After the prologue, here's the first chapter. Slowly sinking into things here, I hope you stick around! :) Enjoy!
Working in a lab was supposed to be cool. Especially in Panthera Technologies, where the machines were cutting-edge, the researchers were seasoned, and the funding was relatively abundant. Being in a lab meant being surrounded by humming tech, bright lights, lab coats, clipboards, protective gear from glasses to hazmat suits. It meant rubbing elbows with experts in hyper-specific fields, learning from one another, while the postdocs clung to your every word. It meant hearing that funding had been increased yet again, that the latest project had been approved, that the simulations were running in their favor, that the beta had completed without a hitch. It meant getting rewards on every one of your papers, having researchers fly in from every corner of the world to learn, and delight in all of it with a nice cup of hot coffee.
Sadly, only some of these things were true at any given point in time, if any at all. Luka sighed as she read yet another e-mail, the last one in a long unbroken chain. In-office bickering was always rife, such a petty little thing, yet such a huge obstacle for science. The clipboard next to her had pages smothered in red marks, her lab coat hadn't been touched since the previous Friday, and worst of all? The coffee machine was out of order.
It was looking to be a long day, and her meeting with Meiko that evening looked further away than it ever had.
When a knock sounded on her door, Luka stopped herself from audibly groaning. Interruptions also weren't part of the dream vision of research, but they were all too present in the real world.
"Come in," she called, making sure to minimize her communications, bringing her screen to the IT-recommended pure black background, marred by a mere dozen icons.
The door opened a moment later, and in strode a tall man, in his mid-forties, his dark blue hair bearing silver streaks. For his age, he looked so remarkably fit, his frame so imposing, he would be more at home on a gym promotional poster than in the halls of scientific laboratories.
Luka was up on her feet within the second.
"Mr. Shion," she said warmly. "Good morning. How nice of you to come by!"
He smiled, raised a hand to indicate that she could sit, which she ignored. "Good morning, Doctor. I was just doing the rounds of a few of the departments, and I wanted to swing by."
Luka nodded and smiled, hoping that it didn't look too forced. "That's kind."
"Namely, I heard you started running a very promising simulation last night. Results should be in, no?"
The clipboard behind her felt like it stuck out like a sore thumb. Keeping her eyes forward, she said, "Results are in, and are promising!"
"So they're positive? You've made progress?"
After a thick second of silence, Luka managed to find her voice. "We're learning a lot."
He sighed. "This is the umpteenth month in a row."
"I know, sir. But this is complex technology and biology; we're innovating in both fields at once. It's bound to take some time."
"We don't have time," he said, and the phrase felt sorely familiar. "Investors are losing interest. The only team here pulling in results is the one led by Dr. Camui, and it's the same old proven stuff that they've completely lost interest in. We're bound to be overshadowed by those space nuts again."
"We do have some interesting things to put in a paper," Luka tried. "We can definitely use the results we've gotten so far to generate interest."
He looked at her. "Could you write a paper by the end of the week?"
"Of course."
"I want it on my desk Monday morning, then," he said, turning to leave her office. "And it better show that, no matter what, we're getting close to 3D printing living tissue. I don't want more dead samples."
"Neither do we, sir."
"Good. Keep that up; it's better for all of our pockets."
"Of course, sir. Have a nice day!"
"You too, Doctor."
Once the door was closed, Luka sat in her chair with another suppressed groan.
"A paper!" she hissed to herself. "Why did I suggest I write a paper! Stupid fucking...space nuts."
She opened her inbox again, not to check e-mails, but to write one. After addressing her whole team, she called for an emergency meeting, making sure they would all get pinged by their most urgent notification sounds.
Once that was done, she gathered her sad clipboard covered with the sad red marks and exited her office, into the hall.
"Ah, Luka, I'm afraid that the sim—"
"I know," she sighed, too used to Aria's sudden arrivals to flinch. She barely even turned towards her as they walked down the hall together. "It didn't hold."
"Maybe we can try to test it in practice regardless?" the postdoc tentatively asked. She clutched a bundle of pages to her chest, sans the clipboard. Not that she hadn't been provided with one; Aria simply preferred to be able to reorder the pages to her impulsive whims. "I always figured that the simulation technology never truly could compute the structural integrity of th—"
"We're far beyond that point, I'm afraid," Luka sighed. As they walked, the hall grew thicker with bodies; the rest of the team scrambling to get to the small conference room on their floor. They passed their labs and machines, all clean and pristine, unused for ages. "We have more pressing emergencies."
"Gosh, what happened?"
"You'll all know in a bit."
The postdoc deflated somewhat, looking at the pile of pages, reorganizing them. Luka let her do so, lazily taking in the halls they walked through. Perhaps she was looking for a spark, for a eureka moment, perhaps she was just trying to keep her mind off of things, but taking in her surroundings was somehow better than simmering in her thoughts. Not that there was that much to see, unfortunately; illuminated by blinding lights, the walls, ceilings, floors, and doors were sleek, futuristic, and sorely bereft of any interesting detail. White or black, easy to clean and sterilize, the only things that stuck out from the smooth surfaces were the light switches, fire alarms, and door frames. Between door frames, though, cork boards clung to the walls, and these captured the bulk of Luka's meager interest. Always decorated with a mess of flyers, informational posters, or portraits, usually she would find something worthwhile, like cheap things to buy or mixer dates, a few random Missing Person posters, which had seemed to become more and more popular lately, but nothing stuck out right then.
Or perhaps she was too preoccupied to care.
As she passed by the doors though, their smooth surfaces showed her their reflections; Aria, with her rose-tinted silver hair, her coke bottle glasses, her back hunched over her reading, her small frame would have completely disappeared behind Luka if she chose to look at the doors on her side of the hall. A recent hire, a fresh postdoc, Aria was still full of that nervous energy, willing to prove herself, still uncertain of what she did know and what she didn't. Luka liked working with her though; she was as fast a learner as she was a provider of fresh insights.
They arrived at the conference room before Aria could finish sorting through her papers. Once there, she mindlessly went to her favorite spot and spread out her sheets, the other teammates mumbling and whispering as they found their own seats. Luka watched for a moment; it was a sad room really. One window punctured the wall at the far end, too high up to see out of, yet the same width of the room. A projector pointed at one of the empty walls hung from the ceiling, with a large circular table in the middle of the floor, surrounded by a dozen or so chairs. Luka headed for one of the remaining empty seats, putting down her clipboard somewhat mindlessly. Nothing it held would help her.
When the door was shut and the last of the team had found a seat, she cleared her throat.
"I know none of us are happy with the simulation results. The president isn't happy with them either, though. First things first, we need to find a fresh new angle of attack and fast."
The room quickly filled with a buzz; maybe a different kind of tissue needed to be tried. Maybe a mucus, or perhaps something more solid, like bone. The techies in the team instead pitched ideas about varying the printing method itself; instead of a top-down depositing, perhaps having a primordial goop of sorts that would be rearranged from the bottom up would help.
Luka waved her hand before they got carried away.
"That's not all," she started again once the volume got low enough. That phrase was enough to silence everyone. "Mr. Shion wants something to show the investors anyway."
"But... but we don't have anything."
"We have failures. We learn from them, and I'm sure we can somehow put a spin on it and make it look like a collection of victories."
"I'm not too sure..."
"We need to put together a paper by Monday."
One could hear a pin drop.
"By Monday?!"
"We don't work like that here!"
"Just like those astrology folks..."
Luka let the storm make its way through the group; eventually, they did calm down on their own, but it was with a new flavor of discontent made visible on everybody's faces.
"Do we even have time to write that kind of a paper?" someone asked, such a small voice Luka would be hard-pressed to identify who spoke.
"I mean, if we make it a priority, we'll be postponing our actual research by a whole week. And nobody will like that, either."
Luka nodded. "One person here will write it. We'll all spend a few hours over the next few days combing through our latest results. Then we'll each send the significant parts to our designated writer, and with the rest of our time we'll continue to make progress on our real project."
"Man, who will that be?"
"I can do it, Doctor."
The whole room turned to look at Aria, who shrank quickly behind her coke-bottle glasses.
Luka smiled at her. "What did I tell you?"
"Don't call you Doctor."
She nodded. "Very well, there we have it. Aria will write our paper."
"The newbie?"
Luka's smile vanished. "She's more than capable and has a wider breadth of understanding in both biology and bio-technology than most anybody else in this room. So unless you want to waste time and pass my judgment through a fine-tooth comb, I recommend you stay silent."
There was a cough, but nothing else.
"Regardless, we all owe everybody here equal amounts of respect. Am I understood?"
"Yes, ma'am,"
"Good. Be sure to send Aria your most optimistic points within the next three days. Now, with all that said..." She sat down. "Time to discuss what exactly went wrong with the simulation."
The room was far more animated after that. Luka, however, found her mind wandering to that evening's hangout with Meiko, and then the next one after that, a few short days from then...
She really just needed to get through the week.
"Doctor? I mean..."
She chuckled. "What is it, Aria?"
The postdoc stood still for a moment, lingering by the conference room door, watching as the last of the group finally left.
"I wanted to thank you for giving me a chance to do this," she muttered. "It means a lot that you trust me."
Luka hesitated for a moment. "I won't lie, this is a high-stakes project," she finally managed to say. "If you need help—"
"I won't hesitate to ask, promise. I might have a bit more experience with the biotechnology side of things than you do, but I don't think I've written anything of this caliber before." She sighed, clutching her pile of papers to her chest. "I also wanted to thank you for, well, everything else you said."
"I said a lot of things. We were in there for hours."
"I mean about the whole, well, respect everyone and stuff."
"Ah." It was Luka's turn to sigh. "Well, that's something I try really hard to enforce here in my team."
"Is that... Normal?"
"Despite ourselves, I think," Luka said. "Care to walk and talk? I want to see if the coffee machine is fixed."
"Oh, of course!"
The halls were suddenly so quiet, Luka wondered if the whole team had had the same idea. "We're all stupid animals, really," she muttered. "Humans aren't as bright and smart as we'd like to be. We pretend we are, but we always fall back into the same traps."
"Being?"
"We always want to feel a little better about ourselves. Sometimes that looks like breaking your record for running a half-marathon. Other times it looks like making the people around you look smaller."
Aria hummed. "I think I wanted to believe that we're past that."
"I doubt it always happens consciously, at least at this level. But everywhere, there's always going to be some kind of bias, some power struggle. Especially in science." She laughed. "You'll never meet a creature more obnoxious than a new, ego-filled, tenured researcher. Then there's those who have been in the game for the longest, those with the most prizes and the most references. Then you have the average researcher, perhaps new, perhaps not very brilliant, perhaps very content doing the most basic of research we'll all thank them for in two hundred years. And then you have the fresh meat."
Aria laughed. "That's me!"
"Don't take this to mean that you have something to prove," Luka said, elbowing her softly. "You made it here, to Panthera Technologies. And more than that, you're in my team. I don't choose just anyone. You're qualified and deserve respect, no matter how much time you've worked, or how many trophies you gathered."
"Thank you."
"Now, if you do need help for whatever reason, whether it be simple proofreading or—"
"I will knock on your door first thing." Aria beamed at her. "Thank you."
They arrived at the break room right about then; Luka opened the door for the younger postdoc, and a voice quickly greeted them.
"Ah, I see you're also here for the coffee!"
Luka took in the room, realizing that almost the whole floor was there. There were her colleagues in 3D printing as well as their neighbors in immunology, a good dozen researchers of all ages. It was almost comical, seeing all these men and women standing like a herd in the narrow room, packed between the tall windows and the kitchen counter. Luka spied her teammates, all hungrily waiting in line, almost bouncing on their feet in excitement. The meeting had obviously worn everybody down and coffee was a sure-fire, if late boost.
"That's right. Is there any?"
"There is!" A man cheered.
On cue, the machine roared to life as it started pushing out another cup of coffee, the liquid so hot Luka could see the steam despite the huge crowd around it.
"Get in line!"
"Nothing will stop me," Luka said with a chuckle. "Would you like some too, Aria?"
"Oh, no, I'm fine," she muttered, her eyes wide, taking in the crowded room.
Luka patted her back. "I'm going to take my lunch break, to consider things. I recommend you do the same."
"Oh, no. I think I'll trade my lunch break for going home earlier," Aria said with a sheepish grin, her eyes still on the crowd even as it inched forward. "I have an important paper to put together after all."
Luka nodded. "Very well. In that case, could you call Gakupo to see if he's free?"
"Gakupo?"
"Dr. Camui."
Aria blinked. "Of course. Can I ask...?"
Luka chuckled, stepped forward as the line moved. "I just wanted to discuss our current dead end, so to speak."
"Is that a good idea?" she asked. "I thought rivalry between teams was..."
"We don't research nearly the same things, it'll be fine. He has many years of experience and knows how to get out of a gridlock, and that's what I'm most interested in. He's helped us before."
"Oh, in that case, no problem. I guess I need to wait for the rest of the team to start sending me things anyway, huh."
"Do it when you have time," Luka said. "There's no rush; I doubt we'll dig our way out of this ourselves any day soon."
"Ok. I can go do that now, if that's alright? Maybe you two will have time to speak after lunch today."
"Sounds good, Aria. I'll see you soon, then."
"Sure!"
Luka watched her dart off, and it was only when Aria turned around the corner that the researcher realized she'd let her eyes linger.
Embarrassed, she cleared her throat and turned her attention towards the coffee machine. Aria was pretty, though. Looking past the glasses, there were bright eyes, a beautiful face. She was the kind of researcher to be a bit manic about her appearance, contrary to the work-obsessed nerd, and Luka could tell. She had spied the short-cut, well-filed nails, and through the work-safe clothes, the lithe frame of a runner, or perhaps a dancer.
Just her type, to be honest. The kind of woman she delighted meeting in mixers, clubs, or bars.
She blinked, cleared her head, and turned her attention back to the line, which continued to inch forward. Briefly, she wondered if she should have gone with Meiko the previous night; she didn't usually let her mind wander like that. Having any thoughts that even suggested she violate her academic integrity was out of the question. Subordinates and coworkers were strictly off-limits.
She desperately needed to run a few miles, full speed.
What felt like an eternity later, she arrived at the coffee machine. There, she greedily made her coffee, almost manhandling the portafilter, deaf to the roar of the machine as it pushed the water through the pressed grounds. Once her cup was poured, she headed back to her office, where she tried to get her mind back on the project and off her teammates.
So much for her lunch break.
There was so much to consider. 3D printing had been a hurdle in its own right, but 3D printing biological matter was another. Especially when it came to living matter: her team's latest attempt at keeping the tissue alive as it was being assembled had failed catastrophically, which was the recurring theme in all their past failures. According to their simulations, they would instead get something akin to overpriced, under-flavored, cooked ground beef. A far cry from an immediately useable, viable heart, or kidney, or literally just a patch of skin, intestinal lining, or piece of bone.
She glared at the notes in her clipboard, stood and glared at the whiteboard, cleared a part of it, started scribbling again. It was useful to brainstorm with the whole team, she knew as much. It didn't rest solely on her shoulders. But it was her passion project, and she couldn't help but keep that responsibility.
Luka scoffed, knowing that her range of knowledge didn't cover all the bases. She didn't have the technological know-how, only the knowledge of the biological materials. And she only knew her niche of biology; there was so much. So much she didn't know.
Trying to do it all on her own would be a waste of her effort and time. But she didn't know what else to do, other than to metaphorically squeeze a brick and hope to get water; how else would they find success after so many failures?
A knock on her door startled her out of her thoughts. She glanced at the clock on her desk; her half an hour of break time had gone.
"Come in."
Aria stepped in, her posture impeccable, a bright smile on her face. "Dr. Camui can speak with you right away, if you can make the trip to his office."
Now that was exactly the news she needed.