Lab Rats

Trigger warning: discussion of animal death

Fate begins before life does, or so the theory goes.

Sperm touches egg and a north star is born. Chemicals cascade from that contact point, spreading throughout the egg cell, concentration falling with each nanometer. That dying light (composed of fibroblast growth factors 1-18, bone morphogenic proteins, secreted frizzled‐related proteins etc.), creates a cartography. Cells divide into being knowing where they sit on this map and thus, what they must become. You, the spinal nerves. You, the bones. You, the lungs. Each cell’s genetic potential is nearly unlimited, but that potential will go unused. Fate is already set. Genes fold themselves away into dark corners to be forgotten. Life unfurls.

I sit at the end of this line of differentiation, a completed being. Every choice already made. No room to maneuver in life’s perfect plan.

But I am human, mammal, vertebrate, animal. Not all life is so limited.

Bathed in the fluorescent light of a sterile flow hood, little squares of leaf shake and shimmer in a bacterial solution, taking in something new, preparing for the journey I have set them.

I reach in with sterile tweezers, removing a single square. Drying it gently, I place it on a little round plate of gel media, soaked in antibiotics and hormones and sugar. I will make this bit of leaf forget its fate, as I have already altered the bacteria it was incubating in for the last thirty minutes. I am a little god, pushing north stars around. This leaf will become something new.

Except I read then, what I had until now missed. A scrawled sharpie label, Valerie’s hand. Her E. coli. Not my A. tumefaciens, strain GV3101, transformed with vector pM1082, my angels in this heretical godhood. A mystifying, catastrophic mistake. I may as well have washed the leaves in water for all the good it will do me.

How have I missed this? How could I have taken the wrong tube from the fridge? The hot nausea of imperfection rises until my face is filled with fire. Forty minutes my mistake has been going on, me all unawares. The leaf, still gripped by my hand, trembles.

I would kill an undergrad over a blunder such as this. A bead of sweat runnels down my spine, though it is late and I am entirely alone in the lab. No one has seen. No one ever has to see this. I put down the leaf, letting out a breath. I have no choice. I cannot waste five weeks growing new Nicotiana leaves, that would have to be explained to my supervisor. I cannot explain to Valerie why her cells are gone, that gossip would infect the whole lab in hours.

When was my sin committed? When did I take that tube from the fridge? Fifty minutes ago, perhaps. I look at my watch. The digital face glows warmly at me, oblivious to my woe. Nearly midnight. I close my eyes.

If only it were as simple to transform plants as it is to reverse the last hour.

I imagine my hands, my purple gloves, my leaves, the sterile, bitter wind that blows beneath the glass of the flow hood screen and up into my face, contaminating itself as it tangles in my hair. I imagine ten thirty-five pm. Just to be safe.

I open my eyes and time has obeyed me. It is ten thirty-five pm again.

I have aged an extra hour and twenty-three minutes.

I remove a glove, reach into my pocket, and record a new entry on my phone.

The leaves are drifting in sterile water, ready for their bacterial bath. The tube of E. coli sits unused. I put it back in the fridge and take out my A. tumefaciens. This time the bathing goes smoothly. I lay each leaf gently in its place on the gel and tuck them in the warm, dark incubator to forget what they have been.

Night has a firm grip on the world by the time the lab door closes behind me. The chokehold tightens still further, making specks in the black eye of the heavens as I slip inside the shadows of my apartment and select a premade dinner from the fridge. I bathe myself in the cool light of the television, lettuce crunching between my teeth. The documentary on an ancient ecosystem collapse is interrupted by a jolt of fear.

Did I set the temperature of the incubator correctly? All is lost if I’ve made a mistake, but if I go back, I’ll have to ask security to let me in, they might report it. And I’ll have to drive all that way. My watch tells me nearly two hours have passed since I left. But I don’t have to drive. A speared cucumber waits to enter my mouth. A thousand other doubts flood in with the tide. Did I close the freezer properly? Did I switch off the spectrophotometer? Did I put my extra plates back in the fridge? One trip to the past will cure me of my doubts, but it’s probably fine. I probably did everything right, as always.

A deafening blast from the TV announces an ad break. A woman stretches her face, inspecting her microscopic wrinkles morosely.

I check one of my spreadsheets. Seven years, eight months, fourteen days, seven hours, and approximately twelve minutes. That is the toll I have paid to time since the day I learned, weeping, staring at a milk and cereal-stained rug, my mother’s keys in the front door, that time will make bargains, sliding a little extra beneath the door of the universe, just for me.

The woman in the ad rubs cream into her face beatifically, safe in the knowledge it will solve her problems.

Who wouldn’t pay two hours to ensure perfection? I won’t sleep if I don’t know, certainly that would cause worse wrinkles than losing two hours of my life.

I retreat into time.

Everything is fine in the lab, of course. But it’s always good to make sure mistakes don’t cascade. If I could leap forward again, back to my couch, I would, but time won’t make that bargain.

I close the lab door again. There was still traffic, somehow, on the wide road back to my apartment when I made the drive last time. Perhaps I should take a different route, save my time that way. I consider my options as I lock the lab.

Clattering glass and feet have me looking up. A girl strides past me, carrying beakers rattling in a bucket, still reeking of sterilization. I recognize her vaguely, from Dr. Misha’s lab. Rodents, then. I saw a talk she gave once; on the brains of baby mice. Her presentation was clear and precise as the lines of her suit jacket. She’d worn a tie and every single hair had been smoothed back from her face with obsessive precision.

She doesn’t look at me as she walks past, though we must be the only two still about at this hour. Her face is beautiful and cold, like a statistic. The sharp lines of it catch and hold the hallway’s shadows. Her hair is in a low bun, but strands have fallen loose and her eyes are red, her façade cracked and ruined. Perfection demands more than normal life can offer. I am silent as she passes.

I go home. I eat my salad. I sleep an extra ten minutes in the hopes it will make up for the hours wasted.

***

It takes several weeks for my plant leaves to forget themselves. They lose chlorophyll. The cells, no longer certain how they were organized, divide unevenly. The flat leaf bubbles up off the media until my leaves have become tiny pale-yellow clouds. Many remain stubbornly green. I discard the failures.

I use another three hours and forty-four minutes of my life when I missed a meeting with my supervisor. I have no defence for this. It was in my calendar. I was distracted by a wrinkle at the corner of my eye, and I had to make more gel media plates for my plants, and one of the undergraduates left the pH meter covered in tiny salt crystals that had to be carefully dissolved away. My supervisor was displeased in both timelines. “I’d hoped for a higher rate of transformation,” she says in the second. “I know you can do better.”

I waste more time calculating what it would cost to try again. Weeks and weeks. Farther than I’ve ever tried. Besides, I followed the protocol perfectly the first time. I know I did. There’s no point. In my first years of school, I’d held a naïve belief that science was a flawless art. It’s only recipes after all, executed precisely. Add this much antibiotic, this much sugar, this much algae powder. Add leaves. After four weeks, you will have transformed plants. But science has its own cursed magic to it. No matter how carefully you perform each step, the results are never the same twice.

It’s late when I leave. I see mouse girl again when I walk past her lab. The door is open, spilling milky white light across the hall floor. Inside, she has her head in her hands, hair loose over her face pooling on the lab bench. Perhaps her lab is less concerned over contamination than ours. Her hair is longer than I thought, dark and shining under fluorescent bulbs, it ripples and snarls wildly.

***

I only need to spend ten minutes to be on time for dinner with my mother, but I waste another fifty when she catches me in a lie. “What ever happened to that nice boy, the economics major?”

“We’re still together, mom. We’re going to the gardens tomorrow.”

“It’s the middle of winter.” She says, raising an elegantly shaped brow. “And I’ve seen no proof of him in months.”

“It’s the indoor garden, the one near the zoo. Not the park up north,” I try to correct. She doesn’t believe me, but I can’t escape immediately to correct my mistake.

Next time I try something else. “He wasn’t serious, mom.”

This opens a new door of disappointment. She shakes her head of perfect dark hair, sighing. “He was nice. Economics. Perhaps you should try a lawyer next. Or a doctor.”

“Maybe.”

She puts down her fork, salad all but untouched, folding manicured hands in her lap. “You’re twenty-seven already dear. Perhaps you’re the one who needs to get serious. Your cousin already has two children. So adorable. Your aunt keeps asking, ‘When is it your turn?’ and I don’t know what to tell her. Maybe you shouldn’t be wasting your time on this doctorate after all.”

I consider sliding time back again, but there is no answer to this most obvious imperfection of mine.  

***

I come into the lab on a Saturday morning to check on my plants. There is contamination in one of my plates, a disfiguring blob of bright pink bacteria, species unknown. Has someone been opening my plates and breathing on them? The other plates don’t look much better, my little mutants aren’t rooting, as though to spite me. Perhaps I made the media wrong.

The autoclave is busy when I arrive, fresh media in hand, ready to be purified in it’s decrepit depths. Two hours until I can use it.

I flip back time forty-five minutes, but when I get to the autoclave room again, mouse girl is there, sliding in a box of shining silver into the steaming machine. She looks waxen, as though its been some time since she last got a good night’s sleep.

“Liquid gets priority over dry loads in the morning,” I say, reading the sign above her head.

She stares, bemused, at the great beakers of stinking, sloshing media in my arms. Humiliating, that my little godhood requires I reek like a low-tide beach.

“I need these this morning,” she says.

“So do I.”

She looks me up and down and snatches her tools from the box. A safety violation. Autoclave steam is 121°C (250°F). The metal is already hot. Her tools burn her as she closes a fist around them.

Mouse girl lets out a muted whimper, nearly lost in the jangling of metal as a rain of scalpels hit the ground.

I regard the back of her head, the disheveled ponytail, strands clumping around the base. I have an irrational urge to pull it lose and fix it for her. Her hair trembles as her shoulders shake with pain. “Are you alright?” I ask, eventually.

She shakes her head, wordless, holding her hands open in her lap, the right already red and blistering.

 I look at my watch, considering. I can slide back time to favor her, but then I won’t get this media made any time soon.

A very quiet moan escapes from between her teeth, coming from somewhere deep inside her, something she won’t let out. I suppose her pain is my fault, in a way.

I close my eyes, picture time sliding back.

She interrupts me, voice so choked with tears I can hardly parse it. “Don’t! Let it happen.”

I stare and stare at her. She can’t possibly know about my bargains with time. No one knows. But she smiles, though her eyes swim with tears. “It will be fine. A lesson for me. There’s a first aid kit in my lab, can you get it?”

If she has chosen this timeline, so be it. I almost put my media in the autoclave, but that seems tasteless. I put it, and my haste, on a shelf.

Mouse girl follows me to her lab, hands held carefully in front of her as though she is offering a prayer, or awaiting a benediction.

The mouse lab is the same layout as mine, except for a huge rack of plastic buckets, each filled a third with shavings and a single white mouse. She slumps into a chair. It rolls slightly into the mouse rack and she leans against it while she directs me to the first aid kit. The mice squeak softly behind her as I retrieve burn cream and bandages. Perfectly white, with beady red eyes, a mouse watches as I rub cream into her hand, gently as I can. She flinches all the same, the soft petal of her hand trying to close, brushing my thumb.

“You do brain research on them?” I ask, to distract us both.

“Mmmh,” she says, eyes closed. “I’m trying to make a neuronal atlas, plotting out the end destination of each cell during development.”

The mouse behind her head chirps.

“I wonder what it’s like, to live as a lab mouse,” I muse, at a loss what else to say. So easy. No choices. No wrong answers.

She disabuses me of that notion at once. “That one ate her children the other day. It’s going to be three weeks before more pups are ready.” The pain in her voice is all too familiar.

           “What kind of mother eats her children?” I wonder. I finish wrapping her hand.

She turns to regard at her mice. “Maybe she’s jealous, that her children have a purpose she is denied. Or maybe she knows what that purpose is and she’s trying to protect them.” She looks back at me, defensive. “But it’s not even painful. They’re fully sedated before their heads are removed. They can’t feel anything. I make sure of it.”

“If only you could explain to them,” I say, “That there’s no perfect life waiting for them somewhere.”

“Would you believe someone, if they told you that?”

“No, I guess I wouldn’t.” I gather courage, like that needed to test a new protocol. “You could go back,” I suggest, so hesitant. “Stop her, get it right.”

For a long time she just looks at me. Then she smiles, blinding as the sun on water. “Then I never would have met you. Besides,” she says, retracting her warmth. “Getting everything right is overrated. These mice are genetically perfect. No mutations. Free of every disease and germ. Look where it gets them.” She stares into the cage. The mouse rises up, whiskers twitching.

“They have a purpose though, their sacrifice makes the world a better place. Isn’t that enough?”

“Maybe,” she concedes. “What would you sacrifice?”

We’re both silent, cataloguing the hours, the tears, the agony of failure. Could I give more? Should I? What will be left?

“But that’s why I don’t go back, try again,” she continues. “I think the universe abhors perfection. I think that’s why our experiments fail.”

“But what about your atlas, the plan?”

“Nothing perfectly fits the plan. Didn’t I tell you my experiments are failing?”

“But the mice are identical.”

“Yep,” she says, resigned. “Yet they all seem to be outliers.” Abruptly, she stands. “Let’s get out of here.”

I think of my plants who are failing me. Perhaps they are choosing some other kind of perfection. “I have to finish my media.” I can always go back, I suppose, erase this moment. Somehow, I don’t think I will. “What about you?”

She looks at her mouse. “Another day won’t kill anyone.”

“Where are we going?”

She shrugs and favors me with that smile again. “Anywhere.”

I take in her, messy hair, red eyes, bandaged hand. Her buttoned shirt is askew. She reaches out her uninjured hand.

Maybe this could be a new kind of experiment. Maybe I can mutate, like my plant cells, and shed my fate. Become something new, never seen before. A statistical outlier.

I take her hand, and as we flee the lab for the sunny Saturday morning, I leave my watch behind.