“Yeah, I guess that’s true,” said Tabby. “But the speed. It’s happening so fast.”
“Shaw wants to use this stuff while he still can,” said Jon. “I don’t blame him, I guess. Get it out there while there’s still people to save. Did you hear anything else?”
“Not really,” said Tabby. “He was kind of tight-lipped about it. There was one thing that stood out, though.”
“What was it?”
“He said security is way more strict,” she said. “There’s actually guards down there, not just cameras.”
“Guarding against who?” asked Jon.
“I don’t know,” said Tabby. “I’m guessing people like Dr. Armitage. The projects are further along down there, so it would be easier to steal and implement, if they got out with it. And sabotage would be that much disastrous.”
“Then they’re defending against that,” said Jon.
“I’m just nervous,” said Tabby. “I feel like it’s the night before the first day of school, and I don’t know anyone, or any of the teachers, but this time, I’ve got to do a report with my whole life on the line.”
“I don’t think your life is on the line,” said Jon. “And you’re smarter than anyone else here. You’ll do great.”
“I’m glad someone thinks so,” said Tabby. “I’ll try and carve out time for us.”
“So will I,” said Jon. “Tommy hasn’t said anything about me spending time here, and I hope his silence is consent. Not that I need it—”
“But you’d like it,” said Tabby. “I get it. You could just ask him.”
“I know,” said Jon. “But he finally seems like he’s comfortable down here. I don’t want to poke the bear.”
“Fair enough,” said Tabby.
“God, I’m tired,” he said. “Sleep has been hard to come by.”
“Why?”
“I keep having nightmares,” said Jon. “Makes it hard to get back to sleep.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll keep them away.” And then she pressed against him, and she kissed him, and the rest of the world melted away.
12
“We can’t do that. We can’t just push it harder,” said Jon. He sat across from Stone in their lab. They’d been working together for a week, and things were finally coming to a head.
“We have to, Jon,” said Stone. “We’re still not getting anywhere. We have to ramp up the accelerator.”
Jon shook his head. “It’s a rat, not a car. And even in a car, if you accelerate too fast, too hard, you’ll overdrive the engine and it’ll burn up. We’ll burn up the damn rat before it even gets started healing. It’ll die before its arm regenerates.”
They hadn’t run any experiments for the entire week, spending the time organizing their new lab, getting their ducks in a row, and deciding on how to simulate their models. Mel had coded it all, and they’d gotten results back, adding in Stone’s research. Nothing in the models looked substantially different from Jon’s original ones, and that worried him.
“What are you so worried about?” asked Stone. “It’s just a damn rat. We’ve killed thousands of them. If one burns up, we’ll alter the code and try again. We don’t have the benefit of time right now. We have to move.”
“Just because we have access to all the rats in the world doesn’t mean we should treat them as disposable. The moment we ignore any kind of unnecessary pain—”
“They won’t be in pain, they’re sedated!” said Stone, standing up.
“That’s not the point,” said Jon. “Sit down.” Stone stared at him, and then sat again.
“We want to—no, we need to be smart here,” said Jon. “We can’t just churn through rats searching heedlessly for a solution. We want to maximize every rat, every test, every moment we have. Because the clock is ticking. Okay? We will move quickly, but we will do it with purpose. What is our goal?”
Stone stared at him. “Why—”
“What is our goal?”
“Right now? For a rat to regenerate a limb successfully, quickly, and able to have full use of the limb after being brought out of sedation.”
“Okay,” said Jon. “That’s our goal. How are we achieving it?”
“We’ll accelerate the healing process at the wound site and convert dormant cells in the rat into stem cells, allowing them to be used as fuel to power the regeneration. In tandem, we will transform the rat’s skin into a feeding mechanism, and then submerge it in a dense nutrient bath, giving it the additional fuel it needs to heal quickly, without deformity or mutation.”
Jon smiled. “You make it so sound so easy.”
“In theory, it is,” said Stone. “But in practice, there’s so many variables.”
“Let’s start out with our models, and see what happens,” said Jon. “Maybe the skin absorption and nutrient bath will make the difference.
So they started, all four of them crowded around a single rat, under sedation. Jon removed its arm, and then Stone injected it with the magic formula. They watched as its genome was re-written, its skin softening, glistening. Stone slipped it into a nutrient bath, it’s stump and mouth sticking out, but all other parts of it submerged in the milky white substance.
“How long will it take?” asked Mel in a hushed whisper.
“I don’t know,” said Jon, but Jon wouldn’t be letting the rat out of his sight. He wanted to see what happened, even if it was incremental.
“My god,” said Andrew, standing with them. The arm healed, the bones knitting themselves back together, muscles interlacing, and then they reached the point where the rat’s internally stored fuel wasn’t enough, and it processed the nutrient bath.
Jon wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it, but the liquid level of the bath was visibly shrinking, the bath being absorbed through the rat’s new skin. The arm continued to regenerate, bones and muscles forming, but then the absorption rate stalled, and Jon saw the arm tissue falter, and then mutate, with bulbous bone and muscle pushing out and through, the rat’s arm no longer looking like it should.
“Fuck,” said Stone. Soon the nutrient bath was gone, burned through, but only to grow a deformed, monstrous arm. “Ugh.”
Jon yelled, but in happiness, whooping through the lab, pumping his arms.
“Why are you so happy?” asked Stone.
“Because this is progress!” said Jon. “My hunch was right. It’s the absorption rate! It caps successful regeneration. All we have to do is up the absorption rate in its skin.”
“So I was right,” said Stone, arching his eyebrows. “We need to speed up the process.”
“Well—yes,” said Jon. “And this proves it. And it proves we’re on the right path. We just need to fiddle.”
So fiddle they did. Stone tried to accelerate all at once, but Jon preached patience, and the model Mel built spit out new formulas over the next few days.
They saw slow and steady progress, as the rats regenerated more and more of their limbs before lapsing into mutation. Stone got more and more frustrated. Jon only grew happier because they were close to success, each rat a substantial jump now.
Shaw had been right. Stone’s help was all he needed to succeed. Stone was driven, and somewhat overbearing, but worked hard, and desperately wanted progress, just like Jon did. Jon’s mind went to Tabby in the special projects lab. She messaged him, but they no longer saw each other at lunch, and he hadn’t been over to her place since she’d moved up. He understood, but he missed her.
His thoughts would move to Maya as well, as he waited for results from the newest subject, of how she was doing top side. He hoped she was okay. He hoped she had gotten his letters.
“This is the day,” said Jon. “I can feel it.” It had been a week full of testing. It was Friday, technically, but the days blended together down here, the normal calendar only used as a common reference point.