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“Telomerase? Is that required to treat the manipulated genes?”

“It’s necessary to treat the progeria that occurred in various tissues of her body,” Young-Joon said. “A-GenBio was developing a telomerase-enhancing bone marrow transplantation treatment, and we want to use that technology here. However, this technology is incomplete, so it needs some technique.”

“What should I do?”

“Telomerase will be secreted from the transplanted hematopoietic stem cells and travel to each tissue. We need to administer an inhibitor to keep them from overreacting, but it’s time and location-sensitive.”

“Time and location?”

“We have to time it by looking at the whites of the eye after the transplant to see the dilation of the capillaries. You have to give a little bit of the inhibitor intravenously or inject it into a specific tissue at a specific time.”

“Is that a symptom I can easily recognize?”

“Probably not. The dilation of the blood vessels is very subtle, so it might be hard to notice unless you have a very good eye,” Young-Joon said.

When the bone marrow transplant was actually completed, Albert had no idea what had changed. While the patient’s care was entirely in the hands of the doctor, it was fundamental to follow the developer’s manual for a newly developed treatment. It was like a programmer reading the hardware engineer’s manual when assembling a computer.

“You need to administer it now…” Young-Joon said.

“R-Really?”

Albert nervously kept watching Isaiah’s eyes.

Young-Joon felt a little guilty. If only he had more time, he could have come up with a reasonable way to help Albert understand, but there was nothing he could do. Given Isaiah’s extremely unstable condition and limited time, he had to do what was best for his patient.

“To be honest, I can’t really tell. Should I call the ophthalmology department for help?” Albert asked, sounding worried.

“No.”

Harris quickly stopped him.

“Albert, I can’t put people in Isaiah’s care unless they are doctors I can trust. I’m not even comfortable being in this room. I came because I was told that the bone marrow transplant itself is simple since it’s just an intravenous infusion, but…”

“But I don’t see the capillary dilation in the whites like Doctor Ryu says.”

“...”

“I know I shouldn’t say this, but it’s a procedure I’m not trained in, and I think Doctor Ryu, the developer, would know better than me. Do you think you could do it, Doctor Ryu? If we have the patient’s consent…”

Albert ended up backing down in fear. He looked at Isaiah with pleading eyes.

“I don’t care if Ryu Young-Joon does it,” she said.

But Young-Joon decided to look out for Albert’s feelings as well.

“Let’s do this.”

Young-Joon approached the bed and sat down beside it.

“I’ll instruct you from the side. When I tap my finger on the back of your hand, you inject the inhibitor, Doctor Albert. I’ll let you know when you need to inject each tissue separately.”

“O-Okay.”

Isaiah looked at Young-Joon and sighed.

“Let’s get started.”

The two started administering the inhibitor. They attached a hose to a vein, then hooked up a vial of fluid.

Rosaline stood by Young-Joon’s side, watching all ten trillion cells in Isaiah’s entire body in Synchronization Mode. Then, she briefly took over control of his right hand.

The telomerase inhibitor was injected into the vein, by the second and by the milliliter. His hand, which was tapping on the back of Albert’s hand, moved as if he was sending Morse code. Sometimes, the inhibitor was injected at a steady rate for two seconds, then stopped. He alternated between injecting and resting in 0.5 second intervals, and sometimes he didn’t inject it at all for several seconds.

Beads of sweat formed on Albert’s forehead. Even as he injected it, he wondered if he was doing the right thing. Was this really going to cure Isaiah Franklin?

*

“The Nicaraguan government charged one hundred thousand dollars to correct one gene in one patient,” a CNN reporter said while reporting on the Nicaraguan story. “This is a very high price, and our reporter Jonathan took a look at how this was reached.”

The broadcast cut to a description of A-GenBio’s procedure for treating genetic conditions.

The process began with the collection of somatic cells from the patient. Single-cell RNA sequencing was used to examine the entirety of the expressed DNA, and from there, mutations were identified. The mutations were plugged into a huge database created from A-GenBio’s genome project, and then correlated with the patient’s condition.

Normally, having a gene mutation didn’t cause problems in every tissue in the body. However, if it was a gene that was important for alcohol detoxification, it was going to cause problems in the liver.

The idea was to de-differentiate the patient’s somatic cells, correct the genes, then culture it into an artificial liver for organ transplantation.

“The labor and time involved in this process, as well as the cost of the reagents, are very expensive,” said Jonathan, the reporter. “However, this is the better option of treatment. If the corrected gene has the potential to trigger an immune response, hematopoietic stem cells would have to be extracted from the patient’s bone marrow and corrected as well.”

Gene therapies were quite expensive due to the inherent difficulty of the procedure.

Once upon a time, a pharmaceutical company called Spark developed and released the first gene therapy called Luxterna. It worked by using a virus to inject an artificially synthesized copy of the RPE65 gene into the retinal cells of patients who have a genetic condition in which the gene was nonfunctional. This simple procedure cost one million dollars per eye.

“A-GenBio’s treatment, which involves making stem cells and artificial organs by correcting the gene, is very inexpensive in comparison. But the problem is the number of patients and mutations,” said the reporter.

“There are a total of two thousand patients in Nicaragua who carry disease-causing gene variants, eight hundred of whom have a couple naturally occurring mutations. However, the other one thousand two hundred individuals are named as victims in the lawsuit filed by the Nicaraguan government.”

The reporter’s voice quivered slightly.

“They have hundreds to thousands of genetic mutations on average, meaning that treating all the patients will be astronomically expensive. The amount of damages claimed by the Nicaraguan government is…”

The reporter gulped.

“One hundred thirty-seven billion dollars. There have been a lot of estimates made by the media and private financial institutions, but this amount was verified with the International Court of Justice by our reporter in the Netherlands,” he said.

This amount was more than ten percent of Apple’s market capitalization and 2.5 percent of the United States’ annual budget. It was equal to the total assets of Bill Gates, the most well-known millionaire. Now, it was a similar amount of money as the first quarter revenue of A-GenBio, the largest company in the world.

This shocking amount of money sent shockwaves across the United States. The street marches and rallies that had been popping up here and there began to grow more organized.

The problem was that their anger had not found their way yet.

*

“Campbell should look out for the American people, not the Nicaraguans!”

“Hold the Heagan administration accountable!”

Most of the anger was directed at the U.S. government for accepting the case, or at the Heagan administration for creating the problem. But Lofair’s name began to pop up occasionally.

“The lab was funded by the Chenover Bank, which Tate Lofair is the chairman of, and Alphonse Lofair was the director of the lab.”

These stories began circulating on university campuses. Students, who were age sensitive to social justice, became frequently interested in investigating the Chenover Bank. Moreover, secrets that were only known in the industry began to trickle out from those in the financial industry.

—The Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States, is owned by Lofair. The U.S. government does not hold even a one percent state in the Federal Reserve.

This crucial truth, which was unknown to the majority of Americans, created a shocking logic as the situation unfolded.

“If the Nicaraguan government wins, the U.S. government will have to pay a staggering one hundred thirty-seven billion dollars in reparations. Since there is no way the government has that amount of money left in its budget, it has two options: one is to ignore the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice again, and the other is to print dollars at the Federal Reserve. Thank God our dollar is the reserve currency.”

Professors were having the same heated debate in the classrooms of many of America’s most prestigious universities.

“The problem is that the U.S. government doesn’t have the right to print money. That money is issued by the Federal Reserve and borrowed by the U.S. government,” the professors said.

“This becomes the government’s debt, and it has to be paid off with taxpayer money. And what happens to the exorbitant interest on that one hundred thirty-seven billion dollar debt? It becomes the Federal Reserve’s earnings, and it goes into the pockets of Lofair, the owner of the Federal Reserve. He is the key person responsible for this, and he’s not paying a penalty. He’s actually making money.”

“Even the money that Chenover Bank spent to set up the lab, one hundred million dollars at the time, was a lot of money. If you trace it back to where it came from, it’s probably the Federal Reserve. I don’t think Chenover Bank could have gotten that kind of money and used it on its own at the time.”

“A private bank used the U.S. central bank as it pleased and made a huge mess. Now, they’re shifting all the responsibility onto American citizens and then making money from it? How is this structure normal?”

“Isn’t this outrageous? I walked into class today, and all of my students went out to protest. Frankly, this is against the market order, and it’s beyond what a private bank should be able to do. It’s a clear overreach.”

“From a capitalist point of view, Chenover invested in Groom Lake laboratory and failed. But did they lose money? No, because they’re about to make one hundred thirty-seven billion dollars in earnings. How does this make any sense in a capitalist country?”

Citizens accustomed to marketism, democracy, and liberalism were outraged by state affairs manipulation. They could forgive Heagan selling arms to Iran and supporting the Contras rebels as a patriotic mistake during the Cold War, but destroying market order and privately monopolizing profits while controlling the Federal Reserve, the absolute financial power, was another story entirely.

Talk about the Lofair family began to increase by the day.

As that was happening, Alphonse Lofair appeared at the International Court of Justice. Young-Joon wasn’t here yet, but Alphonse received an email from Tate along the way.

[The President took off for the Netherlands on his jet. All of the President’s entourage was on it, including Harris and Ryu Young-Joon. There was also a young woman with her face covered.”

‘Isaiah Franklin.’