“Newton’s your son?”
“I take care of him. Have a seat.”
I take the couch. She takes a leather chair across from me that’s so stiff-backed it looks like a torture device.
“Thank you for everything you’ve done,” she says.
“What have I done?”
“You decrypted the package I sent you and you came to my assistance. You’re the hero.”
“Then why do I feel so lost?”
“In my experience, there is no worse feeling than having incomplete information.”
“True. Let’s start with where have you been?”
“Can I tell you about the Human Memory Crusade, and the software, ADAM 1.0?”
“Please.”
“Is this on the record?”
“Hell yes.”
“Could we do it off the record?”
“Why?”
“Because otherwise I won’t say anything.”
“Aren’t we on the same side?”
“I’m on the side of my family.”
“Off the record.”
She sips from a mug. “Coffee?” she asks. I shake my head.
“Newton’s mother is a flight attendant who doesn’t like to stay in one place more than forty-eight hours,” she says. “Newton was being raised by his grandmother. But she’s forgetful and frail and I do most of the mothering, for him and a few others in this building. As Newton’s grandma got more forgetful, I got interested in applying my doctoral training to more practical ends.”
She explains that she got permission inside Biogen to explore using computers to complement traditional and emerging anti-dementia medications.
“The idea was to stimulate the right neuro-chemicals with both drugs and physical interaction. Like building muscles using both steroids and exercise.”
She explains that the initial experiments were promising. They found people who had little or no experience using computers, mostly older folks. As these folks started to use computers, Biogen took functional MRI images of their brains. The images showed that computer users experienced heavy blood flow to parts of the brain associated with the discovery of information and the hunt for knowledge.
“We absolutely succeeded in strengthening neural connections. It looked very much like we were building up the brain.”
“What went wrong?”
“I’m not sure. When we use computers, our brains often are in a mode of discovery. We are hunting, whether for information on the Internet or opening an e-mail. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.”
“But?”
“In the real world, we hunt for a purpose — for food, a job, a relationship. At the end of the hunting period, we consume something or retain it.”
“Don’t we do that with information from the Internet? Don’t we retain what we need and can use?”
“That’s just what I assumed.”
I sense excitement in her. Science is her comfort zone.
“When we started to see problems with some test subjects, I saw another mechanism at work,” she says.
She explains that some people who use computers heavily get caught in the loop of constantly hunting and discovering in a way that appears to diminish their capacity to retain information.
“We use a search engine too much and we become a search engine ourselves. I call it ‘neuro-rabbit holing.’ Our brains become like Alice in Wonderland, searching forward for answers, swirling and chaotic.”
“You’re saying this is more than merely a cultural phenomenon, or habit. We no longer remember phone numbers or driving directions or contact information because we store it all in computers, but you’re talking about something different. You’re saying our brains are changing.”
She clears her throat, and looks down. “Some are affected more than others.”
“What about cortisol?”
“What about it?”
“Don’t treat me like an idiot. I know that it accelerates the process.”
She stands and walks to a window facing the basketball courts. She talks with her back to me. “Sorry. You’re right. It does. Separate mechanism, exacerbating the problem. When we get distracted by too much multitasking, cortisol gets released, killing memory cells in the hippocampus. It can spread like a forest fire.”
“Or a wildfire.”
She turns around. She looks at me quizzically, hesitating. “That term works. Regardless of what you call it, it seemed like the most remote theoretical possibility.”
“How did Pete Laramer and Chuck Taylor get involved?”
“I knew Pete from various research conferences. I brought him into the project.”
She’s biting the inside of her left cheek, and she scratches her head. From her scalp drift several white flakes. Could be dandruff or dry scalp caused by the changing climate. Or maybe its seborrheic dermatitis, which is chronic, but can be triggered by stress.
“You and Pete were lovers?”
She waves her hand, as if to say it’s none of my business. It is shy of an admission, but I’m onto something.
“Is Pete okay?” I ask. “Is he alive?”
She looks down. She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”
“And Chuck?”
She hesitates.
“I know he’s involved,” I say. “He told me. What’s his part?”
“Pete brought him in. Chuck brought investment dollars, access to veterans clinics, clout. He seemed to get the project moving. But I don’t know much about his investment entity.”
Adrianna looks me directly in the eye. She’s aching to be seen as sincere. Her pupils are extremely bloodshot, painfully red.
“Doing neurological tests on people without their permission is at least a civil violation, and probably a criminal one,” I say.
“I’m not proud of what happened. But I didn’t advocate for any of it.”
“How widespread were the tests?” I ask. “How many old people at how many nursing homes got their memories scrambled? How many veterans at how many VA clinics? Who else?”
She puts her hands out, urging me to calm down. She’s right; I need information, not confrontation.
“There were fifteen sites in all — domestically, at least. More, worldwide. With a few exceptions, they were in communities with tech-savvy populations. I’m not at liberty to disclose the exact locations. They’ve all been closed down.”
I’m flummoxed. Adrianna is turning into a hostile witness, or, at least, she’s a practiced one.
I stand, baffled, hoping to find a way to express myself that doesn’t involve hurling insults or pieces of expensive art.
“You know how much you love Newton?”
“Don’t bring him into this.”
“That’s how much I love my grandmother. You poked her brain with a stick. You aged her. You tested her without her permission. You stole a part of her life and you wrote over her story.”
She blinks several times rapidly.
“Adrianna, you’re not telling me everything.”
After a pause she says: “You just told me that you love your grandmother?”
“Of course.”
“So you understand.”
“Understand what?”
“Sometimes you cut your losses. The Human Memory Crusade is dead. ADAM is dead. Falcon will buy Biogen. Bluntly, and I’m sorry to say this: a few old people and veterans endured accelerated memory loss, but they were suffering dementia before. In the grand scheme, it’s water under the bridge.”
“Bullshit,” I spit out. “That logic doesn’t follow. The applicable logic is that I love my grandmother and therefore I’m going to find out what happened to her. Then you and everyone else involved are going to jail.”
“For what? For giving retirement communities new computers and a chance for residents to record their memories? Everything was done with their full support.”
“Except the part where you fried brains.”
“You’ll have to prove that and, in seeking to do so, invoke all kinds of risk.”