The Postmortal (27 page)

Resnick:
Steven Otto was just two years old when his father, Graham, and six of his father’s colleagues were murdered by a group of pro-death insurgents outside his temporary lab in Eugene, Oregon. Over four decades have passed since that night. Steven Otto has asked enough questions about what happened, and gotten enough answers, to be able to construct a full, violent, searing memory of it in his mind. He thinks about his father often, and he never discourages people from bringing up the subject. That openness will serve him well in the coming years, as Steven now stands on the cusp of a scientific breakthrough that may exceed even his father’s. It’s a robovaccine that goes by the code name Skeleton Key. And it’s a breakthrough that he says he was ready to throw into the garbage.

 

Otto:
If you’ll just join me in the lab . . .

 

Resnick (narrating):
Otto works here, in an anonymously funded private lab near Portland. To enter this lab, visitors must go through what is known as a “blow shower,” a fifty-second release of cold air designed to blast away any stray hair and skin cells. We also had to wear full hazmat suits and helmets to get inside this facility. No open seams are allowed. He led us to a series of glass vials that, to the naked eye, appeared to contain nothing but clear liquid.

 

Resnick:
So there are robots in here?

 

Otto:
Very small ones, yes.

 

Resnick:
And what can they do?

 

Otto:
We’re still ironing out the kinks. But ideally Skeleton Key will be able to identify enemy viruses, harmful bacteria, and malignant tissue inside the human body, then destroy them before they ever have a chance to metastasize and do lasting damage.

 

Resnick:
What are we talking about here? Are we talking about curing cancer?

 

Otto:
Preventing it permanently, yes.

 

Resnick:
Heart disease? Clogged arteries?

 

Otto:
Yes.

 

Resnick:
Flu?

 

Otto:
Yes.

 

Resnick:
Can it make you thinner?

 

Otto:
Actually, yes. It can. We program an ideal body mass based upon your genetic blueprint, and Skeleton Key will destroy any fat cells that cause you to exceed that target.

 

Resnick:
Like internal liposuction?

 

Otto (laughing):
See, this always happens. People skip right over the cancer part and go right to the “make me thin” part.

 

Resnick:
So your father invented the cure for aging, and now you’ve come along with the cure for everything else.

 

Otto:
Well, we have a ways to go yet. But that’s the goal: to create a very comprehensive vaccine that remains operational in the bloodstream for the duration of your lifespan, however long that may be. I’m encouraged with what we’ve been able to engineer thus far. I could easily see, within the next decade, perfecting Skeleton Key and making it available on a mass scale.

 

Resnick:
What made you want to pursue this?

 

Otto:
It’s all the dog’s fault. We had this dog, Buggle. And Buggle was known to many people for being the first dog to receive the vector. But he got sick nevertheless, and this was after we had owned him for, I dunno, thirty years or so? I didn’t want to see him go.

 

Resnick:
You loved him.

 

Otto:
Of course. He was our family dog. And he was my father’s dog. So to me Buggle was this remnant of Dad. Something real that I could touch and look in the eye. I didn’t want to lose that. I wasn’t ready to lose that. You hear all these stories now about people who give their pets the cure and the pets get sick and die, and then the owners end up calling an end specialist because they can’t handle their grief. And I understand that to a degree. Anyway, rather than cope with Buggle’s sickness like a healthy person, I decided to try to cure cancer instead. So much easier, am I right?

 

Resnick:
Were you also driven, in a way, to top your father’s discovery?

 

Otto:
No. That was never my intent. My father’s discovery, as far as I’m concerned, remains the greatest scientific discovery in the history of mankind.

 

Resnick:
A discovery that ended up costing him his life.

 

Otto:
Well, no. The discovery didn’t kill him.
People
killed my father. Let’s not confuse the two. People like Casey Jarrett decided to throw him in that van and burn him to death. The cure itself meant no harm.

 

Resnick:
But he himself was ambivalent about the cure and what would happen once it spread.

 

Otto:
Oh, no doubt about that. If there’s no cure, there are no farms in Russia or insurgency or Peter Pan cases or any of those horrible things.

 

Resnick:
In hindsight, do you understand the motives of the people that killed him?

 

Otto:
I understand their viewpoint but not their methodology. The tragedy of my father’s murder was that he and the people who killed him weren’t in disagreement. They shared the exact same fears. But instead of working with my father to see that the cure was used responsibly, they decided to kill him. And that will never make sense to me. It doesn’t make sense to me now. It won’t make sense to me one hundred years from now, if I’m lucky enough to still be here.

 

Resnick:
Do you wish he had never discovered the cure?

 

Otto (pausing):
Sometimes. But wishing is a fool’s errand, isn’t it? There’s only one reality, and that’s the reality that I have to deal with. I think a lot of people mistakenly hoped the cure would end not only death but also the anguish of processing death, of processing finality. I think people thought they would be able to escape that, and the opposite has proven true. They have to spend much longer dealing with their grief.

 

Resnick:
Are you scared the discovery of Skeleton Key will also give people a false sense of security?

 

Otto:
Yes. And that’s why I very nearly threw away the initial prototype.

 

Resnick:
I bet you never thought you’d one day be on the verge of perfecting a cure for cancer, and then wonder if it was a
bad
thing.

 

Otto:
I know. It’s insane that we’ve gotten to this point. But it’s a legitimate thing to think about. Is it a good thing to eliminate an illness, or many illnesses, that are devastating on an individual scale but necessary in the grand scheme of nature? And, if we’re being honest, why am I trying to develop something that will help all these other people? We now live in a world where I think many people walk around asking themselves, do other people matter? Does the rest of the world mean anything to me, or is all that matters this very small world of friends and family and colleagues that I’ve constructed for myself? It’s easy to navigate that minefield of questions and come to the conclusion that this vaccine is a bad thing.

 

Resnick:
So why didn’t you destroy the vaccine?

 

Otto:
Because deep in my heart I know you can’t stop progress. Ever. There are plenty of private labs out there working on something similar. You think Michael Ornster doesn’t have forty people working on this over at Delvair?

Sooner or later this vaccine
will
be perfected, and it is going to be used, both for good and ill. You can’t stop people from doing what they want to do. That’s a realization I had a long time ago—one that came back to me when I was standing on a bridge, ready to throw the prototype down onto the rocks below. I remembered when I married my wife . . .

 

Resnick:
Your current wife.

 

Otto:
I’ve only had one. No cycle marriages for me. Anyway, I remember all the wedding planning we did, and we were scurrying around to bakeries and caterers and God knows where else. And my wife was having panic attacks on the day of the wedding. She’d say to me, “Steve! Do
not
let the guests switch the place cards!” And she’d order the ushers to make sure all the guests signed both the guestbook and some special photo that we had placed on a table in the foyer. Of course, the guests didn’t obey any of our little commands. They switched seats and never bothered to sign the picture, and not everyone danced on the dance floor. I think after about six glasses of champagne, my wife finally decided that there was no use in trying to stop it. That she may as well enjoy the day instead of trying to make sure everyone acted exactly as she wished. You can’t stop people from doing what they want to do. They’re always going to do it. Mankind has a path for itself, a trajectory, and you can never knock it off of that course. All I can do is usher in this vaccine in the most responsible manner I can. After that I have to have faith that people will be as well-intentioned as I am.

 

Resnick:
But hasn’t this century been proof positive that they aren’t?

 

Otto:
To a degree. But there is still some good out there, Micah. Not everyone took the cure and decided to become a crazed goon. A breakthrough like this will solve the organ theft problem, at the very least. Perhaps
this
is the key to turning everything around. That’s what I have to hope for. I have to.

 

Resnick:
Do you wish your father were still alive to see some of the breakthroughs you’ve made?

 

Otto (choking up):
I wish he were still alive. Period. That’s all.

 

Resnick (narrating):
Steven Otto believes Skeleton Key could be ready by 2070. But just today Nobel Prize–winning bioroboticist Lars Anderssen said Otto’s timetable is wishful thinking, and that a vaccine with Skeleton Key’s abilities may never be possible. Either way, Steven Otto will continue working on his vaccine, to improve upon the cure his father gave the world. For better and for worse. As for Buggle the dog, he died from stomach cancer in September 2042.