The sample

The light is off at the office, but it is not dark. Street lamps enter through the half-open curtains at an acute angle, turning the night into a sleepy gloom. Vague shapes can be seen in the room, if looked from the right angle. Four rectangular tables, one for each corner, with their respective chair, screen, keyboard and metal cabinet. Posters on the wall can be seen but not read in the low light. An aquarium lounges on one of the cabinets, walls covered in algae scum and with a low buzz from the oxygenation pump. It is clearly in need of a cleanup.

Work tables, like houses, show signs of the personality of their users. One of them is neat, piles of paper arranged in rows and plastic shelves, with post-its on the screen serving as reminders for future or past events. It has a stapler on the left corner, an essential tool for the well-structured head that arranges documents by topic, relevance and priority. The owner of this table wakes up within seconds of hearing the alarm, to keep on track with the schedule.

The table to the right holds an indefinite amount of stapled scientific publications and folders piled up in a messy ziggurat. Post-its, scraps of paper and small notebooks can be found at any random point. This points to either a tangled mind that can’t keep two thoughts in a row, or to a sharp mind with a different definition for what order means. Often, it is both at the same time.

A third table is devoid of any sign of life. Unused or abandoned, a thin layer of dust reflects what little light enters through the window as if it was powder snow. Thin enough that it could not have been deposited over a long period of time. This place was alive until very recently, but now is found in ruins and speaks of absence. Someone has left, permanently.

The fourth table in this office is special. For one, it does not contain any loose paper. A single dark blue notebook lays to the right, a pen keeping it half open on its latest written page. To the left, a closed laptop shines a small red pilot light. It is not off, but simply taking a small rest. It is not the only thing recharging batteries in the room. Between machine and paper, a pair of worn-out boots lay at the border of the table, barely keeping balance. This is what makes it special: it is the only table occupied this late at night in the entire research institute.

The researcher is not totally sleeping. He plays with the waves of dreams, narrowly avoiding them as they push and pull and lull him into its depths. Neither conscious nor unconscious. Eyes shut tight but the body kept the perfect balance between the reclined chair and the feet on the table. A tightrope walker between worlds. This is not the first time he has kept vigil at this table. He has been there the previous night, the one before, and nearly every single one for the past six months. He is not a night-shift worker or an owl. He arrives every morning at his post at 9AM sharp. His work has not finished yet, just like every day.

In the semi-lit room, he appears to be contours of a shadow. Not even a presence in the room. Furniture with a heartbeat. For those with eyes and wit, he is much more than that. His muddy boots talk of the awful weather. The rain has lasted long enough he does not care to clean them anymore. The frayed edges and tip point to a preference for walking. The three kilometers trip between home and workplace is the only fresh air available to breathe most days. Besides, walking alone at night heals the soul. Everybody knows this.

Next, his jeans are old and well-fitting. Something you can wear every day without people noticing you have not done laundry in several weeks. The gray sports jacket keeps him warm in the cool room, and the spacious pockets come handy to keep the phone and all the other tools when working in the laboratory. A long oil stain runs down the chest from lunch. Gas station sandwich with barbeque sauce, as usual. The sleeves are covered in old coffee stains.

Finally, his face. Scruffy six-day beard. Cracked lips from biting. Bags under the eyes so deep they can only be created by years of late nights. A red skin spot next to the left eye, scratched raw due to a nervous compulsion borne from stress. Standing next to him you would notice he has nice body odor. He takes a shower every morning religiously. Any other defects in his presentation are not caused by sloppiness or lazy behaviour. He just does not have the time to take care of his hygiene or health. His vision has worsened notably, but the glasses work good enough to read the labels in the tiny tubes on the lab bench. He cannot smell anything with the flu he got last weekend. The bad coughing with phlegm has lasted since last Christmas, but it has not worsened yet. It can wait.

A few health issues are the least of his problems. He must finish his thesis by the deadline appointed by the committee or there will be consequences. He is in his third year, the last in this university. The rejection letter for his contract extension is on the top drawer of the cabinet. Any delays and he will not receive his doctorate, and his advisor has already told him there will not be any other opportunities in his lab group. His career path would die in the embryo. His parents would call him a failure again, and this time he cannot beat the allegations. His girlfriend would berate him. Distance and absence have strained the relationship to its limits. The chats are full of empty words, recriminations and regret. Making all of that suffering be for nothing would be the proverbial straw that breaks backs.

He will not be a failure.

All of this can be seen in the sleeping figure. In the tension of his muscles, in the slightly emaciated face that marks sharp cheekbones. In the tense jaw and the too-straight back even in sleep, strings taut to the snap point. He sleeps, but he does not rest.

Suddenly. A strident melody cuts through the silence in the room. It comes from the phone in the young man’s pocket. The device screams, vibrates and shines at 2:31 AM as instructed. It is the alarm, saying it is time to take the next sample for the experiment. The researcher jerks in surprise, pushing the legs against the table. The chair finds itself on a very precarious balance on the two back legs, a somewhat unstable position. Panic surfaces on the man’s face while he makes windmills of his arms and screams silently. He is about to fall back and break his neck… until gravity pushes him forward and he staggers to his feet using the momentum of the fall. He painfully hits the corner of the table with his hip and finds a stable position. Hands on his knees, heart pounding, he takes deep breaths as his eyes struggle to focus on the gloomy office.

The alarm startled him, for sure. But that was not all. There was a dream right before that. Something terrifying. He remembers a huge roar, blinding light, a fear that clawed deep into his bones. He cannot remember the details. Gulping, he gathers his thoughts and remembers. The sample. He has to hurry, this experiment is time-sensitive. Sighing, he grabs the blue notebook from the table and shambles out of the door.

The corridor is darker than the room. Rays of moonlight enter through the window to the right. No streets on that side, just a garden. To the left, there is a pitch black corridor, with evenly spaced office doors on both sides and a bright spot at the end. The man could turn on the lights with a flick of the switch, but it does not really matter to him. He has done this path so many times he could walk it blindfolded. Stay down the center of the corridor to avoid the trash cans and everything goes well. He hurries to the light. It comes from a set of spiral stairs going downwards in a wide curve. He walks down the stairs, fumbling with his notebook as he uses his right arm to grab the railing and the left to not be blinded by the halogen lamps from the lab, spilling out of the semi-transparent door. He passes his magnetic key to the lock, and is invited inside by a green pilot light and a playful musical note from the security system. He opens the door.

A sterile-white corridor hurt his tired eyes despite the protective hand. Too white, too bright. He pushes forward anyway while his eyes adapt, to the third door to the left. Even blind he can easily find his home and hell for the past few years: laboratory room 1.3. A granite laboratory bench occupies the center of the room, machines crowding all available space. PCR machines, centrifuges, spectrophotometers. Metal closets line the walls, and an extraction hood is tightly fit on the farthest corner of the room. Several incubators pile up on the nearest wall, shaking cloudy liquids at comfortable temperatures for optimal growing conditions, and multiple cables and pipes scurry through the wall and ceiling, moving flammable gasses and refrigeration liquid while avoiding the AC system in the center.

The man lays the notebook on top of a machine and kneels down in front of one of the incubators. He hears a hiss, a high-pitch sound that barely stands out from the background, but his mind does not register it. In a room so full of working devices and pipes, it means nothing. He opens the oven-shaped incubator and takes out two dozen small Erlenmeyer flasks to a tray next to it, one at a time. He staggers as he picks up the tray and rises. The glass is heavier than it looks, and he is careful to avoid tipping over any flask. THe walks toward the extraction hood, the only sterile area available in the laboratory. He needs to take the sample without contamination. The hissing becomes more noticeable now, but his tired mind picks its fights. He chooses to ignore any potential failing equipment until the next morning, when his colleagues can take care of it instead. Drops the tray on a table, connects the air extraction unit, waits until stable air flow has been established and opens the hood. Sterilize the surface, put the flasks inside, the pipettes, the lighter and the saline. The hissing noise is drowned by the air pump, as his addled mind notices there is something weird about that sound after all. He has developed an instinct about how everything should be in the laboratory by virtue of all the time he spends there, and something is definitely wrong. He has never heard that sound from a machine, but it rings a bell. He has heard that sound before. If he did not have the flu he could smell out the leak, if there was one. The young man frowns as he sits down on the work stool, sterilising his hands with ethanol as he puts the burner connected to the gas line by pipe. He grabs the lighter from the table, and he tries to turn it on. This is one of the habits he has picked up, a ritual that he always does before doing sterile work. It helps him focus his mind on the task at hand and exclude distractions. Everything that happens after the lighter has to be done carefully. It is a bad habit, since he has just used ethanol on his hands, which is extremely flammable, but that just adds to the need for focus.

Flammable.

In a second, it comes to him. He knows what is making the hissing sound. It is the open gas line. It should not be open. He must have left it open by mistake last time he took a sample, two hours ago. Cold sweat runs down his temple as panic sets in. He turns rapidly to his right hand, holding a burning lighter. The room catches on fire, he screams and the world is flooded with light and fire and pain. In the last second of his life, his mind holds a single thought that consumes him with shame and sadness: he is definitely not going to reach the deadline on time.

The alarm stridently breaks the silence of the office, and the young man stirs. His leg tweaks, and his chair almost falls backwards. Almost. The chair drops forward with added impulse, and the man is pushed against the table. He hits the corner with the hip, grimacing with pain and shock. Breathing heavily, he tries to slow down his heart rate. The alarm startled him, but there was something else that woke him up and made his body react. He was dreaming, but he cannot remember what. He remembers that it was bright and warm and scary, but nothing else. He checks the phone. It’s 2:31 AM. Right. He needs to go take a sample.