Piracetam

Chapter 1
The Blue-Collar Man and the Scientist

The sting of Kaylee’s last words to him before she left raised welts on his memories. "Good luck finding another woman," she’d snarled. "You’re so short their dogs will piss on you." He brushed a stray tear from his eyes, immersed in the nostalgia of a woman he’d loved for ten years. She was right, of course. Women don’t go for short men, and short didn’t begin to describe his stature.

Josh Witz had suffered an accident at the age of 16, after a bout with a bad batch of acne medication that had closed his bone plates and stunted his growth. A late bloomer anyway, the accident had left him five feet, two inches tall. His body seemed to have made up for his short stature in other ways; Josh was one of the hairiest men alive. Left unchecked, his beard would grow up to just below his eye socket, would join up with an incredibly thick mat of chest hair at the neckline, and would circle the neck to join his burgeoning back hair, kept trimmed only through the use of an electric razor with an extensible, bendable pole. He kept a razor in the car, because if he had to meet someone after lunch, he’d need to trim again in order to be presentable. His leg hair was so bushy it pushed his pants legs out, and on the rare day when Josh wore shorts (because they made him look shorter), you couldn’t see any skin on his legs save the very tip of his kneecap.

To make it worse, the construction job he’d been on had had its funding pulled, and Josh had been laid off. "I’m sorry," said Mike, the foreman, "but you have a hard time keeping up. You’re not tall enough to put up drywall, not strong enough to carry lumber, and not detailed enough to do finish work. I gotta make cuts somewhere. I can’t keep everybody on the bench."

Fuming, Josh wandered down the block toward downtown, looking at the ground and stomping every leaf he could with his dirty work boots. He was so immersed in his mood that he didn’t even notice the suited man until he’d bumped into him. Josh sat down hard on the pavement and looked up angrily.

"Sorry, Josh," said the man, extending a hand down to help him up.

"How do you know my name?" asked Josh.

"It’s on your work blues," said the man. "My name is John Cagliari. I’m sorry I ran into you. You look like you’re having a bad day."

"I am," said Josh. "My wife left me last week, I just got laid off, and I don’t know how I’m going to make rent. Nobody’s gonna hire a fat five-foot-two contractor. Look at me!"

Cagliari raised his eyebrow. "You look like a strong enough guy to me," he said. "Sure, you’re not gonna play center for the Bulls, but you’re not abnormally small, at least medically speaking."

"Medically speaking? What is that supposed to mean?"

Cagliari laughed. "I’m a doctor," he said. "Medically short stature means you’re more than two standard deviations below the norm. Given that you look to be about forty, you’d have to be five feet tall to be actually short from a medical point of view."

"That’s great," sneered Josh, "I’ll be sure to tell the next guy who tells me he’s passed me over for some six-foot-four twenty-year-old that some random doctor in the street says I’m not actually short."

"Listen, I obviously made a bad day worse. I’m going to the Starbucks on the corner. Can I offer you a cup of coffee?"

"Sure, what the hell. I don’t have anything else to do anyway."

They entered the Starbucks. Cagliari ordered a cappuccino, Josh ordered a large Frappuccino, and they sat down.

"So what kind of doctor are you, anyway?"

"I’m actually a geneticist. I work in research."

They chatted for a while, and then Dr. Cagliari excused himself.

"Look, Josh," he said, "I’m here every day. Usually not for this long, but if you want to chat, just find me here."

Over the next month, Josh, who was struggling to find work, found himself sitting at the table in the window of the Starbucks more and more. He didn’t know why John Cagliari had decided to be friends with him—he was a rich doctor, and Josh was a poor blue-collar worker—but he was grateful for the distraction.

"Josh, I need to say something to you," said Dr. Cagliari one day.

"What?"

"You are wasting your life."

"No shit? I’m a short, fat, hairy, divorced, unemployed gorilla of a man who lives at home with his mommy and daddy."

"It’s not that. You don’t have the confidence to know that you can overcome people’s first impressions. You’re allowing being short to run your life for you."

"Well, that’s great. What else am I supposed to do about it?"

"Well, that’s what I want to talk to you about. You’ve never asked me what kind of research I do."

"I’m not really a science kinda guy, you know? I figured it was vaccines or medicines or something."

"No. I am a geneticist at the Department of Defense. And for the last ten years, I have been working in concert with two other doctors in other countries on a drug that reverses aging. It’s been known about on a cellular level for a long time—we proved that piracetam reversed cellular aging in mice when Reagan was president—but the research has continued for thirty years. See, when you take piracetam, it reverses the aging just in the cells it targets. No matter how much you give someone, it will only revert the cells most in need of it."

"So you can make cells younger?"

"Yes. But the latest research, which I can’t tell you about in detail, includes a chemical that ’tricks’ the piracetam and makes it think every cell in the body needs its help. Combine that with a huge increase in the dosage and a couple of other substances to help the drugs along, and you have the world’s first actual anti-aging drug. People actually get younger."

"So… you’ve invented the fountain of youth?"

"I guess you could say that. Different people respond differently to it. Everyone gets younger, but the dosage has been weak enough that it doesn’t do anything except really fancy cellular renewal. Bald guys grow their hair back, stuff like that. Most men lose weight, because it’s easier when you’re younger."

"Why isn’t this front-page news all over the world, then? I mean, it’s not that I don’t believe you, but you gotta admit it’s a little farfetched."

"Because the research is tightly controlled. It isn’t exactly classified, because we’re not exactly part of the DoD. We’ve experimented on hundreds of prisoners over the last ten years to see if the increased dosage was safe. Every single one of them resumed their life as though nothing had changed. Some noticed a change in hair color; another one noticed his skin was a slightly different shade. One old man went through what looked like a second puberty, because his hormone levels had been depressed in old age."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because we need to test this at a higher dosage. Right now the best estimate we have is that the current dosage reduces people 10 to 12 years. We gave the old man three doses in a row, but each one was the same strength. He ended up going from about 65 to about 30. We want to try the double dosage. We need to send someone back far enough to see if they will actually get shorter. We’ve tested it in animals and it works."

"Why me?"

"Because you had that accident when you were 16. A double dose would take you to 15 or so. Imagine if you didn’t have that accident. You’d be five-ten as an adult."

"I wish I could be taller," said Josh. "I’d love to know what it feels like to dunk a basketball."

"You know, we can do that. Growth hormone is well understood. If you wanted to do this, we could give you growth hormone and it would probably double your growth spurt. You could be 6’3" if you wanted to. And, of course, the government would pay your expenses for the rest of your life."

"This can’t be real."

"It is. I assure you it is. I’m happy to prove it to you if you want. Take this paperwork. Read it. But please don’t spread this around. Come back tomorrow with all your questions."

Dazed, Josh went home and thought about what Dr. Cagliari had said. It went against the laws of physics, didn’t it? While Josh wasn’t dumb, this was high-flown stuff. He tapped on his parents’ bedroom door, went in, and explained it to his mother and father. The three of them spent almost all night researching it and discussing it with increasing excitement.