Chaos, Viral thought. It was chaos; madness wrapped around a nutmeg of disorder, tucked and woven like a pair of wired earbuds knotted in a pocket.

The electromagnetic crystallography that Aleph had conjured and shared with Plank revealed a blastocyst of amino acids intertwined with the placid complexity of a Mobius strip. When Viral had asked Aleph to explain what it was he was about to see, she spent fifteen silent minutes diagramming with a black, felt pen on a linen napkin. Gyn had tried to tell her the napkin was not disposable but Plank had shushed her. More and more Viral had begun to wonder how and how much of Aleph's reticent language Plank had come to understand.

After Plank had shared his discovery of the three mutation sites on the Wuhan 1 functional proteins -- S, M, E, and N -- Viral led them back into the suite's bedroom Plank had repurposed into his wing of the lab. Aleph was already inside, having previously completed the computational graphics with which she had busied herself after playing with enervated viral strains beneath the hood. When Viral asked Aleph what she had been working on, she pointed to the empty space on her wrist where one would wear a watch. "She wanted to see what made the coronavirus family tick," Plank said.

Viral had not considered the virus, the mortal enemy ravaging his father's lung tissue, as a component in a family unit. Sons, daughters, parents, children, in-laws -- the composite parts of what he had come to know as family did not, in his mind, lend themselves to easy analogy with a virus. Yet, if his colleagues were correct, if a virus was not a living thing but rather a parasite making do, freeloading from a host, then maybe the term family was apropo. Perhaps like human family members, viral strains within a family tree harbored preferences and biases both for and against other members of their clan. If a virus was alive, perhaps it had a personality, if not a personhood, that operated according to the paradigms of Skinner and Freud, according to the paradigms Viral's own father, Dr. Mohdi Chodha, had helped to popularize in clinical academicia twenty years before.

Following Aleph's back of the napkin introduction to electro magnetic crystallography and the role of computer vision algorithms to hypothesize surrogates for unknown carboxyl bonds, Viral finally set his eyes to the machine which had revealed to Plank the pecedillos of Wuhan's S protein.

And therein lie the chaos; therein lie the spaghetti strapped Coriolis of a protein wrapped in and around itself like the vintage tinsel at the bottom of a Christmas box buried in an attic.

As he stared at the Covid-19 S-protein, he considered the difference between a spike and a crown. With Aleph's help, Plank had successfully stained the simulated image of the capsid with a digital dye isolating the protein's points of probabilistic mutation.

"How'd you know to look for these specific mutations?" Viral asked Plank.

"I didn't," Plank said.

Viral looked to Aleph, who shrugged.

"I don't follow," said Gyn, "You told us you had identified three mutations in the genes coding for the virus's functional proteins."

"I didn't identify them," Plank clarified, "I located them. Someone posted a strain in the Gen Bank database that had cross referenced the Wuhan strain with various incarnations of coronaviruses from SARS to MERS and other zoonotic strains. The evidence I saw was just a histogram."

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Viral thought of the charts he had made in Python using the Matplotlib library or Sci-Kit Learn. Importing a .csv into a databricks notebook to bucket a bunch of variables into bins depending on their value.

"What did the histogram measure?" Viral asked.

"Variations in nucleotides,'" Plank said.

Viral scratched his chin, thought. He could feel Gyn looking at him, eagerly awaiting the juicy fruit of his rumination, but for once since he'd laid eyes on her heavenly breasts, he forwent foreplay for formulas.

"How did the original poster run a comparative analysis of 30,000 base pairs for so many strains," he asked.

"Sheut, damned if I know," Plank said, shrugging toward Aleph. Aleph too shrugged.

"Is it a question of computing power?" Gyn asked.

"Yes, but power can come cheap if you know where to get it," Viral said. "Time is the commodity, and being able to crunch that many comparisons in a short amount of time suggests a pretty stellar sorting method."

"It's not just check one and compare, rinse, repeat?" asked Gyn.

"No, it'd be more like check one, then check all, then compare, then rinse, repeat...not just for each nucleotide but for each potential sequence."

Aleph opened and closed her fingers like a quacking duck. Viral understood, for once.

"Yes," he said to Aleph, "like looking for differences in words not just letters."

Plank's cheeks turned red; his dark brown eyes hardened. "You're over thinking it," he said to Viral.

"Or are you under thinking it?" Viral asked.

Plank propped his elbow on the ledge of a dresser drawer. The look in his eyes begged for a tumble. Viral weighed the cons and pros of engaging.

"Someone built a model from thousands of base pairs to mimeograph the most sought after genome in the world then leaked it on the internet...where you just happened to find it?" Viral said, a quarter as a question and a third as a dare.

"I don't know if I like your tone," Plank said, easing his weight from the dresser on to his right foot. His pivot foot, Viral noticed, to pack more power behind a haymaker to Viral's already oddly shaped nose.

Gyn stepped forward toward the space between the two men, but Viral raised his hand. The manner of inches he moved stopped Gyn in her tracks. Viral wondered, is this what power feels like?

To confront Plank about his disappearance from the bathroom in the hotel room, to interrogate about the thirty stolen minutes during which no one knew of his whereabouts, Viral calculated cost and gain. The voice of his hostage negotiating camp counselor rang in his ears: the advantage lies in feigned ignorance against feigned bravado.

Sizing up Plank's stance, his loosely closing fists, his flaring nostrils, Viral erred in favor of caution. "It's a good find, Plank," he said.

"I know," Plank said.

From the corner of his eye Viral saw Gyn's chin balked. On his hand near his waist he raised a finger. Gyn bit her lip.

"I'd like to share this with the rest of the group," Viral said.

Pushing himself off the edge of the dresser, Plank stretched his arms out, yawned. "Be my guest, home slice. I already texted Treyna."

"What'd she say,?" Gyn asked.

Plank turned his head toward her and said, "She didn't."

"It's late. She's probably sleeping," Viral said.

"With Avril," Plank said, smirked.

Viral thought he saw Gyn flinch but it may have only been the flutter of his own jealous rage. Overcoming, he said to Plank, "Do you want to come back to my room and tell the others what you've found?"

Smiling, flashing small, yellowing teeth, Plank said, "Nah, this genius-ing's got me beat. I'ma turn in for the night." He crossed his left arm across his chest, plied it into a shoulder stretch with a cantelever of his right. He opened and closed his fist, presumably for circulation, Viral thought, staring at the mermaids on Plank's forearms whose chests rose and fell with each flex.

"Aleph?" Gyn asked.

But she too was lost in the intrepid dance of Plank's ink. Without meeting Gyn's eyes, Aleph shook her head no. Her straight black hair, collected into a pony with a slate scrunchy, brushed hurriedly against the collar of her lab coat. The sound reminded Viral of Dr. Hackman's flaking skin. He looked toward her and on his gaze she feigned an unconvincing yawn.

Ignorance over bravado, Viral thought. Turning his scrutiny between Aleph and Plank he thought again of Plank's mermaids. He'd staid their undulation in the pockets of his containment coat, but out of sight their smell remained, a smell of duplicity and something awful fishy.