The young man began to look pale as Cameron rambled on. He was a venture capitalist called Malcolm Milne and Bryn was hoping that Milne, or one of his competitors, would be able to solve the young company’s most immediate need – funding. But while there was every reason to impress Milne, there was no need to terrify him.
‘Why don’t you choose, Cameron? This one, for example.’ Bryn grabbed an ampoule at random.
‘Kuru virus!’ she exclaimed in delight. ‘New Guinea laughing sickness. Ex-cellent choice. Slow-acting. Fatal. Virtually wiped out the poor old Foré tribe. Not something we see so much now. Transmitted exclusively via cannibalism, you know. All those raw brains lying around. Mm-mmm. Very tempting.’
Jiggling the ampoule in pleasure, she bounded off to the temporary microscopy bench set up in Bryn’s living room. Cameron’s scientific clutter looked incongruous amidst Cecily’s carefully chosen furniture and costly paintings. On the whole, Bryn knew which he preferred, and he watched contentedly as Cameron drew blood from Milne, and added it to the virus solution. When she was done, Kati took the tube and slid it into the white dome of the Schoolroom, checking the connections into her PC. They were short of tables, so the Schoolroom just sat on the Persian carpet, like a mosque in miniature. ‘OK to start,’ she said.
‘OK,’ said Cameron, ‘get this. Inside the Schoolroom now, in that tube of blood, there are good cells and bad cells. The good cells are going to munch up the kuru virus, the bad cells are going to sit on their butts.’ She moved to the PC monitor, where a crowded data panel was being continually updated. ‘Look here. The Schoolroom is calculating your percentage of successful cells. This number here shows your score.’
Milne looked. ‘Two per cent?’ he said, obviously gutted. ‘Isn’t that awful?’
‘Against a real nasty kuru virus? No, no, I’d say that wasn’t bad at all. But, OK, you need to do better. Now, tell me, what would you do about it?’
‘What would I do?’
‘Sure. Think of your immune cells as soldiers, as a miniature army. What would you do?’
Milne thought about it. ‘I guess an army needs guns and ammunition. It needs equipment. Food, obviously …’ He shrugged. What do armies need? ‘Boots?’
Cameron was nodding vigorously, as though Milne was expounding some brilliantly technical scientific theory. ‘Pre-cise-ly,’ she enthused. ‘That’s it. Guns, ammo, food, boots. And that’s what your immune system needs. Vitamins, minerals, amino acids, antioxidants, catalysts, enzymes, co-factors. You name it. The right amounts, in the right mixtures.’
‘That’s your technique?’ said Milne, disappointed. ‘You dole out vitamins?’
Cameron shook her head. ‘No. Think about the army again. You’ve got it equipped, rested, fed. What next?’
‘Next? You attack the enemy, I suppose. “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.”’
Shakespeare hadn’t been on the Harvard med school syllabus and Cameron looked momentarily puzzled. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Exactly. You attack. But how? You’ve got tanks, planes, infantry – I don’t know, what do they have in armies? – artillery, missiles, all kinds of stuff, but do you just blaze off with everything, or is there some sequence you’re meant to follow? Do you just charge in, or do you co-ordinate things?’
Now it was Milne’s turn to look puzzled. ‘Well, you have a commander-in-chief, I suppose. He gets information, develops a strategy, sends out orders …’ He shrugged again.
Once again, Cameron looked radiant, as though one-to-one with Einstein. ‘Pre-cise-ly. Exactly right. Communication. Armies use radio, computers use program code. The human body uses – well, a whole bunch of stuff, but among other things, it uses peptides.’
Milne began to nod. ‘Peptides, right … program code. This is the Immune Reprogramming part, correct?’
Cameron nodded and tapped the Schoolroom on its baby-smooth dome. ‘Now watch.’
Cameron nodded to Kati, who hit some keys on the PC and threw a switch on the Schoolroom. The Schoolroom’s hum increased, and its faint vibration could be felt working its way through the thick carpet on the floor, creeping out towards Cecily’s expensively tasteful wallpaper.
‘Like I say, we can’t promise much,’ said Cameron. ‘The peptide sequences are very specific. We don’t know the code for humans, and we certainly don’t know the code for kuru viruses in humans.’
‘So what are you doing?’
‘We can get your army properly equipped. Vitamins, minerals, all the rest of it. And we know some parts of the code, peptides which seem to be associated with a generalised performance in immune activity. It’s kind of basic, like getting your plan of attack from a training manual. But still, at this stage it’s as good as we can do.’
Milne nodded.
The Schoolroom hummed in the surrounding silence. On screen, the percentage of good cells ticked slowly upwards: 3%, 4%, 5%, 6%, 6.5%. The rate of increase slowed to a halt. It stopped. Cameron glanced across at Kati, who caught her intention and instructed the Schoolroom to stop. The hum died away. A grey cardboard tray of needles stopped its tiny glassware chatter.
‘That’s it?’ said Milne.
Cameron peered intently at the screen, reading the hundred-and-twenty or so data parameters caught and measured by the Schoolroom. ‘This virus pretty much wiped out the Forés of New Guinea. I told you it was nasty.’
‘And don’t underestimate what we’ve just done,’ added Kati. ‘Your immune system was at two per cent competence. It’s now at six and a half per cent. You’re already three times better at fighting this disease, and that’s our most basic possible treatment programme.’
‘We could try to juice things up a little,’ said Cameron. ‘Now, if you were a rat, of course …’ She spoke briefly with Kati, discussing the on-screen data, and they agreed on some changes. Kati removed one tray of fluids from the Schoolroom and slotted another one home.
Their guess seemed to be an accurate one. The percentage of reprogrammed cells began to creep upwards once again: 7%, 8%, 10%. Then, all of a sudden, the numbers shot upwards: 25%, 67%, 98%. Error messages flashed on-screen and Cameron and Kati sighed in simultaneous disappointment.
‘Isn’t that good?’ asked Milne. ‘Ninety-eight per cent? That virus is dead meat.’
‘True,’ said Cameron, ‘but so are you. We overcharged your immune system and it’s gone crazy. Your army isn’t just attacking the enemy, it’s attacking you. You’ve now got a highly serious auto-immune disease. If you were a patient, you’d be dead.’
Kati typed an instruction on the PC, and the Schoolroom’s hum died away. A little click of glassware indicated the arrival of a bottle in a dispensing chamber. Cameron withdrew it and shook it up against the light from the broad sash windows, then dropped it regretfully into a clinical waste bin.
‘OK. We failed. Shame you’re not a rat.’
‘And if I were?’
‘Then instead of throwing away that bottle, I’d have injected it back into your arm.’
‘Reprogrammed cells only, right?’
‘Right. We chuck the bad ones. And we wouldn’t take a little ten-millilitre sample from you, we’d take half a pint. Every day. Until you’d licked the disease.’
‘And it’s OK just to throw away the cells that don’t make it?’
‘It’s not OK, it’s actually good. It stimulates the body to grow more cells. And since we’re saving the good