Expectation (Ghost Targets, #2) (11 page)

"It made people older," Theresa finished for her. She took a sip of her tea. "Well, it made them age too quickly." She shook a finger at Katie. "The news made it seem like some nightmare scenario, I remember, but Eric says they knew it would do that. Back when they made the first vaccine, they knew the second one would do that. It has to do with telomeres and gene shortening, and you lose a little bit of your genetic blueprint every time your cells divide. That's one of the things that makes people older."

Katie nodded. She had an uncle who had taken the time to explain it to her in detail, a very long time ago. "Something about the immune system," she said. "The system that makes people age is the same one that fights off cancer."

"Exactly," Theresa said. "And everyone who worked on the second vaccine knew that. It was all rooted in perfectly clear genetic science. It was a risk those early testers took knowingly, willingly." She smiled proudly. "But Eric thought it was a tragedy. He never lost anybody to it, thank the Lord. It was just something in his heart that told him he had to find something better. Everyone was happy with a ninety-nine point however many nines success rate, even if it meant advanced aging, but Eric said there had to be something better." Another sip, another proud smile. "He found a way to preserve total telomere strands while adapting the mutagen-targeting attributes of the second vaccine, and developed a third one that cured cancer without the side effect."

Katie nodded. "Aging."

"Not..." Theresa sighed. "I'm not a scientist, okay. I'm not. But it's not
all
 aging. All metabolism introduces decay, but the big bad wolves of aging were mental and physical decay, and then the loss of genetic information that was crucial to maintaining a functioning copy of
you
. Between the mind boosters, the body boosters, and the third cancer vaccine, we had all of those conquered over a decade ago. And by all accounts that should have bought humanity enough time to figure out what they needed to cure the rest of the nasty little ailments inflicted by time."

"Then what's Gevia?"

"Gevia is the dream of a madman." Theresa said. She caught the look of incomprehension in Katie's eyes, and shrugged. "It didn't work," she said. "Eric didn't fully
realize
 the implications of his cancer vaccine until later, but someone else did. Papers came out, they were discussed at length in several prestigious journals, and that's when Eric really became famous. He'd been a name on a patent application, buried beneath all his corporate, collegiate, and government sponsors, but when the debate started about his vaccine's telomerase inhibition and its likely effects on healthy adults, he joined right in and fought with the best of them." She smiled at the memory. "He was wrong, it turns out, but he was on the side of science. He always was."

Katie frowned. "I don't understand."

"There were people saying that his vaccine
should
 cure aging, theoretically, but a lot of other people saying that was absurd. At the time, the vaccine was used on such a small percentage of the population and we didn't have Hippocrates yet to track things, so everything was still being done in studies. The populations were too low for any real statistically-significant analysis, but as the argument grew, people started paying closer and closer attention to the folks who
were
 on the vaccine, and by all appearances they were aging normally. Gradual mental and physical decay starting at thirty and accelerating after fifty, offset predictably by their use of Zinafin or strength boosters."

Katie said, "So it didn't work?"

"It took time to find that out, obviously. But, no. It didn't work. I mean, it didn't make people act any younger, and that was exactly what Eric had anticipated in his arguments. At the time, the standard answer was that the cumulative harmful effects of metabolism are too numerous to ever fully reverse. DNA-shortening was considered just one of the myriad culprits bringing about the constant fall of man."

Katie smiled. "You talk like a poet."

"I get that from Eric," she said, then shrugged. "Well, not really. I was a Lit. major in college, but that was forever ago. I became the happy housewife, and Eric became the novelist. We never imagined that turn of events."

"I saw his books," Katie said and blushed at the look of surprise on Theresa's face. "I stumbled across them while inspecting the lab. Meg told me a little bit about them."

"Oh, Meg," Theresa said. "She's a darling." She smiled.

Katie took a sip of her tea, then shook her head. "So the cancer vaccine just did what it was supposed to?"

"No," Theresa said. A thoughtful frown creased her forehead. "I mean, yes. That's how it seemed. The debate went on and on, but as time passed and the data began pouring in, it sure seemed like all it was doing was fighting cancer. But then Eric got a call from this mystery man, a...I don't know, philosopher, really. He said he was a theorist, and
he
 spoke like a poet, let me tell you. But he was a techie, too, and he told us he could resolve the telomerase question once and for all. He had his own theories, he said, but he'd keep them to himself until his little research project found an answer."

Katie leaned forward, elbows on the table. "And Eric went along with all this? Why?"

"Sheer personality," Theresa said. "The guy wasn't much of a salesman, but he was a true believer. And he was smart, too." She shook her head. "Not...nothing like Eric. Eric is a scientist, through and through. This man was different. He kept talking about prayer and the power of human expectation. He tried to give Eric lectures about the placebo effect, as though a fully-trained doctor and medical researcher wouldn't already know about it." She shook her head. "But that was his theory, and he came backed up with some impressive evidence."

"What's that?" Katie said.

"Hippocrates." Theresa nodded at the sudden comprehension on Katie's face. "It was new then, and he's the one who introduced us to it. He set up a survey in Hippocrates to track every single person who had ever taken Eric's cancer vaccine, and it told us
everything
. Every time one of them stumbled while walking, every time any of them stammered over a word they should have known. Every pulled muscle, every forgotten name at a party. It provided the hard numbers everyone was looking for, with real-time results, and it showed exactly what everyone was expecting."

She held up a hand to stop Katie interrupting, and said, "I told you, he had an experiment in mind. He brought in a huge test batch and had Eric administer the cancer vaccine to them. Most of them were told what they were getting, but a handful were told it was an anti-aging drug in the earliest experimental stages. Gevia was born in that experiment. I think Eric came up with the name, but it might have been the other one. It doesn't matter. Some of them from each group got the vaccine, and some from each group got a placebo. And you know what happened?"

"It worked?"

Theresa smiled. "That's a vague answer, but yes. To put it more specifically, the philosopher's theory was proven correct. It took three years before even Hippocrates could demonstrate it reliably enough to convince Eric, but the signs were there much sooner." She shook her head. "Those people who received the vaccine were not aging. The test proved it. At least, not seriously. But only the ones who were lied to enjoyed the benefits of it. Those who thought they'd received the regular vaccine—which they had—continued to develop symptoms of age at approximately the expected rate."

"How?" Katie asked, unable to restrain herself.

"Expectation," Theresa said. "'Psychosomatic,' was one of his favorite words. He'd say, 'The mind makes it real,' like he was quoting something." She shook her head. "No one really believed aging was curable. It was the stuff of science fiction back then. And religion, I guess. So people would take the cancer vaccine, and all those other drugs, and then there would be no need for them to go dimwitted as time went by, but they knew that was what people did. They'd watched their parents and grandparents go through it."

"So they just let themselves go," Katie said.

"Exactly." Theresa nodded. "Same thing physically. But it was not just laziness. It was real, clinical. These people's own belief in aging caused them to become frail." She sighed. "It's strange, the way our minds can work against us. We're trapped, helpless, beneath the weight of our own expectations."

"So, what?"

"So, Gevia," Theresa said. "These experiments I told you about were never published. They were run through Hippocrates with some sort of special clearance, some administrator thing, and Eric and this philosopher were the only ones who ever knew about the results." She looked down at the table. "And me," she said. "That's...honestly, that's the only reason I know any of this. Because Eric didn't believe the old man. He never thought it would turn out, so he told me everything."

"How did the army feel about it?" Katie asked, trying to guess how she might use this information. "They'd hired him to work on cancer—"

"The philosopher took care of all that," she said. "Eric thought all along he was being recruited to go work somewhere else, but when he agreed to pursue the project, this guy insisted Eric stay put. He said that the easiest way to get access to people's beliefs was to start with people who were already brainwashed to accept what they were told. And the clinic here, of course, was perfect. So he put together a grant proposal, arranged the name change and financed the construction of Eric's research lab, and then he disappeared."

"Do you...any chance you remember his name?" Katie already knew. In her gut, there wasn't any doubt. She wasn't even sure it was worth asking, but she had to.

"Martin," Theresa said. "I never even met him, and he was only in Eric's life for a few months, but I'll never forget that man. Martin Door." She seemed confused when Katie nodded. "Do you know him?"

"I know him," Katie said. "Oh, I know him."

"Well, he said
he
 had expected exactly what Hippocrates showed him, and he had a plan for fixing that. He said we needed a full-scale roll out of Gevia. Everyone in the world needed to be given the placebo, the whole clinical treatment you got, as a follow-up to the cancer vaccine. Between the two—the medical cure in the vaccine and the psychological cure in the big con—we could cure aging completely."

Katie nodded. "I can see him dreaming up something like that."

"Eric couldn't even fathom it. Especially with Hathor really coming onto the scene right then. There would be no way to keep a secret on that scale, but the philosopher told him about the army's restricted access sites, and he even had something similar for himself, so that Hathor—"

"I know all about that," Katie said.

Theresa shook her head. "It was just unimaginable to us. But the philosopher said it had to be Eric. It
had
 to be him because of his unique celebrity. If he would follow through with Martin's lie, he could prevent thousands of unnecessary deaths. Hundreds of thousands. The scale of it all was just huge."

"But how could they keep it hidden? I'm on Gevia, and you'd better believe I did my research before I reported to the clinic. There's not a whisper of this, and if the whole army knows—"

"Hah!" Theresa barked a laugh. "They don't. Three...four people were in on it. Eric and the philosopher, and the base commander at the time, and the president."

Katie's eyes widened. "Really?"

She nodded. "The philosopher arranged it somehow. Closed-door session, off the record, and that was a big deal at the time, because Stewart was a huge believer in Hathor monitoring."

"I recall," Katie said. "It got him elected."

"Well, he knows. He authorized the military trials and he signed the State Secrets letters that have allowed the development to continue entirely without review or oversight." She trailed off. "A few months later, that base commander died. That left three men who knew the secret and me. Well, and Ellie, probably. She worked so closely with Eric, she did the actual coverup, so she must have known."

"What about the research assistant?"

"Meg? No. Well...no, I don't think she knows. She believes in what he does completely. It's her passion, as much as he pretended it was his."

Katie looked down. "So Eric didn't really believe in it?"

"Oh, he did," Theresa said, nodding furiously. "I mean, the numbers were there. The military trials were a huge success, and at this point we've got nearly a decade of data on millions of subjects, and it's there. Gevia saves lives. Combined with the cancer vaccine, of course, but that was always the plan. There's nothing else Eric could have done, in all his life, to affect humanity on the same scale as Gevia."

Katie understood. "But it's just a con," she said. "That bothered him."

Theresa nodded. "I don't think the deception bothered him too much, but he wanted to do more. He wanted to actually do his work, release research, instead of just pretending."

"Surely he had time—"

"Oh, he did," Theresa said. "But it was all about the appearance. People were paying attention to him. Oh, when word of Gevia got out, you can bet people were paying close attention to him. Everything he did made the news, and Hippocrates could tell us, minute by minute, how those news reports affected the success of Gevia. When he published a paper about Parkinson's detection, this story went out that the boy genius was turning his attention to other areas of study, and Hippocrates showed a one percent drop in the effectiveness of Gevia. Then Eric got involved in the debate that his new paper prompted, and I guess that confirmed people's suspicions that his focus was elsewhere, because within a week that drop went from one percent to twelve."

"That's nuts!" Katie said.

"And it was always like that. It...do you remember that guy in the Bible who had to keep his staff raised over his head in order for his side to win the war? It was like that. The reward was worth it, but the process was so silly. No...ritualistic. That's the thing. Eric was a scientist, and it bothered him that his greatest contribution to the world was going to be through this farce."