It had been over twenty years since she’d been to the Free Lab. Over ten since the last stiff, vague “how are you I am fine” messages between Jack and Krish. They had broken up, then drifted apart, and Jack had no idea how he would react to seeing her again after all this time. From following Krish’s publications in the open science journals, she knew his passion for crushing the patent system was as strong as ever. That’s what she was counting on. Plus—he owed her for shutting down The Bilious Pills. Even now, she was still pissed about how he’d dealt with that.
Jack stashed the truck in a student garage out of satellite view, and registered using a forged identifier on the parking network. The campus hadn’t changed much, but the Free Lab had gotten an upgrade since the last time she was here. It now occupied a long, low building, formerly used as animal housing, and was tricked out for the twenty-second century. Still, the security was stuck in another era. Jack got all three of them through the doors with a simple RFID emulator.
They emerged into a space that looked exactly like a barn spliced with a wet lab. The high ceiling peaked over a vast, open room full of tables, sequencers, printers, amplifiers, and dozens of colorful plastic tablets. Somebody had etched the words “FREE LAB” on the wall across from the door, using viruses that ate paint down to the plaster and extruded a thin crust of gold. It was late enough that almost everyone had left for supper, but Jack could hear two people talking over the hum of a printer in one of the offices off the shared room. One of them laughed, and immediately Jack knew that it was Krish. All at once, she felt nauseous: This was going to be weird.
“Come with me,” Jack addressed Threezed and Med, hoping she sounded authoritative. She gestured toward the office.
Krish was still laughing and talking with one of his students when she stepped through the doorway. His hair showed a few streaks of gray, and the brown skin of his face had lost enough collagen that a few lines framed his eyes and mouth. But he still looked very much like the man she’d known decades ago.
“Hey, Krish,” Jack said with deliberate casualness. “Got a few minutes to discuss addiction therapies?”
He stared at her, a pirate in coveralls with silvery-black stubble on her head and a knife on her belt, flanked by a runaway slave and a robot scientist. His eyes widened, but Jack had to admit that Krish was doing a pretty good job of masking his shock.
The student seemed to sense that this situation was way above her pay grade, and quickly showed herself out. Jack didn’t know how to start, so she got down to business. “I know it’s been awhile, but there’s a big problem with a reverse-engineered drug. And we need your help.”
Silently, Krish walked to one of the empty workbenches outside his office. He pushed aside a humming sequencer and gestured a 2-D black screen into the air, a cursor blinking in the upper left corner. At last, he spoke to them. “Show me.”
Jack and Med interrupted each other with details about the Zacuity side effects, supplemented with several hastily designed simulations of brain activity that hovered over the table’s projector. It was like they were visiting scholars sharing important new data. Nothing like work to fill in where personal history has left a smoking hole. But Jack kept getting distracted by Krish’s physical proximity. She had so many vivid memories of Krish that it was hard not to compare this man, almost a stranger, to the one who had helped her found a movement—and then killed it when she was locked up.
Med continued to talk, oblivious to what was going on between Jack and Krish. “Zacuity is designed as a simple work drug, right? So you get sharper focus while you work, longer attention spans. But what makes Zacuity really popular is that it gets deep into the reward center and gives the user a serious dopamine rush when he does his work, or whatever he’s doing when he takes the drug. My patient decided to take a double dose to make house painting more fun.”
Med twisted her lips, concentrating on something. The projector played a 3-D video of dopamine receptors, looking a bit like blooming tulips. Particles sparkled around the edges of their petals.
“Now, as you can see, the drug is stimulating his dopamine receptors. There’s your pleasure bang. But just watch, because the drug is doing something else, too.”
The tulips began to wither and shrink. Soon, there were half as many dopamine receptors on screen.
“Zacuity is reducing the number of dopamine receptors on the neurons in the midbrain and prefrontal cortex. And this is really the key. Doing this interferes with decision-making, and makes the brain extremely vulnerable to addiction. As he loses more and more of those receptors, he gets more addicted to the specific thing he did while taking the drug—in this case, painting. He’s going to be in withdrawal from a painting addiction for years, if he survives at all. The Zacuity has basically rewritten the neurological history of his brain. Now he’s got a powerful, long-term addiction that he wants more than anything to feed.”
Jack jumped in. “That’s good news for corporations who license the drug from Zaxy, because you’ve suddenly got a bunch of workers who are obsessed with going to work and completing projects. The thing is, the corps are pretty careful about regulating dosage and catching it when people are having an adverse reaction. But what about ordinary people who just want to do some painting or studying?
“Those are my customers, and they aren’t taking Zacuity under any kind of supervision.” Jack pulled up the ZoneFeed story about the train controller. “Of course, that’s dangerous. Some people who dose themselves basically become manic. They refuse to do anything but engage in whatever process they associate with that dopamine reward. They don’t eat, sleep, or drink water. These deaths aren’t from the drug itself—they’re side effects from things like dehydration, injury, and organ failure. Of course, people also have to take more and more of the Zacuity to get their rush, so that makes everything worse.”
Med seemed to look into the distance, and the ZoneFeed story disappeared. The projector replaced it with a 3-D representation of a molecular pathway, a flowchart showing how the drug triggered one change after another in the molecules that naturally coursed through its victims’ neurons.
Krish was focused completely on Med’s display. “But how is this different from normal addiction? Neurologically, it’s your typical process addiction, like gambling or even workaholism.”
“The difference is that Zacuity changes your brain’s anatomy to make you susceptible to addiction even before you get high,” the bot replied. “Usually dopamine receptor loss like this takes months or years to happen. But Zacuity addiction is instantaneous. In the short term, you get an incredible high from doing work. But in the long term, your neurochemistry is altered forever. The only thing you want to do is get back to work. Especially if you can take more Zacuity along with it.”
Krish’s face folded into an expression of guilt that Jack had never seen before. “You made this… pirate Zacuity?”
“I did the reverse engineering, yeah. But I didn’t make the drug addictive. And none of the trials showed this long-term damage as a possible side effect.”
“None of the published trials,” Med clarified.
“Right.”
“The public needs to know that Zaxy is marketing an addictive drug, Krish. You can use your research exemption from patent law to publish an analysis. Plus, we need a therapy. That’s why we came to the Free Lab.”