Chapter 7 The German with a Conscience #2
“The one you have been carrying into this room since I walked in. You have prepared it. Say it.”
Hansel Brand looked at him for a moment.
“Fine,” he said. “Full build. Whole genome on every patient, no sampling, the artificial intelligence running the entire.”
“Exome.”
Hansel stopped.
“What?”
“Whole exome and RNA sequencing.” Dieter said it without heat, the way a man corrects a spelling.
“Not whole genome. We have never needed whole genome and you have known that for four years, and you say whole genome in this room because you have said it in eleven other rooms to people who are buying something.”
“It is a shorthand.”
“It is a shorthand that costs eleven million euros a year in expectations we then have to manage.” Dieter waved it away.
“Also there is no artificial intelligence. There is a pipeline. It calls somatic mutations, it types HLA, it predicts binding affinity across the candidate epitope space, it models the complexes, and it scores them. Every step of that has a name and a paper and a person who worked on it for nine years, and when you call it an intelligence you erase all of them and you make it sound like a thing that woke up.”
“Investors do not buy epitope scoring, Dieter.”
“No,” said Dieter Wolffe. “They do not. That is the first honest sentence either of us has said tonight.”
Hansel Brand looked at him for a second, and then laughed, which surprised them both.
“All right,” he said. “All right. Exome. Candidate space. No intelligences.” He sat forward again.
“First indication, at full build, running the pipeline at capacity across the whole candidate space instead of the sampled subset: we can produce personalized therapy for between nine and seven thousand patients in year one, scaling to a hundred and forty thousand by year four. Response rates from the two trials hold in that band. So call it, conservatively, sixty thousand people alive in five years who are otherwise dead.”
“And the other number.”
“Which other number?”
“The one on the bank.”
“Nobody is proposing to kill anybody on the bank, Dieter.”
“Say the number, Hansel.”
Hansel Brand did not blink.
“Forty thousand,” he said. “Relocated, over some period, with compensation that will be inadequate, into housing that will be worse, in a process that will be ugly and will be litigated and which I will not enjoy.” He put one finger on the table.
“Sixty thousand living against forty thousand displaced. I have done that division every night since February and it comes out the same way every single time, and if you have a version of the arithmetic that comes out differently I would genuinely like to see it, because I have looked.”
The rain went on the glass.
“You have made an error,” Dieter said.
“Show me.”
“The error is not in the division. The division is correct.” Dieter put his glasses back on. “The error is that you have used arithmetic.”
Hansel exhaled through his nose.
“Here we go.”
“No. Listen to me, because you are clever and you are wrong and there is a difference, and I have known you for six years and I do not think you have ever once had this explained to you properly.” Dieter put both hands flat on the table.
“You have constructed a trolley problem. It is a very good one. It is the best one I have seen, and it works, and it is the wrong instrument, because a trolley problem is a device for examining an event and this is not an event. It is a policy.”
“That is a distinction without.”
“It is the only distinction there is.” Dieter’s voice did not rise.
It got slower, which anyone who had worked with him would have recognized as far worse.
“If a trolley is coming and I may divert it, I have a terrible choice and I must make it. But nobody handed us this trolley, Hansel. We built the track. We chose the country, we chose the parcel, we chose the schedule, and every one of those choices was made in a room in Heidelberg with coffee, over nineteen months, by people who could have chosen otherwise and who selected this option because it was four years faster.”
“Because four years is sixty thousand people.”
“Because four years is a valuation,” said Dieter Wolffe.
The room was very quiet.
Hansel Brand let the silence run for a while, because he had learned in twelve years of doing this that silence is a tool and that the person who breaks it has usually conceded something.
Dieter did not break it. That was, Hansel thought, the whole trouble with him.
“All right,” Hansel said. “Practical, then. Because I have a board call at six and you have a flight on Thursday and neither of us is going to convince the other of anything about trolleys.”
“I am not signing the deployment authorization.”
“I understand that is your position.”
“It is not a position, Hansel. It is a fact about the next several years.” Dieter folded his hands.
“The signing keys are on my person. They have been on my person since 2021 because you and I agreed, in writing, that no single facility should ever be able to instantiate the models without me. You drafted that clause. You were proud of it.”
“I was.”
“Then you understand that OncoMorph does not run on that campus. Not this year and not in four years. We will build in Bremerhaven with the North Sea for heat rejection and municipal oversight and a works council, and it will take four years longer, and I will be dead, and it will be correct.”
Hansel Brand looked at his old friend for a long moment.
“There it is,” he said.
“There what is.”
“You said it out loud. I have been waiting nine months.” Hansel sat forward. “And I will be dead. You have not started the protocol.”
“That is not relevant.”
“It is the only thing in this room that is relevant.” Hansel’s voice had changed.
It was not colder. It was, for the first time all evening, engaged.
“Dieter, you would be patient zero. You are the exact indication. Your HLA type came back as close to ideal as anything in the trial cohort and you know it because you ran the typing yourself, at night, in December, and did not tell anyone, and I know because I pay for the sequencer.”
Dieter said nothing.
“So why have you not started?”
“Because the compute would run on that campus.”
“Say it plainly.”
“Because I would be alive,” said Dieter Wolffe, “on account of that boy’s channel.”
Hansel Brand sat back in his chair.
“That is the most expensive sentence anybody has ever said to me,” he said.
“Do you understand what you have just told me? You have told me that you would rather die than be improved by an imperfect world. That is not ethics, Dieter. That is hygiene. You are choosing to die in order to feel clean, and you are calling it a principle, and sixty thousand people are going to pay for your bath.”
“Perhaps.”
“Perhaps?”
“Perhaps.” Dieter stood up, unhurried, a tall stooped man in a borrowed shirt.
“You may be right. I have thought about it a great deal at four in the morning and I am not certain, and I do not expect to become certain.” He picked up his glasses case.
“But I notice, Hansel, that you have spent this entire conversation arguing that I should permit this, and not once arguing that this is good. And I have known you for six years, and you are not a man who forgets to make an argument.”
He went to the door.
“I will write to the board tonight,” Dieter said. “I will recommend Bremerhaven and I will disclose the channel and the dredging correspondence, all four of Kirsten’s escalations, which I will be requesting from her in the morning. Good night.”
“Dieter.”
He stopped with his hand on the glass.
“Do not go back to the hotel,” Hansel said.
Dieter Wolffe turned around.
And what he saw on the face of a man he had hired, and argued with, and been to the opera with twice, and trusted with nineteen percent of the only thing he had ever built, was not malice at all.
It was arithmetic.
“Ah,” said Dieter.
Hansel Brand sat alone in the glass room for eleven minutes after the door closed.
He did not do anything in those eleven minutes. He was aware of the watch on his wrist recording a resting rate of fifty-one, which was four beats high for him at that hour, and he was aware of being aware of it, and found the whole apparatus of self-observation contemptible, and stopped.
He was not a monster. He wanted, sitting there, to be extremely clear with himself about that, because he had noticed that the men who did the worst things were the ones who had never once put the question to themselves in plain language.
So: plain language.
If Dieter walked out of that lobby tonight and wrote to the board, one of two things happened.
In the first, the board sided with Dieter, because the board would side with Dieter, because Dieter had founded it and because boards are sentimental about founders and because the dredging correspondence would be attached.
Bremerhaven. Four years. Everything Hansel had built in nineteen months unwound in a single meeting, and six hundred employees, and the Series D, and the debt against the campus, and the sixty thousand.
In the second, the board sided with Hansel, and Dieter resigned publicly with the channel photographs, and DeepKite became a company that had been denounced by its own founder for drowning a slum, and there was no version of that where the therapy reached anybody.
There was no third thing. He had looked for a third thing since February.
That was the actual position, and it had the peculiar quality that Hansel had noticed in every genuinely bad decision of his career: it did not feel like choosing. It felt like arriving.
He thought about the boy on the walkway. He had seen the photograph. He had not asked for it and he had not been shown it before it was taken, and he was aware that this was a distinction he was going to lean on for the rest of his life and that it would not hold.