“Are you sure they’re human?”
“Oh, yes… just very, very, many years from ‘now’.”
I had endured over three years of ‘air quotes’. That alone should have gotten me a ticket back.
“Wow. They sure look different.”
“Selection and genetic manipulation will do that.”
I shook my head back and forth. “I suppose so.”
We stood there for some time, taking in the group before us. It all was like something out of a movie.
__________
Suddenly, the room filled with brilliant color. It quickly condensed into shapes and forms, becoming a hologram of sorts. I looked around in absolute amazement as images came into view.
Behind us, I recognized the interior of my boat. Giddeon was on the couch next to me, and I was putting the magazine down through Boris. I then saw myself push the magazine onto the floor. I could see we were talking, but heard no sound. There was a flash, and the interior of the room in the future momentarily resembled the radiant tunnel of light.
I looked over at Giddeon, and even he appeared shocked.
__________
One of the creatures opened her eyes. I say her, because I could somehow sense a feminine aura emanating off of her skin. Plus, there was a sweet, familiar smell that I had come to associate with estrogen. The eyes looking at me had enormous pupils surrounded by coronas of blue.
She smiled.
I’m sure she couldn’t see us, but, the hologram changed. She was seeing herself… through my eyes. There was such tenderness in the look that I almost felt weak.
In a few moments, the strangest thing happened.
A cat walked through the wall, from our right, and into the room. It was a carbon copy of Samantha. She went to Giddeon, twined through his legs, and then, over to me, where she attempted to rub her face on my jeans.
I reached down and let her smell my hand and run her whiskers through my fingers.
I looked back up and all of the eyes on the semi-supine people were open. The hologram around us had taken on four different perspectives, like slightly offset mirrors. The female that had opened her eyes first, slowly lifted a hand to her lips. I noticed there were only three fingers and a long, elegant thumb.
She winked and blew me a kiss.
__________
With a flash of light, we were back.
“Holy Toledo! That was bizarre!” Giddeon exclaimed. “They couldn’t see through my eyes… only yours! When I went there before, they all just laid there, like they were asleep!”
I was somewhat unsteady on my feet, so I sat down next to Boris. He leaned over, smelled my hand, and then tried to rub against it. I ‘scratched’ behind his ears.
“I… I don’t even know what to say. If it wasn’t real, you have the best imagination, ever.”
“I’m good at fabricating things, but not that good. The emotion was almost palpable,” said Gid.
I nodded my head in agreement. “I felt it, too. How in the world did you know?”
“Know what?”
“That they were remote viewing me.”
“Easy… oh, you didn’t see it.”
“See what?”
“The outside of the building,” he said.
“What about it?”
Giddeon smiled.
“It had that portrait of you and Melody on it.”
__________
We tried to go back to that room in the distant future, but, oddly, Giddeon couldn’t access it, again. As a matter of a fact, he couldn’t get past that time and place… almost like he had hit some type of barrier.
I didn’t think much of it; however, it perplexed him, greatly.
__________
Days passed, as they have a tendency to do, and Melody got engaged. They were planning a June wedding, which was only six months away.
Over that past year or so, I had quit going over to her condo because her fiancé was so often there… and, when he wasn’t, there were always pictures of him scattered around different places that constantly reminded me that there were upcoming nuptials. She even had him in his eco-outfit… khaki shorts, T-shirt, a floppy hat and old Berkshire sandals… on her screen saver. The picture looked to have been taken somewhere in the California desert.
I didn’t love her any less. If anything, I loved her more. After seeing so many permutations of her future, I felt a knife in my heart when I saw them together… knowing that she had at best an even chance of moderate happiness with him.
She was meant to be with me.
I felt it as strongly as I had ever felt anything in my life. And, to make matters worse, my health on the other side had begun to deteriorate. I had had pneumonia twice, and my bone marrow was becoming suppressed. Also, my kidneys and liver were performing not so well. Jeremy came out each time there was a crisis, but I could tell that even he was losing hope. I begged him to not give up on me… that I was fine. That I was coming back.
I’m not really sure I believed it, any longer.
Giddeon, however, was a rock. He never lost faith. Even when two weeks before the wedding he informed me of some terrible news.
Chapter 63
“She has cancer.”
I knew by the expression on his face that he was talking about Melody. At that point, I could practically read his mind, anyway, if I concentrated.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“I can smell it. I wasn’t sure, at first, but, now, I’m certain.”
“What kind?” My heart felt like it had stopped beating in my chest.
“Lymphoma… I think. Or, maybe, leukemia. They both have a similar odor. I’ve been to a few hospitals, sniffing out the oncology wards. That’s what I have it narrowed down to. It seems to be getting worse rather quickly. She doesn’t know it, yet… she just thinks she’s tired and stressed about the wedding.”
I began to panic. “We’ve got to help her… we… we’ve got to do something!”
Giddeon was quiet for a few endless seconds. Then, he said, “I’ve been racking my brain… I don’t know if it’ll work, but, I have a plan.”
At that point, any shred of hope was better than none at all.
“Tell me.”
__________
“We’ve got to get some of her DNA over here.”
I shook my head, not following. “How… I mean, how can we do that? And, why? What good will it do?”
“Do you remember when you pulled Boris from the road?”
“Yeah…”
“You shouldn’t have been able to do it. I’ve never been able to physically interact with a conscious, living field even though I’ve got 92.3 % of the brain power.”
Ordinarily, I would have been thrilled to know I was up to 7.7 percent, but, that didn’t really register at the time.
“Plus, you had his blood all over you. Actual living blood. And, it didn’t go away when you shifted out of the alternate time line. You had to take a shower, remember?”
I nodded.
“Somehow, when you’re in a really emotional state, you bridge the gap. I think you did it before, with her.”
“When?” I asked.
“When you two were on the couch that day… the first time you went over to her place, alone.”
I thought back. “When I tasted her tears?”
“Yes. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but, the more I do, the more I realize how odd that was. We have to go back to that afternoon and collect some DNA… hopefully, there’ll be enough from epithelial cells sloughed off in the fluid.”
“Why… I mean, what will we do with her DNA?”
“Sequence it… at least the parts that matter.”
I was attentive, trying to figure out where he was going. “What parts?”
“Her MHC molecules.”
“MHC… what’re those?”
“Major Histo-compatability Complexes. They’re two different types of proteins, one of which is expressed on the sur
faces of most cells. A lot of alternate sub-type combinations can exist, and those differences are why it’s so difficult for one person to donate tissue to another person… if they don’t match, the recipient’s immune system just destroys the donated organ. Anti-rejection drugs keep that from happening, but they bring on a whole host of other problems. The odds of a perfect match are astronomical, by the way.”
“Okay… so how is that gonna help her?”
He blew air out of his lungs, as if uncertain what he was about to say would actually work. “We’re gonna change your MHC’s to match hers. You’ll be a perfect bone marrow donor.”
I looked at him, hoping he knew of a way for us to accomplish that. However, even if we did, there was still a major hurdle. He obviously knew what it was without me asking.
“Then, all we have to do is get you back over there.”
Chapter 64
One bridge at a time. That’s what I told myself. First we had to get the DNA.
A pipette with a tip, sterile Eppendorf tube, and a small container of ice appeared in Giddeon’s hands. Boris knew something was up and meowed. I don’t think he liked it when we flashed away, and he somehow knew that the luminous tunnel was coming. In an instant, we were back in Melody’s condo; it was exactly as I remembered it from that day. She and I were on the sofa, watching ‘Ghost’.
I looked to the television and once again saw Patrick Swayze behind Demi Moore at the pottery wheel, shaping that wet clay while music played in the background. Giddeon and I walked over close… both Melody and ‘myself’ were unaware of our presence. However, Samantha was not. I saw her looking back and forth between us, as if confused.
A tear began to roll down Melody’s cheek and Giddeon quickly prepared to collect some of the fluid as my old self reached out to touch the wetness. There was a sparkling flicker as Giddeon sucked up some of the tear into the pipette. I remembered that golden flicker happened when I was over there the original time… I saw it when I reached out to her beautiful, wet face. Samantha looked at us and let out meows and trills; then, Melody held the cat close, just like before. Giddeon squirted the fluid into the Eppendorf tube, snapped the lid shut, and placed it, there, on the ice.
__________
We transported back to my boat. Boris had his ears down and a pained look upon his face as we returned… I suppose it was a bit bright for him. He quickly got over it, though.
“First, we need some blood from you,” said Giddeon.
I sat at the table and he drew a tube, using a syringe and rubber tourniquet that had just popped into existence. When he was finished, he put that tube on ice, right next to the sample from Melody.
“I’ll be gone awhile. No sense in you tagging along.”
“Where are you going?”
“UCSD… gotta make some primers and see if we have anything.”
I didn’t really know what primers were, but I was glad that Giddeon did. I promised myself to be more studious if I ever made it back. A lobster dinner with a steaming baked potato appeared on the table.
“Why don’t you have a nice meal and get some rest. We’ll have a long day, tomorrow… with any luck.”
And, then, he was gone. Not knowing what else to do, I followed his advice and sat down to eat. Boris jumped up on the table and sniffed at my plate. He gave a plaintive meow, settled down across from me, and just lay there watching me pick at my food.
__________
Giddeon arrived bright and early the next morning. I was already up and dressed.
“Got it. It took most of the night, but I have the sequences we need.”
I nodded. “Good… what do we do, next?”
“Now, we educate you.”
__________
We flashed into a lecture room at one of the local colleges. I’m not sure which school we were at, but the room appeared new. Giddeon and I were on a stage in front of an amphitheatre of seats; a projection screen was behind us.
“The first problem we have,” he said, “is that your blood is type ‘A’ positive, and Melody’s is ‘B’ negative.”
“Okay…”
Giddeon turned to the screen, with a clicker/laser pointer in his hands. A PowerPoint presentation appeared on the large, white rectangle behind him.
“You two have different surface antigens on your red blood cells… actually, this part doesn’t matter so much if you’re replacing all of her bone marrow with yours, but, it’ll be good practice. Plus, there are new therapies coming down the pipe where you don’t have to totally wipe out the recipient’s stem cells with radiation… so, you having ‘B’ negative could come in handy.”
He then went through an explanation of antigens, and how antibodies could stick to them using the ends of their variable regions (Y-shaped ends that were different from antibody to antibody) in order to tag something considered ‘foreign’ by the body. Such tagging would cause a clumping, in certain cases, if one type of blood was introduced into a pool of another type of blood. We then watched an eight minute video produced by graphic artists from Harvard, called ‘The Inner Life of the Cell’.
It was a well done piece of work, and Giddeon explained, like a narrator, what was going on in each of the scenes.
Then, for the next forty-five minutes, my teacher related to me the basics of Cell and Molecular Biology. I took it in quickly… there was more communication going on between us at that point than vocals and projector slides conveyed.
Over the past few months of my coma, it seemed as if Gid and I were more and more on the same page with all of our thoughts and emotions… like we were merging, somehow. Becoming more interconnected. So, when he was done with his lecture, I felt pretty much like I had completed a graduate course in the science he had presented.
Next, something amazing transpired.
Giddeon produced the tube of blood he had drawn from me, and set it in a rack on the podium. I then felt a quivering type sensation, and, in a few seconds, we began to shrink… all the while being drawn down towards the tube. The process began to go faster and faster; it was almost like the tunnel of light, again, but just slightly different. In a few seconds we were floating in fluid, which was thick and viscous, with enormous biconcave discs all around us. I presumed they were red blood cells.
We continued our miniaturization process, and the exterior of a red blood cell’s phospholipid bilayer came into greater focus. Giddeon pointed out one of the ‘A’ antigens protruding from its surface; the structure resembled a bizarre type of tree, branched and even slightly green in color. No spoken words were necessary. At that point we were simply communicating telepathically.
“Now, I want you to see a lymphocyte,” I heard inside my head.
We jetted off to a nearby cell that appeared somewhat larger than the RBC… it also had a different surface appearance, from what I could tell. It was more rounded and the proteins scattered here and there in the fluid mosaic of its membrane were more numerable and varied.
Giddeon showed me the MHC molecules and I took note of their shapes and orientations. The Type I molecules were decidedly different from the Type II molecules, and my instructor relayed to me that they both had different purposes as far as the immune system was concerned.
After looking them over, we went inside, through some type of channel, and began to shrink even more. Deep within the interior, we made our way through a pore and were presented with all of the genetic machinery housed by the nucleus.
Things were looking less and less like the artists in the video had envisioned them… I suppose that was a function of how light interacted with structures on such a small scale. I actually saw DNA wrapped around a long line of histones, which are proteins shaped like spools. Gid explained to me that that was the way the genetic blueprint was stored when not in use… it was circled around histones like rope around boat cleats.
We then went over to an unraveled section, which was waiting for an RNA polymerase to come by and do its thing. ‘Its thing’ was to re
ad the genetic code while zipping along one strand of the DNA… and, while it zipped, it would simultaneously produce a transcript of messenger RNA. That transcript would then be used by other machinery in the cytoplasm in order to make a protein. Before my lecture, that was about all I knew of Cell and Molecular Biology… thanks to a couple of documentaries on NOVA that I had seen, years, before.
I still remember sitting at the restaurant in Seaport Village and contemplating the transcripts inside of Melody… the transcripts and all of the proteins that were produced.
__________
Before long, we went down almost to an atomic level, and I felt, more than saw, the nucleic acids that were bound together in a double helix. It’s hard to explain how they looked, because the atoms themselves can’t really be viewed. They’re fuzzy… more like fields than things. I sensed motion within them. I suppose it was from the peripheral electrons and, also, from Brownian movement inside of the nuclei.
After a few moments, we buzzed along a section that coded for an MHC molecule. The constituents in that section… adenosine, guanosine, cytidine and thymidine… were linked to each other in seemingly random order on one side of the strand, and also, to their counterparts on the other side of the strand. The purines and pyrimidines were ‘holding hands’ by hydrogen bonding with each other across the way… rungs in the ladder of life.
As we went, Giddeon pointed out where the differences were between my nucleoside sequences and Melody’s. Here and there, a base pair glowed, or sometimes, a stretch of them, which helped me see the ones that were ‘incorrect’. Somehow, all of this knowledge went easily into my brain, and, I realized, on an instinctual level, where the differences were and catalogued them.
We went over to where my ‘A’ antigens were coded. I saw what should have been there in order to have ‘B’ antigens, instead. Also, we scooted along the coding regions for the different ‘Rh’ factors, and Gid showed me the ‘D’ factor… that’s the one that gives you the + or – in your blood type depending on if it is present or not. It was all truly mind boggling, and I was just glad to have enough of a mind to be boggled. I was very eager to be learning… because, finally, it mattered. It mattered tremendously.
Knowledge took on a whole new aspect for me… it was no longer just useless factoids to be stored in my brain.