Twisted Fate Synopsis Linda Boroff lindaboroff2927@gmail.com Set in the late 2020s, the novel follows the struggles of young Silicon Valley worker Zoe Ohrbach and her boyfriend Brian Snyder, amidst an outbreak of a new prion (“Mad Cow”) disease that gradually turns people into psychopaths. Prions, discovered in 1982, are not alive like bacteria or viruses, but are instead twisted bits of protein in the brain. They cause “Mad Cow” or in humans the horrifying variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD). Prion diseases are incurable and have extremely long incubation periods—even decades. There is no vaccine. “Prions are like an enemy within, the alien in some B-movie that transforms people to an evil version,” says prion biologist Edward Hoover of Colorado State University. “The immune system doesn’t see them coming.” This particular prion has been spreading unsuspected for decades.