TGoaW-122

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==Chapter 122 - The Glow of a Worm inside a Child's Eye==
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The only reason...
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...they couldn't hear her screams, was that the lab was wrapped in vacuum, and the microphones were off.
The treatments were painful, because pain-relief would hinder the growth of new nerve tissues, and there's really now way to apply a local when the nerves you're regrowing are in the brain and central nervous system itself.
The lab had to be isolated, because the key word in 'retroviral Therapy' is viral, as in Virus.
Tiny, nanoscopic machines made of engineered proteins, trace silica, and mad science were rebuilding what the Syndrome had already begun eroding.
They were pre-coded, reaching their population limit, a controlled infection, one that will die by the end of this session.
Dr. Sharlene (Labname Hofmann) of Clan Goliath Scorpion studied the readouts from her patient with detached fascination, and occasionally she would choose an action, and neurochemicals would be introduced or witheld to keep the conscious brain of her patient from suffering a catastrophic break.
This of course, won't do anything for the patient's actual psychological condition after treatment-the traumas were going to be a problem in the aftermath, but for now, her patient would have, if the procedure is successful, no physical cause for the inevitable disorders likely to come from it.
the patient's brain chemistry would be kept in balance-within ten percent of human norms for a seventeen year old female of terran-asian extraction.
The method is crude and dangerous. Even by Clan Standards, the method is in fact, forbidden in the Homeworlds due to the dangers posed by tailoring viruses as tools for surgery.
It's too easy to lose control, too risky for the Homeworlds...and perfect for use here-at least, in Hofmann's opinion.
While one set of tailored retroviruses forced the damage to correct, another, more subtle version was undoing the mistakes of the Hanoi Human Genome Improvement Project for the Advancement of Progressive Medicine that created Cholmann's Syndrome in the first place while trying to cure Huntingtons and Epilepsy and any number of progressive, degenerative syndromes that have plagued man in small percentages since Australopithecines left the savannas of Africa.
The second series would continue to work in the quiet hours, while the patient was sustained in oxygenated sterile fluid in a state of near comatose unconsciousness, untangling the damaged DNA and setting it 'to rights' so that cell replication wouldn't result in an immune system that destroyed brain tissue anymore.
Her patient's algometry had passed the traditional critical zone that imposes shock several times without getting the correct reaction, each time, the treatment had to be altered-the goal was that Elizabeth would go into shock-a sign that the process was working, since she had already lost the ability to experience that most basic internal defense of the psyche before her first day in the lab.
"How is it going?"
"We are on schedule, Duke Patrick." she didn't look up, "Your sister is absorbing the physical treatments relatively well. I can not say what impact will be there for her emotional or psychological health, but physically we seem to be beating the syndrome back and cutting it off at the source."
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