“Ah.” He takes a giant bite of toast, chews, and thinks. “So, after the presentation tanked, if anyone found out about me, it would be even more problematic.”
“To say the least.”
“And you’re the person who invented this resurrection machine? Wow.”
“The machine is only part of it, and that wasn’t just me. It’s a big team.” I shift, setting my plate aside and grabbing my mug of coffee, cupping it in both hands. “I’m trained in cardiology and did a fellowship in cardiophysics, which is essentially the study of the electrical properties of the heart. I came to BioNEX right out of the fellowship, and—”
“Wait. How old are we?” he asks, frowning.
“You’re twenty-nine. I’m thirty-four.” Off his look, I explain, “I know. It seems like the math isn’t mathing. I started college at fifteen and finished my MD/PhD at twenty-two.” I wince again. “It sounds more impressive than it is. I didn’t have much of a social life.”
Luca wipes a hand down his face. “Jesus. Was I intimidated the first time I heard this, too?”
I laugh. “A little, but mostly you were distracted by my enthusiastic reaction to your nakedness.”
“I bagged an older woman. Adoctor,” he adds. “Good job, past Luca.” He sets his plate on the coffee table and lifts his chin to me. “Okay, keep going. Tell me about this resurrection machine.”
“Over the past decade or so, my company has developed a machine called the BioSCAN. It was created by a different team, led by Vince, the absolute douchebag I mentioned earlier.”
“Was he a douchebag before, or just at this meeting?”
There’s that protective tenor again. My stomach flutters. “Pretty much from the start. He took an immediate dislike to me the day I came on board.”
“Probably because you’re so smart.”
I smile at him. “Well, I appreciate that, but I think it’s mostly because I was brought on to take this thing he had worked so hard on and make it…more. I’m sure it felt to him that it encroached on his work, but innovation and progress is fucking science, dude. Grow up.”
Luca grins at this.My moxie, I think.There’s one thing he liked about you, Emery.
“Anyway, the BioSCAN is the scanner that combines X-ray, MRI, and CT. I joined when they were working on adding in the cellular-level scan. The executive team brought me in because they wanted to find a way to use it to diagnose injury and disease, and I’d done a ton of work on cardiothoracic imaging. But, in the end, the diagnostic addition was actually much easier than I expected.”
“Of course it was.” He laughs my favorite laugh in the world, and the sound shoots straight through me, bright and alive.
“So, I got started on the aspect of it that interested me the most: using the pod to treat disease and repair tissues. The team had all these prototypes of surgical tools, and things like direct chemotherapy delivery or laser-targeted tumor ablation. It was just a matter of putting it all together and automating the process.”
“Easy,” he jokes, grinning.
“That’s when we named it the BioVIVE. The first things we were able to treat were situations of hemorrhage and blood loss, because blood vessels are easy to image, and we know a lot about their structure. We eventually moved to laser-targeted tumor ablation, directed radiation, and even targeted gene therapy. But the hemorrhage work was always the furthest along. At some point, I knew that, if we could find a way to keep the heart beating after an accident, it would allow us to get the patient to the BioVIVE to be treated. We could save someone who was near death. Or… maybe even recently deceased.”
Luca watches me intently. “You’re talking about the stuff you injected me with.”
“Yes, Compound Y. I partnered with some medicinal chemists to develop it during my doctoral training,” I say. “It causes a drop in body temperature, a contraction of cardiac muscles, and stimulates brain activity in the brain stem, which controls respiration. I was initially developing it as an alternative to pacemakers, because I found it could artificially keep a heart beating. It didn’t seem to be very useful for that—mainly because it’s not very bioavailable—what I mean is, it has to be delivered directly to the heart to work, and I can’t imagine many people wanting to do that every morning before leaving for work.”
He rubs at his chest and huffs out a laugh. “No.”
“But once we were able to quickly heal certain types of vascular damage, I found that, if administered an hour or less before getting a patient into the BioVIVE, Compound Y and the pod could be used to save and even bring back some patients.”
“Like animals that had been in accidents.” He pauses. “Or someone who was hit by a car.”
I nod.
He goes quiet and then reaches up, sending both hands through his hair. “Sorry—I’m just taking all of this in.”
“Of course. It’s a lot.”
“This is really amazing, though. I mean, is this a normal level of invention? This feels… out there.”
“It is very far out there,” I admit. “And very, very classified. The board didn’t technically know I was working on Compound Y.”
