Chapter 5: Opening the Filing Cabinet

It’s the year 2106. Casey has been working in the lab for several months and preparing to extract her grandfather's files and embed them within her memory. She hopes these files will help her better understand Martha's journals and uncover the reason behind her father's secrecy about his work. Despite being an employee at the lab, Casey is puzzled by her inability to access her father's lab and his reluctance to speak about his work.

Casey wasn't sure what to expect from the files, but she hoped to find a logical starting point. This had been part of the challenge with Martha's journals; they had originally been bound and in some sequence, but time and frequent handling had taken their toll. Headings and dates had faded, the binding had deteriorated, and the chest where the pages were stored had been moved several times, disrupting any sequence. Additionally, they contained terms Casey was unfamiliar with.

Once Casey starts extracting information from the filing cabinet in her brain, it becomes part of her memories. Her father had often warned her about the necessity of being very careful when extracting information from the Norabspectra process. If the information is too foreign, complicated, or overwhelming for the user, it could lead to confusion in the mind; therefore, the process has to be done in stages. Stage one involved opening each filing cabinet drawer and seeing if any files were labelled. If so, she needed to assess whether there was any rationale behind the labelling that could be logically interpreted when extracting the information.

Casey's schedule included four days in the lab and four days in the community, so she decided to wait until she had four full days in the community before starting stage one of file extraction. To her surprise, the files were clearly labelled with a number and title. Although she wasn't sure if the number related to the sequence, she felt it best to interpret it that way. However, she couldn't resist jumping to the file labelled 7. Moira Hemingway, her mother.

The writing in the journals within this file seemed to waver between optimism and dread. In the early pages, there was joy that Percy could partner with his wife, Eliza, whose name Casey hadn't heard spoken before, to continue working on his anti-aging formulas. He had met Eliza when she joined the Institute of National Ageing as the head of Nixon's Lab, a position Percy interviewed and appointed her in 2000.

From the journals, it appeared that before Eliza joined the Institute, she and Percy had focused heavily on their careers and had never been married. Though it was unclear how this came about, they eventually married, and Eliza moved to Martha's lab as Percy's right-hand person. The journal entries in this section lack many personal details. Still, it was evident that both Eliza and Percy were their own test subjects for the anti-aging formulas that Percy had been perfecting.

Percy had not dedicated much time to Martha's conception research; his focus had been on anti-aging. However, as Eliza grew her understanding of Martha's work, she became more interested in the science of conception and wanted to continue to build upon it. Without Percy's anti-aging formula, which kept them both youthful, she would never have even considered having a child herself at 69, but people who had received Percy's anti-aging treatment were now living well into their 100s. The journal indicated that Percy was against the idea from the start; there were notes about his mother, Martha, not perfecting the process and dying in childbirth and that there had been no real advancement since then. Casey could tell from the writing that he was worried about Eliza.

Eventually, Eliza seemed to persuade Percy, as the next journal entries described how they spent a few hours each day focused on developing the conception formula and conducting tests. Around this time, Trump Snr introduced a law stating that it was no longer legal to turn off someone's life support; those individuals had to be transferred to the National Institute for Anti-Aging and used as test subjects. This change allowed Eliza and Percy to experiment on live females, something his mother had never had the chance to do. They achieved two successful pregnancies that reached full term, with both babies being delivered by caesarean section and allocated to families who wanted to adopt. It seemed that only one of the mothers survived, and that was only for six weeks after giving birth. Through these experiments, they identified that the deaths were due to a chemical being released into the body, and Eliza was confident that she had an antidote that, if administered just before delivery, would save the mother.

This success motivated Eliza to proceed with her own pregnancy. Although they disagreed initially, Eliza ultimately won; she became pregnant in early 2040. The journals meticulously documented every detail of the pregnancy. Eliza was weighed and scanned daily, and her blood was regularly tested. They could see the chemical buildup in her body and continued to refine what they believed to be the antidote so it would be available as soon as Eliza was ready to deliver.

However, it appeared that the antidote did not work, as the next entry in the journal is from 2041, when the baby, Moira (Casey's mum), was a year old. Percy describes Moira as an inquisitive baby who was with him constantly; he did not allow anyone other than himself to care for her.

Casey began to imagine scenes of her mother and Percy in the lab together, similar to what Martha had written about her and her father in her journal. The journals captured a very similar trajectory until Percy recruited Jonathon Price, Casey's father. Percy lectured at the local university where Moira and Jonathon were students. He had singled Jonathon out early in his studies as special and often invited him to the lab to partner with Moira on specific initiatives. Moira enjoyed having someone else in the lab to talk to besides her father, and eventually, she and Jonathon became very close.

During those four days, Casey read these journal entries about her mother and father over and over; she couldn't move on to other files because she kept replaying all she had learned.