"On a scale between docile and cataclysmic, I'd say we are at a 5.5," Plank said.

Farooq, Smooshy, Aleph, Gyn, Alan, and Viral met eyes. Aleph whispered to Farooq who translated.

"That's literally more ambiguous than no measurement at all," he said.

Plank shrugged and pulled the yellow, rubber gloves off his hands. Sweat had matted the hair on his forarms across the skeletal remains of mermaids tattooed in chiascurro.

"What Plank means is that the setback isn't significant enough to be prohibitive but still of a size to be consequential," Dr. Hackman clarified.

From the corner of his eye, still slightly burning from its encounter with a jalapeno the night before, Viral watched Farooq bristle.

"And what, pray-tell, were you and Plaaaaaaaahnk doing together in this honeymoon suite while the rest of us were exposing ourself to pandemic for supplies," Farooq said. He'd spun his hips to emphasize his over enunciation of Plank's favored pronouncement of his name.

Farooq's description of the group's outting to the West Gardenia Mall was more than generous, Viral thought. Ostensibly, yes, the group had been given access to an expense account to purchase items requisite for minimal, off-site living. However, instead of canned beans, thermals, and charcoal water filters, the group had returned with bags of cosmetics, fitted hats, one pair of cargo pants, 3 flannels, 7 packets mysteriously wrapped in pink tissue paper from Victoria's Secret, 5 utility packs of off-brand boxer briefs, and two used roller blades, a right and a left.

Plank had called dibs on the roller blades as soon as he saw them, citing a tattoo of Mike Meyers from Wayne's World 1 holding a hockey stick, as evidence for his long history of concrete street hockey. Aleph had given some resistance as the original purchaser, but the credibility of Wayne's World 1 transcended culture, and the blackballing of the film's woman director from Hollywood made the movie about two schwinging bachelors on Aurora basic cable a back door icon of the feminist left.

Dr. Hackman had begun patting the air, pre-empting any onslaught Farooq's scorn could burnish.

"Now just hold on a minute," the disgraced doctor said, "Nobody told me this was a honeymoon suite."

"The bathtub is shaped like a heart," Farooq challenged.

"Now, I thought that was a kidney bean," Dr. Hackman said.

"Chelax, 'rab," said Plank, lighting a doobie with a flame from a hemp wick. "Doc tried to grope me but I told him I'd heard you already claimed him."

Approvingly, Farooq nodded.

"Claimed me?" Hackman said.

Monica interjected, pushing herself off the wall with her back foot. Viral hadn't noticed her enter the suite. She wore an electric blue blazer with three-quarter sleeves, slim black jeans, a black v-neck tee, and pointed black boots. Viral had to check his eye for pepper juice before he confirmed her jacket had gold lace for epaulets.

"They're each one strike from being inmates, Doc," she said, moving to the center of the suite's main room. "Bodies to them are just tokens to be traded like cigarettes and herpes."

Dr. Hackman furrowed his brow at the disquieting comparison.

"What's your name again?" Monica asked, snapping at Farooq. Farooq told her. "Right, Fartoosh," she said. Standing behind him to his left, Viral saw Farooq's balding head turn purple like a date.

"Don't worry about what the Doc and Skater-Boi here were up to while you all were out. The important thing is that you all take some time to triple check the setup they assembled."

While the Disciples, as Viral's group had taken to calling themselves in opposition to the Fear Mongers, the other group Monica assembled to stoke her zaibatsu-inspired competition toward innovation, had been shopping at the Garden, Plank and Dr. Hackman had worked to relocate the group's supplies from the women's college to the Ramada.

En route back from DC in a private car paid for by the good citizens of Georgia's 8th district, Monica had called Avril to tell him to secure the "talent" at the Ramada. The Bethany Women's College was officially off-limits as the CDC's recommendation for social distancing creeped into effect.

Emir, a member of the Fear Mongers, led by Ankur and Helen, had tested for "the 'rona", as Monica called it, and both groups had been remanded to quarantine in the Ramada. Officer Avril had made a fuss about being put into harm's way without appropriate hazard pay, but Monica pinched his nuts and made him cry when she told him domestic cops were more rapacious than the teachers' union. She had willingly returned to the hot zone for no greater compensation than the pleasure to serve her country. Avril had tried to convince her that state police took no such oath, but a second pinch of his nutsack between Monica's humonculous finger tips turned his protest into patter. As she walked away from his doubled-over demeanor, he'd managed to mutter that blue lives mattered. Monica could only smile at the narcicism of a statey whose closest bout with the Taliban came during an interview with a Sikh proprietor after a holdup at a BP off the turnpike.

"Don't mind me," Plank said as he removed his tanktop and used it to wipe the sweat that had clung to his body. To compel his eyes from comparing Plank's plethora of chest hair to the savannah of his own, Viral focused on the elegant, medieval ink Plank had needled into his back. The imagery was Gothic Christian, paradoxically anachronistic yet thematically in tune with the bones of dead sea maidens stitched into his arms.

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Smooshy elbowed Viral in the ribs. "Choder, did you check the output on the spectroscopy?" she said. Viral shook his head.

"Gyn's geeking out on the electrophoresis and Aleph's already in a body-suit practicing under the hood." Smooshy tipped her head toward a small alcove with a window abutting the suite's hallway to the bedroom. Viral saw the nickel-plated hood Hackman and Plank had fastened into the air duct that led from the ceiling out and up the Ramada's facade and to the roof. The plastic divider separating the potentially noxious material the check pushers expected the team to handle beneath a behemoth with a vacuum seal looked to Viral pathetically overmatched. Corners had to be cut, he reasoned; the government was doing its best.

But as Viral combed through the connections between the gene sequencers and the computers that routed them to monitors, he couldn't help but notice Monica's twitching, tapping foot. She was snapping her gum more loudly than he'd heard before, and her arms appeared more tightly crossed against her chest than he'd seen. A light had seemed to dim inside her, Viral thought. He began to see lines at the corners of her mouth, her eyes, and between her brows. Worry didn't wear her well.

And what was she to be worried about, Viral wondered. She'd clearly been given carte blanche to run her own operation which flouted every kind of norm and protocol Viral could imagine. An industrial-grade lab fabricated within a morning in the honeymoon suite of a two star Ramada Inn on the outskirts of Wilmington? The setup was laughable except for the very real price-tag Viral imagined each console, pipette, atomic scale, and digital converter carried at retail. Even in a firesale the hardware Plank and Hackman had installed would run into the mid six figures.

Monica clearly held proximity to the purse strings, which made Viral all the more curious about the reason for her impatience. She's an alpha, Alan had said, and that it took one to know one. Smooshy mimed a finger down her throat, but Viral thought he saw Alan smile at her gesture.

After two hours of checking, testing, re-checking, and re-testing the equipment Plank and Hackman had migrated, augmented, and reassembled from the women's college to the Ramada honeymoon suite, the Disciples returned to their nucleus near the center of the main room.

Monica had Avril mark a checklist as she asked each group member the same series of ten questions. Are you satisfied with the state of your combustible octane filter, 1 for very satisfied and five for ungodly disappointed, etc.

After the final round, Gyn raised her hand and Monica patted her on the head. "What is it, Turkish delight?" Monica asked.

Gyn referenced the comparison Plank had made during his opening salvo. What did he mean that things were 5.5 on a scale between botched and bucolic?

After ten minutes of Monica undoing and redoing the suite's firewall to Google the word "bucolic" she asked Plank to explain his reasoning.

"Well," Plank said, "Things aren't totally forked because the good news is that we got the Wuhan strain's RNA assay."

Viral joined the other members in a quick exhalation of relief. Aleph and Farooq rubbed their fingers together like cloven wizards, and even Officer Avril couldn't refrain from doing a white man's cabbage patch. Things got a bit hazy though when Gyn turned from embracing Smooshy and gave Viral's shoulder an enthusiastic shake.

As Viral felt his body oscillate in rhythm with Gyn's vibration, he tried to give into the sensation of shaking reserve from his character attribute tree. But the deep-seated genetic defect that primed his nerves to the smallest suggestion of troubled waters ahead shot flares from the bow of his inner SS Doom & Gloom. From steerage to Captain's table the skipper in the cabin of his adrenal cortex surveyed for an answer to the warning bells.

"And the bad news?" Aleph asked through Farooq as her mouthpiece.

Plank, picking at paint that had stuck to his bicep, said, "The Sinolese incubator that sequenced the genome just made their research public on Arvix."

Gyn ran her fingers through her curls and grimaced; Alan looked for a wall thin enough to punch.

"I don't follow," Avril said.

Viral knew before Gyn had to explain it.

"All that time and effort cracking Ankur's drive for what?" she said.

Viral didn't need to surmise much more; Monica's body language spoke terabytes. Viral knew Arvix as the dubiously credible website that publicly hosted academic research rejected from reputable journals by peer review. Fringe scholars with learning disabilities squeezed from academia by the professionalization and industrialization of research, used Arvix the way fans of Christopher Nolan movies used Reddit, to launch highly opiniated think pieces claiming the absence of outside evidence as a sign of purity from the scourge of privately backed agendad analysis.

That the Sinolese research institute responsible for cracking the secret to the SARS-CoV2 adenovirus would release its findings for free and to the public suggested, at best, two plausible and concomitant scenarios. One, that the research was bunk, intended to mislead. And two, that the pool of players competing to be the first to design a vaccine had instantly deepened by a factor of 100.

Viral thought he could see Monica's hair turning white before him. The gum she'd been mauling had dissolved to a paste that caked her lips. Her zaibatsu model of capitalist research had broken out from the lab into the mainstream, its own virus loose in the world. She was now at war with nature, private enterprise, and every government with an R and D budget hidden in a military line-item.

Worse, she was at war with facts themselves. If the RNA sequence for Covid-19's glycoproteins proved to be false evidence appearing real, then she and her Disciples were further behind now than when they had started.

Reading the hopelessness that had settled on the room, Dr. Hackman employed his signature strength for poor timing. "Perhaps now's not the time to mention that my flagged NIH account got burned by Azure security last night."

Great, Viral thought, to make their group's mandate even harder, Dr. Doo-diddler had lost the in that offered serverless compute power on Microsoft's distributed cloud architecture. Limited to the processing power they had confined in the suite, Viral calculated their productivity had been divided by six.

Not to be outdone by himself, Dr. Hackman offered one last statement to tip the room toward a total ten on the ambiguous Plank Richter scale. "And I'm being held liable for the $35,000 we needlessly spent on using a qbit container to dictionary attack Dr. Bhalla's SHA encryption."

Monica hung her head in defeat. When Dr. Hackman added that he'd accept Venmo for reimbursement, Agent Treyna kicked a bar chair into a console table that shook and shattered a vase full of bath beads, a vase that read, Viral gathered from the pieces strewn on the suite's carpet, Happy Humpday on Your Honeymoon, Sincerely Management of the Oberoi Ramada in Wilmington.

"Like I said," Plank offered laconically, stretching his wrists, flexing his forearms. "Kind of docile but Also kind of cataclysmic."

To Viral Plank's mermaids looked like they were shaking in a watery grave.