"Viral, what up, boi?" Plank said emerging from the second bedroom. He was pulling latex gloves off his hands that smacked like a paddle off a freshman's bottom. The goggles perched on the top of his forehead struck Viral as eerily similar to horns.

"Nothing, Plank --"

"It's Plahnk, like the --"

"--Like the constant, right," Viral said, finishing the signature rebuke. "Gyn was just showing me what she's learned about the virus."

Plank hopped on to the counter of the bar-turned-wash station. "Right on. Turkish delight is definitely a svengali when it comes to the electrophoresis," he said.

Viral wondered, did he just wink? "What's electric 'o penis?" He asked.

Plank guffawed and Gyn's cheeks turned pink. "Electrophoresis, homey," Plank said, hopping down from the countertop and approaching. Running his finger under Gyn's chin he said, "Gynie in a bottle here magnetized a block of ager with a current to run a fingerprint on Emir's DNA."

Gyn clasped her hands behind her back and looked at her feet. "Did Emir consent to that?" Viral asked.

"I mean the dude's barely holding on so I doubt he put up much of a fight to Treyna's insistince. She can be very convincing."

Viral wondered, did this dude just wink again? "I didn't know Emir was suffering so much," he said.

"Oh yeah," Plank said, "Gyn here's got the under on 5 days."

Viral was shocked. He couldn't imagine the woman who had wrapped him in such warmth minutes prior could have even earlier placed a wager on a man's life. Again, he found himself vacillating toward the strangers in whose company he'd been thrust between wariness and trust.

"Did Gynny happen to mention what I'd been working on in the back?" Plank asked.

"I didn't know so I couldn't tell him" Gyn said, demurely.

Did she wink, too? Viral wondered.

"Oh right that's because I wanted to see how high your bosom heaved when I hit you with the miraculous findings," Plank said.

Giggling, Gyn swatted Plank's arm.

Rat-a-tat-typing on the keyboard to Gyn's laptop, Plank brought up an email where he'd sent himself the results. Turning to Gyn and Viral, he said, "The virus in Emir's cells is a high percentage match for what the WHO is calling --"

"Wuhan 1. Gyn knew that already," Viral interrupted. Gyn's shoulders hiccuped at the thrust behind VIral's voice.

"Uhh, yeah, okay, so what I also found was that a significant portion of the non-functional protein coding genes are similar to --"

"RAT-G13, another bat coronavirus," Viral said, jumping in again.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

"Viral --" Gyn started.

"It's all good, Gynny," Plank said. "We're all on the same team here. It's important that we share information." Plank stared through Viral with an edge that made Viral wonder if Plank was daring him to keep silent about his mysterious trip to the bathroom in Viral and Alan's hotel room.

"So you didn't find anything that Gyn didn't already know?" Viral said, sticking his chin out further than he ever had.

"It's not a competition," Gyn said.

"Oh, but it is, Gyn and Tonic," Plank said. Turning his back toward the two of them, Plank began typing again into Gyn's computer. The clickety-clack underscored his voice like the snapping snare drums of an infantry march.

"Gynny," Plank continued, "Am I correct in assuming that because you confirmed the genomic similarities between Wuhan 1 and RAT-G13, that you also confirmed the similarities between its functional proteins and those of SARS-CoVid -1?

"Yes," she said.

"Interesting," Plank said.

"Why?" Gyn asked.

"Because my transcriptomic and PCR assays show at least three mutation sites concentrated in the S protein codon of Wuhan 1," Plank said, facing Gyn and Viral, crossing his arms smugly across his chest.

"Mutation is the heart of evolution," Gyn said.

"That may be," Plank said, crossing back to the countertop and hopping on to it to reclaim his seat. He began picking beneath the nails of his left hand and, with his right, flicking the grime into the empty coffee cannister that had been used for collecting used sugar packets and stirrers. "But even Gyn must know that the S protein has been recognized as the most stable section of the coronavirus strain."

Viral looked at Gyn, and she nodded. "That's right. It's consistent among many coronaviruses," she said.

"No doubt," Plank said, his elbows on his knees. "So why exactly three mutations and why concentrated around the spike?"

"Chance," Viral said.

"Of the tens of thousands of nucleotides in the makeup of the virus; of the thousands of codons responsible for the expression of proteins; why only three mutations, and why only around the single most important element of the virus to eukaryotic infection?"

"Chaos is random," Viral said.

"Exactly," said Plank.

"So you're saying this was...designed?" Gyn asked.

"I'm not concluding; I'm presenting. And the evidence that I've been faced with suggests a non-stochastic distribution of evolutionary mutation events," Plank said.

Viral allowed Plank's statement to settle admist the folds of his grey matter. Non-stochastic distribution...Viral's mind wandered into and through its recesses back into the lecture hall of his course on Data Structures and Algorithms. The class was required learning for all freshmen in the computer science path at his university. The second semester, in January of 2020, began with an exercise the adjunct professor an "Introduction to the Future."

The exercise required students to create a statistical model to predict the distribution of blood types throughout a population. Fundamentally, Viral learned, the solution could not be exact. Using his background in Fuzzy Math, the adjunct explained to the students that probabilistic outcomes were as accurate as exact answers in a long enough time-frame. Viral had gotten a C on the assignment because he could not wrap his understanding around the concept of a time-frame that was long "enough".

He had even gone to the adjunct's office hours held at an Einstein Bros bagel and coffee chain to glean further clarity on the question of "enough" in regard to domains of scientific analysis. The adjunct told him stochastic modelling leaned into the randomness of nature; it did not try to control it.

So much, it seemed to Viral, in the past seventy-two hours had come down to questions of control: who had it; what was it; who wanted it; how long could it last? The virus was a bucking bronco strapped with a time-bomb; if researchers couldn't pin down the exact nature, cause, and execution of the virus quickly enough then the bug would transform beneath their microscopes into a variant at least as deadly as the last.

But, Viral thought, if the evolution of Wuhan 1 was not random, if it indeed was a hybrid between a human coronavirus and a bug native to wild bats, then its future may be as predictable as its past. "Where are the assays?" Viral asked Plank.

Plank stilled his swinging legs from the edge of the countertop. "Why?" he asked.

And Viral said, "Because I want to run an experiment."