The tightness in the chest faded from Lucy, only to give way to a feeling of lightness in her stomach. It was understandable; she was approaching the Director’s office. She had to face him sooner or later, and she couldn’t slow down to delay the meeting or back down; her sandals echoing as she walked had surely made the man aware of her proximity; he worked nights with the door of his office ajar.
She pictured him waiting for her, sitting with his elbows on the desk, his hands clasped under his nose, and the sour expression she knew well. The Director’s expression said nothing but: ‘I’m sick of having to talk to you.’ And she usually felt like saying, ‘It doesn’t make me happy to do it either.’ However, he was the one who led everything, and even when she wasn’t just another employee but a prestigious scientist, she had to behave like his subordinate.
You’re still a submissive girl; you haven’t changed a bit; her mother, with whom she had been estranged for years, spoke to her thoughts. Submissive or not, she couldn’t disrespect her boss; he had been waiting for her for about half an hour, and she couldn’t ignore him, could she?
In her hands she carried a folder that read Binary Protein Project, with several documents inside; she had picked it up from her office after her fleeting visit to the nursery. She shook it, anxious, and mentally prepared herself to see the director.
It was possible that if she confessed the real reason for her delay—not the part of having passed by the nursery, but that she’d learned about the loss of her pregnancy—perhaps she could avoid the rebuke he surely had ready for her. That look of contempt and that tone of voice, calm but with an underlying message that said, ‘I hate you,’ hurt more than any scolding. Perhaps telling him about her loss could make him more sensitive and…
No. Scrawny Lucy lowered her gaze. She was tired. If she had to put up with being yelled at, no matter how unfair the reason was, so be it. If she had to talk about the loss of her baby, that was another issue. Doubts assaulted her, and she was flogged again by the terror that chewed her guts. Then she recalled what that horrible person she had as a director told her when she’d suffered her second miscarriage, “Face it, you’ll never be a mother.”
Doubt resolved. For the moment, she’d keep the loss to herself.
In front of her was a door with a plaque that read: Dr. T.—Director.
She gathered strength, more than she’d needed to enter the nursery; she pushed the door—which was, indeed, ajar—and took the first step into the room.
The office was in semidarkness.
“Bernardo?” she named him.
It turned out the Director was not waiting for her with his hands clasped on the desk, or with his eyes ready to shoot those bullets of contempt at her, with the face that said: ‘It’s been over half an hour since I asked for you to come. Don’t you know how much I hate to wait?’ The man was standing by the projector, watching the blueprints of a building displayed on the wall, with one hand on his chin and thousands of ideas behind his glasses.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Bernardo Templeton, according to the badge that hung from the chest of his white lab coat, was so deep in his own thoughts that it took him a moment to realize that she had entered.
“About time,” that was all he said.
The clock showed 5 minutes past midnight, and Bernardo was still wearing the same coat he’d put on eighteen hours earlier, and he still wore it all buttoned up. He was a long-faced man with premature baldness, a little taller than her, and just as scrawny.
“Tell me what they say,” he asked, waving one of his long fingers at the documents; he didn’t even bother to take them. He always did the same.
Lucy didn’t need to open the folder to explain its contents; she herself had run the tests and written the report. She took a long breath, encouraging herself to speak as if nothing was happening.
“What we thought,” she said. “The comparison between the behavior of the twins and the stars in a binary solar system couldn’t have been more accurate.”
“Two stars orbiting each other,” Bernardo said, “so close they exchange matter until they become one. Or a very dense star cannibalizing its partner, rushing it to collapse.”
“Something similar to what’s going on here,” Lucy continued. “The Binaries’ brain... Their neurotransmitters act in a synchronized way; if one of them experiences an increase in serotonin, then the other will suffer a relapse of it, even when there is no physical link between them. Prior to the… intervention we performed on Brun, we had detected irregularities in his tyrosine levels. We can now confirm that, during that same time, Broga suffered from excessive production of norepinephrine, epinephrine, and dopamine.”
Bernardo noted. “Three neurotransmitters that are synthesized from tyrosine,” he said. “That could explain Binary-C’s schizophrenic outbursts.”
Broga, she corrected him in her thoughts. His name is Broga, not Binary-C.
Bernardo dropped a gurgle that was intended to be a burst of laughter. “Now that the mind of the Binary-R is…let’s say, absent,” he pointed out, “the Binary-C likes to do art. Two people experiencing opposite sensations at the same time, and basically, through the same body.”
Lucy nodded. “Their synchronization helped metabolize the first dose of Primary Plasma,” she said. “However, studies have confirmed your fears.”
And at that moment, she noticed how hope escaped from Bernardo with a sigh.
“The drugs situation, right?” he said and asked for the files to see the result with his own eyes.
With the Director’s focus on the documents, Lucy took the opportunity to give herself the luxury of smiling. That the things turned out as Bernardo would have hoped, but not as he would have wished used to cause her a secret joy, and since there were few times that this happened, she couldn’t let this opportunity pass her by. Trying not to show how much she enjoyed giving him this news, she announced, “Now that the Binaries’ DNA works in conjunction with that of the Primary Plasma, long-term abuse of sedatives and other chemicals would alter their neurotransmitters and proteins significantly. You won’t be able to keep those children in a constant vegetative state, as you wanted. You’ll have to give them autonomy, keep them healthy, and take the trouble to monitor them until they reach the physical maturity that we need for the project to be a success.”
The Director closed the folder with the files and threw it on his desk. He was so disappointed with these latest results that he made no disparaging comments. Better.
“Alright. All the more reason should we put this into operation,” Bernardo said and pointed at the photo projected on the wall. A lab room with large glass containers, tall and oval, next to white ceramic tubs connected to each other through pipes. Everything looked very new and clean. And, of course, very gray.
“What we see?” she asked without real interest.
“Our new home in New Somalia,” replied the Director. “We’ll move to Pannotia at the end of the month.”