Sax looked at his hands until the doctor left him alone. He sat in the room until everyone else was gone. Then he got up and stood at Ann’s side, looking down at her masked face. Nothing to be done. He held her hand; it did not clench. He held her head, as he had been told Nirgal had held his when he was unconscious. It felt like a useless gesture.

He went to the AI screen, and called up the diagnostic program. He called up Ann’s medical data, and ran back the heart monitor data from the incident in the lock. A small arrhythmia, yes; rapid, irregular pattern. He fed the data into the diagnostic program, and looked up heart arrhythmia on his own. There were a lot of aberrant cardiac rhythm patterns, but it appeared that Ann might have a genetic predisposition to suffer from a disorder called long QT syndrome, named for a characteristic abnormal long wave in the electrocardiogram. He called up Ann’s genome, and instructed the AI to run a search in the relevant regions of chromosomes 3, 7, and 11. In the gene called HERG, in her chromosome 7, the AI identified a small mutation: one reversal of adenine-thymine and guanine-cytosine. Small, but HERG contained instructions for the assembly of a protein that served as a potassium ion channel in the surface of heart cells, and these ion channels acted as a switch to turn off contracting heart cells. Without this brake the heart could go arrhythmic, and beat too fast to pump blood effectively.

Ann also appeared to have another problem, with a gene on chromosome 3 called SCN5A. This gene encoded a different regulatory protein, which provided a sodium ion channel on the surface of heart cells. This channel functioned as an accelerator, and mutations here could add to the problem of rapid heartbeat. Ann had a CG bit missing.

These genetic conditions were rare, but for the diagnostic AI that was not an issue. It contained a symptomology for all known problems, no matter how rare. It seemed to consider Ann’s case to be fairly straightforward, and it listed the treatments that existed to counteract the problems presented by the condition. There were a lot of them.

One of the treatments suggested was the recoding of the problem genes, in the course of the standard gerontological treatments. Persistent gene recodings through several longevity treatments should erase the cause of the problem right at the root, or rather in the seed. It seemed strange that this hadn’t been done already, but then Sax saw that the recommendation was only about two decades old; it came from a period after the last time Ann had taken the treatments.

For a long time Sax sat there, staring at the screen. Much later he got up. He began to inspect the Reds’ medical clinic, instrument by instrument, room by room. The nursing attendants let him wander; they thought he was distraught.