Get up, dude. I’m training today. And I have so much homework to do before we go. Thanks to you!
He wanted to walk to Currier’s lab. The lab was four miles from our house, a two-hour walk in each direction. I wasn’t crazy about spending half a day on the adventure, but that was all the birthday present he wanted.
Maples blazed orange against the sky’s deep blue. Robbie took his smallest sketchbook. He held it in the crook of his arm, scribbling into it as we walked. He slowed down for the most banal things. An ant mound. A gray squirrel. An oak leaf on the sidewalk with veins as red as licorice. He and his mother had left me far behind, Earthbound. I needed a moment alone with Aly myself, to visit that ecstasy whose source she never revealed to me. Currier had turned me down for the training once before. But this morning felt like ultimatum time.
Despite my constant prodding, we got to the lab ten minutes late. I came in the door apologizing. Ginny and a pair of lab assistants were huddled in conversation. They broke off, startled to see us. Ginny shook her head, distressed. “I’m so sorry, guys. We need to cancel for today. I should have called.”
I couldn’t tell what was up. But before I could press her, Currier appeared from the back hallway. “Theo. Can we talk?”
We headed to his office. Ginny snagged Robin by the shoulder. “Want to check out the sea slugs?” Robin lit up, and she led him away.
I’d never seen Martin Currier move so slowly. He waved for me to sit. He remained standing, hovering near the window. “We’ve been put on hold. The Office for Human Research Protections sent an interdiction letter last night.”
My first thought was for my son’s safety. “Is there a problem with the technique?”
Currier swung to face me. “Aside from how promising it is?” He waved an apology and composed himself. “We’ve been told to halt all further experiments funded in whole or part by Health and Human Services, pending a review for possible violations of human subject protection.”
“Wait. HHS? That doesn’t happen.”
His mouth soured again at my quaint objection. He crossed to his desk and sat. He pecked at his keyboard. A moment later, he read from the screen. “ ‘There is concern that your procedures may be violating the integrity, autonomy, and sanctity of your research subjects.’ ”
“Sanctity?”
He shrugged. It made no sense. DecNef was a simple, self-modulating therapy showing good results. Labs across the country were conducting far dodgier trials. More drastic experiments were being run inside the bodies of hundreds of thousands of kids every day. But someone in Washington was keen to enforce the new human protection guidelines.
“The government doesn’t arbitrarily shut down reasonable science. Did you do something to alienate someone in power?”
Currier inhaled, and it dawned on me. He hadn’t done anything. My meme of a son had. The elections were coming, and the parties were neck-and-neck. In a single gesture, designed to make the news, agents of the chaos-seeking administration had played to the Human Sanctity Crusade, slapped down the environmental movement, pissed on science, saved taxpayer money, thrown red meat to the base, and shut down a novel threat to commodity culture.
Marty held my gaze—a neural feedback all its own. He was having as much trouble with the idea as I was. The law of parsimony demanded a simpler explanation. But neither of us had one. He pushed his rolling chair away from the computer and massaged his face with both hands. “Needless to say, this kills any chance of licensing the technique. If I were a paranoid person . . .” He was paranoid enough to leave the thought unfinished.
“What will you do?”
“Comply with the investigators and make my case to the appeals board. What else can I do? Maybe it’ll turn out to be a short-lived nuisance.”
“And in the meantime . . . ?”
He looked at me askance. “You want to know what will happen to him, without any more treatments.”
It shamed me, but he was right. The trap evolution shaped for us: the entire species might have been on the line, and I’d still worry first about my son.
“The honest answer is: We don’t know. We have fifty-six subjects pursuing some form of feedback. They’re all going to be yanked violently out of their training. We’re in uncharted waters. There’s no data for what happens next.” He looked around his office, the inspirational posters and 3-D brain teasers. “With luck, he has achieved permanent orbit. Maybe he’ll keep making gains on his own. But DecNef could be like any other kind of exercise. When you stop working out, the health gains degrade and you regress back toward your body’s set point. Life is a machine for homeostasis.”