No, no, he couldn’t bear for it to happen that way. Not without at least making sure she understood how wrong she’d been, how much hurt she’d caused. The woman needed a taste of her own medicine—
He snapped his fingers. Yes! That would do it, better than moving the company or costing her the next election.
Already chuckling, he hurried to his car.
God, Field loved the human body. He never ceased to marvel at it, or at its intricate media of internal communication. He was dealing with one such medium right then: the small islands of cells scattered through the brain that regulated the appetite. They apparently functioned on the basis of feedback from the bloodstream and the alimentary system. Whenever blood sugars hit a certain level, and the stomach held enough nutrients of the right sort, the tiny clusters of brain cells shouted out, “Cool it on the eating! We don’t need any more food now.”
And, of course, practically right next door to them lay that other clump of cells, the one that decided how much effort the gut should put into extracting value from the food flow…
Field thought that by now he understood exactly how the brain and the GI tract managed to do all that. It looked like protein and sugar recognitions and analyses, for the most part.
Once he had realized that, the rest had come easily. He had started with a common virus known to prosper in the lungs without unduly harming them. He’d given it a special affinity, though, for slipping through the bloodstream to replicate in the harsh environment of the stomach. He’d added a little of this; he’d stirred in a touch of that. A twist here, a tweak there.
Presto. He had himself a virus that would rewrite the operating instructions of the alimentary system. Under certain circumstances, the edited system would underreport the volume of food it contained. Under those same circumstances, it would overreport the food’s nutritional value, forcing a cluster of brain cells to issue the order: “Extremely high-value food going through; pump it slow; take lots and lots of time with it; we want all the calories it holds.”
Field giggled as he put the finishing touches onto the virus. The average sedentary adult body needs about ten calories a day per pound to maintain its weight. A moderately active body, about fifteen. A body engaged in intense physical activity—say, a lumberjack—maybe twenty calories per pound.
On average, the consumption of 3,500 excess calories results in the addition of one pound to the body’s mass.
Supervisor Davidoff, he estimated, weighed in at around 120 pounds, and (according to the newspapers, at least) spent an hour or more in the gym three days a week. So unless she had a bulimia problem, he could safely assume she was maintaining her weight on about 1,800 calories a day.
Figuring a standard health-freak diet high in items from the invertebrate column, and low in foods derived from things with legs or fins, her system probably ran at 90 percent efficiency. So she was mostly likely consuming 2,000 raw calories a day.
If he could ratchet her system’s efficiency up to 95 percent for twenty-four hours, her gut would absorb 1,900 of those 2,000 calories. That alone would be enough to plump her out by a pound every thirty-five days.
But if he could fool her brain into thinking she needed 2,400 calories, so that it urged her to take in 2,667, because it expected her only to digest 90 percent of them, why… she’d be tacking on one pound every three and a half days. Two pounds a week. Twelve weeks until she crossed the line into outsized territory—the line she had drawn herself.
Of course, he couldn’t set her system at those higher levels permanently. Oh, no. To higher standard settings, she could, and probably would, adapt. She had great strength of will, and a fervent desire to stay in office. She’d learn to live with constant hunger. In fact, as she grew accustomed to it, she would cease to recognize it as hunger.
No, this had to be a temporary, but recurrent, phenomenon. Something triggered by an external event; something that would last perhaps a day before fading away. It would take longer for her to cross into the realm she and her fellow bigots had proscribed, but that didn’t matter. She would get there, sooner or later.
And she wouldn’t be alone. Oh, my, no. This would be a mildly contagious air-borne disease. Not that sufferers would cough or sneeze. Simply, every tenth or fifteenth breath would exhale a virus looking for a new home, a virus that would die of dehydration within thirty seconds after leaving the lungs.
To infect someone, you’d pretty much have to be talking to him at very close range for a very long period of time.
Like the way politicians talk to each other when they’re trying to muster support.
And even after infection, the virus wouldn’t do much in the absence of certain circumstances. Oh, sure, it would be multiplying through the body, patching its genetic code into that of the cells composing the alimentary system, but that code would lie dormant until the system pulled its trigger.
Field beamed. The aerosol was ready. His next appointment with Supervisor Davidoff began in half an hour. He had already promised her assistant that he would apologize for his bad manners. And he would. He would bow, and scrape, and kiss her hand, and ask her opinion of the odorless room deodorizer he had just formulated.
She would love it. Or maybe not. Her reaction didn’t much matter. All she had to do was breathe deeply within thirty seconds of his spraying it in the air around her. Could she resist that?
He smiled again. Such a simple solution, all things considered.
And such an elegant trigger, too. Chicken. Baked or boiled, fried or broiled, it didn’t matter. The modified cells of the alimentary system would react to half a gram of chicken proteins, and cue the brain to “Keep eating!” and “Process this stuff slowly!”
And where did politicians spend most of their evenings, but on the rubber chicken circuit?
He figured a year before the repeal of all laws regulating the, ah, amply proportioned. Two, tops.
This pleased him to no end. He really hadn’t wanted to learn German…
…And he’d always preferred ribs, anyway.