Oliver got into his car and drove across town to work, making a mental note as he drove past the soccer field that he'd have to swing by the clubhouse to see if the girls' new uniforms had arrived yet. His oldest daughter, Amy, had been playing soccer for years, and he volunteered as the assistant coach for the girl's soccer club in town. Their season had just started, and the first tournament games for the older girls were at the end of the month. He thought they had a good chance of going to the semi-finals. Amy's team would, too, but their tournament ranked games wouldn't start for a few weeks after that.
Entering the downtown area, Oliver steered his car into the large underground garage, parked, and walked to the nondescript office building that was home to "Simpson and Darkchilde R&D" A leading genetics researcher, Oliver Simpson had started this company with his college roommate, Hank Darkchilde, 12 years ago. Since then, they'd worked on ever larger projects, contributing to human genomic work, until they got the attention of the government and started to get some really juicy contracts. Currently they were working on a mutagenic study that the DHS had commissioned. They were only one lab in a much larger study, but Oliver had jumped at the chance. At first it had seemed as if the study was about stabilizing mutagenic factors - things that could cause genes to mutate - but lately he'd been suspicious...
As he walked in, he smelled the cinnamon musk of Alicia's perfume. He groaned inwardly. Hank's wife Alicia was a bunch of trouble...a recovering alcoholic with poor boundaries and a potty mouth, always trying to pry into what was happening in the office. Hank had married Alicia ten years ago, straight out of college, and ever since she had been constantly trying to undermine Oliver's work in a misdirected attempt to promote her husband. The fact was, Oliver was the boss of the outfit in everything but name. He got all the grants, spoke on the lecture tours, and did the lion's share of the research. Hank was too easy-going for serious science. He was a good friend, and so Oliver had made him partner in the lab, but he wasn't capable of doing much more than technician's work. Alicia ran hot and cold; sometimes she was very formal and contemptuous of Oliver, and sometimes she was cheerful and putting on an artificial camaraderie. Oliver thought she would do better to get Hank to focus on his work, rather than cutting down his boss.
Alicia had her back to him as she talked to Callie, the receptionist, so Oliver got an eyeful before she pretended to notice him. "Aha," Oliver thought, "today's it's Friendly Alicia." Alicia hadn't taken great care of herself, but Oliver had to admit that she was still quite attractive...physically, at least. Today she wore black stilleto heels, which rounded her calves, encased in black hose, and lifted her derriere, squeezed into a form-fitting black miniskirt with red piping that would have been appropriate in a club, not early Friday morning at a science laboratory. She wore a black and red bolero jacket over a white satin blouse with ruffles at the throat and cuffs, topped with a little pillbox hat set atop her raven-black hair. As he came in, Alicia was leaning over to say something confidential to Callie, with her ankles crossed and her skirt riding up her thighs. Oliver sighed. Sometimes her contempt was easier to handle; she kept trying to play him for a cuckold, but he had no temptation to take her up on her implicit offer. The crazy woman was toxic. Callie, the girl from the senior soccer team who'd Oliver had hired last year to work as a receptionist, was a sucker for all kinds of gossip. Alicia being here meant that no work was getting done on the project or any of their paperwork.
Alicia's had positioned her rear end so that he'd have to squeeze around it to get past reception. He refused to play that game, and cleared his throat. Alicia looked over at him and straightened with a smile. "Oh, Oliver - pardon me. I didn't see you there!" She stood up and faced him, barely having moved from the spot. "Good morning, Dr. Simpson!" Callie called brightly. "Good morning, Callie." Oliver said and walked past his partner's wife. "Alicia." he acknowledged her with a nod as he stepped past, forced to turn his body so that he didn't bump into her. Alicia smirked at him, then turned back to Callie. "So if you decide you want any tips with that shit, just give me a call." Oliver shook his head, wondering who in their right mind would take advice from that creature.
Through the door and down the hall, Oliver reached the locked security door, which clicked open as he used his keycard to enter that minute's security code. He walked through and the heavy steel door clicked shut behind him again. Inside the lab were various work benches, desks and experimental stations, including three different isolation chambers. For the mutagenic research, they'd been using Iso-2. Hank was in there, observing some tests on strain 509 they'd begun yesterday. Oliver made the rounds of the other experiments, checking on their progress, before suiting up in his clean room suit, opening the outer door of the pressure lock to Iso-2 and stepping into the pressure chamber. He closed the outer door and then opened the inner one, the slightly higher air pressure in Iso-2 pushing any foreign contaminants out with a continuous flow of cool air. "Morning, Hank!" Hank looked at him out of the corner of his eyes and kept working, his hands trembling slightly. "Oh yes, Alicia is out front." Hank nodded, but didn't say anything. Oliver didn't blame him; he wouldn't want to rush out to meet that harpy, either.
They worked side-by-side for a few minutes, checking the temperature of the different dishes, cycling certain cultures into the work chamber so that they could examine them under a microscope or insert some nutrient without exposing them to the open air. Hank continued to act nervous and preoccupied. Eventually Oliver tired of his bumbling. "Are you all right? Do you need some gum?" Hank had been a devoted chewer of nicotine gum ever since Oliver had started the lab, since he couldn't smoke and be allowed in a clean room. Hank jerked his head spasmodically in the negative. Oliver gritted his teeth and continued working, his irritation raising his temperature until it felt almost uncomfortably warm in the small workspace. "Is something on your mind? Anything you want to talk about? Did you have a fight with Alicia?" Oliver replaced the tray 507G-103 after the chemical spray had completed cleaning the outside of the sealed dishes in the work chamber's lock. Everything had to be done exactly and methodically, to avoid any...wait a second...
"What is this?" Oliver gasped, reaching for tray 507G-104 and then pulled his hand back. There was a crack in the sixth dish, large enough that...yes, the culture was exposed to the open air. They'd have to throw out that whole tray and start over. But they'd been breathing that air...a cold sweat broke out as he realized the implications of this. He rounded on Hank, furious. "What happened?"
Hank wouldn't meet his eyes. "I was working late last night, and I...I guess I dropped it. I put it right back. I guess I was really tired and it slipped out of my hands. I'm really sorry! I didn't know what else to do." Oliver wanted to slap him. All their research was shot, and the grants they'd lose now... He reached for Iso-2's phone, about to call Callie. "FIRST, you call ME. Then you call DHS and the CDC. Did you think I wasn't going to notice a big fucking crack in the dish? When were you going to tell me? Maybe before I came into the chamber and exposed myself to whatever mutagens are floating around in here? Do you think that would've been a GOOD IDEA?" He was shouting now, waving his arms. He paced for a moment, breathing heavily, trying to resist the impulse to throttle his idiot friend. After a few moments, he calmed down and sighed. "They're going to have to come in here and sterilize this place, keep us in quarantine until they can be sure that we're not showing any adverse effects." He put the receiver to his ear, pressed "8" for the lobby. "Callie?"
"Wait...quarantine...?" Hank stammered.
"Yes, Dr. Simpson?" Callie answered brightly. "What can I do for you?"
Oliver covered the mouthpiece. "Yes, quarantine. We've been exposed to potentially...wait a fucking...do you-did you GO OUTSIDE THE ISOLATION CHAMBER???" He uncovered the mouthpiece and quickly said "Callie, never mind - I'll call you back." and hung up. He could see the truth from Hank's hangdog look. He would have punched him in the face but for the fact that he probably would've fallen down and knocked a bunch more dishes open...possibly the only way the situation could get any worse. Oliver settled on kicking Hank in the shin instead.
"WHAT...KIND...OF...A...FUCKING...RETARD...ARE...YOU???" Oliver furiously paced back and forth in the small space. They might face criminal charges for negligence...or even terrorism. CDC would close them down, and they'd have to quarantine the whole town, or maybe even a larger area... "How long ago did you leave? How long were you out? Where did you go?" Hank stammered and blubbered. Oliver grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him. "HOW LONG?"
"L-l-last night...around 11. I w-w-went out to my car and drove home; I could hardly keep my eyes open. I stopped for gas and then got home at around midnight."
"Gas?"
"Yeah, and some coffee, too. I was so tired, I could barely keep my eyes open. I stopped as Gasgo...you know the one..."
"Yes," Oliver replied, letting him go and sitting down in the one chair, despondent. "The truck stop just off the interstate. Probably lots of truckers there, too. Shit. Shit shit shit. What am I going to do?"
Hank cleared his throat nervously, "Well...what's the big deal?"
Oliver looked at him in open-mouthed disbelief. He didn't get it? He didn't get it.
"The mutagenic strains we're studying are transported by virus, right?" Hank nodded. "When you broke the dish, those viruses were exposed to the air and you got them on your skin and in your lungs. Then you opened the isolation room door, and the air pressure pushed all the viruses out into the lab. Then you opened the lab door and let the viruses into the rest of the building. Then you left the building and released the viruses into the open air, to be blown willy-nilly by the wind. Then you stopped at a truck stop filled with truckers, exposing everyone in that place to the viruses carrying the mutagens, and then they got back in their trucks and drove off in all directions. The virus and the mutagenic compound it carries may be all over the country in a week! THAT'S the big deal, Hank!"
"But we don't know what it does. It could be completely harmless, right?" Hank whined.
"Or it could melt the tissue off of every living thing!"
"But we don't know, right? So relax, dude."
Oliver was so worked up, sweat was popping out on his brow, his balls and the backs of his hands. "You're right, you're right. We have to figure out what it does."
Oliver crossed over to the terminal and started calling up the specs for 507G-104. As that request processed, he took the dish, put it in the work chamber and sealed up the chamber. Using the gauntlets, he removed the cracked lid to the dish, took a tiny sample of the culture, and put it on a slide, which he then moved over to the microscope. He felt a little ridiculous doing all this in the work chamber - the cat was already out of the bag, as it were - but there was no other way to use the microscope. He'd never anticipated that he'd be in the situation of needing to continue lab work when the isolation chamber was violated. He hoped to see that the viruses had perished in the open air, that somehow they wouldn't be viable. But the opposite was true: the viruses were very active. When he added a drop of nutrient solution, the viruses multiplied themselves with amazing speed. He gestured for Hank to take a look while he returned to the terminal to page through all the data. They showed that the tests on mice had achieved no results; there were no mutagenic effects on their DNA, nor larger scale effects due to the carrier viruses.
Somewhat cheered by this, Oliver started the cleaning cycle for the work chamber airlock, took a scraping of his own skin, put it on another slide, and inserted that into the work chamber airlock. Then he returned to the gauntlets, took the slide and dripped a bit of 507G-104 onto the slide. Finally, he covered all the slides, sealed the dish, put it back in the tray, and put the tray in the airlock for the cleaning cycle. He'd check back in a while to see if the viruses or the mutagenic compound they carried had any effect on human tissue or DNA.
"Well," he said to Hank, "This might not be the end of the world, after all. We'll see." He looked closely at Hank. The man looked terrible: big circles under his eyes, his skin was ashen, his hair hung lank on his forehead and he stumbled around the isolation area trying fearfully to keep out of Oliver's way like a man in a daze. "Were you able to sleep? How do you feel?"
"I slept OK, but I woke up really tired still."
"Are you just tired, or are you feeling any other effects?"
"Wait - I'm just tired because I worked so late yesterday and didn't get enough sleep, that's all. I do feel like I might be coming down with a cold, though."
"What does that mean?"
"Well, I've got some congestion and a slight headache, but aside from that, I feel fine."
"...Hmm. OK."
"Oh, and my hands are shaking a little. But I get that way sometimes when I'm really tired."
Oliver nodded thoughtfully. At least Hank's flesh wasn't melting before his eyes. But he wasn't really qualified to evaluate his condition. He considered giving Dr. Sanders a call, to see if she'd be willing to come down to the lab and give her professional opinion, as best she could outside the chamber. Evelyn did good work, clinical and reserved. But he didn't want to tell anyone and risk causing a panic and then find out that the compound and viruses were harmless. If it wasn't though, every second counted...
Ethically, he was tempted to call the CDC, even though he knew they could do nothing to contain this if it was infectious. He didn't know what it did yet, if anything, so he couldn't work on an "antidote" yet. He could just wait to see what happened with his sample, or he could have Callie ask Dr. Sanders to come down to the lab to evaluate their condition.
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