Phoebe Harkness Omnibus

by James Fahy

  If one of the Pale ever did manage to infiltrate BL1, get past the DNA scan, bypass elevator security, fool a palm and iris scan, and make it to the corridor, they would be in flames before they made it halfway along and would arrive at the other end as a charred microwave meal.

  The doors at the far end led into the lab proper where Lucy, our 19 year old medical intern, was waiting for us with my supervisor, Trevelyan. Lucy looked monumentally relieved to see us. The poor girl had no doubt been getting the sharp end of Vyvienne’s tongue while they waited for us to show. Lucy was a kind and gentle soul, and didn’t deserve that. No one did. I nodded a hello as I shrugged out of my jacket and grabbed a lab coat. “Where is she?” I asked, not bothering with further pleasantries.

  Trevelyan, standing with her arms folded, glared at Griff and me murderously. She was a large, heavy-set woman, expensively dressed in what she would no doubt consider a power-suit. She looked like the kind of no-nonsense woman who would have been head girl and captain of her school’s hockey team, and who wouldn’t have thought twice about breaking both your legs with the stick if occasion arose.

  “Your experiment?” she snorted humourlessly. “She’s everywhere. That’s the issue, Harkness.”

  “Poor Angelina,” Lucy murmured, looking genuinely downcast.

  I followed them to the glass-walled cubicle which served as a holding pen, or less frequently, as a mortuary. The usually pristine and clear white tabletop was a bloodbath. I have a strong stomach, but even I was momentarily taken aback. It looked for all the world as though someone had filled a large water balloon with chunky tomato sauce and lobbed it joyfully into the space. Spatters arced across the walls and soiled the floor. The work surfaces were smeared and painted gloopy red. In the centre of the chaos stood a wire cage, roughly twice the size of a shoebox. It was twisted out of shape and convulsed, like some kind of grotesque modern art.

  “Good God,” I muttered, surveying the carnage. I grabbed a spatula from a nearby tray and gingerly picked through what could only be described as the remaining chunks of Angelina littering the blood-sodden desk. “When did this happen?”

  “About an hour ago,” Lucy said from behind me. Unlike Trevelyan, old iron stomach, and Griff, whose duties included far more stomach-churning things than this, she hadn’t entered the gory cubicle, but stood at the threshold in her plastic covered lab shoes as though afraid to enter. She was hugging herself and looked a little wild-eyed, clear signs of trauma – though whether from witnessing this scene or having to talk to my supervisor on her own for the last half an hour, it was impossible to tell. “I was finishing up the data reports from the Epsilon we ran yesterday afternoon, and then … bang!” Her eyes were wide. “It was so loud, like when a baked potato explodes in a microwave, you know? I screamed.”

  My spatula had found something solid in the goop. I held it up. It looked like a forkful of over-tomato-sauced pot noodle. Griff leaned over to peer past my shoulder.

  “What are we going to tell Brad?” he whispered. “He’s going to be heartbroken. They’ve been a couple since they got here.”

  The object on my spatula was a tiny severed bloody paw. I sighed. “I told you and I told Lucy,” I said patiently. “If we name the lab rats, we only end up getting attached to them.”

  4

  I left Griff and Lucy the glamorous job of mopping up the gore while Trevelyan all but picked me up by my ear and dragged me to the other end of the lab like a bad-tempered PE teacher.

  “What the hell is going on, Harkness?” she demanded to know in a stage whisper hiss that I knew full well my team would be listening to. “Cabal is going live with these results tomorrow, and we have test subjects exploding all over the fucking place? Jesus!”

  I leaned backwards out of her coffee breath. “Servant Trevelyan, Epsilon has tested stable at every level for the last four months,” I began, trying to sound reassuring. “This is clearly an anomaly, but I’m really not going to have an answer for you until I get a chance to run some samples. I’m not sure what else you want me to say.”

  Trevelyan’s nostrils flared. “Stable?” she repeated. “Stable? You think your vaccine is stable? In case you’re confused about what has happened here tonight, Doctor, you have just painted the walls of this room red with your miracle cure. How is that in any way stable? And I think exploding bodies and organs are more than a bloody ‘anomaly’!”

  I held up my hands in frustration. “Epsilon is not a cure. It’s not even a vaccine, it’s … or rather it will be, when we figure it out … a retardant. An inhibitor. The idea is to control the genetic branching, not reverse it. There’s no bioscience in the world that can turn a monkey into a fish, and you’re not going to turn the Pale back into people either…” Sometimes my supervisor’s shaky grasp on what my research actually entailed terrified me.

  Trevelyan pinched the bridge of her nose. “Harkness, I don’t care if it’s a cure, an inhibitor, or magical snake oil. What I care about is that Cabal have ploughed a huge budget into your pet side project here at Blue Lab, and so far, the only decent results we have are Gamma strain, which seems to paralyse the fuckers temporarily, and Epsilon, which was supposed to have significant results in time for tomorrow’s meeting.”

  “Gamma was abandoned,” I argued. “It didn’t work. It’s not a very effective inhibitor if it causes prolonged spasms followed by bouts of catatonic immobility. My work here is supposed to stop further mutation and enable some level of reintegration into society. I don’t appreciate the fact that you seem to think that weaponising its negative side effects is a good plan.”

  I pushed away from the table and crossed to my databank, logging onto my files with a swipe of my hand across the screen. God bless whichever tech-wizards fitted out the computer systems at Blue Lab – I think they may previously have worked on Star Trek. At home I have trouble operating the TV timed-recorder, but here in the lab I can totally Captain Janeway my way through the day.

  Then I noticed Trevelyan was following me. Pursuing might be a more accurate term.

  “And Epsilon?” she pressed.

  “Well, clearly not as stable as we’d hoped,” I admitted grudgingly, flicking a glance over her shoulder to where Griff was on his knees with a blood-soaked mini mop. “If I can’t get it to level out, I’m sure you can pass it off to the military as another bio-weapon gem. I can see the marketing now: ‘We can’t help or aid the afflicted, but we can blow them to pieces. All thanks to Blue Lab’.” I flicked through my electronic file notes from the previous day’s testing. Graphs and figures flew across the screen in rapid succession. There must be something in here to explain such a reaction.

  “Maybe if you give me a week … I need to run further tests, bloodwork on what remains of Angelina, find out what caused the exothermic combustion.”

  “You don’t have a week,” my boss told me, looming over the screen. “The presentation is tomorrow. I am going to have to go into a hall filled not only with the Cabal representatives but also face the press and the public. I need something to tell them.”

  My eyes flicked up from my screen. Tomorrow’s meeting was public? Well, this was news. “Why are Cabal going public already?” I asked. “We don’t have any definitive results yet.”

  “They trust we do,” Trevelyan growled. She gave me a significant look from beneath her beetling brow. Her arse was on the line, it said. Which implied that my own was dangling precariously over the edge.

  “Then they are going to be disappointed,” I said, mustering my best sympathetic face. “I mean, we can be honest and tell them research is ongoing, that we are making progress…”

  “Explosive progress,” Griff’s voice called out from across the lab, safely hidden as he was behind the cubicle of gore. I hated him slightly for a moment.

  “Cabal don’t want to see a report card for Blue Lab saying that we are all doing well in class and playing well with others, Harkness,” Trevelyan snapped. “They want updates, they want succes
sful animal tests. They want positive and measurable results. And the public want to know that Cabal is looking after them, and making the world a safer place.”

  Making the world a safer place? Please. I work for a government bio-chemistry unit, not Disney. My job is not PR. Cabal have their own spin-doctors for that. My urge to say this out loud was only just drowned out by my urge not to get fired and starve homeless on the streets.

  Instead I hit a button on my touch screen, causing my DataStream report for the last 48 hours to print out swiftly and silently elsewhere at the other end of the office. Star Trek-inspired techno-wizards can do a lot of impressive things with lab computers, but no power on earth can ever put a printer conveniently near the workstation you are actually sat at. “I can give you what we’ve got so far. I can look into this … incident … and have the results on your desk by nine.”

  “By seven.” Trevelyan turned and stormed out of the lab. “I want real results and hard data, because if I don’t have anything to take to them tomorrow night at this review, then your little vaccine project will have every penny of funding cut. Do you understand that, Harkness? It’s not my decision. They will close you down.” She clomped out of the vacuum doors with a resounding swoosh.

  “It’s not a vaccine,” I muttered under my breath through gritted teeth.

  Griff and Lucy both appeared after Trevelyan had gone, their heads poking out of the blood-spattered cubicle like nervous meerkats emerging tentatively in the calm after a thunderstorm.

  “She was pissed off,” Griff said observantly.

  “Would she really shut us down?” Lucy asked, looking worried.

  “Ignore her,” I said rebelliously. “She’s annoyed because she has to go before the board tomorrow and she is going to be humiliated if all she can say is that we’ve figured out new and exciting ways to stun and kill rats. She doesn’t give a damn about the actual work we do here, she only cares if it reflects well on her in Cabal meetings.”

  “I guess rats exploding don’t reflect well on anyone,” Griff said, peeling off his plastic apron, which was so red with gore it made him look like a modern day Jack the Ripper. “I think your boss believes advances in science are made by shouting loudly enough at scientists to make advances happen. Was she ever in the military?”

  I smirked despite my mood. “Not as far as I know. Powerful family though. She’s a bureaucrat, not a scientist. She does make sure the money gets thrown our way though, so we need her to keep loving us as much as she does.”

  Lucy, being an actual angel from heaven rather than a squeamish intern, had made coffee and brought me a steaming cup. “Is it true what she said about the aborted strains of the inhibitor?” she asked, concerned. “Gamma I mean. Do they really have plans to make that into a weapon against the Pale?”

  I shook my head. “Only in her Rambo fantasies. Gamma isn’t stable enough to be weaponised, even if you could get that through the ethics committee. And besides, it’s my formula, and I wouldn’t release it anyway. Blue Lab isn’t military.” I took a sip of my coffee, picking up my printouts. Eighty nine pages of them. Oh happy, happy day. “Forget about Gamma anyway, that was a dead end. We need to go over everything and figure out where Epsilon is going wrong. And we need to do it by seven. Trevelyan needs to be able to tell the board some good news.”

  Griff looked at his watch. “That’s three hours from now.”

  Fuck, I thought genteelly to myself. “I’ll throw in a lot of extra-sciencey words in my report. They’ll lap it up,” I said briskly. “Maybe a pie chart. Board members love pie charts.”

  “Griff, I’m going to need your brain on these.” I handed him a sheaf of papers. “Run the numbers again, see what we missed, cross it with the DNA bank for subjects T1 to T11. All the rats, even Jennifer.”

  He groaned, but quietly. I looked up to Lucy, who stared back at me wide-eyed and expectant.

  “We will be needing a lot more coffee,” I told her.

  5

  It was close to midday when I stumbled back into my tiny flat on the other side of town. I had thrown together everything we could find on Epsilon, and had managed to find a reason behind the extreme reaction suffered by subject T10, otherwise known as Angelina, which handily could only be coherently expressed in pure maths. My boss couldn’t argue with that, and neither could the board members. The report had been on Trevelyan’s desk by 7.30. Oddly, she hadn’t been in her office. Her assistant, a dangerously-efficient woman called Melanie, whose pristine and immaculate appearance always managed to make me feel a slovenly helpless mess despite the fact that she was briskly pleasant, informed me that she hadn’t been in all day. I was slightly pissed by this, as I had been bracing myself in the elevator all the way up for the screaming and spittle. I’d planned and practised all of my rebuttals.

  Now I discover that she must have gone straight home after leaving us in the lab, probably to go back to bed, leaving us all to sweat through the wee hours of the morning getting together a report which she wasn’t even here to look at, and didn’t actually need until the meeting this evening.

  I’d left the report with the immaculately coiffed Melanie, trying my best not to hate the fact that she looked well-rested and stylishly turned out, unlike myself who hadn’t had time to brush my teeth before being dragged out of bed at three am. I resisted the urge to suggest she file it up Trevelyan’s arse, and politely complimented her brooch instead. She tried to compliment me in return, but the only adornments I was wearing were my swipe pass, on which I look like a washed out Russian figure skater turned crack whore (my own interpretation), and a biro in my hair.

  Back home, after a mercifully long shower, and reassuring myself that, while I may not be a twenty year old PA with a tiny, gravity-defying arse and elfin smile, I at least have a double doctorate and a PHD, I had collapsed back into bed. The plan being to sleep the rest of the day away. With any luck I could sleep through the entire review tonight. Thank God I didn’t have to be there – that was Trevelyan’s problem. Griff and Lucy had been given the rest of the day off too. We would work on Epsilon tomorrow. Right now, I was freshly washed, smelling of mango soap, and drifting into blessed salacious daytime sleep. I had no plans to wake up again unless there was another exploding rat drama.

  As things turned out, what happened was worse.

  6

  Good news in my life always seems to come by phone.

  “Dr Harkness? It’s Melanie Potts again. Sorry to disturb your evening, but I’ve been instructed by the board to advise you that due to Director Trevelyan’s unwarranted absence, you are to give the Blue Lab report this evening at the college.”

  Great. This is what I get for being the head of the bloodwork department. Just so we’re clear, even having ‘happy birthday’ sung to me by work colleagues makes me want to disappear into a hole in the ground, so this was hardly my idea of a calm and relaxing evening. I’m not a fan of the public eye. I mentally made notes to find inventive ways to make my boss suffer when she resurfaced from wherever the hell she had dropped off the map.

  A couple of hours later, I stood in the wings of the oak panelled and venerable lecture theatre of the Pepys Library, waiting to go and face roughly a hundred expectant faces with a report which I had invented only hours earlier and which was mainly theoretical supposition. I should have just brought a rat and made it explode. Show and tell is always more entertaining.

  “Why am I here again?” I asked Lucy, who was darting around in what I had mentally dubbed ‘backstage’, carrying my notes and reports. “I mean, I know why I’m here, that’s not a philosophical question; what I mean is, why specifically me?”

  “Well, I guess until Director Trevelyan turns up, you’re the authority, Doc,” Lucy said. “Do you want me to get you a drink of water before you go on?” She looked genuinely worried for me, or possibly for herself. I was representing the entire department after all, whether I wanted to or not. I shook my head. “No, thanks. Vodka might have swayed me,
for courage, but water, I will just need to pee halfway through.”

  “You’ll do fine.” Lucy straightened my papers in my hand. “You look great, Doc. Very chic.” She smiled at me encouragingly. I thought for a moment she might punch me in the arm like a football coach.

  We were in the Second Court at Magdalene College, in the lecture hall situated in the large lower ground floor of the Pepys. It was 7.30pm and I was about to deliver the Blue Lab findings and development to an audience of Cabal board members, fellow scientists, academics, the press and the public. Trevelyan had never gone AWOL before. I wondered if she were punishing me for being smart-mouthed earlier. I never did know when to know my place.

  I had tried to look a little more professional that I had appeared this morning. I was wearing my most serious pantsuit in pale charcoal, and had swept my hair up into a sleek style I saw on some late night NBC show and now refer to as my ‘ice queen lady lawyer hair’. I looked every inch the professional and well turned out scientist, right down to the frameless glasses.

  “Let’s just get this over with, and we can make the voodoo doll of Trevelyan when I get back,” I said.

  I waited for my cue, being introduced by some professor of the college whose name had been told to me but which I had now completely forgotten. He was explaining Director Trevelyan’s sad absence this evening due to ill health, but reassuring the crowd that to present the findings he was honoured, truly honoured, to have the illustrious paratoxicologist currently spearheading the Blue Lab’s R&D program, Doctor Fiona Harkness.

  I entered to applause, shook his hand on stage and took my place behind the podium, staring out at the lecture hall. It was packed. Tiers of seats like an amphitheatre rose around me on three sides. I had no idea who was who in the sea of faces which stared expectantly back up at me. I could tell where the press were, as they stood at the back of the lecture hall, up near the doors. TV had been given limited access, I saw. Channel Seven and the official Cabal network. I waited for the applause to die down, which it did very quickly, and leaned into the microphone.