Distraction - Bruce Sterling [71]
Oscar picked his way through a dense litter of tricycles and inflatable animals, then took a crowded elevator up to the third floor. This section of the building reeked powerfully of East Indian cooking—curries, papadams, maybe some chicken masala. Probably, to judge by the smell, large flocks of computer-tagged chickens.
The double doors of Room 358 opened trustingly at his touch. Oscar found himself in a sculptor’s studio, a bleak, ill-smelling place reconstructed from a fire-blackened set of office cubicles. The torched federal offices had left eerie remains: a gridwork of blackened floor scars and the dripping stalagmite lumps of dead plastic workstations. The retrofitted office had been reoccupied, however. It now boasted a long makeshift workbench of bolted railway ties, amid piles of automotive scrap metal, flattened epoxy tubes, and stubby welding rods. The concrete floor echoed beneath Oscar’s shoes.
Clearly he was in the wrong room.
His phone rang. He answered it. “Hello?”
“Is this really you?” It was Greta.
“It’s me all right—live and in person.”
“It’s not a phone-sex line?”
“No. I use that phone-sex service to reroute my private calls. They have tremendous voice traffic on their lines, so it helps a lot against tracing attacks. And if anyone is running traffic analysis, they’ll just assume … Well, never mind the technical details. The point is that we can talk safely together on an unencrypted phone.”
“I guess it’s okay.”
“So, let’s talk, Greta. Tell me how you are. Tell me everything.”
“Are you safe there in Washington?”
Oscar clutched the fabric phone tenderly. It was as if he had her ear cradled in his hand. It now mattered much less to him that he was hopelessly lost and in the wrong building.
“I’m perfectly fine. This is where I make my career, after all.”
“I worry about you, Oscar.” Long pause. “I think … I think maybe I could go to Boston later. There’s a neuro seminar there. Maybe I could block some time in.”
“Excellent! You should come to Boston, by all means. I’ll show you my house.” A slow, sizzling pause.
“That sounds interesting.…”
“Do it. It’s what we need. It’s good for us.”
“I have to tell you something important.…”
He swiftly examined his battery level and replaced the phone at his ear. “Just go ahead and tell me, Greta.”
“It’s so hard to explain this.… It’s just that … I feel so different now and … I’m all inspired and it’s just …” A lingering silence.
“Go on,” he coaxed. “Get it off your chest.”
Her voice dropped to a confiding whisper. “It’s my amyloid fibrils.…”
“It’s what?”
“My fibrils. There are a lot of diverse neural proteins that form amyloid fibrils in vivo. And even though they have unrelated sequences, they all polymerize into fibrils with similar ultrastructure. The conformational folding arrangements have been bothering me. A lot.”
“Really? That’s a shame.”
“But then I was messing with my GDNF adeno carriers, yesterday, and I grafted a new amyloidogenic variant onto the carrier. I’ve just derived their mass with the electrospray spectrometer. And, Oscar, they’re expressing. And they’re all enzymatically active and they all have the correct, intact disulfide bonds.”
“It’s marvelous when you’re expressing.”
“They’re going to express in vivo! And that’s so much less invasive than dumb, old-fashioned gene therapy. That’s been the critical limiting factor, a permanent cheap method of delivery. And if we can do amyloids as well as dopamine and neurotrophic factors … I mean, transfer all those loads congruently into live neural tissue.… Well, I don’t have to tell you what that means.”
“No, no,” Oscar said deftly, “depend on it, I’m solid on that issue.”
“It’s just that Bellotti and Hawkins are doing autosomal amyloidosis, so they’re right on top of this problem. And they’re doing a poster session at the Boston AMAC.”
“Then you should