Chapter Twenty-Six: What a Stupid Idea
"Got anything?"
Contrary to what Reilly had thought, spying on people was really boring.
Kyle shook his head. "Nada."
He'd been expecting something to come of all this work -- but so far, they had... well, nothing.
"Nothing? C'mon. There must be something." Reilly looked over Kyle's shoulder at the laptop screen -- and, once again, had to admit he had no idea what Kyle was doing.
"Nope. Jenny's working on a novel, but..."
"Jenny receptionist Jenny?"
"You know another Jenny here?"
"No." Reilly shook his head. "...Is it any good?"
"Fuck's sake, man, it's not like I read it."
Reilly gave him a Look -- 'Fess up already.
"OK, fine. I had a look. It's not too bad."
He went back to doing... whatever the fuck he was doing with the laptop, and Reilly took the opportunity to get up and stretch his legs.
They were lurking at the back of the ill-used Animal Testing break room -- once again, they were there thanks to the graces of Reilly's security clearance -- which meant that, although there was no coffee, they had a (thin) excuse to be there, as well as the advantage of having no company at just past four-thirty in the morning on a mid-July Sunday.
Reilly wandered over to the window (wired-glass, "just in case") and looked out into the... well, calling it a "yard" would be generous. Despite the heavy use the yard saw in Eraser training (because it was fenced in, it was this yard that got the most intensive use for that purpose), green tumbleweeds still struggled up out of the dust.
He really didn't get how they did it.
Goddamn weeds.
Maybe there was something of value there -- something he wasn't seeing in the resilience of tumbleweeds. Something they could use.
Reilly hadn't taken long to acquire the heterodoxy of thought common at the School. Or maybe he hadn't acquired it so much as brought out his natural tendencies -- it was really the one thing that had kept his lazy ass afloat in high school and college, being able to see illogical-seeming answers. If you could do that -- you could do anything.
Case in point: Subject Eleven. Reilly had still been in college when it was created, but once he'd arrived at the School, Reilly had sought out the story of its creation with a vengeance, intending to discover and expand on the principles that had gone into its making.
Which he had, after finding out that the world-famous Doctor Batchelder had suffered a weird kind of psychotic break while working on Subject Eleven. (Admittedly, that made it all the more alluring to Reilly. So he had an attraction to doomed things with odd origin stories. So what?)
Of course, he hadn't gone so far as to induce a mental breakdown of his own -- but he had borrowed from and built upon Jeb's ideas.
Which brought him right back around to the tumbleweeds. Opportunistic little bastards -- even when they repeatedly kept getting their asses kicked by rampaging wolfmen, the fuckers just refused to stay dead.
There was probably a moral in there somewhere, but damned if Reilly was going to pursue it -- not this early in the morning, anyway. It was... well, OK, so the sun was just starting to (kind of) show its face in the east. But it was still way too early for any kind of philosophizing.
Thankfully, Reilly was interrupted before he could burden the collective unconscious with any more deep thoughts on tumbleweeds.
"Holy shit," Kyle said softly, and Reilly half-turned away from the window.
"What?"
"Dude. Come look at this."
Reilly hurried over and had a look.
Miracle of miracles, Kyle had pulled it up (whatever it was) in a form understandable by normal humans -- well, normal humans with a pretty good biochem background, anyway.
"Who the hell is 'R'?" Reilly wondered aloud.
"Keep reading," Kyle said grimly, and tapped the screen with a fingernail, careful not to leave a smudge. "I pulled this out of Batchelder's file on the network. (Totally unencrypted, by the way.) Now, how many 'R's do you know here -- besides you?"
Reilly looked at Kyle, understanding what he meant. "Looks like some kind of ... crazy hormone therapy," he muttered, returning to the document and looking closely at the numbers. "Which would explain quite a bit."
"Nah, man." Kyle scrolled down, pulling more data up on the screen. "Keep reading. It gets weirder."
Reilly skimmed through the remaining data -- with each successive number, a terrible, illogical conclusion was building in his head.
He pushed the laptop back towards Kyle.
"Oh. My. God," Reilly said, cradling his head in his hands.
"Yeah," Kyle said, with a sick little smile. "That's basically what I thought too."
"But... how the hell is that... what the fuck?"
Kyle looked at him mildly.
"It's im-fucking-possible!" Reilly said, and then, amending himself. "But... it's what the data says."
"Which means it's possible," Kyle said.
"Yes, but... it's stupidly dangerous! Why in the hell would you do this?"
Kyle shrugged. "Beats me. To get results?"
"Well, yes, but -- this could kill him!"
"So could working with a bunch of psycho genetic recombinants," Kyle said. "Dude. Remember who we're talking about here."
"The greatest geneticist of all time and his -- boyfriend," Reilly hissed.
"Mad scientists. There's a reason they're called that, y' know."
Reilly stared at him, jaw dropping open. "Kyle. Do you understand how dangerous this is?"
"Not really." He shrugged, impervious. "You are such a fuckwad, Reilly. Stop for a moment. You're the one who's always on about putting science before yourself. So tell me. What makes Dr. ter Borcht doing a little experimenting on himself so damn bad?"
Reilly stared at him for a while before finally sputtering, "I... don't know." He fell silent, then burst out, "You're just not supposed to!"
"Who says?" Kyle said.
Reilly ran a hand through his hair -- with that, all the fight had gone out of him -- and sighed. "OK. I... I get it."
"Good." Kyle grinned. "'Cause I was totally making that up as I went."
"I suspected as much." Reilly cracked a smile. "Sorry I kind of flipped out on you."
"Nah, it's cool." He shrugged.
Reilly heard footsteps in the hall, and shot a glance at Kyle. "Shit!"
Kyle moved fast, closing the laptop and shoving it under the table onto the seat of the chair across from him.
"We need an excuse to be here, don't we?" he said.
"I have an idea," Reilly said as the footsteps approached the door.
"Please don't let it be illegal," Kyle muttered.
"Only in Utah," Reilly said. "Kiss me."
He had to admit.
It was a pretty good excuse.
The look on Harrison's face when she walked in on them made it even more worth it.