It was 2:00 a.m. and Jack’s eyes were blurring over a line of code when Lyle poked her. “Can I crash with you tonight?” Lyle looked sheepish. “I’m about to fall over, and my clone sequence won’t be cooked until morning anyway. You have a bed up there, right?” Lyle pointed up, vaguely in the direction of Jack’s loft, and raised her eyebrows. Was it an innocent request, or something more? Jack hadn’t had sex since her awkward attempts with Krish after prison. It was as if her desires were as broken as her bones had been: She couldn’t figure out what she wanted, and was even more clueless when it came to other people.
“I’m not trying to hit on you, I swear.” Lyle grinned. “I’m just so tired I don’t think I can make it home.”
Everyone else had left around midnight. Jack shrugged. “Sure.”
In the semidarkness of the loft, surrounded by boxes emblazoned with corporate logos for scientific instruments, Jack and Lyle were suddenly wide-awake. They couldn’t stop talking. They rehashed the results of a recent patent infringement trial.
“I can’t believe they gave Thorton ten years in prison,” Lyle whispered fiercely. “What the hell? He wasn’t selling those drugs. He gave them away to his neighborhood because of a goddamn epidemic.”
“Ten years in prison makes my experience seem like a walk in the park.”
Lyle didn’t say anything. Eventually she spoke in an uncertain voice. “Is it OK for me to ask what that was like? I read The Bilious Pills and I’ve been trying to get up the courage to ask you, but it always seems tacky or weird or fannish or something.”
“It was mostly boring.” Jack pulled back before spilling anything more. This was Krish’s protégé. No sense launching into an entire diatribe about how Lyle’s beloved Freeculturist boss had sold out and abandoned the cause while Jack learned about bone engineering firsthand. Besides, there was something else that Jack suddenly, desperately needed to ask. “Were you serious about not hitting on me?”
“I don’t have to be serious about it. I could be sort of… exaggerating my lack of interest… a lot.”
Jack got up on one elbow and stared down at Lyle, trying to understand how the arch of her nose made every feature on her face more beautiful. A slice of light from the lab below illuminated the static petals of her tattoo and the half-smile on her lips. Then Jack couldn’t help it anymore. She grabbed Lyle harder than she intended, kissed her harder than she’d wanted to kiss anyone for the past year. Maybe she was being too intense, but it was intoxicating to be able to measure the strength of her desire again. Lyle didn’t mind. In the grip of Jack’s embrace, she thrashed with pleasure and moaned.
The two of them slept for only about an hour while Lyle’s clones were cooking, and the next day they were the happiest sleep-deprived zombies in the lab.
JULY 11, 2144
Jack put her beaker of coffee down on the lab bench next to Med and glanced up at the loft where Threezed was still sleeping. More than a quarter of a century had passed, and she was still crashing in lab storage rooms. And her future was more uncertain than ever.
“Here’s my hypothesis about a possible therapy,” Med announced. “We need to circumvent the reward patterns Zacuity created in the ODs, and we can only do that if we disable people’s memory of the addiction. Memory of the work reward is what keeps addicts coming back for more, even after they’ve detoxed. Every time they see a cue that reminds them of work—whether that’s a breadboard or a paintbrush—they’ll want to eat Zacuity again. Over time the dopamine receptors will grow back, and that’s helpful, but the main thing is to get rid of those reward memories.”
“Makes sense,” Krish mused. “What kind of memory blocker would you use?”
“Check this out.” Med allowed herself a quick grin, and showed them a molecular structure erupting into the air as a series of abstracted bonds. It was a collection of already-existing biological parts, along with a protein that Med had folded herself.
“I call it Retcon,” she said. Krish walked around the table, looking at the projection from every angle. “Essentially, what we’ll be doing is establishing retroactive continuity in the brain. We tweak the neurons to avoid the memory of the Zacuity-fueled reward, and we link the pre-addiction past to the present. You could say we create an alternate present for the brain, based on changing what it thinks has just happened.”
“Sounds easy.” Krish’s tone hovered between distracted and sarcastic, making Jack remember why she’d once loved him so much.
“What will be the experiential result for the person undergoing this therapy?” The question came from an undergraduate with a mass of curly red hair and a very serious expression on his face. “I mean, will they literally forget that they’ve ever taken the addictive substance before? Or just all the cues that make them want to do it again?”
“I am not sure,” Med admitted, looking at Jack for help. “I think they will forget some things, but I am not sure how much, or what that will feel like.”
“But won’t you be destroying years’ worth of memories?”
Jack could tell this kid was going to keep asking questions, and Med didn’t have much experience dealing with curious undergrads.
“Here’s the deal,” Jack interjected. “Retcon isn’t a cure-all for every kind of addiction. Nobody can make that. But it will work as a therapy for people who’ve taken Zacuity.” She had his attention now, and Med nodded gratefully. “Potentially, we can save thousands of lives.”
Seemingly mollified, the undergrad crooked his right index finger at Med’s simulation, downloading it to his goggles. The bot addressed the group again. “Anybody want to help out? We could divide up some of these simulations today, to model how different molecules might affect the brain.”
Jack raised her hand. “Sign me up.”
“Sure, I’ll do some.” This next volunteer was a postdoc who typed on the lab bench as she talked, her fingers’ movements captured by wrist sensors that translated them into keystrokes. Her coveralls were plastered with patches that seemed to be responding to the sound of her voice: When she spoke, they all turned red, then slowly faded through green into black again. The grad student with vines growing out of her head, who went by the nym Catalyst, volunteered, too. The serious undergraduate, who had no special adornments other than his grave facial expression, glanced through whatever he saw on his goggles, then focused on Med and Jack. “I’m intrigued,” he said. “I’ll put in some hours right now. I don’t have class until tomorrow.”
For a moment, Jack allowed herself to be charmed. These students loved their work at Free Lab so much that they came here when they weren’t in class, first thing in the morning, just to find something “intriguing” to research. It had been a long time since she’d worked on a drug project with people doing it for the thrill of discovery. Usually her lab teams were motivated by death or money, half-crazed with a desire to cure the former and bathe in giant tanks of the latter. She wasn’t sure which motivation made better fuel for innovation: naïve but ethical beliefs, or the need to survive.
Med organized the simulations quickly, parceling them out equally to everyone on the ad hoc Retcon Team.
Absorbed in analysis, the group lapsed into silence. Several meters above them, the Free Lab’s rectangular windows illuminated walls covered in shelves, revealing in dusty splotches of light the half-finished projects of dozens of genetic engineers. PCR machines the size of Jack’s fist lay in boxes with cables and self-cooling sample holders. A robotic arm inside a transparent shoebox was harvesting amplified sequence from minute cultures on a tray.