The sun set on the west end of Delaware a bit after 7:30. Spring had begun to creep more boldly from its crevice, preparing the way for its arrival with a routine patina of mist. The late afternoon rain had cleared; the long, golden rays of the sun stretched like fingers tapping on the windows of the Ramada's conference room. A floor above Plank and Dr. Hackman had spent the day refabricating a honeymoon suite into a CDC-grade field laboratory. Viral, Alan, Gyn, Farooq, Smooshy, and Aleph had gone with Officer Avril to the mall. On returning they reunited with their handler, Agent Treyna, who had informed them that a positive case of Covid-19 in a member of the other group had triggered quarantine protocol. For the foreseeable future, the bottom six floors of the Wilmington Ramada was refuge, internment, and home.

The squeak of the dry erase markers on the white board Monica and Avril had hauled from a run-down Office Max on Route 9 pleasantly reminded Viral of his TA section for Introduction to Programming for Electrical Engineering, his happy place. The smell of Expo markers and the simmering dust bunnies cooking beneath the classroom radiator hung in his head, an added spice to the barbacoa burrito bowl he'd ordered for their family meal.

Plank pointed the jagged edge of a tortilla chip at Dr. Hackman and ordered him to get to his point. Apparently accustomed to the abuse of an audience, Dr. Hackman scratched at his forehead, muttering to himself about the difficulty of synthesizing information for a broad demographic.

Alan had told the group while he waited for his turn to enter his Chipotle burrito order into the iPad making the rounds that by the time he had finished high school he had already scored a 35 on the MCATs. Aleph and Farooq, however, had not had the advantage of AP or IB Biology in their secondary schooling. Their understanding of genetics stopped with Punnet Squares. Plank on the other hand was a preternatural virtuoso of organic chemistry, able to hydrolozize ethanol into bathtub gin he brewed in abandoned pools in Chino.

Viral had kept his mouth shut as the other members of the group flung self-appraising accolades at each other when they weren't checking boxes into the Chipotle online order app. That news of his father's status in the pharmacological community had percolated from Monica to Gyn to Farooq and beyond created a cloud of self-consciousness that trapped his imposter syndrome around him like greenhouse gas. He stayed silent for fear that speaking on the subject of molecular biology would affirm just how far his apple had fallen from his father's towering tree.

When Monica returned to the conference room with Officer Avril carrying the bounty from a contactless delivery, she'd dang near lost her spit. The empty white board at the front of the conference room had so greatly offended her because the lengths to which she had gone to procure it violated her principle of never stepping into an Office Max as an adult. She had cared little that Dr. Hackman's introductory lesson on viralology would go over the heads of some while barely landing at the feet of others. She equated the sound of markers on a white board with progress, and she needed something to look at while she snapped into her hard shell tacos.

Officer Avril put an end to Plank's abuse of Dr. Hackman by pulling the paper bag of tortilla chips away from Plank. Plank had protested, but when Avril threatened to cough into the bag, Plank withdrew his complaints. In exchange for the chips and a side of guac he agreed to let Dr. Hackman continue.

"As I was saying," Dr. Hackman said, turning toward the diagram he had drawn on the white board, "An adenovirus normally settles along the cell membrane of its host by fastening to the lipid bilayer with its spike."

Viral licked the sour cream from his plastic fork and nodded as Dr. Hackman circled the illustration of a virus shaped like a bishop landing on the outer edge of a two-dimensional circle.

"A protease enzyme contained inside the virus shell then cleaves the cell's membrane creating a channel between the virus' payload and the host cytoplasm akin to an airlock between vehicles docking in pressurized environments like underwater or in space."

From behind him Viral heard Monica's throat gargle, a unique phoneme comprised of a savory yum and awe-struck wonder.

"Once the viral RNA enters the cytoplasm it fights its way into the cell's Golgi Complex, where it hijacks the machinery the cell normally uses to create the proteins the instructions for which come from the cell's DNA."

Viral considered the story Dr. Hackman had unspoiled, one of equal stubbornness and duplicity. In invading a cell, a virus evinced heroic behavior, like a cavalcade of Huns overrunning the sanctity of a Roman wall. It also demonstrated an embarrassing lack of chivalry, sportsmanship. Hijacking the cell's own manufacturing equipment for selfish aims.

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Though he hadn't been born yet, Viral had developed a keen interest in the act and ensuing events of 9/11. He watched filled with macabre curiosity as teachers in his elementary and high schools shared tear-soaked accounts of where they had been when. Viral could not imagine the visceral, collective impact 3,000 deaths and a handful of demolished buildings could draw comparisons by some to Hiroshima or Nagasaki, ground zeroes where the number of dead had six or nine zeroes instead of three.

But that the loss of life could gain in severity logarithmically was to Viral as unsettling as the weighted value given in America to American life. If any truth held as self-evident it was that life was life, and its loss, whether on a scale of base 10 or 100, was a fundamental mark against a civilization built by humankind.

Wherein lied Viral's disgust with the adeno coronavirus. It was one thing to engage in an all or nothing battle, one lot for the exchange of a life, on even ground confined by mutually acceptable rules. It was another, however, to behave dishonorably and snatch victory from the jaws of law and order.

While wiping the crumbs from tortilla chips from his goatee, Plank asked, "So what's the virus do then, once it's chilling in the Golgi?"

"Well 'chilling' is hardly the word I'd use," said Dr. Hackman. "The polymerase proteins created by the viral RNA work exhaustively to churn out copies of the virus genome and its capsid."

Farooq waved his half-eaten, gluten-free burrito above his head, spilling beans on to the carpet around him. "What is this polymerase?"

"Polymerase --"

Smooshy interrupted Dr. Hackman. She said, "it's a protein that --"

Alan joined her, adding in unison, "catalyzes protein synthesis."

Viral stole a peak beneath the table at their feet, to see in time Smooshy's Keds reaching to touch Alan's LeBrons, flexed and stretched out from the ankle.

"Hold up, proteins making proteins?" Farooq asked.

"That can't be right," Monica said into her Mr. Pibb, shaking her head.

"It really is quite beautiful," Gyn said, pushing the mango bites in her remoulade over a bed of spinach. "The viral bits somehow prioritize generating this protein, the polymerase, before anything else. The virus holds not only instructions for recreating itself, but also the sequence of events to deploy its recreation machine."

Dr. Hackman pulled his marker from his mouth, where he had been suckling it like a pacifying pee-pee. "A creation-machine. That is beautiful," he said.

Aleph whispered to Farooq, who said, "Yeah, I think so."

"Think so what?" Smooshy asked.

"A virus is alive."

Smooshy and Alan both made the sound of the buzzer from Family Feud. To celebrate their timing they high-fived; Viral noticed their fingers clinging to each other for a fraction of a second longer than platonically ideal. He looked toward Gyn, who broke her gaze from her salad bowl just long enough to catch his eye.

"A virus is most definitely not alive," Plank said, skimming the bottom of a paper bag for tortilla chip detritus.

Aleph pounded the table, made a face at Plank.

"Procreating isn't the sole criteria for life," Plank countered.

Monica stuck her head up like a gopher, and the other group members met eyes about Plank, curious how he had understood Aleph's pantomime. Viral noticed that Farooq looked mortally hurt.

"But the elegance of its procedure suggests intelligence," Gyn said.

Procedure. The word stuck itself in Viral's ear canal and wormed into his chugging train of thought. Like a main() function call at the outset of an Objective C script, it triggered a cascade of callbacks that placed him right back into his programing study section. Procedures, or algorithms as his textbook had called them, were nothing more than recipes, a list of instructions within conditional trees; if this then that, else these, and not those. The logic of Boolean algebra, translated into the electrical wiring of silicon chips, gave computers ready-made instructions to start-up and stay on. While the devices themselves did not procreate, the instruction set looped, guaranteeing a system's thread could last at least as long as its power source.

He thought about information and the loving manner with which Gyn spoke about the coded book of nature with their hands buried in the Gardenia dirt. Life unfolded, like the buds of tulips, the hatching of eggs, like affection between lovers, understanding between parent and child. Life was growth, and growth took time.

The sun had vanished behind the horizon, but its glow echoed into the night sky, the final note of the day's chorus. Twilight and a belly full of Mexican always nudged Viral toward pontificating reflection. In his mind's eye he replayed the synchrony of Smooshy and Alan's allusion to Family Feud, the perfect moment in which his eyes met Gyn's across the table. What had spoken to them both, at that exact second, to coordinate their sight, he wondered. Time was consistent but timing was always a surprise. A single entity acting alone only knew time through the succession of its thoughts, its heartbeats. But a group of entity's understood time through its impact on its members. One woman's period was a nuisance, but two women's concurrent ovulations was a sign of something bigger. How did a virus understand, let alone interpret, time?

Viral had chewed on his thoughts like a marbled piece of mutton while the others cast recriminations over who had ordered the Snapple Ice Tea. As Plank, Farooq, and Smooshy locked horns and elbows over the drink, and Alan, Aleph, Gyn, and Avril tugged at their hips and shirt sleeves, Viral walked slowly toward the white board.

He pulled the dry erase marker from Dr. Hackman's loose grip and undid the top. From behind him, seated in a chair against the paisley patterned wall of the Ramada conference room, Monica watched him, intrigued. As he stood before the white board, dwarfed by the diagram Dr. Hackman had illustrated, Viral summoned the voice of nature to imbue him with the secret of life. To quicken enlightenment he exhaled and breathed in a full chest of the marker's fumes. The ruckus behind him dulled as the blood inside his capillaries rushed with the power of oceans. He saw Tyler Osterhauf in a bathrobe on the back of his eyelids. He opened his mouth and a butterfly clawed its way out. It spread its wings to take flight, revealing a script tattooed across its body. The letters were G, U, A, and C. Tyler smiled, winked, and humped the air. Viral knew he may not have been given the secret to life, but the secret to death may have just found him.