“Another obstacle.” Dr. Kriss sighed. “The short answer is, as long as we can keep him. I prefer fifty days, to monitor his health and collect data, but I’ll settle for three weeks. A lot of our subjects, as you can imagine, wrestle with their mental health or substance abuse, and it isn’t easy to keep them in bed. I do everything I can to persuade them to stay, though, because once they’re out those doors, there’s a good chance we’ll never see them again. It’s extremely difficult to perform follow-up testing. These aren’t citizens in a conventional sense of the word.”

The trial was up and running in three cities, she told me: Arcade, Retreat, and somewhere in California called Mimico. It amazed me to think that, coast to coast, there were people walking around with plastic blood in their veins.

Dr. Kriss had arranged a series of ride-alongs with Common Dreams for me. It was her hope I’d be able to observe a subject’s progress after intake.

“As long as you have a strong stomach,” she added.

“I think I can handle it.”

I told her that the experts I’d talked to thought this was impossible, that we were still years away from the breakthrough she was claiming. Dr. Kriss let me finish, then rooted around beneath her desk and produced a small plastic sack of white liquid. She tossed it on the desk and it bounced into my lap. The bag was cool. The liquid sloshed from side to side, like cream.

“Forget what people say, Whitney. You’re going to see it for yourself.”

5.

As I followed her around Ocean General that day, everyone seemed in awe of Dr. Kriss, an awe tinged with fear. She almost never made eye contact, and when she did, there was a sense that she avoided it for your sake, her gaze opening onto an intelligence that saw through everything, especially you.

Personally, I was prepared for it. My mom also had a confidence that came across as intolerance. I remember sitting in on one of her organic chemistry classes at USC. In front of the students, all the impatience and superiority that I dreaded at home were amplified to cartoonish proportions. There was no generosity toward the silly question, every sentence was punctuated with a crisp, rhetorical, “Yes?” Then on to the next slide. She wasn’t very popular. I once found a stack of her student evaluations and was startled by the anger, the hurt: rude, unfair, dangerous.