Out of the Shadows 002
A machine-augmented MIDNIGHT'S WAR novel
As he surmised, there was one thing, and only one thing, that could possibly have interested Theranos’s elderly board of directors, and that was the prospect of somehow restoring their youth to them.
Youth! The one thing that no amount of money can buy. Time! The ephemeral treasure that steadily vanishes with each grain of sand falling down the Reaper’s ruthless hourglass! Life! The one priceless thing that each of those twelve old men were rapidly running out of.
That had to be the answer. It simply had to be! And yet, when he scoured the news and the business media for even the smallest hint of what Elizabeth Holmes had promised her directors, he couldn’t find anything beyond what the whole world now knew was obvious nonsense.
He was almost beginning to believe the narrative and accept that Holmes was just another corporate scam artist in the mode of Bernie Madoff or Kenneth Lay, when he came across some fascinating comments on an employment review site written by a scientist who claimed to have worked for Theranos in the early days.
it didn’t work out, sadly, but that was no fault of the dev team. i worked with some of the best and brightest engineers i’ve ever known and we accomplished things that no one will ever know and i will always be proud of. we could have all lived for centuries but management shut us all down and i will never understand why.
Elliott had underlined two sections of the last sentence. What the unknown scientist meant by lived for centuries was pretty clear and confirmed that he was right to be suspicious of the official story. But what had he meant by management shut us all down? And who was “management” if it wasn’t Holmes or Balwani?
The more he dug into the matter, the more he learned, the more he began to conclude that Holmes and Balwani were neither fraudsters nor truly in charge of anything, they were simply cut-outs used to cover for the people who had actually been calling the shots at Theranos. And while he never unraveled the mystery of who those people were, or why they had shut the high-flying medical technology startup down, in the course of his efforts he conceived something that was turning out to be a billion-dollar technology concept.
HemaTech, now entering its sixth year of existence, had been founded with an objective of profiting from extending the basic human lifespan. The concept, like most genuinely revolutionary ideas, turned out to be fairly obvious in hindsight, and the process had already been tested successfully in rats, rabbits, and, strangely enough, crocodiles. The applied process involved building a massive genetic database across a population, and, after identifying the various RNA encodings that increased the viable lifespan of individual cells, simulating them and injecting modified RNA therapies into the subjects.
The initial results were very promising, as one of the first rats to be subjected to the treatment was now four years old, which was downright ancient for an animal that normally lived two to three years, and yet the little creature still appeared to have barely entered middle age. And while it was far too soon to have any idea of what the mRNA treatments had done for the already-long-lived crocodiles, the reptiles turned out to possess three times more useful RNA encodings than any other animal yet tested.
Elliott was desperate to get his hands on a Galapagos giant turtle or a whale shark, as both species were known to have unusually long life spans, but his inquiries made to various zoos and marine biology programs had been rejected, often quite rudely.
But soon, probably within one year, HemaTech would go public and he would be able to afford all of the machines and experts and animals required for the next phase, the phase that would prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that the company was on the right track for human life extension. And while he doubted it would be possible to turn the clock back more than a decade or two, he was confident to the point of near-certainty that HemaTech’s biotechnology would be able to slow down the aging process enough to double the lifespan of children who were being born today.
