Although I’m not buying the whole story, big parts make sense.
“What went wrong?” I ask.
Chuck brings up the next slide. It’s an image of the brain. Two small, banana-shaped regions in the center of the brain are highlighted, drawn out of proportion with the others. These are the hippocampi.
“The research team noticed that some Human Memory Crusade users were experiencing accelerated memory loss,” he says.
He hits the button again, revealing an image of a collection of cells. Above the image is a caption: Magnification, 75,000:1.
“I’m over my head here,” Chuck says. “In lay terms, these are memory cells.”
“And they were dying,” I interrupt.
“Cortisol,” he says.
“Of course.” Even though I’d guessed this earlier, I’m hit hard by the revelation.
The hyper-stimulation released cortisol.
“So the brain wasn’t strengthened but weakened,” I say.
He nods. “You understand how this works?”
“Maybe.”
“Explain it to me. I’ve heard it a dozen times, and I never can quite grasp the science.”
“What happens to you when you multitask?”
“I get a lot of shit done.”
“But at a cost.” I stand, start to pace, and think aloud.
“When you’ve got a ton of information flowing — when you’re trying to juggle e-mail, browsing, phone calls, whatever — you’re putting yourself in a highly stressful situation. Your brain is fighting to keep up.”
“How stressful can e-mail be?”
“Don’t think of it like that. Think of the computer as a virtual environment — our twenty-first-century jungle. We spend all day interacting with it. If we were in an actual jungle, it would be highly stressful if we had to face challenges from lots of different directions — lions on one side, alligators on another, hot sun, battles for food, whatever.”
“So?”
“In that environment, our adrenal glands produce brain cortisol, a lot of it. It’s a stress hormone. It helps us focus intensely for a short period so we can survive.”
“Okay, I get that analogy.”
I’m sure he’s patronizing me. But I continue hypothesizing.
“The problem is that cortisol kills memory cells.”
“Bingo.” He looks impressed.
I don’t know enough about the neuroscience to know if this is a big deal, though I sense from the violence and secrecy involved here that Biogen and Laramer have discovered something radical.
“Say something,” Chuck says.
“You’re killing my grandmother’s brain.”
He looks away.
“It’s worse than you think.”
Chapter 44
I hold out my hands, palms up, then ball them into fists, enraged. “Worse than frying her memory with a fucking motherboard!?”
“There was some chain reaction.”
“Meaning?” My fists are still clenched.
“A handful of patients suffered sudden degradation of their memory assets.”
“You mean: their memory
“Right. It’s been described to me that they contracted a virus. Somehow the interaction between computer and human stimulated a cascade of cell loss.”
“A wildfire,” I say.
He nods.
“But if the computers reported a ‘wildfire,’ they must have been programmed to look for it. Its creators must have known this was a possibility. That makes this something less than an unforeseeable accident.”
I ring my fingers around the wine opener in my pocket. “So why did you try to kill her — and me?”
Chuck puts out his hands, trying to calm me. I take another step forward. He scoots to the edge of the couch and, without taking his eyes from me, opens the drawer in an end table. He pulls out a gun.
“The only thing I’ve ever tried to kill, or killed, has been helpless wildlife.” He cradles the gun casually, the threat only implicit.
“Who then? Who tried to kill us?” I demand.
He sighs. “You said it yourself. The Swiss.”
I shake my head. Not grasping this.
“Falcon,” he says flatly.
“The Swiss giant trying to buy Biogen?” Incredulous.
He shifts back to his computer. He moves the cursor and double clicks on something on his monitor. Moments later, the PowerPoint presentation disappears, and a new image appears — the hooded man who tried to shoot us and set me on fire.
“That’s the Swiss guy?”
“Sven something. Works for Falcon. If they’re going to buy Biogen, they can’t afford to have a messy secret experiment exposed.”
“Did they kill Adrianna?”
“My guess is they’ve detained her, not killed her. No reason to. They’re not indiscriminate killers.”
“But they’ll kill a demented grandmother who can’t reveal any information, and her grandson who doesn’t know a damn thing? Or didn’t until now. Why?”
“That part is personal.”
I shake my head — I don’t understand his meaning.
“Adrianna has made a long-term investment in another person, and she’s deeply emotionally committed to seeing it pay off.”
“English!”
“She’s playing the role of aunt to the boy. As long as they threaten his safety, she won’t compromise their secrets.”
“Newton?”
He nods.
“And Grandma and I don’t have anything to live for?”
He closes the top of his computer.
“Two different issues,” he says. “Your grandmother — she can’t be stopped from talking because she can no longer understand reason, or be coerced or blackmailed. Ironically enough, because she has dementia, she’s a liability for what she knows, even if she doesn’t know she knows it.”
“What does she know?”
He shakes his head. He wants to say something else but seems to change gears. He says: “You’re a liability for a different reason.”
“Because I’m a journalist.”
“Because you’re a junkie for the hunt. I’m guessing here, inferring a little. But if I were them, I’d find you threatening because you live for this kind of action. No personal connection or promise of wealth or intimacy is as interesting to you as the chase. That makes you beyond blackmail or reason.”
I close my eyes and clench my teeth. I let out a loud, frustrated exhale. I’m seeing an image of Grandma and
