Afterparty (23 page)

Every lab needs a rat wrangler; that is what the young man became. Though unsalaried, he took his job seriously. He ordered the rats online, unpacked them when they arrived, and set them in their plastic cages along the metal racks. He fed and watered them and monitored them for seizures, blindness, difficulty in walking, or any other signs of neurological damage. And every day at 2 p.m. he selected one rat and killed it.

Lab people use the term “sacrifice,” which appealed to the Wrangler. Was not the rat giving his life in the name of science, humanity, and an eventual patent? One of these animals would make them all rich.

He was as meticulous in administering death as he was at maintaining life. He gently placed the rat’s head inside the clear plastic funnel and waited patiently for the CO2 to do its work. Once the rat had stopped breathing, he placed its body into the stereotaxic frame, a metal contraption that would have looked at home in any woodshop. The rat’s chin and nose went into the little stirrup, and two rods extended to press against the bones just in front of the rat’s ear, holding its skull in place. The Rat Brain Atlas lay open on the table, with its many pages of diagrams, each important location annotated with its three-axis coordinates. Soon he barely consulted the atlas, having come to know the tiny lobes and crevasses of the rat’s brain as if they were the streets of his home neighborhood. Rovil was on patrol, alert for aneurysms, stroke effects, and tumors. He filed careful reports assessing the damage.

He came to know the humans at the company with more difficulty, but he attacked the problem scientifically. As was his habit since he was a boy, the Wrangler assigned the humans scores in three categories:

The system, he realized now, was a three-coordinate matrix much like the stereotaxic coordinates in the Rat Brain Atlas. Rat brains, however, were easier to understand than human ones. Why did Lyda, the red-headed woman who seemed too fond of low-cut tops, always bring up sex? She talked constantly about who was getting fucked, whether Mikala was going to fuck her, and whether Rovil—for that was the Wrangler’s name—would ever get fucked if he didn’t stop dressing that way.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
No one else seemed to take offense, and Gil especially seemed to find Lyda hilarious. He was a nearly spherical man who, the Wrangler guessed, did not get fucked very often. Perhaps that was why he so often lost his temper: He behaved as if every piece of equipment in the lab belonged to him personally, and when someone did not clean an instrument to his standards or failed to return it to its Gil-designated space, he would shout like a madman. In the first two months his target was most often the Wrangler, but the young man took some comfort when Gil occasionally yelled at Lyda or Mikala.

It was Mikala who showed him the most kindness. Yes, she was intellectually intimidating, and could ask him questions that could freeze his tongue, but she often defended him when Lyda embarrassed him or Gil yelled at him. And it was Mikala who came to him after he’d been on the job for six months to tell him that he’d been doing a great job, and they’d like to keep him on. The Little Sprout partners hired him as an actual employee with a salary of $24,000 a year, which in the year 2015 allowed him enough money for a grubby apartment on the south side of Chicago, as long as he shared it with two other people.

The fourth partner was Edo Anderssen Vik (PA 5, K 5, I 4). Vik dropped in every couple weeks to check on his investment, and when he arrived he seemed to take up all the space in the building. He liked to put an arm over the Wrangler’s shoulders and shake him like a dog. Rovil would laugh good-naturedly and then escape to the rat room. He suspected that Edo did not enjoy people as much as he appeared, but that would not change his score: The matrix only assessed
perceived
attributes. Kindness was as much an act of presentation as physical beauty. Even intelligence could be faked, for a time.

The Wrangler’s goal was to raise his own scores as perceived by his coworkers. He could do little about his attractiveness (though with more money he might someday be able to correct some of his flaws, such as his spotty skin and his crooked right canine tooth), but at every opportunity he tried to demonstrate that he was a caring person who could also contribute ideas. He took on more responsibilities, especially the onerous ones, such as cleaning the bioreactor, a large stainless steel vat on wheels that Gil called “the Dalek.”

The Dalek grew tumors. Rat tumors, to be precise, steaming batches of pheochromocytoma, whose cells Mikala then injected with genetically modified plasmids, which in turn prompted the cells to generate an array of neurotrophins, which, when injected into the rats, spurred their brains to grow new neurons … and occasionally, when things went wrong, new tumors.

“The circle of death,” Mikala told him.

It was Mikala that the Wrangler most wanted to impress; she was clearly the brightest person in the company. She had designed the genetically engineered plasmids herself, using open-source molecular CAD software. True, Gil had rewritten the software almost from scratch, which caused Rovil to raise the man’s intelligence score by a point. And Lyda was the schizophrenia expert who had come up with the idea that led to the creation of Little Sprout. But it was Mikala who would make the idea work, down among the amino acids.

The Wrangler made it his mission to become a better chemist, and he studied the New Molecular Entities that Mikala had created, even going so far as to copy Gil’s CAD program so he could run it at home. More than anything the young man wanted to contribute his ideas to Little Sprout, and his opportunity came at a time when he was feeling the most stupid and the most helpless.

His rats were dying. Something in NME 109, the latest batch, was causing them to drastically lose weight. After a few days the animals stopped drinking water, stopped eating, and retreated to the corners of their cages, where eventually they died. A dozen brain examinations revealed nothing: no tumors, no strokes. Then, even though he had not been told to do so, he began working overtime to do full dissections. He examined each organ, comparing it to the healthy rats still in his population. He found nothing.

He began reading more and more online, and took home books from Mikala’s shelf. He studied all the neurotrophins that Mikala’s modified cells produced—BDNF, VGF, NGF, CREB—an alphabet of proteins that kept neurons growing and dividing and forming new connections. Schizophrenics didn’t develop all the connections that normal children did, and even as adults their blood contained smaller amounts of neurotrophins. Lyda’s original idea, and Little Sprout’s goal, was to find a way to boost levels of neurotrophins and make the brain plastic again.

The Wrangler found a clue in one of Lyda’s own research articles. A footnote about BDNF—Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor—gave him an idea. He went back to the dissections, this time diving deep into the rat brains. It took him two weeks to be sure enough of the idea to share it.

Mikala and Lyda were in the lab, working at separate computers. Some days they barely spoke to each other, yet they were rarely apart. The Wrangler stood in the middle of the room, equidistant from them. He held his lab reports in one hand, and his laptop in the other.

“The rats are depressed,” he said.

“You don’t say,” Mikala said without looking up.

“I went back and extracted each hippocampus,” he said. “They’re twenty to thirty percent smaller than they ought to be.”

He carried the reports to Mikala’s workstation, and she leaned forward to study them. Her neck was very beautiful, a strong contributing factor to her high physical score. Her hair smelled of citrus. He had never accounted for scent on his score card, but he wondered if he should start tracking that as well; research suggested that scent played a strong role in mate choice.

“Damn it, you’re right,” Mikala said. “Lyda, take a look at this. The poor little guys are clinically depressed.” Both women laughed, and he laughed with them, though he didn’t quite understand why it was funny. He was flush with the heat of their regard.

“This is great news,” Lyda said. She walked up behind Mikala. “We can market it as pest control. All you need is a bunch of really tiny nooses.”

Mikala laughed again. “The rats just kill themselves!”

“The tough part is teaching them to write the suicide notes,” Lyda said.

The Wrangler watched their faces—especially Mikala’s. He had never seen her laugh this hard. He’d hardly seen her laugh at all, lately.

When they settled down, he said, “I do have a suggestion for the next batch, however.”

“You do, huh?” Lyda said. Still grinning.

He said, “Is it possible—and I’m not sure it is—to increase the transcription rate of BDNF? I was looking at the CAD program—” He saw the two women exchange a look of surprise and said, “I’m sorry, was that not appropriate?”

“No, no,” Lyda said, still amused.

“We’re just impressed,” Mikala said. “Continue.”

He opened his laptop and showed them the change in the tumor cells that he thought might work. The women looked thoughtful, and finally Mikala said, “It’s worth a shot.”

They were taking him seriously! He could practically see them updating his scorecard.

In the end Mikala could not implement the exact change he suggested, but the idea led her in another direction. A month after he had brought her his diagnosis, she handed him the first batch of NME 110.

“I think the rats will be happier with this,” she said. “Thanks for your help on this, Rovil.”

At last he was being recognized. The Wrangler was dead. What would he become next?

—G.I.E.D.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“Holy shit,” I said to Rovil. Ollie and I stood side by side in his foyer, surveying his apartment. “This is like a fucking Sims house.”

He smiled hesitantly, not getting the reference.

“The Sims,” I said. “Computer game when I was a kid.” Supposedly the point was to guide your virtual self into getting a job and falling in love and starting a family, but I spent all my time using cheat codes to get virtual dollars which I then used to build the
coolest
house and fill it with the
coolest
gadgets and furniture.

Rovil was playing it in real life. The apartment was overcrowded with trendy objects: white leather couches, a La Cornue gas range, white walls that became video screens and video screens that acted as walls, a sleek steel dining room table that appeared to hover over the floor, a glass-encased samurai sword … Each item was tremendously expensive, and each looked like it belonged in a different house.

Just like the twelve-year-old me, Rovil had no taste.

“How much is Landon-Rousse paying you?” I asked.

“It’s only two bedrooms,” Rovil said.

“It’s two bedrooms on the Lower East Side with
that
fucking view,” I said. The floor-to-ceiling windows were the classiest things about the apartment. We were on the twentieth floor, looking across the sparkling night city toward the Williamsburg Bridge, which glowed and pulsed with the lights of traffic. If it were me, I would have emptied the apartment except for a single couch and then set it in front of the window.

“I’ll be back in a bit,” Dr. Gloria said. “I need to see the city.” She slid through the window and flapped into the night.

Rovil said, “LR does compensate me a little better than Little Sprout did.”

“What do you do for them?” Ollie said. She was scanning the room as if it were a vault to unlock. She’d barely spoken during the ride south, and I was growing nervous about her mental state.

“I’m a product owner,” Rovil said.

“Which means…?” she asked.

“I’m responsible for overseeing everything to do with a product during its entire life cycle, from R&D to testing to marketing.”

“What product is that?”

“Ollie, leave him alone,” I said.

Rovil smiled, embarrassed. “It’s not out yet. I would have to have you sign a nondisclosure agreement.”

Ollie bristled. “After all we’ve shared, you’re going to ask us to sign an
NDA
?”

“I’m sorry,” Rovil said, truly apologetic. “I didn’t mean—”

I stepped between them. “It doesn’t matter. Let’s get settled. I need a shower, and then Rovil’s going to take us out for dinner, right, Rovil?”

I hadn’t mentioned this to him, but he grinned. “Yes, of course.”

“Great,” I said. “Now show us where we’re bunking.”

Ollie and I carried our shopping bags into the second bedroom, which Rovil didn’t seem to use. There were cardboard boxes stacked in the corner, a small desk, and a futon. He found us towels and bed linens, and then showed us the guest bathroom.

I took the first turn in the shower. When I got back, Ollie was crouched over one of the boxes.

“What are you doing?” I said, whispering and laughing at the same time.

She showed me the open box, which was lined with several white plastic bottles. “Rovil brings his work home with him,” she said.

“Are those drugs?” I kept my voice low. “What kind?”