I waved her off. “I want to see the vivarium.”
A flicker—uncertainty? Annoyance?—crossed her face, but she didn’t show it long. “Absolutely. Whenever you’re ready. Do you normally bring your husband to work?”
“When under these circumstances, yes,” I replied.
Dante nodded, all business, but I saw the way his jaw worked. “I’ll stay out of the way,” he said, like he was promising to keep his hands in his pockets and his mouth shut at a funeral. Heller was on a schedule, today more than yesterday. She hustled us down the hall, past the same row of glass offices and through adouble set of security doors. The passcode she used wasn’t the same as before—three digits instead of six, entered with her left hand.
Either she was nervous or someone had changed the protocols overnight. The hallway on the other side was colder, the air louder with filtered pressure, and the lights stung my eyes like I was walking into a cleanroom at midnight. “You’ll need to gown up,” she said, handing me a set of disposable coveralls and booties. I caught the label on the pack: XL, Unisex, and a little smiley-face sticker someone had drawn beside the bar code.
I got the sense this was meant to put me at ease, but it only made me more aware of the body I was cramming into the suit—how much space I took up now, and how every motion required an extra beat of planning. Dante was given a set, too. He didn’t complain, but I could see the way he itched under the plastic, pulling at the sleeves like a bear forced into a Halloween costume. Heller watched us with professional patience, but her eyes were always flicking to something behind us, as if she expected a ghost to come barreling down the hallway at any minute.
The vivarium was nothing like the ones I’d worked in in grad school. There was space, for one. Each animal had its own suite, glass-walled and independently ventilated, with digital screens displaying vital stats and a real-time feed of whatever they were doing. Most were mice, some rats, and—disturbingly—a whole row of juvenile macaques, each pacing or perching or staring at nothing, eyes red from too much artificial light. “You’re using primates,” I said, not bothering to hide my disgust.
Heller shrugged. “It’s the only way to get functional nervous tissue without a decade-long wait. If you’re queasy, you’re not alone. But the client wants results.”
I stepped to the glass, looking for any sign of what protocol they were running. One of the macaques had a shaved patch on its head, a thin white scar puckered along the temple.
Another had bandages on its wrist, the plastic sheeting taped with surgical precision. “They’re running the new vector?” I asked. Heller nodded. “Pilot started last week. The first batch failed—immune rejection, mostly. But the next cohort is looking promising. You’ll have access to all the logs.”
Dante was quiet, studying the room. I could tell he was clocking exits, cameras, the way the ceiling panels were fitted.
I watched one of the techs—a kid, couldn’t have been more than twenty-five—move a macaque from its cage to a restraint chair.
He did it gently, murmuring something soft, but the animal’s eyes were wild. I recognized the look; it was the same one in every animal I’d ever “sacrificed” in the name of data.
I’d told myself it was for the greater good, but that look never went away. I kept my arms folded, hands deep in the ill-fitting sleeves of the coverall. “Can I see the logs?” I asked. “Raw data, not just the summary.”
Heller hesitated, but then walked me to a touchscreen console mounted on the wall.
“Here,” she said, tapping through a labyrinth of folders. “We’re a little behind on annotation, but you’ll get the idea.”
She handed me a disposable stylus.
The interface was idiotic—clearly built by a programmer who’d never spent a minute in a real lab—but after a minute I found what I was looking for. The animal IDs matched the ones in the reports I’d stolen.
I scrolled to the latest entry and started scanning. The protocol was exactly what I expected—and exactly what I feared. They’d doubled the dose.
Knocked out all immune safeguards.
The vector was running wild, punching through the blood-brain barrier with a viral load that should have killed the animal outright, except it hadn’t. It had done something worse. I flipped through the logs. The monkey had lost motor control in its left side for two days, then rebounded to baseline, then started showing behavioral changes I’d only ever seen in late-stage Parkinson’s. The team had logged it as “unexpected,” but I knew what it was: the vector was off-target. It was editing genes in places it shouldn’t, but it was persistent. It was surviving. In my brain, I started to map the cascade: first motor, then cognitive, then—if the vector didn’t flame out—full-blown behavioral rewrite. Not a cure, but damn close to a way to make an animal forget what it ever was.
My mouth tasted like pennies. I slid the stylus through the next subject’s profile. This one had been terminated at day six; no notes, just a timestamp and a single line: “Per D. Smith, escalate to human cohort.” They were leapfrogging the process, skipping every ethical guardrail because there was no one to stop them.
I said, “You’re not going to get the fidelity you want running it this hot. You’ll get mosaic expression at best, and at worst you’ll get something that doesn’t even look like a brain when you’re done.”
Heller’s eyes glittered. “We’re not worried about post-mortem. We’re worried about real time. You understand the urgency.”
“And you understand that if this gets out, you’ll never work in a real lab again,” I said.
She shrugged. “If this gets out, the world will be different. Nobody will care what my CV says.”
I wanted to hate her, but I couldn’t. I recognized the hunger, the way her hands shook at the edge of discovery, the way she couldn’t look away from the results even when they scared her. She was me, two degrees left of center, one bad day from doing something unthinkable and calling it progress.
I tapped through to the human logs. There they were—the same patient codes, the same sequencing run, only now the data was sparser, patchier. Subject 3 had survived longer than the rest, but by day ten the log was just a string of numbers, then nothing. Subject 4 was the one I’d seen in the report, the pregnant woman. Her data was cleaner, but the last entry chilled me: “Fetal heart rate nonviable after 96h. Maternal status: unresolved. Awaiting directive.”
I felt my heart hammer against the inside of my ribs. I wanted to punch through the glass and drag Heller through the shards, but I made myself keep the tone even: “You’re going to need a new protocol. And a new team, if you want to scale this to human at all.”
Heller smiled, a little pitying. “That’s why you’re here, Jade. You’re the new team.”
