Chapter 1 #2
As they walked down the corridor, they passed door after door with signs saying No Entry.
Keep Out. Danger. Trespassers Will Be Shot.
Intruders Will Be Exterminated. Well, sort of.
Signs like that were just a temptation. Guess where I want to go!
They ended up in Harris’ office. Kaden wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but it wasn’t very interesting.
A white cube with a window obscured by a blind.
One wall full of shelves holding thick books and box files.
An uncluttered desk with two computer screens.
A couple of chairs, a bare coffee table and a coat stand where Harris exchanged his jacket for a white lab coat, then handed one to Kaden.
Kaden put it on.
“Do exactly as you’re told at all times,” Harris said. “Biotechnology carries more risk than many other scientific fields.”
“Uh-huh.”
Harris growled his displeasure and Kaden gulped.
“Yes.” Kaden stood straighter. “Sorry. I know it’s serious stuff.”
“Do you even know what biotechnology is?”
Yes, because he’d looked it up after he’d met Harris in a club. “Making products from the extraction or manipulation of living organisms.”
“What’s a microbe?”
“A microorganism too small to be seen with the naked eye.”
“Are microbes good or bad?” Harris snapped out another question.
Bloody hell. “Some microbes make us sick, some are essential for a healthy life.”
“Types?”
“Bacteria, algae, viruses, protozoa and fungi.”
“Right.”
Kaden wanted to protest at the unexpected quiz, but when Harris was in this sort of mood it was better to play along. Not that he’d do anything to him here.
“The dangers posed by microbes are vast,” Harris said. “Give me examples.”
We’re still going? “Ebola. Covid-19.”
“And why are they difficult to treat?”
“Because they’re viral diseases where microbes hide inside cells and it’s tricky for antibodies to reach them.”
“At least you’ve listened when I’ve been talking.”
Not always.
“In this building, we handle engineered cells. Their capacity to divide and spread has far-reaching consequences. Do. Not. Touch. Anything. Have I made myself clear?”
“Yes.” Kaden opened his mouth to add a snarky comment and changed his mind.
There was a sharp rap at the door and a red-haired guy in a lab coat came in. He was maybe in his late thirties. Harris was thirty-seven, sometimes going on sixty-seven. Kaden was twenty-five.
“Dr Harris, you’re needed upstairs. Another issue with the coolant.”
“Right. Max, look after Kaden. I’ve told him not to touch anything. Show him around until I get back.”
“No problem.” Max smiled until Harris had gone, then glared. “I’ve got more important things to do than babysit you.”
Arsehole. Kaden had done or said nothing to deserve that comment. But maybe Max didn’t like Harris. He clapped his hands to his cheeks. “Oh no, who’s going to wipe my backside when I go to the toilet?”
Max snorted, but that won Kaden a smile.
“Get on with whatever you need to and I’ll just sit and wait for Harris.” Or go wandering on his own.
“No way. Come with me.” Max walked out and Kaden reluctantly followed.
“What’s in there?” Kaden asked every time they passed a door.
Max only ever said “Lab,” even when it said Cleaning Supplies.
At the end of the corridor, Max scanned his pass and when a glass door slid open, Kaden slipped in after him.
He half-listened to what Max was saying to a couple of people in there, until he registered they were talking about the TV show, Traitors.
“You can look around in here, but don’t touch anything,” Max said.
For Christ’s sake! It made Kaden want to touch everything.
He wandered over to a work bench and stared through a microscope.
It looked like lumpy green slime on the slide and he stepped back.
Ugh. Not touching that! All along a wide shelf on the wall facing him were glass receptacles, a bit like a display of fish tanks in a pet shop, but none of them contained water.
Or fish. Ha! Kaden moved along peering into each of them.
There wasn’t much to see. Just off-white blobs lying on some sort of pale brown matting.
Presumably not microbes or he wouldn’t be able to see them.
So maybe the microbes were in or on the blobs.
In the last tank were several pale blue blobs, most the size and shape of fifty pence pieces and one little one that was round like a marble.
The larger blobs were very slowly undulating in the direction of the smaller one, which flattened out so it looked like them, then began to move up the glass.
Trying to get away? Kaden frowned. That seemed odd.
Even though they were moving slowly, he hadn’t expected to see anything travelling fast enough for him to notice. Nine against one. Hmm. Not fair.
Max came up at his back.
“What’s in this tank?” Kaden asked.
“Hosts.”
“What are they hosting?”
“What do you think? A cocktail party?” Max laughed loudly at his own feeble joke.
Dickhead. “Are they dangerous?”
Max mock-shuddered, then snorted. “Yeah, ‘cos that’s why they’re behind a single sheet of glass in here and not in a BSL 4 lab.”
“What does that mean?”
“Biosafety level 4.” Max rolled his eyes as if he shouldn’t have needed to explain.
“For things like Ebola and Lassa fever?”
“Yes. Diseases that are normally fatal. A level 4 lab requires multiple containment rooms, airflow systems, sealed containers, detailed protocols for all procedures, positive pressure suits and high security.”
Kaden recorded that.
“Is there a level 4 lab here?”
“No.”
That was disappointing.
“You wouldn’t be allowed in anyway. But I can show you something dangerous. Come on.”
Kaden was actually excited until they ended up in the canteen. Max almost choked laughing when he saw Kaden’s face.
“Don’t eat the muesli,” he whispered dramatically.
Kaden forced himself to chuckle. He swiped his ID to get an orange juice and a chocolate muffin while Max went for coffee and a croissant.
“Can I ask you about—”
“You sit here.” Max pulled out a chair at a table in the centre of the room. He muttered, “Take your time,” then went to sit with a young woman near the window.
It was irritating that Max couldn’t even be bothered to sit with him. Writing this article was doing them all a favour.
Kaden pinched out a chunk of muffin and put it in his mouth. At least it tasted nice.
No one else in the canteen was sitting on their own.
Kaden hadn’t been one of the popular kids at school.
That might not have been so bad if he’d had a friend to do stuff with.
Though he wasn’t entirely sure what stuff he wanted to do because he wasn’t into football or girls, and having one special pal could have backfired if they’d objected to Kaden being gay.
It was such a minefield that it had been easier to stay on his own, make himself comfortable in the closet and create his own entertainment by writing funny stories.
At some point, sitting in that closet, he’d decided he wanted to be a stand-up comedian.
He’d thought that might make people like him.
His mum had said that making people laugh was a great way to distract them from being cruel.
He was still working on that. Well, on both.
On being successful at stand-up and getting people to like him.
He’d come out at uni, though, because there was a strong, supportive LGBTQIA+ society.
He thought he’d found his people and he almost had.
But when the leader of the group had come on to him and Kaden turned him down, he never felt comfortable whenever everyone met up.
Eventually, he’d made some friends in his hall of residence, and they were still friends now.
Thinking about coming out made him wonder about that blob in the tank.
It couldn’t really have been trying to escape the other blobs because that implied conceptual thought.
It was probably just roving at random, no matter what it had looked like.
Just Kaden’s overactive imagination going wild as usual.
When Max had finished chatting up the woman, he took Kaden down to the ground floor.
“You can access most doors on this floor. Go wherever you like. I need to do some work. Just don’t touch anything,” Max said.
If anyone else said that to him, Kaden was going to explode.
He wandered around asking questions, making notes on what technicians were doing.
Most people were friendly but Kaden didn’t understand a lot of what he was told.
He couldn’t help thinking about the blob in the tank and eventually made his way back to that lab.
When he reached it, the little blob was still climbing the glass but at the other end of the tank.
The others were grouped together at the bottom, waiting for it to fall.
Waiting? I’ll be giving them names next.
Tom, Dick, Harry and desperate Joe. He stifled a laugh.
How would he know if they were waiting? And yet…
He touched the glass right in front of where the little blue ball was stuck and a small finger-like extension came out to touch his finger on the other side of the glass. Wow!
When Kaden moved his finger, the sort-of finger followed. Double wow! This had to be some sort of animal, but he had no idea what. It looked a little like a single-armed sea anemone.
A woman came up at his shoulder and he dropped his hand into his pocket.
“Hi, Kaden. I’m Alisha. I work with Harris.”
“Hi. Yes, I’ve heard him mention your name. What’s in this tank?” He pressed record on his phone.
“Archaea. You know what that is?”
“Er… Not bacteria?”
She smiled. “That’s right. Bacteria contain peptidoglycan in the cell wall but archaea don’t. The cell membrane in bacteria is a lipid bilayer; in archaea, it can be a lipid bilayer or a monolayer. Plus, bacteria contain fatty acids on the cell membrane, while archaea contain phytanyl.”
That was far too much information but Kaden kept going with questions. “So are archaea good or bad?”
“Generally, they’re pretty friendly. Many live in mutualistic relationships with other living things. Do you know the difference between mutualistic and symbiotic?”
He wanted to say yes, but, “No.”
“Mutualism is a type of symbiosis where there’s an ecological interaction between at least two species where both partners benefit. In symbiosis, there’s persistent contact between the partners and it’s not always mutually beneficial.”
Like his relationship with Harris. Not always good. Not for Kaden anyway, but then Harris didn’t seem to be particularly happy either.
“We’re studying parasitism in this other tank. That’s a symbiotic relationship in which one species benefit while the other species gets no benefit or is harmed.”
“Like fleas.”
“That’s right.”
She sounded surprised but he wasn’t entirely stupid.
“Do parasites get parasites?” he asked.
“They can, yes. A microbiologist at Vanderbilt University studied a five-tiered system of hyperparasites, starting with a fledgling bird. Blowflies infested the bird’s underside with bloodsucking larvae, which then dropped off and fell prey to hyper parasitic wasps.
The wasps carry a parasitic bacterium called Wolbachia, which has evolved to modify its host’s reproductive system.
Those bacteria are invaded by tiny viruses known as bacteriophages, which use Wolbachia’s cellular machinery to multiply. ” She gave him a broad smile.
“So they get smaller and smaller? How small can they go?”
“Maybe a transposon, a roving bit of nucleic acid—a single, parasitic gene. Transposons have been discovered inside viruses that infect other viruses, which in turn infect amoebas that go on to infect human beings.”
In easier words—very small. Could the blue blob be a roving bit of nucleic acid but inside something else?
“But you don’t do testing on dogs, cats, rats, rabbits or any other animal.” He knew what Harris had told him, but he still needed to ask. “Can you think why an animal extremist organisation would imagine that you do?”
“Because they don’t understand what we’re doing and make stuff up.”
He could tell by her tone she was pissed off, though not with him.
“We do important research here. Even if we were testing substances for use in cosmetics, the use of animals is banned in the UK.”
Kaden pushed a little. “But animal testing still happens for medical, scientific, and regulatory purposes, especially for new drugs and diseases.”
“It does, but not here. You can go almost everywhere in this building and you’ll see for yourself. The only places out of bounds are controlled labs that we have to keep sterile.” She smiled at him. “I need to get back to work. Harris will come as soon as he can.”
She moved away and when Kaden turned to the tank, he saw the little blob lying on the matting, just to the side of the others.
Had it fallen? He put his finger on the glass and two blue extensions shot out.
Like…hands? As he watched, the blob began to work its way up again right in front of Kaden, but this time, the largest blob followed close behind.
Why did he feel so strongly that he wanted the little one to get away?
Maybe because he identified with it. He hated bullies.
“Keep going,” he whispered.
Kaden slid his finger up and the blob followed.
Could he move it to the other end of the tank?
A different tank? Some of them looked empty.
Except he couldn’t do anything if someone was watching.
He backed away and shuffled around the room, pretending to look at other stuff and when there were only two technicians in there with him, and they were busy with their backs to him at the other end of the room, he returned to the tank.
The little blob was almost at the lid, the big one close behind.
If Kaden was going to do this, he had to do it now.
Don’t touch anything. Harris’ voice echoed in his head.
Ah shit. Sorry.
Not sorry.