"What am I looking at?" Viral asked.

"The virus," Gyn answered. She was so close to him Viral could feel the whiff of her breath on his neck; the warmth from her body bared but for a sports bra from the waist up wrapped around him like a hot pocket.

He doubled down on his focus, staring at the petri dish.

"Um, I don't see anything," Viral said.

"I would be worried if you did," Gyn said. "The virus is molecular, orders of magnitude smaller than a single cell."

Tugging at his arm she pulled him to the near end of her repurposed work bench. "To see anything we have to use machines like this," she said.

Viral put his eyes to the machine Gyn presented. Upon a flick of a switch, the machine began to hum; a glow danced across Viral's cornea.

"What is it?" He asked.

"It's the virus broken up into its constituent parts."

"It's dead?"

"If it ever was alive..."

Gyn explained the details of the procedure she learned while working as an after school intern in a research lab in Istanbul during the MERS outbreak of the early aughts.

"In addition to his blood, we took a sample of Emir's bronchoalveolar lavage fluid, his spitum. Looking for bits of the virus we ran the specifimen through deep meta-transcriptomic sequencing. In other words, we tried to make puzzle pieces out of the virus' remains. Then, using a software package we looked for what unified viral genome most likely matched the virus in Emir's blood."

"But Monica told us it was Covid," Viral said.

Raising a finger, Gyn nodded. She moved around Viral's shoulder and he turned to follow her with his head. She grabbed the sides of her laptop and pivoted its screen toward Viral. "Yes, but by using a process called reverse-transcription polymerase chain-reaction, we were able to confirm a match to the same genome Ankur had on his thumb drive."

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"So he was right," Viral said.

"Not only that," Gyn said, leaning in toward Viral, oblivious to the hypnotic sway of her bosom clasped beneath its sports bra. "By lining up all the pieces of the virus' RNA, deducing its complementary DNA source, we were able to locate a genomic similarity to two other viruses -- SARS 1 and RATG13, a coronovirus exclusive to bats."

"So it's a hybrid?" Viral asked.

Gyn smiled. "That's good," she said. "You're catching on quick." The affirmation stoked Viral's posture.

"So knowing where it comes from means we now know how it works?" he asked.

Gyn crossed behind him to the suite's bar where the team had refurbished the sink into a wash station. Rubbing her hands with soap Gyn continued, "Not yet. Because of my work with MERS I've decided to focus on the virus' similarities to previous coronavirus pandemics. Plank's in the bedroom with his own setup going through the mechanics of the bat bug."

"Is it okay that's he alone in there with the virus?" Viral asked.

"Plank knows more about bioinformatics that any of us. I'm sure he's fine," Gyn said.

Viral bit his tongue before he expressed the mistrust percolating in his bones toward Plank. There was no need at the moment, he determined, to throw a wrench into a harmonious working arrangement -- especially one from which his father and the world stood so much to gain.

"If I can determine just how closely the coding for MERS and Covid are related," Gyn said, "Then maybe we'll have a chance to figure out how stopping one could stop the other."

"So the battle's almost won," Viral said.

"Not really," said Gyn, drying her hands with a paper towel. "A difference of just a few nucleotides can mean the difference between a headache and a cytokine storm. If Covid is just different enough from SARS or MERS then whatever similarity exists could be moot."

Viral tapped his chin and wondered. Gyn's use of the word "coding" sent his mind racing into the borderlands between computation and biology. What would a viral genome coded in a programming language he understood look like? Recollecting the notes of his favorite high school class, AP Biology, he ran through the exercise of how DNA became proteins in his cells.

First, messenger RNA used the DNA as a template to transfer the code out of the nucleus. Messenger RNA then visited the ribosome where it instructed transfer RNA of the order in which to align amino acids. The reticulum in which the ribosomes housed themselves then conducted an elegant, mysterious folding ritual on each chain of amino acids, determining the exact protein it would become. RNA, therefore, was like the assembly language, the machine code the body understood. DNA, on the other hand, was the higher order syntax, the language used by the cell to send instructions to its factories...

"What are you thinking?" Gyn asked, approaching him, her chin tilted up toward his. Viral refocused his gaze toward her eyes, which seemed to sparkle like her skin in the electric light. "Coding..." Viral said.

"What about it?"

"I don't know, but there's something just so beautiful about it."

Viral wondered if Gyn thought he meant the wonder of the body or the wonder of just hers. One, the other, or both, Viral resolved, he'd get inside to uncover the seudctive, cloistered, intimate secrets of life on Earth.