Interrupt (4 page)

Ray grimaced. “Emily—”

“If we give one subset of my data to the right people, they can design the vaccine. There’s a team at the University of Texas. They’re primed to jump on this. They probably won’t develop it as fast as I could, but maybe I can consult a bit. Then the vaccine goes to trials. They make eighty billion dollars. Most of that money comes right back to us and we also get the accolades, the good will, and the proof this stuff works exactly like the melanoma gene therapies out of UCSD in 2010. If we have real-world evidence from—”

“Emily, enough. I see what you’re trying to do and it’s commendable. This is about your nephew.” The look in Ray’s brown eyes was shrewder than she would have guessed. “You don’t want anyone else to suffer like him,” Ray said. “It’s a noble cause. Honestly. But how old is he now? Eight? He’s exactly who you’ll save by developing our juvenile therapies, and he’s your own flesh and blood.”

That was a cheap shot,
she thought.

“The important thing is to help the people who need it,” Ray said. He was parroting the company line, which sounded great.
Help the people who need it.

In the meanwhile, what if their own kids were born with preventable disorders? Their greed had a blindness she couldn’t resolve. If their own children grew up autistic or bipolar, what good were an extra gazillion dollars in stock?

“Here we go,” she said, looking down to hide her anger. Her log-in had finally been accepted, and she navigated her way through the UCLA server to her files. There were two. The third was only a progress bar at ninety-eight percent. “Let me show you how the Pelat data changes our simulations.”

“We’re using your original sims today,” Ray said.

“The new results are done.”

“They haven’t been vetted, and we’re not rescheduling this event.” Ray’s voice was stern with a hint of exasperation.

He was being fatherly now, she realized, and he’d cast her as the overexcited young fool. Emily wanted to forgive him. Ray was protecting his job. He had retired parents to support and two sons, one in the Air Force, another in college. Her project wasn’t the only reason he was on edge. His first boy was a weapons loader in South Korea, where the military had been on alert for weeks. Ray was worried.

I guess I should be, too.

DNAllied was already doing the dance with Pfizer and Enring Corp., two of the heavy hitters in Big Pharma. The board wanted a bidding war. The miracles Emily envisioned couldn’t come fast enough.

Even if Pfizer or Enring bought in, her team at DNAllied was several months from their first drug trials. She could accelerate the process by sinking her time into the infant and juvenile therapies, but she wanted to stay with her vaccine. She didn’t have six months to spare. Other labs were pursuing identical lines of research, and a prenatal vaccine might be worth consideration for the Nobel Prize for medicine.

“Just tell me I’ll have free rein after today,” she said. “I’ve earned the right to move in new directions.”

“Absolutely not,” Ray said. “You’re the one who started this, and you’re the one they want to see it through. What’s wrong with that?”

He must have seen the dismay in her eyes.

“Listen,” he said. “I’m not supposed to say this. The board brought up the possibility of firing you if necessary.”

“That’s insane. I did all the work.”

Legally, the patents were theirs. Her data, her simulations, the biomarkers—her contract said everything she did on company time was proprietary.

Should I get a lawyer?
she wondered.
All they want are their drugs. They don’t care what else I can accomplish.

“I went to bat for you,” Ray said. “I told them you’re a team player, but you’re a little ball of energy. A genius. I told them you’re like our own little Einstein.”

Emily forced a smile, but inside, she chafed at
little.
Worse, her laptop dropped the connection to UCLA. “Wait,” she said.

“What’s up?”

“I lost everything.”

“Don’t give me this, Emily.”

She flashed Ray a look, hoping it was clear she wouldn’t kill her own data on purpose. But for the first time, she wondered if she should sneak her files to another team. She corresponded with other labs every day. Getting her data out wouldn’t be hard.

She logged in again as Ray took the chair beside her. He smelled like deodorant and sweat. She opened one of her files. It should have begun with a series of bipartite graphs showing the abundance of specific peptides in autistic males. Instead, she’d received half of her data feed.

“This isn’t right,” she said with an unpleasant heat in her stomach. She laid one hand on her midriff as if to contain the feeling.

Somehow her new files had been corrupted. DNAllied’s laptops were loaded with firewalls and crypto. The university’s supercloud was equally secure. A virus was unlikely. What did that leave? Either she’d experienced data transmission errors or someone in the company had sabotaged her results.

My God,
Emily thought.
What else could go wrong today?

LOS ANGELES

I
n the kitchenette tucked behind the conference room, Emily stood by the sink with her older sister Laura. Laura’s eight-year-old son, P.J., sat in the corner with a Nintendo 3DS game. Both women held handfuls of note cards.

The power flickered, and Emily glanced at the lights as the microwave beeped, automatically resetting its digital display. “Is that bad luck?” she asked. “I’m having bad luck today.”

Laura smiled. “You can’t get out of this, Em.”

“I’m serious.”

“You’re stalling.”

An hour and a half had passed since Emily’s fight with Ray. The media event started in ten minutes. Through the wall, Emily heard a hubbub of voices. She paced nervously while Laura leafed through several cards prepared in Emily’s handwriting.

Laura was gorgeous. Her dark blond hair was more honey-hued than Emily’s straw-colored ponytail. The diamond stud earrings and smoky eyes didn’t hurt, either. Laura exuded a casual, unflinching maturity
Emily tried to emulate. Since they’d been kids, she’d wanted to emulate nearly everything about Laura.

Will you be proud of me?
she thought.

Detached from the women, P.J.’s silence made an odd counterpoint to Emily’s restlessness. Laura rarely allowed him to play his 3DS because it could be an ordeal to separate him from the game. P.J. resisted to the point of shrieking.

Now the thin-limbed boy set his 3DS in his lap, ignoring the rousing sound track of
LEGO Indiana Jones.
Was he staring at the wallpaper?

“Let’s practice one more time,” Laura said.

Emily gestured at him. “Are you sure?”

“Yes. He’s fine, Auntie Em.”

The nickname rankled and pleased Emily. She wasn’t a wrinkled old lady like Dorothy’s aunt in
The Wizard of Oz,
but the movie had always been one of their favorites.

The good news was she’d recovered her statistical models from UCLA. A few minutes ago, the IT guys at DNAllied had texted Ray and Emily to explain what they thought had happened. The ECC circuitry in DNAllied’s server—error control and correction—appeared to have been fooled by corrupted line transmissions that met the circuitry’s parity tests. For several seconds, Emily’s data packets had been dropping bits in between UCLA and the Plaza. Then the problem stopped, although Laura said she’d read some nutty stuff on her iPhone this morning.

The net overflowed with stories of hackers and worms. Credit cards had been declined everywhere on the West Coast for twenty minutes. Emily wasn’t sure what to think. First her car, then her computers. If she gave in to Ray’s demands and made no mention of a prenatal vaccine, today would be a complete disaster.

“I need to ask you something,” she said.

Laura shook her head and raised the note cards like an axe. “Straighten up. You’re slouching.”

“Sir, yes, sir, sir,” Emily joked. But she did as she was told and lifted her shoulders. “Thank you for coming in this morning,” she said, smiling at an imaginary crowd. “Your press kits contain links to hi-def presentations. I’d like to touch on several highlights, then field any questions you may have.”

“Slower,” Laura said.

“My colleagues and I have finished a comprehensive study in functional genomics, reaching into mankind’s distant past in order to study who we are today. More specifically, we focused on the causes of one of society’s most tragic epidemics.”

Settling into her speech, Emily stole another glance at P.J. while Laura’s gaze was on the note cards.

Her nephew was autistic. Auntie Em believed she could save him. She’d gone into biology for other reasons, but P.J. had become a large part of what motivated her.

“Hold on,” she said, stepping toward him.

“You cheater,” Laura said.

P.J. didn’t turn as Emily approached, taking the game from his lap before it fell to the floor. “Here you go,” she said.

Did his gaze dart toward her face? Maybe. She did not receive the smile she’d hoped for. Interacting with P.J. could be like talking to someone through a fog bank. There were glimpses, which made their relationship all the more poignant. P.J. was someone she’d lost too many times. From one day to the next they would be apart, together, then apart again.

Emily wanted to ruffle his hair, yet stopped herself, putting his feelings before her own. Most of the time, P.J. didn’t like physical contact—but he’d detected something in how she’d paused.

“Four thousand seventy-four,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“Four thousand seventy-four,” he said.

Autistic children had trouble reading expressions and body language. They responded to different cues. Emily wondered what he’d meant until she realized,
That’s how many dots there are on the wallpaper.

His talent for math ran in the family. She shared the same knack. On good days, he was capable of solving multiplication tables that would stump a high school senior.

“P.J., you’re so awesome,” she said.

He had been seventeen months old when he faded. Until then he’d been an active little bug, grasping and walking and beginning to make silly noises like words. Then his gaze turned inward. He stopped talking. The change was a horrific trauma for everyone in the family, especially Laura’s husband, Greg, who eventually—right or wrong—put the blame on himself.

In developed nations like the U.S. and Europe, autism rates had skyrocketed, increasing 700 percent since 1996. More than 1 percent of children were being diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorders.

Was there an environmental factor, a sudden genetic drift, or both? The first might cause the other. The world’s drinking water was laced with new chemical compounds and trace metals. Pharmaceutical agents, pesticides, flame retardants, and dioxin were all measurable in the biosphere, some of it transient, most of it everlasting.

Originally, Laura had seized any number of explanations for P.J.’s condition. Several advocate groups had filed lawsuits, insisting vaccines such as MMR caused autism. After dozens of studies, solid evidence said vaccinations weren’t at fault—but it was an emotional issue, because if there wasn’t an outside source, the cause must be something in the parents themselves. Research showed a powerful genetic basis for ASD, a term used to encompass autism, Asperger syndrome, Rett syndrome, childhood disintegrative disorder, and PDD-NOS, pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified.

Even with Emily’s data, several steps remained before anyone could determine if ASD was caused by rare mutations or by multi-gene interactions of common variants. One thing she knew for sure. Ninety percent of the risk of ASD was inherited.

One factor was older moms and dads. The father’s sperm were less active, the mother’s eggs had aged. Laura was eleven years Emily’s senior because Emily had been a late surprise for their parents. Greg was six years older than Laura. In the modern age, people delayed parenthood to pursue their careers or simply to avoid the responsibility.

Emily’s personal fear was mixed with defiance and shame. She wanted kids. Chase said he did, too, but neither of them wanted to rush into diapers and a minivan. And if they waited a few more years… Her family genes were suspect.