Syndrome by Thomas Hoover (read along books txt) 📖

Wednesday, April 8

8:25 P.M.

Alexa watches as the prow of their forty-one-foot Morgan, two-masted, cuts silently through a placid sea. She vaguely remembers the vessel. It was teak and magnificent. Steve had chartered it, bare-boat, for two weeks and taken them cruising through the Bahamas. By the end of that time, she felt they could have sailed it around the world.

But that was six years ago, when he was still very much alive. Now the boat feels like a magical carpet taking them someplace together, effortlessly. The genoa, the mainsail, and the mizzen are all full and blossoming outward even though there’s no wind. She’s at the helm, holding a course toward something white on the horizon, and Steve is with her. He’s alive again and he’s with her. She feels her body suffused with joy. Then she looks at the reflection of herself in his sunglasses and realizes she’s a little girl, still a child. This is all a dream, she realizes, a cruel dream. Then she looks again at the horizon, the blazing white light, and senses that it represents the future. Their destiny.

Now the sea around them, which had been placid, starts to roil. The wheel is becoming harder to control, and the sun is starting to burn her. In its pitiless glare she feels herself beginning to age rapidly. She glances at Steve and she can see his skin starting to shrivel. She senses he is dying, right there before her eyes, but her hands feel glued to the wheel and she can’t let go to try to help him.

Now the sea is growing ever more choppy and the white symbol on the horizon has begun to bob in and out of view. Sometimes she can see the “future” and sometimes she can’t. Waves are crashing over the sides, inundating the deck, and she feels anxious about what lies up ahead. Will they ever get there, and if they do, will she want what she finds? Even more important now, will Steve still be with her?

As the waves pound against them both, oddly she doesn’t feel wet. Instead, what she feels is a stab of muted pain in her upper chest, pain she knows would be searing if she were to experience its full impact. She looks down to see that the wheel she thought she was holding is gone, and her chest is pierced by the steel mechanism to which it was attached. It has gone all the way through her.

Next a huge wave comes straight over the bow and slams against her and Steve. Her body convulses with pain and she senses that he is being swept overboard, directly off the stern. She screams at him to hold on, but then he is gone, lost in the dark sea.

Now the boat itself is starting to disintegrate, as both masts tip backwards, then come crashing down. Up ahead, the white light that is the future is growing ever more flame-like. It is part of a shoreline she is trying to reach, but now she doesn’t think she’s going to get there. Around her, the boat’s lines and cleats are being swept into the pounding sea.

In moments the boat has disappeared, but she continues on, propelled by some force she cannot see, until she finally crashes onto the rocky shore.

It is a chiaroscuro landscape of blacks and whites. Oddly, Stone Aimes has appeared and is holding her hand as they make their way along the barren seascape, where everything is hazy and trapped in fog. She thinks she sees figures lurking in the mist around them but can’t make out who they are. Everything is static and frozen in place, like the images of motion on the Grecian urn caught for eternity.

She reaches out to touch Stone and her hand passes right through. That’s when she realizes the white light and this rocky shoreline represent the other side. Is this what death feels like? she wonders. Like the white tunnel drawing you in?

But then she has another thought. Maybe she isn’t dead at all. Maybe she is in a third place, somewhere suspended between life and death. She looks again at Stone and tells herself they’re not dead, they’re in some kind of time machine. This voyage is about time.

Now time has begun to flow around her like a river. Days, weeks, months, years, they all course by. But she knows it is a chimera. Nothing can make time go faster or slower.

Then the bright lights are gone and she feels alone. Very alone.

But she isn’t. She hears voices around her, drifting, echoing, and she tries to understand what they are saying.

“She’s stabilized. We’re past the critical phase.”

“Do you want to bring her up now?”

“Not yet. We still don’t know how it’s going to go.”

There was a pause, and then a male voice.

“This was the Beta too, wasn’t it, Karl?” Another pause. “Well, wasn’t it? The injections. That’s the first time since…”

Again the voices drift off. She listens, not sure what she is hearing. She tries to process the word “beta” but makes no headway. In computer slang, “beta” means a program that is still being tested. Then she remembers hearing the word just hours earlier. She had been talking to some woman. But she can’t remember who—”

“I changed the procedure this time,” comes a voice. “I injected the special Beta enzyme separately from the activated stem cells. Whatever happens will happen at the enzyme’s own pace now. And I kept the dosage as low as I could. We’ll be monitoring her telomerase levels throughout the day. If there’s no rejection, we will be past the first phase.”

“Is the dosage the only difference from before?” comes the other, accusing voice.

“At this point, David, manipulating the Beta is an art, not a science. I’m just attempting to create antigens, the way a smallpox vaccination does. Then we’ll try to harvest them. This is not really a full-scale Beta procedure. I don’t plan to do that ever again.”

There was another long silence.

“That man who was here with her. Her cousin, did he say? I saw no family resemblance, but he seemed very upset.”

“That’s why I had him sent upstairs. I think he’s the reporter W.B. was so concerned about. Anyway, he’s gone.”

Stone. She realizes that’s who they’re talking about. And now he’s gone. She’s on her own.

Next the voices drift away for a time, into some echo space that mutes them. Finally, though, they come back.

“This should be adequate for another four hours. After that, you’ll need a glucose IV to keep her hydrated.”

“I’ve already put it on her chart. By then we should have some idea of which way this is going. I’m thinking, I’m praying, that this time is going to be the charm. That I’ve learned how to modulate the enzyme.”

“Is she ready for transfer to IC?”

“Anytime.”

The voices start drifting away. A fuzziness is enveloping her senses, leaving everything soft and muted.

The pain is gone from her body now, and the bright lights around her seem to be dimming. The figures in the white haze on the perimeter are now disappearing, one by one, as though filing out of a room. And now she feels like she’s floating, with things moving past her.

Then, finally, one lone voice is talking to her, is really talking to her, in a private and unmistakable way. And as she drifts back into the gulf of anesthesia, she listens to words that do not make a lot of sense.

“The Fountain. Through all the ages, we’ve been looking in the wrong place. It’s within us. Together, Alexa, we have this chance.”

She listens as the voice begins to drift away. Yet she feels a genuine sense of closeness to it. She realizes she no longer has control of her destiny. But still she wants to be where she is.

Now the sea is coming back, flowing around her, and she tries to remember where she is and why, but all she is aware of is the sea rising, until she is engulfed.