobbies, time, and her sanity. She was on fire! The endorphins coursing through her body soothed the physical and mental anguish. She had to get back. Karen nearly sideswiped a couple of cabs, a Transit bus on Mass Ave., and pedestrians on her way back to the lab. She didn’t bother with a shower. Karen threw her bike against the wall of her office and headed for her inner sanctum. It would be hours before Christine informed her that she still had her bike helmet on.
Back in her lab, Karen fanned the faint ember that had flickered into existence in the vacuum of her exercising mind. She was giddy, excited, and scared all at once. These moments were getting rarer as she neared her thirtieth birthday. In fact, she would never admit that she had not had one for the last two years. Karen was keenly aware that true genius seemed to extinguish itself somewhere in the mid-thirties. Her mother’s oft-repeated, Einsteinian quote was tattooed on her consciousness: ‘A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so.’ What was her contribution? Though successful by anyone else’s standards, she felt lacking. Where was her one irrefutable contribution to science? How would she cement herself in the pantheon of scientific greats to which she belonged? She had received numerous professional accolades, but deep down, she resented the adoration. She knew that hers was the incestuous world of academia. She could not help but feel that her work was overly lauded because she was a young woman achieving in a field dominated by men. It did not escape her that her life in the academic circles of ultra-progressive, politically-correct Boston was an artificial construct of ivory-towered elites. Her discord rang loudest when she was compelled by her patrons to enjoy the aristocratic trappings of the unending, exclusive galas that masqueraded as science symposia. Oh, how they loved exchanging adulation for
ground-breaking achievements
, being neither ground-breaking nor achievements.
Genius
, was a word bandied about to the point where it had become devoid of its true meaning, much like
wicked
in New England parlance.
Her mother, a child of the sixties and women’s lib veteran, had often warned her about being one of the few female scientists in her field. The barriers that she would surely face from the male-dominated, patriarchal institution that was scientific research would be nearly insurmountable. Her mother had prepared her to fight against the inevitable condescension by her colleagues and the university boards that would attempt to put her in support roles for the ‘more important’ research of her male colleagues. Karen, however, had experienced the exact opposite. Her arrival in Boston was less
shock and awe
than it was pomp and circumstance. It seemed that she had just missed the battle against male tyranny. Having women at the forefront of research was in vogue and she felt like the latest beneficiary of the trend. Her suspicions were confirmed when she was awarded the money to open her own research laboratory. Though she and several male colleagues had requested the research funding for the microbiological sciences laboratory, the grant was funded solely in her name. After a quick discussion with the university’s research board, she was told that the university preferred her to be the face of the laboratory because women researchers brought
prestige
. Karen instantly realized that she was just the latest trophy-wife of the old, male-dominated regime, and like every trophy wife, she had a shelf life.
But she felt it now. Her skin tingled, and her hair stood on end as she sketched the carbon-nanotube chrysalis. She envisioned how the synthetic DNA of Manny’s organism would be transported within the chrysalis, protected from the body’s immune system. Once it arrived at the target cell, it would penetrate the cellular membrane and infuse its powerful code. Karen uploaded the sketch to Miles’s program. The program synthesized the sketch and attempted to make minute corrections to the dimensions, which Karen quickly overrode. She wanted to see if her creation worked. Et voilà, the chrysalis, inspired by her monarch butterflies. Karen pumped her fists in the air and wept tears of joy as she reached for her phone and texted, Manny, “Eureka”. It was 4 a.m. in California and she doubted that he would see the text until the next day. Exhausted Karen grabbed her riding gear and headed home to catch a few hours of much needed sleep. The next morning would bring excitement.
Karen woke up around 9 a.m. She had emailed Manny the specifications for the chrysalis and the three-dimensional simulation shortly before going to bed. Karen rubbed her eyes and walked over to the kitchen to make some coffee. Her neck was stiff from having passed out on the couch. She checked her phone to find a few missed calls and texts from Manny. He was the desperate type. He did not have a relaxed bone in his body, but then again, glass houses.
Manny was ecstatic over the phone. “You’ve done it, Karen! I love you woman! Do you know that?” Karen was taken aback. She hadn’t heard him ever sound so euphoric.
“You have to come out here to our lab. When can you come? Do you have a couple of days? I want to show you something. I think you’ve earned it!”
Karen knew what that meant. She would finally get to see the secret project that Manny had been working on all of these years and though her part was vital, as Manny had kept reminding her, she had no idea what it was for. “Of course! I can leave today.” Later that morning Karen flew out of Boston on a non-stop flight to San Francisco.
Unbeknownst to anyone, about an hour earlier, somewhere in a bank of servers in Silicon Valley, Karen Mayfield was added to a database of potential threats that numbered in the thousands. Her profile would be archived. No one would actually review her profile for months. Hers, like many others over the last several months, was just another slightly questionable profile dredged up in an ever-expanding dragnet.