A Heartbeat Away - Michael Palmer [137]
Ten times the norm.
Side effects of the treatment were not a concern. With a WRX infection, the only thing worse than the inevitable death were the days that preceded it.
Adding the antisense/ODN adjuvant to his Orion program took more than four hours. Griff had barely eaten or slept in two days. Still, with the excitement of the discovery, he found that his focus was sharp. His brain was pulsating with possibilities.
Work, baby!… Come on, deliver for Papa!
When the programming was complete, Griff sat in silence for a time, with his finger poised above the Return key, set to execute Orion’s “run” sequence. Images of the Capitol and Jim Allaire tumbled through his thoughts along with those of Angie and Melvin and Louisa and even Moonshine. Finally, his jaw set, he held his breath and pressed the key.
Orion was programmed by Griff to terminate computation the instant it failed. No reason to waste computing time processing a dead-end treatment. The longer Orion’s program processed, the greater the probability of success. Over the years of working in Sylvia Chen’s lab, Griff had run thousands of simulations that churned through thousands of preprogrammed assumptions, subroutines, and over a hundred thousand lines of complex code. In all that time, Orion had never run for longer than ten minutes.
Griff watched the digital clock on his computer monitor as it counted the time.
Two minutes passed … then three … then five.
Griff could feel the adrenaline rushing through his circulation.
Eight minutes … nine …
At the ten-minute-and-zero-second mark, Orion’s program terminated with the abruptness of a racecar hitting a wall. Griff knew without having to read through the output what had happened. His system had failed once again.
Four more hours.
Griff tweaked the levels of the adjuvant to drive the IL-6 levels from ten times normal up to thirty, always in increments of five. He ran a test for each change that he made.
Every time, Orion’s treatment simulation failed, and always at the ten-minute-zero-second mark.
Beneath his suit, Griff was sweating profusely now. He was exhausted to the point of delirium. But time was continuing to spill away for the people in the Capitol. He refused to quit—to believe that he and the system he so believed in had failed.
Then, like a lantern approaching through fog, an idea came to him.
What if IL-6 levels were just a part of the solution? What if there was something unique in Davis’s serum itself that would make the treatment work?
Griff altered Orion’s programming so that in addition to the antisense/ODN booster, it incorporated an exact replica of the DNA, RNA, and proteins found in Davis’s blood.
Then, once again, his eyes fixed on the counter, he initiated the program.
Once again, Orion began to synthesize a blocker against the growth of the WRX virus.
At the nine-minute mark, Griff felt a tremor of anticipation begin. At nine minutes and forty-five seconds he began to hyperventilate—short, shallow, rapid respirations.
He closed his eyes, waited for as long as he could stand, then looked at the timer.
Eleven minutes and forty-eight seconds, and Orion was still running.
In all, it took twenty-five minutes for the program to complete. Griff, flushed with excitement, waited for the output to compile. When the data finished processing, he sank into his chair. He’d been so conditioned to expect failure that when success finally had occurred, he did not exactly know how to feel.
Angie was the key. If she had not succeeded in New York, none of this would have been possible. Because of her, they had an antiviral treatment. He wished he could call and tell her, but with Rappaport listening in, he wasn’t certain the idea was a good one.
Then Griff began to wonder. Orion had worked. At least, according to the computer it had worked. The data said the drug would be a success, but he had no empirical proof—no infected subjects that he had cured.
What should be done next?
The laboratory had an extensive supply of biological and synthetic