A Conspiracy of Fate

[MaiusImperium]

“The time is zero-six hundred ours.” Intoned the cold female voice of the facility’s internal computerised clock. There was a groan from the mess of bed sheets and limbs that counted for Quentin Jeffers’ bed. Six o’clock already, he couldn’t possibly have been asleep so long, he’d only just laid his head down when the alarm seemed to sound. The junior researcher lifted his head groggily from the pillows at the head of the bed, a hand emerged from the mess of sheets and fumbled at his bedside table. A number of things were scattered and knocked over before his pawing hand latched onto his glasses.

With the glasses perched on Quentin’s nose he slid his legs out of the bed and sat up. His blue eyes glared at the clock by his bedside, the computer hadn’t been lying, it was indeed six o’clock, actually it was six-zero-three. The scientist groaned and rose to his feet unsteadily, pushing the fringe of his curly brown hair from his face as he padded towards the bathroom. On his way he flicked his lamplight on. There wasn’t much pointing having windows this far underground, Quentin didn’t miss the sun much regardless, he’d always been something of a night owl, even when he’d worked up above on the surface.

Divesting himself of the grey patented Octanis pyjamas he, unsteadily he stood in the shower, somewhat fearful of slipping. He shuddered as the warm water hit his body. Once Quentin was washed and his long hair shampooed he stood from the steamy shower and wrapped a long towel around his dripping body. Standing before the mirror in front of the wash basin he stared at his reflection for some minutes.

“Where did it all go wrong?” He said to no one in particular as he stared at his reflection. At one point the twenty-six year old had had everything, after he’d got his PHD the world had seemingly been at his feet. He hadn’t had to think twice about taking the offered place at Octanis Biotech; they were the biggest company on earth and he knew they paid well, very well. Of course he’d never imagined his impressive PHD in genetics and biochemistry would have been squandered on pushing trolleys around and growing mould in Petri dishes. He’d expected to be working on some juicy secret project, cloning super soldiers or finding a cure for cancer, not this. At least the pay was good, but Quentin couldn’t help getting the feeling that he was wasting his life away in this underground vault.

Quentin liked to think that the reason he couldn’t get a girl was because he was locked away in an underground research lab for most of his life and that Octanis frowned in interpersonal relationships in the work place. Of course such thoughts were practically a myth, Quentin had always been uneasy around girls, though before moving to the facility he had been seeing a cute nerdy girl on his course at University. That had been four years ago, he wondered wistfully what she was doing with her life now. Certainly not living underground like a mole, that’s for sure. He though glumly. It wasn’t that he was unattractive, Quentin was cute rather than handsome, his eyes were bright, and his hair was quite floppy and long, he was something of a fop. He had been locked away for so long his social skills were somewhat rusty and his manner wasn’t exactly easy to get along with.

He didn’t bother with breakfast as such, it was usually served in the cantine and he was in no mood for pancakes of fried eggs, instead he stuffed half a toasted bagel into his mouth and took his coffee mug with out the door. Today was going to be interesting, at least interesting by Quentin’s standards, it didn’t take much change to make a day interesting, when you’d grown mould on a Petri dish once, you’d done it a million times. His new lab assistant was being assigned today after the last one had got promoted from pushing trolleys in his lab to cleaning out test tubes in Dr. Monroe’s lab. Truth be told Quentin hadn’t really been paying attention to his supervisor, Dr. Terrell, when he had been told about his new lab assistant. Her name was Morris someone, the Morris woman, was all he could remember.

Quentin slipped quietly down the bright white corridors of level four, or the habitat level. It was the most tolerable part of the entire facility, since thousands of people lived in the level it had more of a lived-in feeling that the rest of the facility. There were posters about, plants, empty pop cans and litter here or there. The rest of the facility was spotless and surgical.

As Quentin waited for the lift down to the lower reaches of the facility he smoothed the neatly starched lab coat he was wearing and pensively fidgeted with a pen in his top pocket. He was always full of nervous energy, it was one of his traits, his other traits included being especially awkward around people, especially women. This particular trait didn’t manifest itself in the normal way, he was not clumsy around women and he didn’t muddle his words, but he did come across as cold, detached and at times arrogant. It was Quentin’s way of dealing with things, it had served him well in his professional capacity, but it hadn’t earned him many friends in the facility.

The lift doors slid open with a clean sssshhhing sound, which roused Quentin from his nervous fidgeting.

“Jeffers.” Acknowledged Quentin’s supervisor, Doctor Clarke Terrell. The lift was almost packed, Quentin pushed himself into the lift as he swallowed the last crumbs of his bagel.

“Doctor Terrell.” He mumbled polite as he pushed back into a rotund little doctor from the quantum physics department. There was much grumbling and complaining as Quentin insinuated himself into the tightly packed lift, the lift doors slid closed, sealing the lot of them in for at least another floor. The lift beeped warmly.

“Elevator going down.” Came the slightly warmer voice of the lift, warmer at least than his computer alarm clock. The lift went down three more levels, to level Seven, the physics department where many of the staff got off. The next stop was level nine, chemistry and metallurgy, finally the lift stopped at Quentin’s destination, level eighteen, genetics and biochemistry. By the time the lift had reached G and BC, as it was colloquially referred to, there was only Quentin, Dr Terrell and a couple of others in the lift. As he and Dr. Terrell got out of the lift he spared a thought for the hapless souls who were going even deeper underground, probably to waste disposal and sanitation, or worse, to the…the cells. No one knew what went on that far down, at the bottom the facility, but naturally superstition had lead to all manner of bogey stories ranging from horrific human experimentation to satanic sacrifices.

G and BC was exactly the same as any other level of the facility, it was a labyrinth of labs and offices, laid out in a careful grid that was roughly octagonal, to go with the company logo. Everywhere was brightly lit, it was a sea of surgical white panelling and harsh lights, it made the eyes hurt. As the day wore on the lighting level waxed and waxed in intensity to simulate day time and night time, it seemed to help people a little in keeping track of the hours flying by.

“Your new lab assistant is being assigned today, her name is Rebecca Morris. I want you to watch her closely, she’s been involved in some research as an intern that might prove promising in correlation to our own work, just keep an eye on her, involve her with your work, make an effort, Jeffers.” Dr. Terrell knew how stand-offish Quentin could be, but he could spare no one more senior to dally with an intern, so Quentin Jeffers would have to do.

“What? Oh…yes doctor.” Quentin was absorbed in the pen in his hands, it was a fancy pen from the NASA space program, it had a compass on it and a knife, he was awfully fond of gadgets and not paying much attention to his supervisor.

The two parted company at a intersection in the corridor, Dr. Terrell went left towards the central hub of level eighteen, where most of the high profile research was carried out. Quentin went right, towards his own small, unimportant corner of the level, a small lab that was barely large enough for one person to work in, let alone two or three. He was lost in a day dream as he approached his lab, he swiped his card through the reader and steppe into the room beyond.

Quentin was surprised to find the lights already on, his desk still there, nothing was touched, though in the background he could hear someone flipping through papers. His office was small, very small, there was barely room for a desk and two metal-frame chairs, a small book shelf that was groaning under the weight of several files as thick as two-by-four. On the desk a cat’s cradle lay, unmoving.

“Hello?” As he peered through the Perspex glass into the lab beyond his office, sat at a side desk was a woman, her dark hair held loosely in a bun atop her head. Quentin frowned, the conversation about his new intern had completely vanished from memory. Quentin stepped through the door into his lab, which slit open with a whirr.

“Who are you? What are you doing here?” He asked in a quiet voice, though his tone was slightly demanding, even accusing. Immediately his ego assumed she was from one of the other labs, send to steal his work, his ideas, then he realised sheepishly that there was nothing worth stealing or plagiarising amidst the debris of his lab.

---

Closed thread for myself and Saccharine. Comments via Pm are welcome as always.

 

[Saccharine]

The young woman stared open mouthed at the new arrival to the office for a moment, shifting in the facility’s stereotypicaly sterile standard issue steel chair. Her narrowed blue eyes darted about, deciphering Quentin’s features. Her initial inspection pegged him as harmless, simply one of many mild mannered nerds contained in the underground concrete cage she had called home for the past twelve months. He was perhaps easier on the eyes then most of the mole men, not that Rebecca was in any mindset to appreciate a cute set of features, even one completed with a hairstyle that reminded her of her hockey heroes from home. Despite his unintimidating appearance, she was visibly unsettled by the stranger’s tone, perhaps even offended.

Rebecca still clung to the manners of the outside world, abiding by them chipperly in her every encounter, even the formalities weren’t reciprocated or appreciated. However, something about having her name demanded by this stranger before he had offered his own was supremely innerving. She tried to blame the sleepless night she had endured, coupled with the bizarre turns of events springing from her botched research proposal for her discomfort, but that did little to ease her frazzledness. Her apprehensive appearance was exaggerated by her unusual disheveledness. Her cotton coat was creased with an array of wrinkles, her electric eyes underscored with dark circles, and her bun sloppier then usual, allowing scattered wisps of dark hair to fall loosely about her rounded pale features.

Her gaze dropped to her reassignment file, a conspicuously thin collection of vague job descriptions blotted with black censorship bars. As if hit with the sting of a migraine, her brow creased in an unguarded moment of pained expression. The answers demanded of her were surely at her fingertips, and she was eager to give them if she could only find them. After flipping through the pages a final nerve racking time, she pushed herself from the remarkably uncomfortable metallic chair she had taken the liberty of seating herself in, sending its legs screeching irritably against the linoleum floors. With a frustrated grunt, she placed the package of papers atop the desk with a little more force then she intended, creating a loud rattling plop.

Standing had brought Quentin further into her personal space then she would have normally allowed a stranger, but the restrictive dimensions of the small room left her little options. With a minimal gap between their starchy white lab coats, Rebecca had to strain her neck slightly looking upward to maintain eye contact through the thick dark frames of her glasses.

“I am Rebecca Morris, intern, reporting for... well I'm not entirely sure.” She responded curtly. After addressing the questions directed at her in a single breath, she didn’t hesitate forming a few of her own. If this unnamed stranger had the authority to demand her title, she hoped he would be able to explain why she had been barred from her research, and shuffled further down in the facility then she had even been before.

“Do you know what’s going on here?” She asked frankly, forgoing her usually formal tone. “Why have I been deprived of my personal lab time? And why…” Rebecca paused to clear her throat, hoping to do away with a bit of troublesome emotion that had crept into her voice. “Why have I been cut off from my lab mates?” She asked, her large eyes focusing unabashedly on his.

Her tone was not demanding, but sincere and laced with an inflection of desperation. She needed answers, not only for herself, but for her Shauni and Luke, her colleagues who had trusted her with presenting the fruits of their cumulative painstaking labor in the most impressive light possible, a task in which she had apparently failed in miserably. Had she been aware her days at the facility were numbered, she would have been far more forward. The prospect of informing her lab mates they were being expelled would have been enough to send the mild mannered young woman grabbing hold of the coat of the man before her, breathlessly demanding explanations until she was red in the face. Her limited knowledge left her in charge of her emotions, but her breath had become more ellusive then she realized. She had stopped breathing as soon as her inquiry ceaced, absorbed by her anticipation.

 

[MaiusImperium]

“I am Rebecca Morris, intern, reporting for... well I'm not entirely sure.”

The name swilled about in his chaotic head for a moment, his eyes glazed for a moment as if deep in thought. The words of Dr. Terrell came back to him suddenly and his eyes lit up. He shuffled past her, a little awkward considering the small room, and made his way to an incubator behind Rebecca. He peered into it for a moment before making an undecipherable utterance that seemed to convey satisfaction with whatever he saw within the device.

“Dr. Jeffers, Quentin Jeffers, Microbial Genetics.” He mumbled with a pang of guilt. Doctor of growing mould. He thought to himself bitterly. It was not written in stone, but junior doctors were not supposed to go around referring to themselves as Dr. <insert name>. Such an honorific was reserved for the facility’s senior scientists. Of course, she was just an intern, she didn’t need to know that.

Her questions came thick and fast and he found it a chore to keep up, and all the while she seemed to be peering into his soul, which made him abundantly awkward. He’d never been much good at eye-to-eye contact, certainly not with females of the species and so Quentin busied himself with shuffling papers about and checking empty test tubes for signs if non existent life as he answered her.

“You’ve been reassigned to my lab,” he gestured to all he surveyed in the tiny lab and office beyond, “the suits thought your talents could be better used here, where the real research is happening.” Not entirely a lie, though he was sure Rebecca would not think of bacteria growing as ‘real research’, not for the first time he cursed his supervisor for putting him effectively ‘in charge’ of this intern. It was true that Quentin was overworked, but he had always preferred working alone, he just wasn’t a natural leader or figure of authority, he liked being told what to do since it meant he only had responsibility for himself and not others.

“You’ll be able to see your lab mates out of office hours, but for the rest of your term here at Phiorina Seven, you’ll be working on the biggest project in the facility, project Lazarus.” He tried to make ‘Project Lazarus’ sound grand and impressive, but again, he wasn’t much good at speech giving. Dr. Terrell had made it quite clear he was only to tell her what she needed to know, that had puzzled Quentin a little as he was fairly sure he didn’t know anything that was particularly important or interesting, he was pretty sure Terrell only told him what he needed to know too. Quentin new the basics behind Project Lazarus, he knew the gist of it but he’d no idea how far the ‘suits’ had gotten with it.

He turned from the incubator, which he’d been fiddling with for several minutes now in an effort to avoid looking her in the eyes. He turned to look at her and there was an uneasy silence as his fingers trailed back up to his coat pocket to fidget with the pen.

“Yes…well…welcome aboard.” His hand thrust out as far as the tight confines of the room would permit for a firm handshake.

 

[Saccharine]

Rebecca’s piecing gaze dropped from her new supervisor’s elusive eyes to his offered hand. The man had just delivered her some of the most gut wrenching news she had ever received in her life, only to have punctuated it with a generic flavorless greeting. The insincerity of the procedure was enough to nauseate her. Every little disingenuousness she had swallowed with a smile over the past year had been for her research. Now that it seemed she was going to be deprived of her independent work, all her repressed angst and resentment threatened to bubble to the surface and explode over the dreary little office. Her lids slid shut for a moment, and she felt a ripple of heat blaze up her neck.

In brief moment of darkness, she felt herself transported to another place and time. She was sixteen, draped in the first dress she had worn in years as she stood over the open casket of her grandfather. She felt just as frustrated, just as helpless. The mourning crowd had long departed, taking with them their never ending cycle of ‘He’s gone to a better place’, ‘his suffering is finally over’, ‘he’s finally found peace’ and every other tired cliché her grandfather would have growled at if he had had any breath left in him.

Her grandfather had suffered a death preceding the one that had placed him in the coffin. Alzheimer’s had robbed his family of him a good decade ago. The imprint of Quentin’s hand took the shape of the bony digits of her local parishioner, slipping over her shoulder in a vain attempt to bring comfort. The old priest’s voice rattled through the rafters of the empty church, stirring the stale air: “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”

The verse failed to comfort now as it failed to comfort then, despite its persistent echoing in her memory. Her grandfather wasn’t coming back. The small country chapel was no tomb in Bethany and he was no…

“Lazarus?” Rebecca parroted, reopening her eyes. She instantly remembered the catalyst that had sparked her little detour down memory lane. You didn’t have to be a theologian to understand what that project title implied. Her curiosity was piqued, but she wondered if she could control herself long enough to discover what this new assignment of her entailed. She couldn’t help but infer that labeling this new work as ‘real research’ was branding her past work as insignificant, which simply wasn’t the case - to her, at least. What ‘the suits’ had to say mattered little to Rebecca. She had no intention of passively allowing herself to be uprooted from the precious progress her team had finally stumbled upon. She was going to give the fight of her life to get out of this reassignment, however she was willing to work under this young doctor as a means to discover what secret project merited deterring her from the most important work she had done in her life.

Rebecca took what tiny shred of pride she had left and swallowed it, pressing it down to into the neatly packed ball of rage she had been accumulating while sterilizing lab equipment and filing case reports for the past twelve months. Her sweaty palm jammed into his rather ungracefully, and she returned the firm grip.

“Well... Thank you Dr. Jeffers.” The expression of gratitude was delivered with a smile, but Rebecca couldn’t mask the sincere disgust and outrage brewing behind her blue eyes. She retracted her hand, and subtly wiped her moistened palm against lab coat.

“So how may I put my ‘talents’ to use, then?” She inquired. Her own gaze became fugitive, creeping over Quentin’s shoulder in an effort to steal a look at the contents of the incubator.

 

[MaiusImperium]

Quentin had taken to fidgeting, as he often did when in the presences of others, it had been a habit he’d picked up as a child at school when brought in front of the principal. He shuffled his weight from one foot to the other and suddenly took a great interest in the green plastic pen in his hand. He took to unscrewing the tip, pulling the transparent plastic tube of ink from it before reassembling the entire thing. The young scientist repeated the process over and over again as she spoke.

“So how may I put my ‘talents’ to use, then?”

He didn’t really pay much attention to what she was saying, though when he noticed she had stopped speaking it was obvious it was his turn to speak.

“Talents? Oh…yes. Right.” He cleared his throat and the pen slipped from his clumsy grasp and fell on the sterile white lino. “You’ll be working under me. This lab is dedicated to the growing if cell clusters that will eventually be subjected to a number of viruses. We’re supposed to monitor the progress of the viruses, once the cells have reached a certain stage of mutation they’re moved on to other labs for more detailed study.” It was a useful way of explaining what his job was without actually telling her anything useful, Quentin wasn’t even aware of how much he was supposed to tell Rebecca. Quentin didn’t have access to the classified database, nor did he get to see the more…advanced specimens, but he knew what project Lazarus was about, anyone with a degree in genetics and biochemistry could two and two together.

“The senior doctors have instructed me to brief you on Project Lazarus,” He certainly wasn’t about to let her on to the fact that he was in out of his depth, “we’re here to find a cure for death.” His delivery was so dead-pan it seemed more like a joke than the truth. “Octanis have been working for decades on project Lazarus, this installation is merely where the latest phase of the research is taking place. The viruses we introduce to these cell preparations are customised viruses, a bit like designer genetics. We weave and thread together certain sequences of DNA to get the desired effect.”

He realised her eyes were rapidly drifting over his shoulder to the incubator behind him and he shuffled awkwardly to the side, brushing past her, not for the first time he resolved to badger Dr. Terrell about getting a larger laboratory. Quentin flicked a black switch on top of the incubator and a fluorescent tube light flickered into life within the incubator. Quentin motioned for Rebecca to come closer. Within the incubator, arranged in neat rows were circular Petri dishes, each with a different type of smearing on the agar jelly. Some sickly coloured smearings were larger, obviously in a more advanced stage of growth, the most advanced of them were threatening to outgrow the small dishes and throbbed and pulsed horribly. To the layman it would have looked like nothing more than a pathetic collection of snot-coloured slime, but the readings on the computer screen beside the incubator told a more interesting story.

“All of these dishes were smeared with dead cells, when we introduced various strains of the Lazarus virus to them the necrotic tissues were…excited. Eventually they will outgrow the incubator, which is when they get moved to more…advanced labs.” His tone was slightly pained at that, he had effectively admitted that the big boys got to do all the fun stuff, Quentin was little more than a caretaker. Still, it was surprising just how much paperwork a caretaker had to…take care of. For a moment Quentin contemplated telling her that she would more or less just be filling out the paperwork he himself couldn’t finish, but common sense made a rare intervention and he thought better of it.

“There’s some similarities between the work we’re doing here and yours,” He motioned to the computer monitor which charged each specimen’s growth. “of course, we’ve got a much bigger budget than you.” He laughed, nervously, it wasn’t a very good laugh, not very practised at all. You certainly wouldn’t be able to tell they had an astronomical budget from Quentin’s pokey lab.

“You’ll mostly be assisting me while you’re hear, there’s a surprising amount of paper work involved.” Finally he got around to her question, Quentin had a way of rambling and dancing around straight answers. “It’ll take me a few days to show you around, how everything is done, but I don’t think you’ll have much difficulty, it’s, um, not very taxing.” He admitted sheepishly.