Miracle Machine

Emily’s foot tapped the floor as the elevator climbed the long ascent to the eleventh floor. She glanced at her watch and memorized the time – 8:10 am. This would be the day she would make history and her lips were sealed. Five other humans knew about the project that lived in room 301. Lives would be changed forever by the technology she and her colleagues had labored over for the past ten years. Emily let out a sigh and closed her eyes.

Her memories echoed within the halls of her mind as she journeyed back in time. The summer of 1996 flashed across her mind. The summer she said goodbye to the smaller version of herself…her sister, Hannah. Emily felt a lump form in her throat every time she recalled their last moments together. The beach house where they spent their last vacation as a complete family had been their favorite spot since they were babies. The well-worn path to the shore had witnessed two happy girls that day in June. Emily and Hannah strode past the tall grasses, allowing their hands to ride the breezy waves of the feather reeds. Emily looked behind her to make sure she could see her sister and noticed a faraway look in Hannah’s eyes. 

As they settled their small frames on to the tropical print beach towels, Emily asked the question which weighed heavy in the air. “Hannah, what’s wrong?” Tears formed at the corners of her little sister’s eyes, begging to be set free. Hannah hugged her knees to her chest and rocked side to side as if to comfort herself in this moment of honesty. “I don’t want to leave you,” she whispered. “I don’t want to leave any of you.” Emily’s tears now joined her little sister’s misty lament. She moved to sit beside her grieving sibling, feeling the weight of their combined anguish. 

The year had been brutal on her sister. The surgery, chemo and radiation had all but obliterated Hannah’s already slight frame. There was nothing left to take from her except her life, and the cancer promised to do just that. They both knew the end was coming for her. There was nothing they could do to stop the inevitable descent toward death. 

It was the death of so many things for Emily. The beauty of the present. The future they had hoped for. They had been inseparable from the moment they met in their mom’s hospital room the beautiful day Hannah was born. A desire to protect her baby sister rose up within Emily and she vowed to always do just that. Once Hannah became ill, Emily’s broken heart was set on fire with the desire to shield her from the likelihood of pain. It became something of an obsession as Emily determined to make good out of a bad situation.

Emily felt her mind jerked back to the present as her watch buzzed. A message from Clark. “Dinner tonight?” Her eyes glanced upward as if searching for help from beyond. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to go enjoy an evening with the man who had been pursuing her for the last year. Today felt weighty and different and she wanted to be alone. Emily needed space as her life’s greatest accomplishment would become a reality. She couldn’t bear the thought of spending this day with anyone or anything other than the purpose she had been handed.

The past called for reminiscence as she continued to rise to the floor where she would turn the key on a new tomorrow. Her mind raced through the decades of her life where she had just emerged from. College, graduate school, medical, scientific and technological boards and finally her latest obsession…a kind of miracle machine. If Hannah’s death had done anything, it had fueled a kind of urgency within Emily to change the world for lives touched by cancer. Her whole career had been filled with steps toward meaningful discovery. She had done the unthinkable. Her creation was unlike anything before…a way to target and treat cancer cells without harming any other cells in the body. The technology was groundbreaking and promised to change the future of cancer treatment. Her two partners and their two test subjects were the only witnesses to her immense sense of pride. This was the future of medicine.

Emily thought back to the people who had discounted her ideas for such ground-breaking technology. Her long hours at the lab had proved them wrong. “This will work,” she muttered under her breath. “It has to work.” If her years in the scientific and medical fields had taught her anything, it was to hope for a breakthrough. A breakthrough is what Hannah needed all those years before. The miracle Emily couldn’t procure for her dying sister became the revelation saved for a new generation. It took pain and suffering to birth new possibilities. 

The first eight years working on the miracle machine had proved disappointing. Trial after trial produced nothing but defeat. And then, one day a momentous discovery…Emily discovered the exact weapon she needed to target cancerous cells and stop them in their tracks, instantaneously. Her mind had raced with the possibilities of what this could mean for the future and for patients just like Hannah. She wept as she drove home that day, determined to perfect this technology and save lives. Oh, how she wanted to save people from the pain she had endured. 

Emily jolted back to her current time as she answered the text from Clark. “Rain check?” she spoke into her watch. Her mind was on the last parts of the checklist she would need to go over today. With a great invention comes great responsibility, and Emily felt that weight keenly. She took a deep breath; the deepest one she had taken in all morning. She straightened her shoulders, closed her eyes and waited for the elevator door to open. 

As the two sides of the door parted, Emily walked forward, turned to the right and paused before the door which guarded so much promise. Emily placed her key in the door handle, gave it a turn and whispered to Hannah as much as to the air, “This is for you, my sweet sister. This is for you.”