CΦDE:Eraser

CHAPTER ONE

I hate Houston. If I hadn’t thought it was pretty damned important, I wouldn’t have gone there in the first place. When Renken called me on the phone, asking could I please come down and take a look at some funky Russian medical treatment device, the first thing that ran through my mind was the picture of the herd of tiny livestock I’d tripped over in my hotel bathroom the last time I’d been there. As I reflect on it now, the thing that put me over the top was his promise that our first stop would be Bubba’s.

As much as I loathe Houston, I love Bubba’s. It’s a barbeque and ribs joint on the outskirts of town where some genius of African heritage cooks pork ribs that are transcendent. Unbelievable. So I said, okay, I’ll come down on Saturday, after I finish pouring the concrete countertop on my outdoor kitchen. He said he’d email the link to Southwest Airlines so I could print out my own boarding pass. And I said if I have to fly on Southwest, I’d rather take the damned bus. So he capitulated and bought an assigned seat on United. It’s not like it used to be, with decent food and all that, but it beats hell out of being crammed into a flying sardine can all the way to Texas.

I’ve known Renken for years. We met at a scientific conference in Las Vegas where I was presenting a paper about non-local field effects. The fact that mainstream science still operates in a context that refuses to acknowledge such things made the conference much more interesting than most of the other staid, stuffy affairs I’d been attending lately. Most of the time, whenever anyone talks about things like non-local field effects, mainstream scientists just turn off their brains and stick their head between their legs. Every once in a while, though, some genuinely bright and shiny newcomer gets the gist of it, so the effort to preach the gospel of a newly enlightened science occasionally pays off.

Normally, neophytes in the field make it a point to find a way to talk with me in private, in some secluded place, where no one they know will catch them keeping company with a heretic. Actually, I have come to prefer meeting in this way because I always learn more from such people than they do from me. And that was how I met Renken, in Las Vegas, while I was sitting alone.

The Venetian is one of those rare places in Las Vegas where you can actually sit in a quiet, comfortable place and carry on a conversation. The guy who designed and built it had the right idea. He built the hotel rooms so they are really two rooms in one. The bed and bath are on the upper level where the door opens. The lower level is set up for sitting, working, talking and watching television. After working in Vegas as a strategic planner for various high-tech companies over the past 25 years, I’ve made it a habit to stay at the Venetian whenever I can. It never disappoints.

They have an Italian restaurant there called Zeffirino Ristorante that is only accessible inside the hotel via gondola. I was eating there alone after presenting my paper when Renken wandered in, introduced himself, and sat down to join me. By the time we were ready to leave, we’d gone through more wine than I care to remember. But the conversation was stimulating.

One of the sub-topics I had addressed during my talk was about using non-local field effects to drive applications such as communications systems and electrical power generators. Renken told me that he had come into some pretty serious money recently and was in the market for some outlandish technologies, so he decided to come to Vegas and look me up. He said he had been referred to me by a mutual acquaintance, a guy named Walter Drew, now deceased but formerly of Henderson, Nevada, who had done some very profitable real estate deals with him before he died.

Walter and I had worked together for more than ten years after meeting at a little technology marketing company in Las Vegas called Ashurst Technology Corporation in the early ‘90’s. He was one of the most thoroughly kind and decent people I have ever known. He married a Jordanian woman named Hannan Muhammed, whose father had been the Prime Minister of Jordan for a very long time. He had converted to Islam and changed his name to Habib, the lover. He was such a lovely man and an excellent partner. I figured if Renken had been suitable as a partner for Walter, he had to be okay with me.

Renken wasn’t like anyone else I had ever met before. Okay, he’s a died-in-the-wool Texican. That’s all right. No problem with that. I take Texans just as I find them, one at a time, up close and personal, just like I do with everyone else except ultra-conservative Republicans and religious fanatics. I made no exception with him and soon discovered that he is a naturally gifted guy who really knows how to create money, lots of it, without having to print it in his garage.

As with everyone I’ve ever known who has whiled away their best years chasing the evil dollar, Renken has some deep teeth marks embedded in his backside. Years after we first met, in an uncharacteristic moment of genuine circumspection, he disclosed that the dragon of regulated securities had taken a bite out of his butt not too many years before. I didn’t ask about the details because I figured if he wanted me to know that much about it he would get around to telling me in his own good time. Since he never got around to it, I still don’t know exactly what happened, but I do know he did a stretch in a country club facility somewhere. Never thought much about it though, because I quickly discovered that he is a very capable and talented guy who has always been a straight-shooter with me. As far as I am concerned, that’s the only thing that really matters.

It usually takes about two and a half hours to fly from Salt Lake City to Houston. Last time I made the trip nothing worth talking about happened. When I went to the airport to catch the flight to Houston this time, the flight was forty minutes late because the weather in Houston was so unstable that the FAA was unwilling to clear the flight plan. While I was waiting to board the plane, a short, fat, bald guy wearing a two thousand dollar suit and a ten-thousand dollar wrist watch started badgering the lady at the boarding kiosk. The longer it took to get the doors open, the angrier he became. No amount of soothing numb-speak about weather fronts and passenger safety made things any better, so by the time they finally did open the doors to the jetway everyone was on edge.

As soon as the flight attendant announced the flight was about to begin boarding, he barged to front of the line and started waving his platinum credit card around, demanding that he be allowed to board first. When he started yelling at the flight attendant who was playing guardian at the gate, he got about ten words out of his mouth before two very large airport security guards descended on him. They didn’t say anything at all. They just grabbed Mr. Mouth by the arms, lifted him off the floor, and waltzed him out of the boarding area. We heard him yelling and screaming all the way down the hall. Sort of put a head on things before we got on the plane. And some of us applauded. It was quite a performance.

Renken never paid for first class tickets, so I sat halfway down the aisle in coach, next to a young Japanese woman who was dressed in a crisp black executive uniform with a white silk blouse and a very masculine looking hand-painted silk tie. She spoke impeccable English but it was clear from her accent that she was Japanese and not American. Our conversation started when she turned to me and asked if it would be all right if she put her computer bag on the seat between us. I long ago swore off trying to get any serious work done on airplanes, and since my computer was stowed in the overhead bin, I told her it was no problem for me at all.

One thing led to another and I was surprised at how quickly the old language file in my head got re-booted. It has been more than 40 years since I was a high school kid living in Tokyo. While my air force dad was flying electronics intelligence missions against the Russian and North Korean radar sites in the mid-sixties, I was going to an American high school on the outskirts of Tokyo and learning to speak Japanese. After a couple of years my fluency in conversational Nihongo had become at least passable. As long as I stuck with the honorific word forms, I found I could usually stay out of trouble by not offending too many people.

I asked her in Japanese if she was native born in Japan, and she replied that she had been born in Osaka. Lovely place. Very civilized and not far from Kobe, one of my favorite places in the world. As we talked, I learned that she was a grand-niece to the founder of the Toyota Motor Company, currently studying international law at Stanford University. When I asked her why she was flying in coach, she simply smiled and told me that she saw no need to spend the extra money to fly first class. After all, a college girl in LA needs all the extra money she can get.

The old words and verb forms began to click back into place as we talked, and eventually I was able to return to a level of reasonable confidence with the language. I knew I was getting back into the zone when I stopped stuttering – I always stutter at first, no matter which foreign language I am trying to work with. But as with French and sometimes Russian, I discovered that after a couple of glasses of wine my sense of exposure recedes enough to let me talk without having to think about how to hang the words together. It’s a nice feeling.

When I asked why she was going to Houston, she hesitated for a moment. When she replied, I was a little surprised.

My doctoral dissertation is about the global economics of oil, she said. Eventually, maybe within the next twenty years or so, the Pacific Rim countries will consume more oil than the US and EEU put together. And that is going to be a big problem for us.

Not just for you, I said.

So, I am going to Houston to interview some top executives of major oil companies as part of my research project. I intend to discover, if I can, what they plan to do with the oil reserves they have under control right now, and what they plan to do to increase supply to meet future demands.

It’s a fatal weakness I have always suffered from I couldn’t help myself. Like lots of other scientists, engineers and technology integrators, I have been hacking away on the design of a zero point energy system for years. In the back of my mind, though, I keep asking myself the same disturbing questions and not coming up with any answers. Things like, if I actually succeeded in developing a way to produce electrical power so cheap that it wouldn’t be cost-effective to meter it, would I actually use it? And if I did, who would welcome it, benefit from it, support it? And who would resist it? Whose vested interests would be threatened by it? How would I strategically position the technology to respond to these issues?

Since Japan owns no oil resources of its own, I couldn’t resist the urge to ask the question. What would you do, I said, if someone were to develop a new form of energy production that could effectively replace fossil fuels as an inexhaustible source of electrical power?

She looked directly at me, almost through me, before answering. If such an energy source ever becomes available, she said, we will be among the first to adopt it. Japan is entirely dependent on outside sources of petroleum. Every industry, every household, every automobile is powered by petroleum supplied by someone else. If we could break that stranglehold on our economy, Japan would be able to forge economic undertakings that would revolutionize the world.

This lady was all business, totally serious, completely focused on this subject. And with the economic might of Toyota at her eventual disposal, it occurred to me that I might be sitting next to one of tomorrow’s global economic giants. For a moment, it was an exciting idea. But after I thought about it, I decided to let it go because the last thing I wanted to do was get tangled up in a conversation about the geo-politics of oil and energy production. That’s not my idea of a relaxing way to survive the terrors of air travel. Instead, I ordered another glass of wine, offered to buy her a drink, which she politely declined, and turned my eyes toward the window. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Off in the distance I saw the thunderheads building up over the Gulf. It was impossible to tell where Houston lay under all that weather, but it was clear to me that we were probably going to have a bumpy landing. As it turned out, the landing was fine, but what happened just after we landed was not fine at all.

The newly renovated Hobby International Airport provides travelers with a virtually unrestricted view of the runways from the passenger loading and unloading areas. Huge glass windows rise more than 60 feet from the floor of the lobby to the viewing platform on the deck above. While I was waiting for my bags to chunk out of the mouth of the baggage lift and onto the revolving carousel, I wandered over to the windows to take a look at the weather.

Along with hundreds of other hapless travelers, I watched for a while without really understanding what I was seeing. One moment the cloud cover reached down from the sky and blanketed the runway, so that we couldn’t see beyond the end of the jetway. In the next instant, the clouds raised up about three hundred feet, turned a funky kind of swamp green color, and then formed a flat, linear bottom underneath the cloud layer, as if someone had taken a giant trowel and swiped a straight line across the underside of the sky. Suddenly, we could see clear across the airport to the general aviation hangars nearly a mile way.

After about 30 seconds, I noticed that the huge windows soaring over our heads had begun to oscillate inwards and outwards like the skin of a huge bass drum – slowly stretching in and out as if they were breathing. And then it hit me – without waiting another second, I turned around and ran as fast as I could towards the center of the terminal building. When I got to the customer service desk, which is anchored to the brick sheer wall that supports the airport terminal, I scuttled around behind it and peeped up over the top. What I saw made my hair stand straight up.

The windows had begun to bulge in and out by nearly three feet at their center. I could feel the air pressure inside the terminal building shifting, compressing and decompressing in my ears with a slow, mournful cadence. All at once, a swirling finger of black cloud squirted down out of the bottom of the cloud cover and pierced the grass infield separating the two runways. Someone screamed. Tornado! and most of the people who had been standing under the windows began to run back towards the wall. But there were many who simply stood there, utterly transfixed by what we were witnessing.

Almost as if it was being piloted by remote control, the funnel of the tornado ripped through the infield on a parallel course with the two runways. It took about 15 seconds for it to cover the spread from one end of the runway to the other, and then, just as suddenly as it had appeared, it simply vanished. While it was ripping its way across the infield, I noticed two things. First, I felt a powerful, deep vibration coursing up through the floor. Second, I could hear the tornado warning sirens blaring across the inner spaces of the terminal. And during all that time, while the tornado was tearing up huge chunks of sod and flinging them hundreds of yards out onto the runways, no one standing next to those huge windows moved a muscle.

When it was over, I walked over to the carousel and picked up my bags. In the midst of the herd of travelers, I walked as if nothing had happened, out through the double doors and onto the sidewalk outside.

It was only 11:15 in the morning. The air outside the terminal was hot and damp For the first few breaths, I thought I was going to suffocate Just about the time I figured out how to breathe again, a white Cadillac Eldorado pulled up in front of the curb and stopped. The driver was a very large, very white guy wearing a huge white cowboy hat and a Gold’s Gym t-shirt, which didn’t quite make it all the way over his tool shed. The interior of the car was shiny red leather, and honest to god, the damned thing actually had a set of Texas longhorns mounted to the hood.

The enormous guy at the wheel lifted his sun glasses off the bridge of his nose, peered at me for a moment as if trying to sort out who I was, and then motioned for me to come closer to the car. I couldn’t help but notice that even from 40 feet away; I could see food stains scattered across the bulging belly of his t-shirt.

Hey, dude! he shouted at me. You James Karl and Renken’s guy?

James Karl and Renken. Jitterbug Perfume. I couldn’t figure out if he was asking about some guys in a law firm or if some guy named James Karl was part of Renken’s posse.

Well, I said when I got up next to the car, I’m here to meet with Randy Renken, if that’s what you’re asking.

A big smile lit up his face. Well, hell, climb on in here, then! he said. They’re waitin’ for you down at Bubba’s.

I hucked my bags into the back seat and opened the massive passenger side door As I stepped into the car, I noticed that it was totally impeccable inside.

Your wheels? I asked

Damn straight, he said. This baby’s just about the finest set of wheels in town, ask me. He patted affectionately on the top of the white steering wheel with a massive hand On the back of his ring finger I noticed a huge diamond encrusted ring. Very large. Very impressive.

Super bowl? I asked.

His smile was huge. Yup! he said. Super Bowl thirty-one. Green Bay and New England. He looked right at me and put out his hand. Billy Ray Booker, he said. Welcome to Houston.

When I took his hand, it felt like I had just inserted my whole hand into a catcher’s mitt. Large guy. Very big. Very strong.

They said you weren’t big enough or fast enough to be as good as you were, I offered.

The smile got bigger. Yeah, well, what do they know? You ready for some ribs?

Damn straight, I said. So off we went.

CHAPTER TWO

I could tell we were getting close to Bubba’s by the way the aroma of smoked meat clung to the air. By the time I followed Billy Ray through the door, I was drooling down both sides of my mouth. It must be a primitive thing, drooling. The smell of roasting pork and Louisiana rib sauce trips my olfactory trigger so hard I can barely contain myself. Orgasmic.

At a long planked table clear across the room, I saw Renken and a bunch of other guys sitting with their faces buried in their plates. A friend of mine from another lifetime once had a big dog, a German shepherd, I think, named Ben. The gentlest, most cordial of animals. I happened to be out in the back yard one day with Lorin when his neighbor had brought a deer shoulder out of his garage. When he gave the shoulder to Ben, the dog grabbed it in his teeth, stealthed his way into the far corner of the garden, wedged his rump up against both sides of the fence, and wrapped his massive paws around the meat, all the while glaring at us, daring us to make a move. When Lorin started to walk towards him, the dog laid his ears back, barred his fangs and growled deep in this throat. Anyone who was dumb enough to try to take that meat away from him deserved it

Aborigines, I thought. Primitive mid-brain in total control of the system. Renkin looked up at me without lifting his head, just like Ben. I half expected him to growl when I walked over to greet him, but instead he wiped his lips with a paper towel, stood up and gave me a big bear hug. Damn, he said, his hands on my shoulders, holding me at arms length. How long has it been?

Since Suzy and the tiny livestock, I said. He tilted his head back and roared with laughter. He knew all about that episode, thought it was one of the funniest things he had ever done. At the time I was pretty pissed off about it, but after all these years I was willing to credit the humor of it.

So who’s Suzy? asked Tom Sawyer, Renken’s side kick and loyal in-house legal beagle.

It’s a long story, he said, which was his way of telling Tommy and everyone else not to go there. Turning to the rest of the guys seated around the table, he said,

Guys, this is Dave. He’s the guy who’s gonna help us sort things out. Using his napkin as a pointer, he worked his way around the table making introductions.

You know James Karl… who tipped his head and promptly got back to eating.

…and this is Dr. Bob Bob Wheelwright… who rose to shake my hand. Bob is head shed for clinical trials at the hepatitis Research Center over at Baylor You guys are gonna get to know each other real well before this is over…

…and you know Tom Sawyer.

Hi, Tommy, I said, offering my hand. Tom is a rarity among Texans. Smart, tall, handsome, erudite and very funny. But the thing I like most about him is that as rich and successful as he has become, he is one of the most humble, self-effacing people I have ever met. A true gentleman. Soft spoken, polite, an adroit listener Which reminded me to ask him why the hell he was still with Renken.

Howdy, he said. Nice to see you again.

…and this is Doctor Valeriy Plotnikov, our resident Russian medical doctor and weird science expert. He’s the reason you’re here.

I bent over the table to shake his hand. Dobry dyen’, I said. Zdravstvujte.

Pozhalujsta, he said. It’s a pleasure.

Renken sat back down and with his mouth already full of pork ribs, mumbled and pointed towards the buffet lined up against the far wall. I got the idea and walked over to the serving trays. Billy Ray walked behind me.

It’s an all-you-can-eat thing, he said. Take as much as you want but don’t get any of it on you. Which I thought was particularly interesting coming from such an obviously well-fed guy. It was clear he hadn’t let anything go to waste except perhaps his waist. I watched with fascination as he piled stack after stack of ribs on first one plate and then a second. My eyes must have betrayed my astonishment.

What! he said. A man’s gotta eat, right?

Right, I said lamely. Watching him fill his plate with such gusto reminded me of the little guy in a locker room full of large men who, when presented with a gigantic jock strap, realizes he will never make it in the NFL. I picked out a half slab of ribs, put them on one side of my plate, spooned some wonderful smelling baked beans next to them and put my nose down close to the plate so I could savor the aroma.

You ain’t never gonna make it at Bubba’s you keep scrimpin’ like that, he said.

So I dumped another spoonful of baked beans on my plate, wondering what terrible punishment he would inflict on me when he saw I couldn’t eat them all. I carried my plate over to the drink machine, filled a paper cup with ice and poured ice tea into it. When I got back to the table, Renken was mopping the sauce from his face.

So, how was your flight?

You hear about the tornado?

No Hell no What tornado?

The one that ripped up the infield at Hobby about 40 minutes ago.

He looked at me for a second then turned to James Karl.

Karl, you hear anything about a tornado this afternoon?

Billy Ray chimed in as he was sitting down with two full plates, a stack of bread rolls, a huge soft drink and a roll of paper towels. Damned straight, he said. Sucker ripped up the infield one end t’other. Pretty cool.

Jesus! said Renken. Anybody get hurt?

No, I said, but I couldn’t believe it. You know those huge windows in the observation area? The ones that look out over the runways? Those things were pumping in and out like a kettle drum.

No shit, said James Karl.

Like that. So what. No big deal. Happens all the time. Nothing to get worked up about. This is Texas, boy. Stuff like that happens all the time. Eat your lunch.

So I started in. I ate in silence for a while, soaking up the conversation and the smells and the ambience of one of my favorite places on the planet. I love listening to Southerners talk. I can taste the cadence and rhythm of their language. It’s a lot like the way they cook and eat their ribs. Slow, rich, tangy and unctuous. Foreigners must go slightly insane trying to make sense of the way Texans talk. I noticed Valeriy, the Russian, listening politely with his head cocked to one side, as if sifting through the sands of the language on one side of his head would make it more understandable. Welcome to Texas, I thought. Damned straight.

CHAPTER THREE

When I stood up from the table, I felt like the snake that ate the pig. Probably looked like it, too. My belly was so full I almost couldn’t breathe. While I was struggling through the last of my baked beans, Billie Ray emptied two full plates, ate all the bread on the table, guzzled a 32 ounce soft drink and went back for seconds. If I hadn’t been so uncomfortably full I would have given him a bad time about it, but as it was, I thought I was doing pretty well not to give it all back.

We looked like a group of comatose lemmings when we marched out of Bubba’s. We split up into three cars and convoyed back to Renken’s office. I was genuinely surprised to discover that he had moved from the 26th floor of the Texas Commerce Bank Building in downtown Houston to a heavily remodeled tire store in the middle of a little suburb of Houston called Humble. Humble, Texas. Now if that’s not an oxymoron, I never met one.

The garage doors had been replaced by cleverly designed inserts with crowned windows and decorative woodwork. The roof was covered with terra cotta tiles, and the building had been stuccoed to resemble something vaguely Tuscan, with a Southwestern accent. The space inside was also surprising. Just inside the doorway, a tall water fountain cascaded into a pool of Mexican azulejos tiles. Skylights accented the entryway and Ficus trees surrounded the fountain Beyond the fountain, Saltillo tiles paved the way to the interior, where I was pleased to see indirect lighting, no fluorescent fixtures, expensive furnishings, fabric-covered walls, Berber carpets, Persian rugs and an impressive collection of paintings and art work adorning fabric covered walls. All in all, the effect was extremely tranquilizing.

Peacifying, ain’t it? Billy Ray seemed to swell with pride as we stood there surveying the interior landscape.

Totally, I said. Who’s the designer?

I am, he said.

My eyes must have given me away again. You crochet butterflies on jock straps? I asked?

Renken and James Karl were just coming up behind us. I thought Karl was going to hurt himself because he was gasping for breath. Valeriy, the Russian, was smiling because everyone else was laughing, but it was obvious that he didn’t understand the humor. So Tommy proceeded to explain it to him, whereupon he again smiled politely. A joke that has to be explained is never very funny in any language.

Renken led the way into the Board room, which looked as if it had been transplanted wholesale from somebody’s bank. Twenty feet of custom-carved walnut table stretched across an exquisite hand-woven rug. It was surrounded by more than a dozen tufted-leather wingback chairs, and a blown-glass center-piece, heaped with gladiolas. My favorite flowers. Purple and white.

When everyone had been seated, Renken’s secretary, a petite blonde named Candy with skin like the flesh of a MacIntosh apple [don’t they all?], rolled an English tea tray into the room. On top of the cart she had neatly organized tea and coffee cups, some macaroons, and a small dish of antacid tablets. While she was rolling the tray into the room, Billy Ray unleashed a belch that hit the Richter Scale at about 4.3, and the uncontrolled laughter started again. Before we could recover from this event, Karl farted so hard he damned near got lift off. and that brought the rest of the house down.

My god, I thought. It’s Blazing Saddles all over again.

After we caught our breath and Renken opened a window to clear the air, he sat back down and began his presentation. While Candy put his notebook computer on the table and bent over to plug it into the electrical outlet on the floor, Renken activated a projector screen that unrolled out of the ceiling at the far end of the Board room. He began talking while Candy got the computer running and focused the LCD projector on the screen.

Thanks for coming to Texas, he said to me. The guys have been eager to meet you. I think you’re gonna be intrigued by what we’re going to show you. He paused a second while maneuvering the mouse device on the table top so he could advance the next power point slide onto the screen.

So, here’s the deal. About two months ago, Valeriy hosted a team of Russian doctors down in Atlanta while they conducted some clinical trials at CDCC. They brought a magic black box they claimed could cure the Corona Virus, and of course the CDCC guys thought they were full of crap.

I turned to face Valeriy, who was seated across the table. What was your role? I asked.

He hesitated a beat and then dialed in. I speak the language, he said. I was trained in Vladivostok, where I received my MD degree, then I studied physics in Moscow under a scholarship provided by the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Hell a’mighty! said Tommy. You must be about 75 years old by now, aren’t you?

Valeriy simply smiled .Maybe he did not get the joke. Maybe he just had no sense of humor at all. Whatever. When the Russian Academy requested permission to conduct jointly monitored trials at the CDCC, I was asked to translate and moderate the process.

You work for the government? I asked.

As a consultant, he said. I’ve been adjunct medical faculty at the Johns Hopkins Medical Research Center for the past 10 years.

And your specialty?

Nuclear medicine, he said. No facial expression. No vocal inflection. It occurred to me that I’d hate to play poker against this guy. While he continued to answer my innocuous questions, I carefully examined his body language. His hands were laid on the table top, fingers neatly folded together He was relaxed, open, not deliberately masking, which I thought was pretty remarkable. Total kinesthetic control. After working with expatriated Russian scientists for more than 15 years, I have come to consider myself something of an authority on their non-verbal body signals. As a class, Russian scientists are notorious for giving nothing away. Even if their lives depend on disclosing specific kinds of information, if you don’t ask for it, they will not volunteer it. It’s a most peculiar behavioral attribute, and one that I have observed in every Russian scientist or engineer I have ever dealt with. Someone has trained this guy, I thought. His body language is totally neutral all the time. I wondered what he was really doing here.

So, what was the trial? I asked.

Renken moved the next slide onto the screen.

The Russians treated 14 patients with well-documented cases of advanced complications associated with COVID-19. The slide on the screen displayed a well-organized, easily readable matrix representing a database of clinical trial protocols and results. All 14 patients exhibited the effects of long term complications, including things like acute respiratory syndrome, hypoxaemia, dyspnea, fever, chills, fatigue, you name it.

I don’t know anything about COVID-19, I said. So what am I doing here?

Dr. Bob chimed in for the first time. Two months ago, during those trials, out of the 14 original participants, two died as the result of irreversible, long term respiratory complications. They were too far gone by the time we got our hands on them for the treatment to do any good. He paused and helped himself to a sip from his water glass.

I still don’t get it, I said. "What am I