Sammy came out of the lab, shoulders hunched over.
“Failed again?” I asked over my shoulder from inside the clean washroom, as I ran the nanosoap over my fingers, with painstaking precision.
We’d taken to dying our hands green first before washing, so we were absolutely sure every last inch of skin had been covered. I was using a fiber brush on my cuticles, now, just another 5 minutes or so before I’d be cleared to head out for my monthly leave. I had a pile of deliveries coming in. The service told me that I’d get fruit this time, although I had no idea what kind.
I hadn’t seen fruit in a while, so this was pretty exciting.
“I don’t get it, Mar,” Sam said, “I just don’t get it.
I shared Sam’s confusion. We’d been running the simulations for years and the answer seemed perfectly clear. But once out of the computer and into the lab….
I stepped under the black light and waiting to be scanned. “No infection.” There was a pause. “All clear.”
The light went out and I stepped out of the chamber, heading towards the changing room. I looked over my shoulder at Sammy, shoulders still slumped, lack of sleep visible in every wrinkle of the lab coat as they tossed it into the bin.
“Get some sleep Sam,” I waved, but didn’t wait for a reaction.
I’d come to hate my days off.
The lab was boring, grinding work, long hours, but it was safe. I was clean and fed and never had to worry about infection there. The moment I left the lab, everything was different. I eyed the folks in the parking lot carefully, making sure I never came within 100 meters of another person. I’d heard that some labs had built individual car ports, so none of the scientists ever saw one another until after they’d clocked in, but ours was a government -run facility and they had stopped funding us ages ago. We all just coming in, doing our work, as long as there was someone, somewhere who gave us money for laundry and lab equipment.
Once in my car, I breathed my sigh of relief into the tester. When it flashed “all clear” I stopped holding my breath. I took a few moments to clear my head and headed home, where fruit was waiting for me. Maybe. If I was lucky.
When I’d bought the house, I never really imagined that I needed a garage. But if you asked me now, I’d tell you that it was my favorite feature. I ride up, press a button, the door goes up, I drive in, the door closes. I hit another button, the air flushes out. I wait for “all clear” before getting out of the car.
I can see the deliveries in the airlock. I weighed the advantages and disadvantages of handling them now, fresh from outside, or after I’d eaten whatever I had left in the fridge. I decided they can wait.
Dinner was leftovers of a lasagna I’d made last month during my day off and I was hungry. I’d take a look at the supplies when I wasn’t hungry.
I was old enough that I could remember when we were allowed outside without a reason. We could just take a walk because we wanted to for no reason. But the idea made me shudder now. All that moving around, each person a vector, carrying the infection with them. I was kind of glad I’d never managed to find a partner or have kids. It would have been more stressful to worry about other people. I had a dog when I was young, before all the dogs died. When she died of old age, it was really traumatizing. I could only imagine that it would be worse if it was a kid. Or a spouse.
I opened the airlock, a converted foyer, not the pre-installed kind they have now for new construction. The packages all had green tape, making them safe to handle. I grabbed a pair of washable gloves from the kitchen, slipped on the mask, put a cleancoat over my clothes, then checked all the tape before I opened anything. My scanner read “all clear” so I started to open the boxes and check what I had gotten.
They managed to get me everything except cauliflower. I was a little bummed, because they substituted celeriac. I don’t mind celeriac, I had just found a recipe I wanted to try out. It was doubly annoying when I saw they had included the tahini…which had been for the cauliflower. Oh well. I guess I was going to be making some hummus instead, since I got twice what I ordered in chickpeas. Yay? I guess.
The food was put into clean storage, I peeled out of my clothes and threw everything into a sterilize cycle in the laundry, then headed for a shower. My skin was raw from all the washing, but I needed the overall sense of cleanness after a work shift.
After dinner, I call up Sammy’s data on the computer. Let’s see what got my partner so depressed. It was instantly apparent what the problem was.
Two days later I was back in the lab watching the specimens misbehaving. There was no other way to describe it.
One dish had clean cells, the other infected cells. The clean cells moved around normally, living, reproducing, dying, but the infected cells never stayed still. Up and down, they crawled out of the dish – even squeezing out of the covered dishes. One specimen mutated to develop acidic properties and burned their way out of the dish. There was no way to neutralize it. It was like the only thing It wanted to do was move around. One sample, the cells formed a chain, extending itself across a shelf to reach another dish.
Sammy came in. I looked up, shrugged a greeting.
“Did you get your fruit?”
I smiled. “Oranges!” then looked back at the scope. The sample was already moving off the edge of the slide.
All characters and situations, E. Friedman,
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)