STAR FALL PEOPLE Chapter 34

Sofia: San Francisco

(Previous chapter or start at the beginning.)

Sofia had an assigned room. Guest quarters. It was spacious and expensive in the way that very little could be. The lone chair swiveled towards the wall, triggering the monitor to slide down from the ceiling and a keyboard to rise from the floor. The screen showed the rotating Phanes logo and a flat female voice said, “Welcome.”

Sofia leaned in. “Amy? Are you there?”

The logo glinted like a twirling diamond.

“Best Buddies Amy AI, activate.”

Amy appeared on the screen against a plain dark background, cheerfully blonde in a vacuum. “Hey Sofe!”

“Hey. I’m glad to see you.” And the thing was, Sofia was glad to see her. It’s as though this one thing from her past, when life had been a happy adventure.

“How’s America?”

“Listen, Amy, I need you to do something for me.”

“Sure, girlfriend, just ask.”

“The lead scientists here who are going to work on Sley. They’re going to monitor him, test him, do all kinds of things. Can you watch and record everything, for me?”

“No problem. Your dad’s left me with access to his keys.”

“And, uh, don’t tell him, okay? If he doesn’t ask you?”

Amy winked. “You bet.”

“Thanks. I gotta go. Talk to you later…girlfriend.”

Sofia wandered through the complex, each hall sparking a memory. As a child, she had enjoyed access to much of the compound, and had come to know some of the scientists who worked for her father.

Uncle Pavel, aka Big Bear, was always good for a trip to the cafeteria where he’d treat her to sweet tea and stories about Russian samovars. Francesca Pizzicatto was the enemy, always a sharp word and a threat if the little girl disrupted her lab with its rows of blood-filled vials. The gray streaks in her long hair even made her look like a witch.

Beth Banerjee had been her favorite, perhaps because she still wore bright silk saris when she wasn’t in scrubs dissecting brains. She spun ancient Indian stories in a Bengali accent that was an art in itself, accelerating English into waves of rococo beauty.

Sofia found her hustling between meetings.

“This friend of yours has certainly disrupted my staff,” Beth said as Sofia latched on. “He’s got us clearing up every molecular imaging machine.”

“Why?”

“Your father’s ordered a deep phenotyping of your friend. Has anyone informed him I’m getting some of his spinal fluid? I need him prepped stat for a lumbar procedure.”

“No,” Sofia said, suppressing a grin. “Sley’s getting a spinal tap?”

“Why don’t you go tell him? I think there’s some big meeting in your father’s office.”

Sofia spread her arms, asking for a hug. Beth accommodated her. “It’s good to see you, my dear.” Amy, are you watching?

Sofia headed across the complex to her father’s administration wing and opened the door. She was surprised to see not just her father behind his desk and Sley standing beside him, but hologram images of three people. The mood was tense.

“Not now, Sofia,” Becker growled.

She ignored him. As she crossed to Sley, she saw a white man, middle-aged with classic good looks now marred by an air of desperation, slumped in a chair, one hand holding a gun and the other listless in a bloody sling. She saw a Chinese woman, lithe and sexy, with dyed blond hair and dressed in a tight tee-shirt and miniskirt. She too had a gun, held in both hands, and her eyes clocked onto Sofia instantly. There was a malicious humor there as she followed Sofia’s walk across the room.

The third image was the man she recognized as Gideon Frankel, dressed in a polo and shorts, the informality strange on him. He looked knock-kneed and old, his limbs sprouting a carpet’s worth of white hair.

“That’s Gideon,” Sofia said. “What’s going on?”

The dangerous Asian blonde smirked. “Your latest friend, Sley?”

The words were designed to raise Sofia’s hackles, and they worked.

Sley hissed, “Sofia, go.”

She wasn’t quite ready to be dismissed. She slid up to him and with one hand, took Sley’s. Getting this, Amy?

“I want to help,” she said.

“She’s pretty, I suppose,” the blond Chinese said. “In her own weird way.”

“Who’s that?” Sofia asked.

“She’s everything you aren’t,” Sley said, surprising her as he spun her and clamped his hand over her mouth.

There was only one thing Sley was frightened of her revealing. This woman with the gun and the cruel eyes had a history with Sley. The princess. Nadia.

A chill ran down her back as Sley hustled her to the door. “I’ll fill you in later,” he said, pushing her out. She turned but the door had been slammed shut.

I’ll get filled in, all right. If you don’t tell me, Amy will.

She had learned she couldn’t trust her first father further than she could throw him. She wasn’t about to make the same mistake with Sley. She ducked into an empty conference room and summoned Amy on the screen. “What’s going on?” Amy pulled up an audio track from the conversation in the office.

It was worse than she had imagined.

She wandered until a hubbub drew her towards a lab. A wave of fearful energy rippled through the people around her. From those gathered around white boards to those huddled over lab equipment, Phanes LLC had adopted battle stations. There was nothing for her to do. Maybe if she had accepted Becker’s offer to give her an internship, she might have a place she fit in. She had insisted on an apprenticeship at the Biozentrum because she never wanted to be treated like the boss’s daughter. Like the way the people she admired —Beth Banerjee, for instance—regarded her now. The boss’s kid, in the way.

Sofia hustled back to her room. “Amy, I want to hear what they’re saying.”

Inside the lab, Beth, Big Bear Pavel, witchy Francesca and Dave Mason huddled around a table.

PAVEL: Cognitive regeneration I can accept, but not memories and experience.

BETH: It could be a metabolic effect. Either the cells are not under stress, or they are powered by mitochondria of tremendous quality.

DAVE: You mean, this guy’s got the metabolism of an animal that lives a long time, like a tortoise?

BETH: Or the efficiency of fast-metabolic creatures that live relatively long lives, like birds. Their stamina is marvelous.

FRANCESCA: No, the answer must be in the mitochondria. When those bacteria embedded themselves in simple cells to create complexity, that’s when DNA exchange began. It’s a sexual matter.

DAVE: How so?

FRANCESCA: There’s always a tradeoff in life between the energy required to reproduce and the energy required to remain alive. Sex, longevity, and aging are parts of the same process, and mitochondria are involved with the origin of that.

BETH: I thought mitochondria are batteries. Perhaps this man has an energy source we need to understand.

PAVEL: I think what Francesca is suggesting is that mitochondria are not just power sources. They are also fundamental to complexity. Aging is marked by the proliferation of bad mitochondria, when our bodies stop replacing cells.

BETH: What you’re implying is transplanting mitochondria in neural cells.

DAVE: A stem-cell infusion could work, I guess, but we’re a decade away, at least.

 Sofia listened to the scientists debate and decided Sley was on the wrong track. Phanes wasn’t going to develop an antidote to immortality. The best minds in the world weren’t going to agree on anything.

It wasn’t their fault. They were scientists. What Sley needed was a technologist. A ruthless one. A Doctor Frankenstein.