The lab was an oasis, a sanctuary... a temple. Was it any wonder Timmons preferred being in his lab to sitting in his office? He could focus on his work, let it all speak to him. In his office, amid the constant yammering drone of e.mail and office politics, he couldn't hear the whisper of the chemicals. The low hum of the aromatic amines, the buzzing of the short-chain oligopolymers, the happy chirping of the rare earth catalysts in the bioreactor... it was all music to him. He loved it all, even the sullen mutterings of those tricky synthetic bastards, the aerosilization substrates.
His lab was an orchestra and he was the conductor that led them all to sing together in wonderful, flowing, glowing, crowing harmony. Even though the beakers, tubes and microchannel pipettors were all empty at the moment, the air in the lab was still alive with the chemical calliope of experiments past.
In the corner of his eye, he saw movement. The sink drain began to boil with a roiling upsurge of ants. In their thousands and millions they came scurrying up, a clackering flood of tiny bodies tumbling over each other as they filled the wide stainless steel sink and spilled outward, flooding across the benchtop and raining down onto the floor. A chattering, crying, tearing, foaming mass spread over the lab, mounding high and washing towards him.
He closed his eyes and waited.
When the noises stopped, he opened his eyes. His lab was his again, clean and pristine. From their bottles and jars, his chemicals spoke to him, sang to him. In the refrigerators, the light-sensitive reagents hummed in their cold, quiet repose. The old favorites: aniline blue, acridine orange, carmine red... they were les grand dames ancient of the world of color, invited to the balls and cotillions of modern science, but purely out of familial respect, for they were never invited to dance anymore. Electroporated membrane permeability assays used tRNA activity stains, dull and ugly chemicals that lit up in brilliant greens, blues and reds under the right excitation wavelengths. And the plasmid-bound transgenic fluorescent dyes, the true beauties of the modern age...
Refrigerator 7A creaked open. A scaly, dead-white hand reached out to shove it open still further. Its nails were cracked and stained with dried blood, putrescence weeping from the broken skin stretched tight across the shifting bones. From within 7A, a moan of hunger and sullen rage rose in volume as the hand extended. The forearm protruded, the hand now turned to show a gaping, stigmatic wound torn into the wrist, tendons flopping and flexing as the dead, dead, dead hand reached out for him.
He closed his eyes and waited.
When the moaning stopped, he opened his eyes. The bank of refrigerators and freezers were once again patient, humming sentinels, guardians of the eternal secrets that only cold could keep. The lab sang to him, the rolling chorus of compounds and precursors, reagents and intermediary reaction products a chorus, an opera, a choir celestial. In the middle of the music, the gas taps exploded, sending gouts of flame slashing against the shelves and equipment. Bottles exploded, their contents shrieking in pain and fear. From the roaring inferno, a toxic wave of heat and combustion products rolled across the ceiling. The pipes and lights blackened and shattered, raining sparks and molten glass down onto him.
He closed his eyes and waited.
When the roaring stopped, he opened his eyes. The cool repose of the laboratory was undisturbed. All was as it should be. All was perfect and serene and wonderful. He sat in the middle of the best of all possible worlds, buoyed by the music of the material world.
The door to the lab opened. A heavyset woman entered, her gray rayon top singing to him of death and terror. Her upswept hair was an unnatural shade of brown, the faintest whisper of peroxyoctanoic acid crying out amid the organic dyes and surfactants.
"Dr. Timmons?" she said. "They told me I'd find you in here. I'm Helen Morits, from HR?"
Her voice was barely audible. In unison, his chemicals - his loyal, wonderful chemicals - lifted their voices to drown her out. Even the smallest of the microvials rang with the sforzando fortissimo explosion of sound.
"Dr. Timmons, I realize this can't be welcome news, but your appeal has been denied. Given the... well, the tragedy that took place with the clinical trials, the review board was working with a pretty overwhelming body of evidence." In her fat, horrid, devil's face, her eyes were solid black, shiny and dead... her eyes were lizard-like protruding and swiveling independently, looking for prey... her eyes were spider-like clusters, buboes of silver-slicked ocularity that stared at him from a hundred angles at once... her eyes were running masses of pus...
He closed his own eyes and waited.
"Look, I know how hard this must be for you to hear."
He opened his eyes again. She was still there, still talking.
"This kind of thing is never easy, either for the employee or for us in HR. But the facts are what they are. The board gave us very little wiggle room. I'm not a scientist, so I don't know exactly what was wrong with your work, but they were very specific. They cited your work with 'unstable aerosolized psychoactives' as the root cause of what happened with the volunteers. If I can be blunt, Dr. Timmons, the board was pissed off." The manila folder she held in her grasping, clawlike hand writhed and snapped, its edges rimmed with tiny, dagger teeth, like the inside of a carnivorous plant. They dripped with venom and honey, luring the foolish and the helpless to be digested and absorbed into its own monstrous body.
He closed his eyes and waited.
"I know this is hard for you to hear, but now that your appeal process is concluded, we need you to sign some forms. The board instructed HR to draw up an early retirement package for you, effective immediately. Now, I know the terms of it aren't what you would hope for. To be honest, they're not really what any of us would hope for in a retirement package, but believe me, you don't really have a choice here. It's either take this early out or they'll fire you for cause and you get nothing. Either way, there's a guard waiting outside the lab to escort you from the building. Your things will be sent on after. Please come sign the forms, Dr. Timmons. It's better this way, it really is."
He opened his eyes. She was still there.
===== Feel free to comment on this or any other post.
p.s. My thanks to Icy Sedgwick for the prompt: "An empty lab, and a lone scientist"
