Bartlett felt a chill run through him. He had once cared for this woman as much as he was capable of caring for anybody, and what had happened was a damned shame. All he had intended was to give her something special, something no man had ever given a woman before.
"Will she know who I am? She still did yesterday."
"It depends," Van de Vliet replied. "Yesterday afternoon she was fully lucid, but then earlier this morning I got the impression she thinks she's in a different place and time. If I had to guess, I'd say she's regressing chronologically. I suppose that's logical, though nothing about this makes any sense."
Bartlett was following him back through the air lock and
into the laboratory. The intensive‑care area below was reachable only by a special elevator at the rear of the lab.
All these once‑cocky people, Bartlett thought, were now scared to death. Van de Vliet and his research team might actually be criminally liable if the right prosecutor got hold of the case. At the very least they'd be facing an ethics fiasco.
But I'm the one who's about to be destroyed. In every sense.
It had all started when Karl Van de Vliet confided in him that there was an adjunct procedure arising out of stem cell research that might, might, offer the possibility of a radical new cosmetic breakthrough. Just a possibility. He called it the Beta, since it was highly experimental. He also wasn't sure it was reproducible. But he had inadvertently discovered it while testing the telomerase enzyme on his own skin over a decade ago.
At the time he was experimenting with topical treatments for pigment abnormalities, but the particular telomerase enzyme he was working with had had the unexpected effect of changing the texture of his skin, softening it and removing wrinkles, a change that subsequently seemed permanent.
The idea had lain dormant while they were preparing for the clinical trials. But then Bartlett's petite amie, the cable‑TV personality Kristen Starr, had had a career crisis that she blamed on aging, and he came up with the idea of having her undergo the skin procedure.