Thomas Hoover - Syndrome

What was the worst-case scenario at this point?

What he had to do was figure that out and then plan a countermove.

Friday, April 10

7:48p.m.

There are sounds of doors opening and closing, with whispered words that are like alien hisses. She senses she is in motion, on a bed that is gliding past powerful overhead lights.

She doesn't know where she is, but that doesn't matter, because wherever it was, she knows it surely is a dream.

All she remembers is that Karl Van de Vliet had told her he wants her to undergo a second procedure with the telomerase enzyme, which possibly might create sufficient antibodies to reverse. . It's all a jumble now in her mind.

Or had she just dreamed all that? Now her life seems a flowing river that has no beginning and no end. Her mind is drifting, a cork bobbing helplessly in the current.

Then her brother, Grant, drifts alongside her. At least she thinks it's Grant. She recognizes his voice.

"Ally, can you hear me?" he seems to be asking. "Is there anything you want to tell me? Do you still want to go through with this?"

It's the kind of dream where she can hear things around her, but when she tries to speak, no sounds will come. Instead, she's talking inside her head.

I'm afraid. I'm just afraid.

"I can still try to get you out, but you have to help. I waited for you last night but you never came."

She wants to say, yes, get me out , but she can only speak in the dream.

Now the lighting changes and she feels like she is falling. No, she realizes, she's just on an elevator.

"Talk to me, Ally," whispers the voice one last time. "I can try to stop them, but I have to know what you want."

Then a door opens and she floats through it and out. Then comes the clanking of a door that reminds her of the steel air lock she'd gone through last night looking for Kristen. The smells. She's in the laboratory.

"We can take her from here," comes a voice, drifting through her reverie.

She fantasizes it's Karl Van de Vliet. Or maybe he really is there. In her dream state it's hard to know. But he isn't alone.

"You said you'd make one more attempt to create the antibodies. Is. . "

It's Winston Bartlett. Or at least it sounds like him.

"I said I would do all I could, W.B. The first attempt. . you know what happened. I got almost no results, but I gave you an injection of all I managed to garner. Today I spent the day doing simulations. We're working closer to the edge than I thought. That's why I needed her down at the lab tonight. I want to run some more tests and then try to make a decision. Tonight. There's just a hell of a lot more risk than I first thought."

The voice trails off and Ally finds herself trying to comprehend "risk."

She hears "beta" again and it floats through her mind, but now its meaning is unclear. It's something she'd heard but can no longer place.

"Ally," comes a ghostly voice. Surely this is a dream, and she recognizes it as her father, Arthur. Now she can see him. He's wearing a white cap and they're boating in Central Park. He shows up in her dreams a lot and she feels he's the messenger of her unconscious, telling her truths that she sometimes doesn't want to hear.

"Ally," he says, "he's going to perform the full Beta procedure on you. He didn't tell you, but you know it's true. He thinks he's finally calculated everything right. Can't you see? Is that what you want?"

She isn't sure what she wants. And right now she isn't entirely clear where she fits on the scale of sleeping/waking. It is so bizarre. The two parts of her mind, the conscious and the unconscious, are talking to each other. Her unconscious is warning her about fears she didn't even know she had. Or at least she hadn't admitted to yet.

Then she hears Winston Bartlett's voice again.

"Karl, we can't save Kristen now. I've finally realized that. She's gone too far. It's just a tragedy we'll have to figure out how to live with."

"The body is a complex chemical laboratory that sometimes gets out of balance. There's always hope. I think-"

"Know what I fucking think?" Bartlett cuts him off. "I think I'm in line for the Syndrome if you don't get this right."

What Ally wants to do, more than anything else, is to make sense of what her options are. The most obvious one- in fact, maybe the only one-is to flow along with that infinite river she feels around her, just to lie where she is, in this sedative-induced reverie, and let her body be taken over by Karl Van de Vliet. Perhaps he has marvelous things in store for her. Except she has no idea what's real and what is imaginary.

"The simulations are giving me some idea of what went wrong with the Beta before." The voice is Van de Vliet's. "I have one more test to run, but if I handled this the way the simulation now suggests, I think I could actually generate the telomerase antibodies we need and get the Beta to finally work, avoiding the Syndrome. But to prove it would require a full-scale experiment. I'm reluctant to do that without Alexa's permission."

"Christ, Karl, are you getting cold feet? This is a hell of a time for that."

"Call it a pang of rationality."

"But everything is at stake."

"I don't know what's eventually going to happen with the Syndrome, but it's criminal to jeopardize any more lives." Van de Vliet sighs. "Look, you had the procedure of your own free will, and you knew the risks. Alexa Hampton didn't volunteer for the Beta. She's not a lab rat. At the very least, we ought to get her to sign a release. The liability is. . In any case, I'm not doing anything till I run this last test. Then maybe I'll have some idea exactly how much risk is involved."

"And then, by God we're going to do it. Tonight. This is it."

She feels a cold metal object insinuate itself against her chest. Time rushes around her, sending her forward on a journey that seems increasingly inevitable. Where it's taking her, she has no idea, but she senses she no longer has an option of whether she wants to go or not.

Now her dreamscape has become crowded as Grant drifts in once more. He seems to be wearing a white lab coat like the others. He settles beside her and takes her hand

"Ally, it's going to be okay. I'm going to be here for you."

Grant, why are you here? Do you really give a damn about me?

She wants to talk to him, but the words aren't working. Why is this happening?

Don't let them give you more medications , she tells herself. Get your mind back and get out of here.

Friday, April 10

8:45p.m.

Ellen O'Hara had not left after the day shift ended at sixp.m. Instead, she had told Dr. Van de Vliet that she wanted to reorganize some of the NIH paper files she kept in her office on the first floor. The truth was, she had become convinced that the culmination of something deeply evil was scheduled for later that night.

The evil had begun when Kristen Starr's mother arrived looking for her and declaring that she'd been kidnapped. Then after Dr. Vee categorically denied he knew anything about her (a blatant lie), Kristen was brought back to the institute from wherever she'd been moved to, and she was visibly changed. She was whisked down to the subbasement the moment she arrived and immediately sealed off in intensive care, but it was clear she had no idea who she was or where she was. Something horrible had happened to her. And maybe it was imagination, but she no longer even looked like a grown woman.

Then this morning, Bartlett and his Japanese bodyguard brought in the young man who had accompanied Alexa Hampton, but he wasn't put through the admissions formalities. Instead he was taken directly downstairs.