1:59pm.

An office building close by.

Dr. Angus was confused.

Today was his quarterly investor update, yet he was, as far as he could tell, the only one who had bothered to turn up.

He was sitting alone in a huge boardroom at his offices, right up the tippy end of one of those long oblong tables with lots of chairs and a conference call device in the middle. He was wearing his usual white lab coat, keenly aware that he had sweated through it at the underarms. A pathetic cuckoo clock announced arrival of the hour with a mincy chef figurine trotting out from inside a teeny bakery door with the loaf of the day.

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His quarterly investor updates were usually very well-attended. His ageing billionaire investors were almost always there, even if they had to miss other less important appointments, like a son or daughter’s wedding or an ex-wife’s funeral.

But even his own team was missing, and his Associate Director and number two - Dr. Keenan Fritz - was nowhere to be found.

What in the blasted hell was going on?

Where the hell was Keenan? Keenan; who had never missed a day’s work in his life. Keenan; who normally stuck to Angus like a fruit fly to a bag of rancid cherries.

Keenan; that lumbering dolt of a man with sweaty palms, a PhD in neurochemistry, and a tendency to spit aggressively while talking.

Angus flicked through the slides of his presentation once while he waited, then he looked out the window of the boardroom over at the lab. It was much quieter than usual.

Angus hadn’t normally taken it upon himself to be particularly observant of the comings and goings of the rank and file, but he did make note of the fact that almost every member of his team had somehow vapoured out of the building.

Where the hell was everybody? Don’t they know we just put a rat on a computer?