(Slightly Belated) Disclaimer: I don't own Eureka, the characters, or any related intellectual property, and am making no money from this story.
Author's Note: Thank you, everyone who has reviewed thus far! It's really gratifying to know that there are people reading along and enjoying this story. I hope this chapter doesn't disappoint.
Jo was halfway to the elevator when the doors slid open to reveal Carter, probably coming up from Allison's medical lab. When he saw her hustling toward the elevator, he stopped in mid-step and held the door open for her. "Problem?" he asked when she closed to conversational distance.
"I think so," she confirmed, feeling a flush of relief at having work to concentrate on. "I'm not sure exactly, but there's something wrong with the vents in one of the labs in Section Two."
"Can I give you a hand?" Carter asked. "It looks like a slow day so far, in town. Some kid electromagnetically charged his sister's braces, and we had to pry her off the bike rack at Tesla, but she's fine now."
Jo waved a hand at him. "Sure. Just be quiet for a second; I'm trying to pinpoint the source of the problem." She closed her eyes and took a few slow breaths, focusing on the sensations in her lungs.
Carter blinked. "Pinpoint the... what's going on, Jo?"
"Oh, right." She opened her eyes again, then turned slightly away from him and held her ponytail to one side to reveal the device attached to the back of her neck. "New GD hardware. Comprehensive Holistic Awareness Relay and... Monitoring System, I think. It links my senses to GD's internal monitoring devices, so I'm instantly alerted to any security issue and can track it down using sensory cues."
Carter took a half-step back. "Um, this isn't going to be like the PALs all over again, is it? 'Cause I can think of about a dozen ways that thing could go horribly wrong."
Jo dropped her ponytail and shook her head. "There shouldn't be any problems like we had with the PALs; those were experimental predictive technology that relied on a supercomputer to manage the calculations. This is just a real-time data feed, and they've had plenty of time to work all the bugs out. Larry said that they're already accepting orders from the government on this."
"Oh, Larry said? Well, color me reassured," Carter drawled. He shook his head. "I just don't trust anything that hooks itself up to your brain."
Jo started to reply, but was interrupted by a coughing spasm. She cleared her throat a couple of times and swallowed. "Foreign objects in the ventilation shafts," she told Carter. "Somewhere in the east wing." The elevator doors whooshed silently open onto Section Two. "Let's go track it down." Carter nodded and followed her out.
It took them less than ten minutes to zero in on the lab where the problem had originated, with the CHARMS interface playing hotter-or-colder with Jo's respiratory tract. After the sixth lab they checked, Jo had to stop and lean against the wall through another coughing fit, this one punctuated by a violent sneeze at the end. Afterward, all she'd said was, "This way!" and led Carter down a side corridor at a jog.
He caught up with her when she stopped in front of the door to a lab. "It's this one." Carter noticed that her voice was a little rough, as if she'd recently had a hay fever attack. He started to ask if she was okay, but she preempted him by opening the door.
"Don't open that!" shouted a man from inside the room. Too late, of course; Jo was already across the threshold, with Carter close at her heels.
"What? Why?" Carter asked, looking around in alarm. Throughout the lab, white-coated figures were crawling around the floor on all fours, peering under counters and cabinets. Rows of small wire cages lined one wall of the lab, and he noticed that several of them stood empty, with their doors hanging loosely open.
The man who had spoken shoved past the two enforcement officers and pushed the door closed behind them, making sure the latch clicked home securely before turning to face them. "We've had an escape, and we don't want the specimens getting out of the lab. So please, keep the door shut until we find them." The short, bearded man slid his glasses farther up the bridge of his nose, and finally seemed to remember who he was talking to. "Security Chief Lupo, Sheriff Carter. Is there something you need?"
"They're in the air vents," Jo told him, half of her attention already on the walls of the room as she looked for the access points where the escapees could have gotten into the ventilation system.
"Okay, I'll ask the obvious question," Carter announced. "What are in the air vents?"
The bearded lead scientist was about to respond when Fargo's voice, slightly tinny from the speakers that were projecting it, cut in. "Only GD's longest-running longitudinal study of nutritional efficacy of foods designed for long-term space missions!" His voice rose to a slightly squeaky pitch toward the end of the sentence. "We only have a matter of weeks before Astraeus launches, and your test subjects get loose before you can tell us whether the nutrition packs Parrish's team has been working on are going to keep us from getting scurvy! This is great, just great! I'm coming down there." On the monitor attached to the speakers, Carter saw Fargo start to push himself up out of his desk chair.
"It's all right, Fargo," Carter told him, raising a hand at the screen in a placating gesture. "We've got everything under control down here. Jo's already checking the air vents to track down where the – what are they again?" he asked the bearded scientist beside him.
"Guinea pigs," the short man supplied, "they're a good experimental match for certain nutritional requirements in humans, because they can't naturally synthesize their own vitamin C, the way most mammals can."
"Guinea pigs," Carter repeated, mostly to himself. "Of course. Can't have crazy super-science without Guinea pigs. Don't worry, Fargo," he said to the monitor, "we'll find your Guinea pigs."
On the screen, he saw the young Director lower himself back into his chair. "Well, all right," he said, not entirely mollified, "but keep me apprised. The last thing I need with all the final preparations for the Astraeus launch to worry about is a bunch of experimental subjects going all Secret of NIMH on us. Are you sure you and Jo have things under control down there?"
Carter glanced over his shoulder at Jo, who had dragged a table against the far wall underneath an air vent and was now perched on top of it, her high-heeled shoes discarded on the floor below. He turned back to the monitor. "Yeah, everything's well in hand here. Leave it to us, and we'll have the little guys back in their cages in no time." Fargo nodded and turned off the video call, and Carter looked at the scientist beside him, who was watching Jo anxiously. "They are still 'little' guys, right? You guys haven't come up with mutant ninja Guinea pigs, or anything?"
The other man shook his head. "No, they're perfectly normal examples of the species, physiologically. There has been some selective breeding for intelligence throughout the course of the study, simply because of some of the behaviors we require of them, but they're certainly not dangerous."
"Well that's good, because I think they're about to meet someone who is." Carter's gaze drifted over the scientist's head to fix on Jo, who had the hatch of the vent lifted up and was visually measuring the width of the duct against her shoulder span.
"Carter, can you give me a hand over here?" she called. "I need a boost."
The sheriff quickly crossed the room, with the diminutive biologist trailing after him. "You're gonna need something to catch them in, if you're heading in after them," Carter observed. He turned to the scientist in charge of the project, whose name, Carter realized, he still hadn't asked. "I don't suppose you've got, I don't know, a pillowcase or something?"
The scientist rummaged in a nearby drawer for a moment and came up with a heavy cloth bag with a drawstring mouth. "Try not to put more than two or three in before you bring them back out," he instructed Jo. "They can get rather territorial."
Jo stuck her head into the vent, sniffed experimentally, and winced. "Yeah, I can smell that. Get me a spare lab coat." As the bearded man gestured at a lab tech to fetch the coat, Jo twisted her ponytail up into a tight bun against the back of her head.
"Are you sure you want to go in there?" Carter asked, eyeing the duct aperture dubiously.
"Well you're not going to fit," she retorted, reaching for the bag. When the tech returned with the lab coat, she shrugged it on and buttoned it closed. "Now, help me up."
Carter climbed up and knelt on the metal table, making a stirrup with his hands. Jo stepped into it with her sock-clad foot and, with a lift from Carter, wriggled into the shaft opening. The sheriff slid down off the table and stood next to the bearded scientist to wait.
"I'm sorry I didn't introduce myself earlier, Sheriff, but with the stress of the escape and having to report it to Director Fargo, I... well, you know how things can get around here. I'm Dr. Bernard, head of the zero-G zoology lab."
Carter accepted the shorter man's extended hand and shook it. "That's not a problem, Dr. Bernard. Let's just focus on getting everything back under control and – I'm sorry, did you just say 'zero-G zoology'?"
Bernard nodded. "Weightlessness can have a significant impact on the way an organism absorbs and processes nutrients. In order to determine conclusively whether the Astraeus team or any other group of astronauts will be able to meet their nutritional needs with the foods we're testing, we need to expose the test subjects to zero- and low-gravity conditions on a regular basis."
"So these Guinea pigs could have just floated up into the air vent?" Carter asked, gesturing with one hand to imitate a levitating rodent.
Bernard scratched his beard. "I don't know – maybe. The Localized Repulsor Field was left on overnight, and there isn't any other likely way for them to have reached that vent; Guinea pigs are poor climbers. But I still don't know how they could have escaped their cages to begin with. Our standard laboratory protocols mandate that two people personally check each cage before closing up the lab for the night, and last night I was one of them. Matthew, one of our techs, was the other, and he's one of the most reliable people here."
Carter strolled over to the cages and started poking at one of the open doors. "You said there was no gravity in here last night?"
"Well, that's not quite how the technology works; the force of gravity was effectively neutralized by an equivalent force being projected in the opposite direction," Bernard corrected.
Carter raised a hand to fend off the science-speak. "But everything in this room was basically weightless, right?"
The biologist nodded. "Basically, yes."
Turning his attention back to the cage, Carter fiddled with the latch – a basic lift-slide-and-drop mechanism made of wire. "Then I think I know how the little guys got out. You're gonna need to upgrade your cages if you plan to keep turning off the gravity in here."
Jo's slightly strained voice cut across the lab. "Here's the first three!" She had slid partway out of the air shaft, and was pushing the wriggling canvas bag past her knees for someone to grab. Bernard rushed over to accept his escaped specimens from her, and Carter followed more sedately.
"Flying Guinea pigs. What next?" he muttered. "At least it wasn't a bank this time..."
It didn't take long for Jo to round up the rest of the wayward rodents. She handed down the last squirming bag and snaked out of the duct, landing on the slippery table without apparent difficulty. As she hopped down to the floor and started putting on her shoes, though, Carter noticed her massaging her left hand, as though it were asleep.
"Did one of our little fugitives bite you?" he asked, gesturing at her hand.
She looked down at her hands in mild surprise, then back up at Carter. "Oh, no – but I think they were chewing on some wiring running into one of the other labs in this section; I'll send Maintenance down to check it out when I get back to my office to file a report."
"You still think it's a good idea for GD's systems to be hooked up to your body like this?"
Jo ignored the concern in his voice, and led the way out of the lab and back to the elevator. "Sure. It would've taken them hours to track down those oversized rats if I hadn't been able to trace the ventilation disturbance to this lab. By the time they got around to reporting the escape to Security, the little bastards could've made their way through the air ducts to almost any other lab in this section, interfered with other projects, and caused who-knows-how-much trouble. And it's not actually doing my body any damage; I just get the sensations connected with different things that go wrong. It's like how pain alerts you to something wrong in your body, only now I get those alerts when there's something wrong in GD."
Carter looked unconvinced, but he knew better than to push Jo on something security-related. "Well, if you're sure," was all he said. "I should probably get back to the office. Call me if anything else comes up that I can help with."
"Will do," she assured him as the elevator doors hissed open. "See you later." They parted ways, and Jo paced down the corridor leading back to the Security office. About twenty feet down the hall, she stopped short, and a puzzled look crossed her face. Strange, she thought, I have the oddest feeling like I've misplaced something, but I can't think what it is. She patted her pockets, running through a mental checklist: smartphone, keys, security badge. I don't think I'm missing anything. Weird. She shrugged off the feeling and continued down the hallway, threading a path through the busy scientists and techs all going distractedly about their own business.