century. We’re not helpless anymore. Anything can be cured, once you understand it.”
Masika eyed me dubiously, as if he was trying to decide whether or not to tell me to save my platitudes for the champagne dinners. Then he said, “We do understand Yeyuka. We have HealthGuard software written for it, ready and waiting to go. But we can’t run it on the machine here. So we don’t need funds for research. What we need is another machine.”
I was speechless for several seconds, trying to make sense of this extraordinary claim. “The hospital’s machine is broken —?”
Masika shook his head. “The software is unlicensed. If we used it on the hospital’s machine, our agreement with HealthGuard would be void. We’d lose the use of the machine entirely.”
I could hardly believe that the necessary research had been completed without a single publication, but I couldn’t believe Masika would lie about it either. “How long can it take HealthGuard to approve the software? When was it submitted to them?”
Masika was beginning to look like he wished he’d kept his mouth shut, but there was no going back now. He admitted warily, “It hasn’t been submitted to them. It can’t be — that’s the whole problem. We need a bootleg machine, a decommissioned model with the satellite link disabled, so we can run the Yeyuka software without their knowledge.”
“Why? Why can’t they find out about it?”
He hesitated. “I don’t know if I can tell you that.”
“Is it illegal? Stolen?” But if it was stolen, why hadn’t the rightful owners licensed the damned thing, so people could use it?
Masika replied icily, “Stolen
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll have to make a phone call.”
—
Masika took me to what looked like a boarding house, student accommodation in one of the suburbs close to the campus. He walked briskly, giving me no time to ask questions, or even orient myself in the darkness. I had a feeling he would have liked to have blindfolded me, but it would hardly have made a difference; by the time we arrived I couldn’t have said where we were to the nearest kilometre.
A young woman, maybe nineteen or twenty, opened the door. Masika didn’t introduce us, but I assumed she was the person he’d phoned from the hospital, since she was clearly expecting us. She led us to a ground floor room; someone was playing music upstairs, but there was no one else in sight.
In the room, there was a desk with an old-style keyboard and computer monitor, and an extraordinary device standing on the floor beside it: a rack of electronics the size of a chest of drawers, full of exposed circuit boards, all cooled by a fan half a metre wide.
“What is that?”
The woman grinned. “We modestly call it the Makerere supercomputer. Five hundred and twelve processors, working in parallel. Total cost, fifty thousand shillings.”
That was about fifty dollars. “How —?”
“Recycling. Twenty or thirty years ago, the computer industry ran an elaborate scam: software companies wrote deliberately inefficient programs, to make people buy newer, faster computers all the time — then they made sure that the faster computers needed brand new software to work at all. People threw out perfectly good machines every three or four years, and though some ended up as landfill, millions were saved. There’s been a worldwide market in discarded processors for years, and the slowest now cost about as much as buttons. But all it takes to get some real power out of them is a little ingenuity.”
I stared at the wonderful contraption. “And you wrote the Yeyuka software on this?”
“Absolutely.” She smiled proudly. “First, the software characterises any damaged surface adhesion molecules it finds — there are always a few floating freely in the bloodstream, and their exact shape depends on the strain of Yeyuka, and the particular cells that have been infected. Then drugs are tailor-made to lock on to those damaged adhesion molecules, and kill the infected cells by rupturing their membranes.” As she spoke, she typed on the keyboard, summoning up animations to illustrate each stage of the process. “If we can get this onto a real machine…we’ll be able to cure three people a day.”
“But where did all the raw data come from? The RNA sequencing, the X-ray diffraction studies…?”
The woman’s smile vanished. “An insider at HealthGuard found it in the company archives, and sent it to us over the net.”
“I don’t understand. When did HealthGuard do Yeyuka studies? Why haven’t they published them? Why haven’t they written software themselves?”
She glanced uncertainly at Masika. He said, “HealthGuard’s parent company collected blood from five thousand people in southern Uganda in 2013. Supposedly to follow up on the effectiveness of their HIV vaccine. What they actually wanted, though, was a large sample of metastasising cells so they could perfect the biggest selling point of the HealthGuard: cancer protection. Yeyuka offered them the cheapest, simplest way to get the data they needed.”
I’d been half expecting something like this since Masika’s comments back in the hospital, but I was still shaken. To collect the data dishonestly was bad enough, but to bury information that was halfway to a cure — just to save paying for what they’d taken — was unspeakable.
I said, “Sue the bastards! Get everyone who had samples taken together for a class action: royalties plus punitive damages. You’ll raise hundreds of millions of dollars. Then you can buy as many machines as you want.”
The woman laughed bitterly. “We have no proof. The files were sent anonymously, there’s no way to authenticate their origin. And can you imagine how much HealthGuard would spend on their defence? We can’t afford to waste the next twenty years in a legal battle, just for the satisfaction of shouting the truth from the rooftops. The only way we can be sure of making use of this software is to get a bootleg machine, and do everything in silence.”
I stared at the screen, at the cure being played out in simulation that should have been happening three times a day in Mulago Hospital. She was right, though. However hard it was to stomach, taking on HealthGuard directly would be futile.
Walking back across the campus with Masika, I kept thinking of the girl with the liver infestation, and the possibility of undoing the moment of clumsiness that would otherwise almost certainly kill her. I said, “Maybe I can get hold of a bootleg machine in Shanghai. If I knew where to ask, where to look.” They’d certainly be expensive, but they’d have to be much cheaper than a commissioned model, running without the usual software and support.
My hand moved almost unconsciously to check the metal pulse on my index finger. I held the ring up in the starlight. “I’d give you this, if it was mine to give. But that’s thirty years away.” Masika didn’t reply, too polite to suggest that if I’d owned the ring outright, I wouldn’t even have raised the possibility.
We reached the University Hall; I could find my way back to the guest house now. But I couldn’t leave it at that; I couldn’t face another six weeks of surgery unless I knew that something was going to come of the night’s revelations. I said, “Look, I don’t have connections to any black market, I don’t have a clue how to go about getting a machine. But if you can find out what I have to do, and it’s within my power…I’ll do it.”
Masika smiled, and nodded thanks, but I could tell that he didn’t believe me. I wondered how many other people had made promises like this, then vanished back into the world-without-disease while the Yeyuka wards kept overflowing.
As he turned to go, I put a hand on his shoulder to stop him. “I mean it. Whatever it takes, I’ll do it.”
He met my eyes in the dark, trying to judge something deeper than this easy protestation of sincerity. I felt a sudden flicker of shame; I’d completely forgotten that I was an impostor, that I’d never really meant to come here, that two months ago a few words from Lisa would have seen me throw away my ticket, gratefully.
Masika said quietly, “Then I’m sorry that I doubted you. And I’ll take you at your word.”
