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Rachel had never enjoyed flying, but this particular flight had been quite different. First of all, someone from the previous flight had left a newspaper in the little netting on the seatback in front of her. She’d gladly turned to the puzzles page and went to work. All through her treatments and doctor’s appointments for her brain tumor, it had been suggested that she work on all sorts of puzzles to keep her mind sharp. She’d spent several weeks tearing through Sudoku books and had downloaded three different crossword apps to her phone. From time to time, she’d find herself getting stuck, as if her brain felt like it was stripped of a few gears. She felt it now, in the place as she struggled with 32 Down in the morning crossword puzzle; it took her far too long to come up with the rather obvious answer of Male Lead in Hit Film, Dirty Dancing. Of course, it could just be her brain decided that Patrick Swayze wasn’t important enough to remember, but still…it made her worry.
When she’d gone back to work, she’d stopped doing such exercises within ay regularity. It had been lessened to a morning crossword over coffee or maybe, if she was having trouble sleeping, a puzzle app on her phone. But when she saw the newspaper right in front of her, the itch had come back. Also, there was just something quaint and oddly comforting about doing a crossword puzzle on newsprint.
So she did the crossword puzzle, and then she knocked out the word jumbles. And when she was done, she took the time to peruse the paper. It was a paper out of Seattle—her destination—so she figured she'd get an idea of what was going on in the area. She'd be there for a total of four days, after all. She'd never visited Seattle before, so she thought it might be helpful to get an idea of things she could do during her downtime.
That was, of course, if she had downtime. The specialists she’d spoken to about this groundbreaking and highly experimental treatment claimed the side effects were minimal. But they’d also stressed that people responded differently. While there was a high probability that she’d be perfectly fine following each of the four treatments she’d be getting, they’d made sure to point out that there was a very small chance that she may feel sick to the stomach and experience headaches.
She breezed through the papers, getting a sense of the weather forecast while she’d be there (drizzling rain and overcast the entire time) and found a few restaurants she thought she might try out. In the midst of all of this, though, something in the local news caught her eye. Overshadowing the news of a new bakery opening up and a local teen who’d saved an elderly woman from an apartment fire, there was news of a murder that had the Seattle PD baffled.
So, as the flight drew closer to its end, Rachel read about the strange murder of Dr. Emma Willis. A brilliant biochemist, she’d been murdered in her apartment two nights ago and so far, the police and even agents from the bureau field office out of Seattle had no clues as to who did it. The why seemed to be a bit clearer, as Willis had been working on experimental methods to reverse aging. There were quotes from Dr. Willis’s colleagues in the article, grieving her loss not only as a friend but as one of the most pioneering minds in the field of reverse aging.
The article explained very little of the crime scene or the body—just that she'd apparently been pushed out of her eleventh-story window. Rachel understood that this lack of detail was probably out of respect for Dr. Willis and her family, but it already had Rachel's mind working. Who would have killed such a doctor? Had the original intent been to push her from a window, or had there been something else planned? Has she been the center of controversy at some point because of her research and work?
When the pilot announced that they were beginning their descent into Seattle, Rachel folded the paper up and placed it back into the netting in front of her. As she looked out to the gray sky, she thought about the sort of work and potential scorn some doctors surely took because of their research. Over the course of the past fourteen months or so, she’d become very much aware of how competitive and cutting-edge experimental treatments could be. Only her own view had been confined to cancer and tumor research. And if there were that many advancements in that field, there was no telling what sort of approaches were being studied and researched. Stem cell, sure…she’d heard all about the protests and angry groups who had railed against that sort of research when it came to anti-aging practices. But beyond that, Rachel was mostly uneducated on the field.
She thought back over all she’d read in the article just as another way to keep her mind sharp and focused. But by the time the landing gear touched down on the runway, she had somehow slipped into work mode and found herself trying to view the case from every possible angle.
This came to a stop as she grabbed her luggage from the overhead compartment and filed off of the plane. She then made her way into the airport and made a direct line for check-in for her rental car. She had her first appointment with the team of neuropathologists in exactly an hour and a half and, not knowing the city, was already fearing she was going to be racing the clock.
But in the back of her mind, she held on to the hope that this appointment could be the first of a handful that end up bringing an end to this chapter of her life. She’d tried so many different approaches, and with each one, Rachel had become more and more hopeful. She'd nearly stayed with the treatments in Sweden but had ultimately decided to try these specialists not only based on the word of mouth from doctors back in Richmond, but because the team in Switzerland had never quite gotten behind the idea that their approach would actually cure her. And maybe it was just the competitive streak in her, but she wanted to beat this damned thing, not just learn how to live with it.
And that was the attitude that carried her out of airport, across the rental parking lot under a drizzle of chilly rain. She punched the address of the clinic into her phone and headed into the city, chasing answers to her cancer and, perhaps more importantly, hope.
***
“We’re excited to get started,” Angler said as they all took seats at the table. He then reached out to a very large stack of file folders and stroked them as if they were cat. “Of course, as you can imagine with a treatment like this, there are lots of waivers and signatures required.”
“I trust you’ve read over everything we sent you?” Dr. Pace asked.
“I did,” Rachel said. “Several times, in fact.”
“Do you have any questions before we get started? Anything at all. I know there are a lot of peculiar things to wrap your head around.”
That was an understatement. She felt like she’d been trying to desperately make sense of things ever since she arrived. The clinic didn’t feel like any sort of medical clinic or research center she’d seen before. Instead, it was decorated almost like a resort. When she’d presented herself at the front desk and signed in, the receptionist had offered her a coffee—four different kinds, at that. Rachel declined, as she was already a little jittery about the meeting.
A second receptionist had escorted her down a wide, brightly-lit hallway. There were only a few doors on each side, but from one of the doors being open, Rachel could clearly see that the rooms were enormous. The receptionist led her to the last door on the right and opened it for her. When Rachel stepped inside, there were already three people sitting around an elegant conference table—the place she currently sat.
And that was what brought her snapping into the moment again. For a second, she’d allowed her FBI agent tactics to take over, retracing her steps to see if she did indeed have any questions.
There were two men and a woman, all of whom looked to be middle-aged, sitting at the table with her. There were no doctor smocks or coats. They were all dressed casually; in fact, one of the of the men was wearing a rather bright polo with a subtle tropical design.
The woman was a thin, blonde woman with a bright smile and blue, sparkling eyes behind a pair of glasses. “She’d introduced herself as Dr. Laura Pace. It was her job to keep track of Rachel’s progress after each of the injections.”
To her immediate left sat a man in a tropical polo shirt. His black hair had started going grey at the temples, but he possessed a boyish sort of charm and gait. He’d introduced himself as Dr. Warren Angler. The other man was of Asian descent and was the only familiar face in the room. Rachel had spoken with him once before via video call. Dressed in a simple blue button-down and a pair of slacks, he introduced himself as Dr. Ken Seang.
Rachel eyed them all, wondering if they expected her to have questions. She was quite sure she understood it all but feared that she might have questions that she’d buried down under all of the details. She’d read the PDF documents that had been sent over and could even recall the conversation she’d had with Dr. Seang on a video call eight days ago. She knew the basics of the treatment and why it was seen as so strange and controversial. Essentially, over the course of the next four days, this small team would inject her with an extremely experimental nanobot. She would be only the eleventh person to receive these particular nanobot, and would become one of less than three thousand in the world to receive a nanobot injection. Hence the experimental nature. The nanobot would deliver medicines that were almost identical to what she’d been receiving in Sweden directly to the tumor. It would be aided by ultrasound techniques that she honestly didn’t understand.
If the nanobots failed, there was no harm, no foul. She'd simply have a little nanoparticle trapped in her bloodstream—too small to cause any damage. But if it worked, as it had in ten out of eleven recipients so far, she could be cancer-free within two months. And the best part (as far as she was concerned) was that the treatments were minimally invasive and wouldn’t cause her to be laid up at home.
“No, I think I understand everything,” she finally said. “I just wonder…how long will each treatment take?”
Angler chuckled and this and said, “Well, the injection should take about three seconds. The walk down tot eh ultrasound machine will take toughly thirty seconds, and then the ultrasound itself will take about five minutes.”
“And that’s it?” She could hardly believe it. Seang had told her it was a quick procedure, but this was crazy. She’d expected at least an hour or so.
“And when I leave here today, from what I understand, I can just go about my day?”
“Absolutely,” Dr. Pace said. “Go grab a bite to eat, maybe a drink somewhere. Did anyone come with you?”
