Page 98 of Mastermind

“I think he won.”

“He won? That’s all you have to say? What exactly did he win? He killed some people and used a computer to say he cured some other people. We don’t know if any of that is true.”

“You’re right. But we’ll find out pretty quickly. And in theory, it makes sense.”

“Does it?” she asks.

“In theory. Up to now, nobody’s ever been able to put this kind of effort into solving disease.”

“Why not? If it was so easy?”

“It wasn’t easy. And the answer is more complicated, but even when we were trying to decode the human genome, the National Institutes of Health vetoed using supercomputers to decode it faster. They only relented when a start-up company was about to beat them and showed that their methods were hopelessly antiquated. Medicine is conservative. Sometimes for the right reasons. Sometimes for the wrong reasons. We’ll let people die from a pandemic because we don’t want to give them a cure that might also kill them. It’s easier to deal with the repercussions of a death by natural causes than a death from an experimental procedure. We worry about fallout more than data. That’s why it takes a sociopath to do what Heywood has done.”

“They’re not going to give him what he wants,” says Jessica. “They can’t.”

“Sure they can. The entire US space program was led by a former Nazi officer who ran a slave camp. When we landed on the moon, he became an American hero. Did we make the wrong decision? I don’t know that we did. If they want what Heywood’s offering enough, then anything is possible.”

“I’m going to be sick,” says Jessica.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

THE GIFT

“Please have a seat,” the unfamiliar Department of Justice attorney tells me, directing me to a chair opposite him and a dozen other people. Gerald and Jessica are already sitting to my right. They’ve been speaking to the committee today and for half of yesterday. As I sit, I scan the names and badges. There are scientists from the National Institutes of Health and the FDA, some advisers from different universities, and some Senate staffers. A few others don’t have name tags and could be people from the CIA, NSA, or some obscure computational agency dedicated to artificial-intelligence security that’s rumored to exist. IDR director Vivian Kieren is here as well.

“Dr. Cray, thank you for joining us,” says the justice official who greeted me, Benjamin Elliott. “You had a chance to hear Mr. Heywood’s claims. What do you make of them?”

“I think the phrase is, ‘Big, if true,’” I reply.

“Could you be more specific?”

“Everything he said made sense, in its own right. If you had access to that amount of processing power, and if you had the right data, you could make some interesting discoveries. The key is putting them to the test. Knowing which ones worked.”

“And do you think they worked?”

“I’m not a medical doctor. I haven’t examined anyone he claimed was cured.”

“You saw the patients in Chernobyl,” says Elliott. “Heywood says that he’d asked an outside organization for independent verification. He claims that those patients were cured.”

Interesting. So Heywood’s claiming that he asked some folks to check his numbers and they’re the ones accountable for the horrific treatment those men suffered?

“I saw malnourished people who were the victims of cruel experiments,” I explain.

“But ambulatory and showing no signs of the diseases they had been suffering from,” says a woman named Dr. Wheeler.

“I have no idea what they were suffering from,” I answer.

“What about the chimpanzee facility? What was the condition of the animals?” Wheeler asks.

“They, too, were in a malnourished state.”

“Were they ill?”

“Again, not my area,” I reply. “I know the ones buried out back were pretty ill. And I suspect the Chernobyl facility has more skeletons. But I don’t think you brought me here to get my opinion on those horror shows. You have experts on the ground.”

“We wanted your assessment, Dr. Cray. We have some very challenging decisions. We’ve looked at eighty of Heywood’s so-called miracle cures and found what appear to be eighty spontaneous remissions. When we ran the pharmaceutical combination that Jessica suggested in our own computer model, we came up with a pattern match.”

“I’m sorry. Jessica suggested . . . ?” I look to Jessica.