Race Across the Sky (7 page)

Orphans

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O
n Monday morning, Shane began his first day at Helixia.

He was greeted unexpectedly at the second-floor elevator by a short, Sicilian-looking brunette wearing oblong maroon glasses over a punchy nose.

“I'm Stacey,” she told him. Shane started to shake her hand. Instead, she tossed him a baseball. “You're Janelle's husband?”

“It's amazing, I know.”

As they walked down the hall she waved at a few people.

“Dennis says you were a star at Orco.”

“That seems overstated.”

“I can see why you left,” Stacey frowned. “Any company where frat boys make two hundred grand a year has to be full of assholes.”

He felt unsure how to respond. She dropped him at a cubicle with a wave.

“I'm on your team. There's a weekly sales review with Dennis in half an hour. I'll pick you up.”

Shane stood in his empty cube, staring at a note from IT about his computer. Leaves from a plant spiraled down the right side of the partition from the adjacent desk.

His flight home had been difficult. He had spent Saturday night watching the Happy Trails house fill with guests. Many of them looked like other runners; some were clearly locals there for free beer. He had drunk moderately, his eyes lifting frequently toward the second floor, where he knew the baby to be sleeping. Although Caleb had spoken of going up to Boulder to see a band, he had not had time alone with him again.

“I'll leave here to help her.”

The words had burned through Shane's body as he drove back to Denver. During the flight he lost himself looking out at the Rockies. They seemed alive to him, rippling and flowing with some inner force. He could make out small roads along their slopes. He imagined the overwhelming awe of the first settlers who encountered them. Which of them had dared dream that they could scale these sharp, infinite peaks? What kind of person had laid down these roads? He thought of his brother.

By the time he had landed, his exhaustion had turned into a thick syrup behind his sinuses. Janelle greeted him with jasmine tea, and they sat on their old white sofa. She had put some Internet radio on, and sleepy ambient music soothed his head. Outside their bay window, a streetlight battled with the fog.

“Is it his baby?” Janelle asked right away.

Shane watched her; the intensity behind her eyes might, he thought, be the thing that made her most beautiful. “He says no.”

“What's June like?”

“Kind of mousey. But she runs these ultramarathons, so how mousey can she be?”

Janelle placed his hand on top of her belly and pressed down, and he felt their baby push back. It filled him with something like magic.

“What are the others like? Super weird?”

“A little weird, for sure. But they're nice, you'd like them. There's twenty-year-olds, thirty-year-olds, forty-year-olds. One guy, John, is in his, like, late fifties. You know, they all work in local towns, or even up in Boulder like Caleb. They see a lot of regular people. They're not trapped in some compound.” He nodded to himself, as if just realizing something. “They could leave there anytime they want to.”

“They're brainwashed,” Janelle pronounced, sipping her tea. “Four hours of sleep a night? Two meals a day? Eight hours of running a day? They're all exhausted, dependent physically and emotionally, on this Mack guy. He can give them some leash, they're not going anywhere.”

“Just to play devil's advocate, it seems to work.”

Janelle frowned. “How do you mean?”

“They kick ass in these ultramarathons.”

“Well, I guess their lives are great then.”

“This is good,” Shane yawned, finishing his mug. “What did you put in it?”

“Tell me about the baby.”

He leaned back into the sofa. “She has a genetic disorder. I searched it on my phone. It says there's no treatment. June brought her there so Mack could cure her, he's supposedly this healer? This whole thing is predicated on him being all-powerful. They all have stories about him healing their injuries and diseases”—Shane waved his arms—“with the laying on of his hands.”

“Energy healing works,” she informed him.

“If you're Chinese.”

She shook her head at his ignorance.

“But it's not working for Lily. June and Caleb, they've lost faith in him. I need to find options. There has to be something in trials, don't you think? If not from Helixia, then from someone?”

“There are trials going on for almost everything,” she agreed.

“I need to find one to get this baby into. One as far from Colorado as possible.”

Janelle considered this. “Talk to Dineesh. He's our Director of Immunology. He'd know all the stuff that's not public yet.”

“Cool,” Shane replied, pressing his eyes with the flats of his hands.

While Janelle slept, he'd lain on his side, staring at her stomach. Her body was making calculations and divisions beyond his understanding. The big questions about their son had already been decided: would he have an instinct for trigonometry? A wide Asian nose? Would he shoot with his left? But other decisions were ongoing. Every day, billions of Nicholas's cells were splitting and dividing, agreeing on details without bothering to check with Shane.

And this was where things went wrong. Too much or too little of one protein in one cell, and their lives would all change forever. Written into the spiraling strands of Nicholas's genetic code were secrets they would only learn by watching.

Shane's knowledge of genetic prenatal disease, which he had picked up during his career selling these drugs, might have frightened him, but Shane felt no real fear for his unborn son. Things did not go wrong in his life. Only his brother had ever disturbed his confidence in the universe.

Stacey took him to his first meeting, where Dennis Adderberry greeted him warmly. He was introduced by conference call to his team of sales reps around the Northwest. They briefed him on the current state of the cancer drug Sorion. It was selling beautifully, though its chart seemed to have plateaued some years earlier. Dennis gave a cheery speech about the future. Afterward, Shane stayed behind to speak with him.

“The scientists who created this,” he asked. “Do they still work here?”

“Most of them, sure.”

“I'd love to talk with one of them. I like to have an idea of the thinking behind products, understand the passion they have for it. I use that when I sell to doctors.”

Dennis's jet black eyebrows arched, and Shane sensed he had made an unorthodox request. “Well, you should talk to Prajuk Acharn. He led the team. I'm sure he'd tell you what you want to know, if you can get him to leave his lab.”

So at lunch, Shane walked out into June's early breeze, across a brick walkway to the concrete, five-story Research and Laboratory building. It reminded him of a Lego piece: blunt, flat, unadorned, ready to be transplanted like a gene onto another building.

When its industrial door closed behind him, all signs of day disappeared. There were no windows, and no reception area. A small sign directed him to Protein Chemistry. He turned left, facing a long straight corridor, and noticed a pungent chemical scent dominating the air. Though the corridor was empty, he could feel the presence of scientist specters. He walked past narrow offices adorned with names from every culture imaginable, until he found the nameplate for Dr. Prajuk Acharn.

His knock pushed the door open, revealing a slight man behind a small desk. He seemed to be in his early sixties. He wore a white shirt and a brown tie too thick for these times. He possessed a narrow face on the edge of delicacy, and his straight black hair was combed harshly to the left, though it faced a counterinsurgency along its part. He was glancing between an old PC on the side of his desk and a larger Mac monitor in front of him. His neck, Shane thought, must ache at night.

“Excuse me? Doctor Acharn?”

The scientist looked up at him.

“I'm Shane Oberest. I'm the new Director of Commercial on Sorion.”

An empty swivel chair sat just out of reach, but Shane didn't feel he should make a move for it just yet.

“I'm fairly sure I've never seen anyone from Commercial in this building, unless we're in a Phase Three.” Doctor Acharn's voice was unexpectedly high-pitched, that particular nasal blend of Asia and California.

“Are you Korean?” Shane asked him impulsively.

“No, I'm from Khon Kaen.”

“Really? I'd love to see the beaches.”

“All American college students want to see the beaches. This thing has become some rite of passage.”

“It used to be Jamaica,” Shane told him.

“A huge loss for the Jamaicans,” Prajuk replied dryly.

Shane smiled and took a tentative step inside his office. “So, I just started on Sorion.” He placed a thick purple-bound deck onto his desk. “They gave me this.”

“They want you to learn about a biologic from a PowerPoint deck?”

Shane grinned. The doctor's eyes brightened, and he knew he was in.

“I'd love to ask you a couple of questions really, really quick. Do you have a few minutes by any chance?”

“A few, sure.”

“I'd like to understand more than the numbers. Can I ask you about its genesis? You guys were looking for a cure for prostate cancer?”

“Oh, no. Is that what that deck says?”

He sat in the chair, as Prajuk shook his head. “This thing, ‘cure,' is what they say for investors. We are not looking for a cure for cancer.”

Shane frowned. “You're not?”

“There is no such thing.”

“If you don't believe in curing cancer, then what do you want patients to do?”

“Live with it.” Prajuk leaned back into his chair.

“Live with it?”

“Why not? Your body already lives with cancer every day. Stop anyone on the street at any time and screen them, and you'll find some cancerous cells. So what? Your body absorbs them, most of the time. We place our bet on aiding the body's natural processes to absorb these mutations before they grow large enough to interfere with life. We do not bombard it with radiations and chemicals. Attack the body, and it will attack back. That is what kills people.”

“Well, the tumors kill people.”

But Prajuk shook his head no. “Most cancer patients don't die from cancer. They die from having their immune system and red blood cells obliterated by chemotherapy and radiation. They get pneumonia, infections; organ failure. With Sorion, we were not starting from a place of, how do we cure cancer? We were studying B and T cells, to understand how they function. Nothing in the body exists to do nothing.”

“Except male nipples.”

Doctor Acharn looked at him. A moment passed.

“What we noticed was that cancerous cells produce an enzyme that healthy cells do not. This thing, a telomere, is an enzyme which prevents a cell from dividing. So it keeps growing, until it interferes with the body's essential processes. If we could focus on inhibiting telomere production, we could stop this thing, tumors, from growing, without trying to kill them. Our idea is to keep this thing, tumors, at a size where the body can live with them. And manage cancer, the way you manage diabetes.”

Shane blinked. “That's a pretty radical notion.”

“To doctors, maybe. But not to the body. B cells already produce a monoclonal antibody that targets telomeres and inhibits them. That is what our team discovered. The challenge is, the body does not produce enough of it. So obviously, if we could isolate these telomeres' antibodies, if we could reproduce them in the lab”—he opened his arms—“then we could have a drug that targets only the cells which produce telomeres and leaves the healthy cells alone. With healthy cells alive and functioning, there are none of the side effects to current chemotherapy treatment. No pneumonia, no hair loss, no weakness, the immune system is left whole. Only the tumorous cells are targeted.”

Shane shook his head. Coming from Orco, a company that sold chemotherapy drugs, and then more drugs to address their side effects, this was a revelation. “I think I'm getting this. It's enzyme profiling.”

Doctor Acharn clapped his hands. This small gesture of joy seemed a complete breaking of his character. In his high-pitched voice he exclaimed, “Enzyme profiling. Yes. Definitely you are in Commercial for a reason.”

“So, is that what Sorion is?”

“Yes. We cloned the gene that produces this antibody that attacks telomeres. We placed it on to an HIV virus, and introduced it back into the body. The virus carries the new cells through the body where . . .” He noticed the look on Shane's face. “This thing is a disabled form of HIV. We are not injecting cancer patients with live AIDS-causing organisms.”

“Okay, that's good to hear.”

“HIV is actually a wonderful vehicle for transporting genes through the body. What makes it so terrible to fight also makes it unstoppable in advancing good. Just because it is being used to destroy life does not mean it cannot be used to save it. Everything in nature is a tool, you know.”

“I'm starting to understand that.”

Doctor Acharn was watching him. “Now maybe you can help me understand something.”

“Sure.”

“This name ‘Sorion'? This thing sounds like a whale. What has this word got to do with telomeres?”

Shane grinned. “That's actually in the PowerPoint.”

He noticed several picture frames on the doctor's desk, but their backs were to him. He wondered what they displayed.

“You should write a book, Doctor.”

“I'm reading one.”

Shane understood; he was talking about the human body. “How long have you worked here, Doctor Acharn?”

“A long time. I was employee number five.”