Her first act as chief was to deep-six the old corporate name in favor of her own. Her second: invest heavily, some said recklessly, in outer space. In particular, low- to mid-orbiting space stations. Future homes for drug production was her thinking, skirting the laws and limits of production on Earth. Not to mention R & D: she foresaw the rise of low and null-grav meds. Had a lab in place years before her competition.
Gleem One just to let everybody know that there were other Gleems on the way. Gleem Galactic because that’s where her mind went when her body hurt: somewhere other than Earth.
An unexpected dividend of the station: with a little rearranging, it could double as a treatment center. Gunjita, who kept abreast of such things, had seen this immediately, and at the face-to-face with Gleem’s R & D director, Laura, on remote, she and Cav had worked it into their pitch.
So now Gleem was looking at on-site delivery. Already it had its fingers in all other things pharmaceutical, from health to husbandry, agriculture to athletics, procreation to recreation, sewage to cosmetics, so why not? Planetary consumption of drugs, fueled by equal parts need, desire, addiction, the simple habit of everyday life, had never been higher. Gravity-sensitive drugs—small molecules primarily, but also novel pro-and eukaryotic biologics—were the latest craze. The field was just getting started. None of the candidate drugs had been tested in extremely high gravitational conditions—the edge of a black hole, for example, or even Jupiter—and only a few had been tested in extremely low ones, such as outer space. Gleem Galactic was out to rectify this.
Cav and Gunjita were under contract to test H82W8, a tweaked version of one of the linchpin agents used in juvenation, in the hopes of breaking through the so-far unbreakable ceiling of two treatments for any one person. Two treatments, three lifetimes. That was the limit. Two was what you got. Two was safe. More than two, bad things happened. The reports were there for anyone to read. The pictures, if you had the stomach.
Most people didn’t.
Finding a way for three to work, and beyond that, for four, five, six … for any number of treatments … a limitless number … was the holy grail of life extension.
H82W8 showed promise, but was unsafe, at least on Earth. How unsafe? Uniformly lethal. Deadly 100 percent of the time. Lethal and deadly were frowned upon in the course of routine treatment, and accordingly, the agent had been re-engineered with a nano-accelerometer insert, a so-called gravitational sensor, which, when activated, led to a change in spatial conformation. Same agent, new shape. New shape, new agent, function following form, as it always did. The questions: one, would the drug remain effective? And two, would it now be safe, at least safe enough?
For the study they had a sample of human cells from a sample of humans, in lieu of an actual living, breathing human person. Surrogate markers weren’t perfect, but they were useful. Cells were easy to come by, and relatively easy to manage. They were cheaper by far than whole people. They gave up their secrets much quicker. They didn’t complain, at least not audibly. And you didn’t get attached to them in quite the same way as you did to a fully formed, fully realized living creature, be it human, monkey, kitty, bunny, or cute little mouse.
Cav had long been a proponent of gravitational testing of biologics. If direct contact were ever to happen with alien life, it would be life that could travel through space. One could imagine a form of life, not to mention of travel, that used gravity not only to navigate and orient itself, but for energy—a kind of food, or nourishment, which was a sine qua non of life. The more you knew about the sine qua nons of life—nourishment, balance, growth, renewal, decay—the greater your chance of recognizing it when otherwise you might not.
Before Gleem, he’d been unable to secure funding for this, despite a lifetime of success and a distinguished career, including a host of honors, prizes, and recognitions. Before Gleem came along, there was no money in micrograv bio, and the days of market-blind, not-for-profit (save intellectual profit), and knowledge-for-knowledge’s-sake research were all but extinct. They’d vanished along with the dodo of public financing, not to mention unencumbered public financing, which was truly a dinosaur. Virtually nothing existed in the field of astrobiology, which had dried up more or less completely after the Hoax.
Gleem was an oasis. Sanity in a storm.
It hadn’t hurt that Gunjita had agreed to partner with him. She was a major star in her own right. Professor, researcher, pioneer thinker, co-discoverer of CrB, the so-called altruism suppressor gene,[2] olfactologist extraordinaire. A veteran of the science wars and of the lab, even more than Cav, who’d come to research relatively late, having spent a good part of his early career as a practicing surgeon.
They had the station to themselves, an anomaly. A series of minor and major crises—a sudden illness, an unexpected pregnancy, a family emergency—had decimated the ranks of the standard five.
Gunjita found the absence of people refreshing, if odd. Labs were like families, and for many years hers had been like large, extended ones. She was used to carving out pockets of silence in the hubbub, where she could think. She did some of her best work in the privacy of her own mind. Solitude nourished her. The only possible thing that rivaled it was collaboration.
She’d been looking forward to collaborating with Cav—it wasn’t often their work coincided—but Cav seemed to have other things on his mind. Not entirely. Maybe fairer to say, his idea of collaboration was different than hers. Involved less talk—certainly less directed talk—and longer silences. This had started as soon as they’d stepped foot on the station. He’d turned quiet and even more reflective than normal. As though their research, the very reason they were there, were just a feint, a ploy.
Now Eurydice, with its strange passenger, was docked to the station, and the old Cav was back. Bubbly. Effusive. A twinkle in his eye. Say what you would, you had to love a man with a twinkle.
Laura Gleem, they said, shot fire from her eyes.
Laura Gleem, they said, was a force of nature.
Gunjita and Cav were indebted to her.
On the second anniversary of Gleem One’s launch, Laura had hosted a get-together on the station. Five handpicked invitees of diverse talents and gifts culled from a watch list of radicals, dreamers, and ne’er-do-wells generated by the DHS, purchased and tweaked by Laura’s people to exclude misanthropes, naysayers, finger-pointers, windbags, and bullies. Laura had a fondness for the number five, the color pink, and the letter k. The group included a kinesiologist, a knight-of-industry, a remnant Kallikak with something to prove, a kosher Kurdish khan turned propulsion engineer, and Kleptomania, stage name of Ruby Kincade, performance artist and roboticist, who proudly traced her lineage to the Kanuri of central Africa, a striking, outspoken woman and onetime friend of Gunjita, until their terrible falling out. Laura’s idea, simplicity itself: put ’em all together with nowhere to go for a brainstorming session. No idea too big or small, too long-or short-termed, too crazy, too pricey. No telling what would happen next. What, if anything, would take root. She had a hunch that something would, was okay if nothing obvious did. Seeds could lie dormant for years. The outcome was unpredictable. That’s what appealed to her. That, and being weightless.
2
Actually, a constellation of genes involved in the regulation of neural and neuroendocrine systems, principally the oxytocin system, that contribute to altruistic behavior. CrB in honor of Hamilton’s groundbreaking formula: C < r x B, describing the evolutionary advantage of social behavior, where C represents the costs to the acting individual, B the benefits to the recipient, and r the relatedness between actor and recipient.