Second Chances(110)

"What do you mean?"

Both Paige and Jason remained quiet, leaning forward a little, anticipating the answer.

"I won't pretend to say I understand a quarter of what Jason does or did. None of us do, even after all this time. Memories are stored chemically, proteins encoded in the brain. Well Jason developed a way to scan, map, record and transfer those memories."

"To what end? I mean how would that help Alzheimer victims?"

"Understanding how something works is one of the first steps to knowing how to fix it. If this car broke down, could you fix it? Could you diagnose what was wrong with it?"

"No."

"Neither could I. But a mechanic could. A mechanic knows how a car engine works. He knows what each part is and what they are supposed to do. Jason was seeing how the brain and memory, specifically, worked. The stuff he developed was incredible. He started small. As with almost all research, it started with mice."

"Mice?"

"Yes, I am sure you've heard of training mice to run a complex maze. Well he would train a mouse to learn a maze, then he used his techniques to transfer that knowledge from that mouse to another mouse that had never seen the maze."

"I remember those experiments," Jason said, a sad smile on his face. Nathan guessed there was much he did not remember.

"Does he have Alz..."

"No. Not real Alzheimer's," Julie insisted. "I will get to that. I wasn't his assistant at the time he was doing those experiments. Most of this I learned later from Jason and from reading his notes. Most of which, I will be honest, I couldn't come close to understanding."

"So what happened?" Paige asked.

"You did. Paige did. The fire. It was clear that there was no way Paige was going to recover from the fire. Jason refused to let her go. During her final days, he scanned her six ways from Sunday. Did every test he could imagine and recorded her memories. At the time I don't know what he thought he might do with them, but he couldn't let go and so he preserved her the only way he knew how."

"I couldn't just let her go," Jason whispered. "I didn't have a real plan. I was completely lost until Bill called."

"Bill?" Paige asked.

"Your godfather, William Dillinger. He was my college roommate. I hadn't talked to him in years. I went on to medical school while he went to work for the government. We kept in touch, but not as often as I would have liked. His work was apparently very hush hush. He adored you though."

Julie looked at Jason, with a smile on her lips. "You are remembering more and more, aren't you?"

He nodded.

"Then the damage may not be permanent."

"What damage?"

Jason ignored Nathan's question. "He adored you. He called the day after Paige died, I could tell he'd been crying. He told me he might be able to help. He said he knew about my research and wanted me to meet with...with..."

"Doctor Rosenthal," Julie said.

"Yes, Rosenthal. He said our research might compliment each others. With Bill's prodding I left my old life behind and joined a government research project and went to work with Rosenthal."

"What did he do?" Nathan asked.

"He was the cloning expert. He'd been working on cloning for quite some time. Wherever you think cloning technology is at, you'd likely be wrong. He'd been working on cloning organs. Think of it, you need a kidney replaced, clone a new one using your own genetic material. No chance of rejection because it is already you."

Julie wiped absently at the tears at the corners of her eyes. Watching Jason recount the story, as painful as it was for him, filled her with hope.

"They can clone single organs?" Paige asked, astonished.

"No, well maybe now they can. I don't know. But that was what Rosenthal was working on back then, but couldn't get it to work. He moved on to cloning entire beings, which worked. Sort of. He could clone a person almost exactly. And we aren't talking embryos, but fully developed beings. I won't even pretend to say I understood any of it. I suppose in a way it was almost the same as what I was doing with copying the brain. Anyway, he could grow an entire person, but they always died."

Before either Nathan or Paige could ask a question, Jason said. "It was the brain factor. He could clone and grow an exact physical duplicate, but the brain is a huge part of what keeps a person alive. Say what you will, but the will to live exists and it exists in a functioning mind. His clones lacked that. He could grow an exact duplicate, but the brain growing in that body didn't possess the knowledge or have the will that a person develops over their lifetime. His clones, they were just shells really, empty husks. For whatever reason, his cloning process was not able to clone the memories of a person. That is what I was able to provide. Kind of."