“Doctor Santiago!” Bellowed the gruff voice of Doctor Rhode.
“Yes, sir?” Santiago hissed, and turned to face the bloated Assistant Director.
The thirty nine year old man easily weighed in at around 250 lbs, most of it languished about his waste. Of distinctly Indian descent, there was a remnant of an accent in the cadence of his speech, and his skin was smooth and dark, both on his heavy chops and atop his head. For lack of better options, he sported a horseshoe haircut, and the unruly dark hairs were slicked down tight against his scalp. He looked older than he was, due to his balding and weight issues, but the lack of peppering in his mane indicated him as the youngest of the management, at least amongst the male department heads.
“You are late, again.” The pudgy man growled and began to tap his gold wristwatch.
Santiago looked him up and down with some disinterest. He wore rich name brand clothing beneath his tight immaculate lab coat, and it would not surprise the young man if the Assistant Director even had each piece of clothing custom tailored to fit his odd pear shape. “I'm so very sorry, sir!” He smirked. “It will never happen again.” He could care less what Doctor Rhode or any of the others thought of him. He worked hard and made excellent progress on everything they placed him on. It was by no fault of his own that this particular job required to him do very little at all. If they fired him for being late to a job he sat around at anyway, then it really was their loss. He already had a number of privately owned drug companies interested in adding him to their roster- for better pay, too.
Doctor Rhode looked like he was about to pop, unable to process the flagrant disrespect shown to him by this nobody biologist. He had selected the young scientist himself from the entire facility due to his success record; management that had worked with Santiago warned about his nasty attitude possibly being too problematic for the delicate work Rhode was heading. Having a notorious attitude of his own, Rhode laughed off the advice and decided that reigning in the wild stallion would be a fun side project.
How wrong had he been.
After several months on the job, Santiago proved to be more akin to a coiled viper with an acid tongue than an unbroken buck. He lashed out at management, harshly criticized his coworkers, and routinely showed his total disregard for the leaders of the research facility- yet his numbers remained consistent, his initial analysis of the material provided was always spot on, and he worked hard and efficiently- whenever he happened to arrive at work, that is. For this reason, the facilities president, Doctor Prescott, stayed his hand. He would not permit Santiago to be fired from the facility, feeling confident he would not quit after only a year, and he refused to permit Rhode to reassign him to another sector in the facility.
“He's your problem, now.” Prescott had teased his old friend. “He's not the worst problem to have.”
“What could possibly be worse than having that irritating little whelp messing things up?” Rhode had shot back in exasperation, knowing it was useless to argue it further. When Prescott made up his mind, that was it.
“Just get to your station!” Doctor Rhode hollered, and pointed a sausage like finger towards the experiment control room.
Santiago grinned at him and slunk past, down the empty hall and into the indicated room. Rhode stared after him until the man disappeared through the sliding metal door. When he heard the door hiss shut again, he returned to his last round of hunting for malingering employees to admonish.
Once inside the control room, Santiago snuck behind last row of doctors, and grabbed his customary seat against the far wall. The camera on the opposite side of the room dutifully tracked his progress to his seat before returning to a rhythmic panning of the large room.
Halstead, unsurprisingly, had taken the seat beside him. He felt eyes on him almost immediately and glanced over at the annoying kid; Halstead gave him a painfully exaggerated slow motion wink followed by a thumbs up. Santiago returned the look with a wide eyed silent death threat.
“You know the experiments can't start until everyone's at their station, right?” Halstead grinned.
“Shut up, idiot!” Santiago spat and proceeded to boot up his computer.
The room itself was the size of a small theater, and arranged similarly; rows of ten by ten seats stood in blocks to the right and left of the room with a wide middle aisle between them. Each seat was a stiff office chair bolted down before a long counter that stretched the length of the ten seats, and in front of each seat was a monitor, mouse, and keyboard; the bulky tower was slotted into a special made cubicle under the table, to the right of each seat. At the front of the room was a massive bank of machinery; the super computer that mastered the operation. It sent instantaneous readouts to each of the two hundred computers before it, providing a piece of the whole for every specialist to quickly analyze in real time, and thus monitor the operation of the program before, during, and after each of its weekly launches. Each experiment took place on a Monday morning, and the rest of the week was spent studying the results.
Behind the massive computer where the stage of the theater might have been, was a massive window, made of reinforced bullet proof glass. Beyond the wind was an all metal enclosure, air tight and impenetrable, where the experiments actually manifested. Currently, the protective steel shield was lowered over the viewing panel, making it impossible to look in. It would stay that way until the experiment had concluded, and there was no risk of burning retinas or light radiation.
Doctor Rhode strode in moments after Santiago's computer finished loading into the facility’s custom operating system. The automated door snicked shut behind him and he stormed up to the head of the great hall, where he stood before the immense computer.
“Please run your system check applications, now.” He barked, his deep voice booming about the blank high walls.
A deafening roar of thousands of keys being rapidly pressed overwhelmed the room, only to stop as quickly as it began. A series of loud blips range out around the room for a few seconds, and Doctor Rhode looked down at one of the several monitors on the master computer; it displayed a black screen lit by two hundred red lights that began to one by one turn green. Soon they all showed positive responses to the preliminary scans, and Rhode turned back to the assembly, satisfied.
“Gateway Experiment Number Twenty Three will commence shortly. Today we are making history, ladies and gentlemen.” Rhode nodded solemnly. “Today we will increase the power of the warp to… two.”
A muffled snicker drifted up from the back of the room. Instinctively, Doctor Rhode shot a glare at the back corner. Santiago was watching him with a bored expression but quickly looked somewhat offended by the accusing glare. Rhode snarled in frustration before continuing to look over the room. “It may not seem like much, but keep in mind… that is still double our normal power levels.” He assured the crowd.
Meanwhile, in the back row, Santiago pressed his hand over Halstead's mouth, smothering his giggles. He then proceeded to punch the young man as hard as he could in the arm. Halstead's mirth faded instantly, replaced by a wide eyed hurt expression.
“Experiment live in ten… nine… eight...” Doctor Rhode droned on.
Santiago released his neighbor and moved back in front of his own monitor. Halstead wordlessly mouthed 'owch' at Santiago before he too returned his studying his screen.
“Three… two… one.” Rhode concluded and flipped the large switch at the center of the desk sized computer. “Go!” He shouted and instinctively flinched, squeezing his eyes shut.
From the other side of the metal barricade their came a screeching that grew to an ear splitting cacophony that stopped only when it was drowned out by a tremendous boom. A crackling sound of rippling electricity reverberated around the chamber and steadily fizzled out to silence. After a moment, there was a loud pop, and Rhode quickly pressed the button to raise the shield. The metal panel slid up in time for the Doctor to catch sight of a speck falling to the chamber floor.
Glancing back at the assembly he saw everyone had their heads bowed before the screens- everyone except one vexatious man. Santiago was watching him closely, his readout screen blank. They both knew the scan for pathogens and bacteria was not instantaneous and actually required a different set of equipment to launch than the warp itself. Rhode had tried in vain to insist he keep his head down, anyway, but Santiago always appeared in the far corner, watching him at the end of every experiment.
Doctor Rhode grimaced before looking back at the glass panel. He leaned closer over the hulking machine and squinted. There, at the center of the chamber, something small and black twitched. It took him a moment but he soon recognized the symmetrical body and multitude of flailing appendages.
“Ladies and gentlemen.” He grinned eagerly. “We have brought forth the first extraterrestrial multicelled lifeform!”
The crowd finally looked up from their screens and began to whoop and holler. Each of them either reveled in the miracle of science they had witnessed or secretly hoped this new piece of progress was enough to immortalize them in some way. Halstead and Santiago remained still and quiet at the back, neither terribly impressed.
“Ok, well...” Halstead sniffed. “That was fun. Back to endless safety checks for the rest of the week, I guess.” He shrugged, trying to hide his disappointment.
“Great.” Santiago spat. “Multicellular? That means I'll have pretty much nothing to do at all this week. Unless this thing is crawling with parasites and diseases, I'll probably just be staring at it's dried husk for a week. Amazing.”
Both young men threw back their heads and groaned in annoyance, their dismay drowned out by the good cheer of their cohorts.
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