Botanicaust

protectiveness.
    A flush crept up his neck and he grinned, turning his face half to the side.
    The woman raised her brows, shrugged, and returned to the other room.
    “ Come sit with me, Michael. ” Tula pointed to the chair next to her.
    He remained rooted in place, hands on the cart.
    “ If you want to. ” She was accustomed to the shyness of cannibal prisoners. She had to approach them from the side, let them think the decision to communicate was theirs.
    Michael let go of the cart and wiped his enormous palms on his thighs, but remained standing.
    “ You are supposed to be working, is that it? ”
    He nodded and toyed with the keycard around his neck.
    “ Well, I ’ m glad you could stop by and say hello. I don ’ t want you to get in trouble. Maybe I could sit with you at the meal later? ”
    His brows rose and he snuck a look at her. The long planes of his face perpetually drooped, but she saw gratefulness. He nodded.
    Dr. Kaneka appeared at the doorway, and Michael grabbed the cart. The doctor gave him a hard glance and turned his attention to Tula. “ I hope he was not bothering you? ”
    “ Not at all. I asked him to sit down, but he said he had work to do. ” Tula waved her fingers goodbye at Michael but he was so focused on the doors, he didn ’ t see her.
    Dr. Kaneka pulled out a chair but did not sit. “ You and the man you arrived with are close. ”
    Tula flushed, knowing he meant last night. “ I know it ’ s unethical to be intimate with patients, but he ceased being my patient the moment Vitus sentenced him to death. ” She had no regrets about being with Levi.
    “ How well can you communicate? ” He held a gamma pad in one hand, his other resting on the back of the empty chair.
    “ Rudimentary word usage and a lot of body language. Why? ”
    “ I have given some thought to your request for asylum. ”
    Her heart lurched as she realized this was an interview, not a social visit. She had to make herself look valuable. “ I am quite good at interfacing with cannibals, and in Confinement, I ’ m the only one Levi would talk to. And that was after a lot — ”
    He waved the gamma pad to halt her. “ We have no need for a Conversion Psychiatrist, but we may have another use for you. ” Placing the pad on the table in front of her, he stood behind her shoulder. The photoelectric image of a brain glowed purple across the screen, tiny data points printed below. He pointed to several white spots at the center of the image deep inside the two lobes of the brain. “ See these lesions in the hippocampus? Telomerase cannot pass through the blood brain barrier to heal aging cells. Our brains are vulnerable to old-age diseases like Parkinson ’ s, Alzheimer ’ s, and other dementia. For over four hundred years our bodies have not aged. But our brains are another matter. Our time is running out. ”
    “ That ’ s — ” She didn ’ t know what to say. Horrible was not a strong enough word. “ How can I help? ”
    Kaneka pulled out the chair next to her and sat with his hands folded on the table. “ When we encountered the Haldanians several decades ago, we discovered telomerase aided the uptake of chloroplasts during cell conversion. And during telomerase repair, your chloroplasts release a specific steroid which can penetrate the blood brain barrier and dissolve abnormal protein deposits and aging cells from brain tissue without harming surrounding cells. ” He touched the screen to zoom in on some white spots within the center of the image. “ These lesions are prior to injection of Haldanian steroids. ” He changed to another image. “ Here is the same brain after one week of treatment. ”
    Shocked, Tula stared at the screen. Almost all the lesions had disappeared. Frowning, she asked, “ Why don ’ t you ask the Protectorate to convert you? ”
    “ No! ” Dr. Kaneka reeled backward in his chair, eyes wide and lip curled in revulsion. “ No, conversion is not an option for us. Just as immortality is not an option for the converted. Our initial experiments to combine the technologies proved disastrous. Telomerase alone does not allow one to be immortal. The sustained amounts required for immortality cause mutations and cancer. We use a panel of enzymes and immunoreactives to control and remove mutated and apoptotic cells. The immunoreactives do not take kindly to the insertion of chloroplasts into the cell genome. ” Dr. Kaneka winked and laughed, as if he ’ d just