“You really had me going with the yacht story.”
Sam smiled and turned around in his seat. “You and my mother have been talking incessantly.”
“She told me a story.”
“Yeah?”
“An Indian girl grew apart from her husband and?? about a single man to take as a lover. Many nights she sneaked across the stream. To make it easy she planted large stones and learned to dance across and keep her moccasins dry even in the dark. Then her lover took a wife and left her alone. Every day she looked at the stones and was reminded of him. One night she danced across the stones and found her husband waiting. After that meeting, so the legend goes, they prospered and had many children and every night her husband waited for her at the other side of the river. Over time the story of the stones got around the village and dancing across them in the dark became a game amongst the young women, and soon they placed more stones and made more elaborate crossings.
“Have you heard this story?” she asked Sam.
“Yes,” he said. “But keep going. Sometimes my mother’s stories have a fork in the road-which fork depends on the traveler.”
“Then you know that as time passed, crossing the river on the stones became a wedding ritual for brides, who would find their husbands waiting on the other side to take them off to a secret place.
“Then one day a Talth went to the people and said this ritual was not right because the stones were a memorial to treachery and should not be part of a wedding celebration. Wanting to keep the tradition, the people went to the chief and inquired about the message of the Talth.
“The chief said that time for love must be stolen from the cares of life or it will fade. So the ritual was good because it taught an important lesson.”
Sam smiled as if he understood the point. “And what did you get out of the story?”
“There is something about escaping cares and commitments and just stealing time for love that perpetuates it. For a lot of people, it’s sort of in the blueprint for marriage that duties are more important than love.”
“But?”
“Love seems dangerous. If you don’t want to feel it you can escape it, but you then become emotionally unavailable.”
“She really is getting to you.”
“Are you feeeee… ling something, Sam?” she asked teasingly. “You won’t get this overnight. How did your mother tell the story to you?”
“It was the same story with a different emphasis. It was all about the path in your mind that not trusting makes. You know, it leaves a trail like the stones. She was telling me that my dad left a trail in my mind. Of course the moral had to be that it’s up to me to give the stones a new meaning. In the story the woman’s husband and the whole tribe gave the stones a new meaning. With the new trust came new feelings. It’s a versatile story.”
“Funny. I wrote this poem. It seems like she would have told me the meaning she told you. The part about reinterpreting something that happened in the past.
“Anyway did the story soften you up, Sam?”
“Give me a break. What man with any balls is going to be softened by a story?”
The phone rang. It was T.J.
“We got an e-mail. They’re ready to talk at Harvard.”
“Okay. We’ll come to the scrambler and place the call.”
Sam turned on the speakerphone and everyone but Sam, Anna, Grady, and T.J. cleared the office area that had been set up in the house’s spacious library.
“I think we have it licked,” Fielding began. “We elected George to explain it.”
“I don’t know how much you want me to try to cover on the phone.”
“The whole thing,” Anna said. “I want to know what’s wrong with Jason.”
“Well, as you know there were two codes just to get into the main files. Paul cracked the second, but then individual files were encrypted and we had to go back to Big Brain four times. Jason had hacked into various parts of the Grace computer and downloaded backup files from the lab in Kuching. We are the first to read them, and it took a whole team of us including some folks from the University of Washington and a private foundation lab. But we got their game or at least part of it. And it is fascinating.”
“How does it affect my brother?”
“Okay, maybe I should start with the rather glum conclusion and then explain it.”
“Yes.”
“They altered his DNA. The DNA of his neurons. His brain. It’s probably permanent unless the lab that did it has a fix. But there does seem to be a treatment and we know the active ingredient. It is a temporary antidote that will relieve the effects of the DNA alteration for about twenty-four hours. If he takes it every twenty-four hours, he may not feel the effects of what has been done to his brain.”
“So he’s paranoid because of this?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“This seems incredible.”
“Well, there is a lot to it. I can explain if you like. I will tell you that we can send you some hormone that will make him feel better.”
“Yes. Yes.”
“All right Where to start… let’s see… they needed to alter just certain of his brain cells. They started with neurons in the limbic system, the prefrontal cortex, and the amygdala. They alter them genetically. Once changed, they have radical effects on people’s state of mind. To change them genetically they alter the DNA. To do that they deliver new DNA that affects certain predetermined neuron cell types.”
Anna seemed to pale.
“Okay. We’re all ears,” Sam said.
“Okay, to begin with, if we’re trying to influence anxiety we go to the cells that influence that mental state. Anxiety is largely controlled by certain brain cells in the limbic system, amygdala, and prefrontal cortex.”
“Okay.”
“There are two kinds of cells there. Some enhance a response, such as anxiety, and others reduce it. Activator cells or inhibitor cells, we call them. Grace calls the inhibitor cells suppressor cells, so we’ll go with their lingo. If you increase the sensitivity of anxiety-suppressor cells, you will actually be suffering less anxiety, whereas the opposite is true if you increase the sensitivity of an activator cell. To increase sensitivity to a neuron they add what we call a receptor. It’s actually a molecule on the dendrite.”
Sam let George know that they’d become familiar with the workings of dendrites and synapses, courtesy of Dr. Yanavitch.
“If I understand this,” Sam said, “my next question is how they forced the DNA changes in Jason’s brain.”
“To deliver the DNA coding sequence they use a structure that is in some respects like a virus and it is called a vector. To make it they break apart a virus and strip away its protein coating. Then they insert two pieces of DNA. One causes the formation of the extra receptor molecule on the dendrites and that is called the coding sequence. The other is called the promoter strand and it identifies the cells that are to be changed by the coding sequence. It’s like the passkey to changing only the neurons that make a difference in the anxiety response.
“Specifically, Grace breaks down a monkey herpes virus. They splice in the coding DNA and the promoter DNA, reinstall a new protein coat around this new ring of DNA, and bam, they have a delivery vehicle that infects a foreign cell and installs new coding sequences. All body cells of different function are defined by the proteins that they make. What defines those special proteins that make a cell unique are the promoters that are active in the cell to produce their unique proteins. For cells that have specialized functions like a cell in the amygdala of your brain, involved in an anxiety response, there must be unique proteins produced by that cell and cells of the same function. Each cell type will have its own promoter.
“If the vector enters a neuron that doesn’t recognize the promoter, then there is no change in that cell. They introduce the vector (which for these purposes is like a virus that won’t replicate) and it invades all or most brain cells indiscriminately. The protein changes forced by the changed DNA will only apply to the desired cells of the brain. So if any given neuron happens to be a brain cell concerned with anxiety, the vector basically says, ‘Honey, I’m home,’ and the cell recognizes that voice.