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MAGGIE HAD A CARRIAGE house behind her home that she had converted into a workable lab. With help from Danny and Kevin, the lab had the usual equipment and some very unusual inventions made by one or more of the trio.
Usually in a group of friends, there is one who is the voice of reason. One who will rein someone in if they go off on a tangent. In this trio, there was no voice of reason. There were only varying degrees of insanity when it came to their experiments.
The lab had one long table for general use equipment, microscopes of various types and questionable provenance, as well as a laboratory centrifuge and an autoclave, each of dubious origin. Three other tables stood against opposing walls, leaving the large carriage door available to be opened for a quick exit or airing out. Each table had epoxy resin countertops and held equipment related to its owner’s particular specialty.
Maggie’s space was organized chaos with a small square area on the table in which she actually did her work. The remaining space was filled with chemistry, nanotechnology and biology books, as well as several laptops and a computer tablet. Recently there had been an addition of several books titled Aquatic Animals and a few on organic olive productions. Danny had read through some of Maggie’s notes one day and immediately took everyone out for seafood that night. Maggie’s tablet looked worse for wear as though someone may have used it to mix or chop ingredients on its surface. Maggie mostly worked on hair-care formulas and had various liquids and different components piled in boxes under her desk. She was also interested in nanotechnology, nanoemulsion, and synthetic chemistry to manufacture her own chemicals.
Outside the lab, Kevin was the prudent one, the spoilsport in the group who advised against chili dogs or garbage pizza after midnight, but inside the lab turned into Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Dr. Frankenstein rolled into one. He employed the philosophy, “why the hell not?” instead of the more prudent, “this may need more thought and testing.” He always dressed nattily, though. That never changed in or outside of the lab. Kevin’s space was set up identical to the other two but on a much neater scale. He was the Hercule Poirot of lab setups. Everything was in neat rows, arranged by use and size. Books were in bookcases rather than in un-tidy heaps on the floor, like Maggie and Danny’s. Kevin had a flat screen monitor attached to the wall to make more room on his spotless counter with the keyboard affixed under the bench also as another space-saving measure.
Kevin felt that the perfect, and safe energy source was out there in the environment and didn’t require digging deep into the earth to retrieve. He tried combinations of wind and solar. He also tested several types of alternative fuels, although the test drives almost required the services of the local fire department. Luckily Maggie was a firm believer in accident prevention, knew her lab mates well, and thus had every type of fire extinguisher on the market in her lab.
Danny’s area was nearly bare as he preferred to use everyone else’s instruments and laptops, or utilized the general use equipment since he’d destroyed his own several times over. He did have a beat-up laptop that had survived longer than most of his property. He referred to it as his silver laptop even though to Kevin and Maggie’s eyes it looked jet- black. Even though Danny’s space was the sparsest, he seemed to come up with an incredible number of half-assed inventions. There were countless pieces of equipment and samples of liquid that would make an appearance for one or two days and then disappear never to be seen again. There was the MP3 microwave that would play during your microwaving experience. He felt that depending on the cooking time he could set the appropriate song. Popcorn equaled a three-minute song. Reheating a baked potato could be a TV theme song. Unfortunately, the songs had to be set precisely, and random play had to be turned off completely, otherwise, significant malfunctions could occur. If, for popcorn, the MP3 randomly played on “Drown” or “Siamese Dream” by Smashing Pumpkins (both over eight minutes long) Iron Butterfly’s In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (running time 17:05) the odor of burnt popcorn would definitely be smelled for a long time. Kevin’s favorite Danny’s concoction was his super cleaning solution that ate through everything like the alien blood in the Alien movies. That scary stuff had burned through the epoxy resin countertop, the cement floor, and then possibly continued on through to the earth’s crust.
Kevin told Maggie in confidence once that he had a private theory that Danny had another secret lab somewhere funded by radicals where he kept all his failed experiments. Or were they failed?
Inside the carriage house/lab, they had all settled at their workstations. Maggie stared at Danny and Kevin for a few seconds and then realized she would have to start the ball rolling.
“So, are you two going to tell me what’s going on or do I have to read about you in the Yahoo headlines. ‘Lexi employees run amuck at the plant and piss off SWAT team in the process.’ I am not a complete idiot, either. You two have done something to yourselves. Under the most extreme torture imaginable, I’d deny it, but you two look incredibly good. Either you guys have actually discovered something amazing or have given me something that fools me into thinking you look fantastic. Now spill.”
“Okay, Okay it all started when we realized we weren’t as far along on the formula as we had led Conner to believe. We needed another month or so for testing and were behind schedule,” Danny began.
Maggie stood up and waved her arms in front of Danny as if warding off a plane coming in for a landing. “Wait a second; I don’t want the courtroom version.” Maggie punctuated this with a poke to Danny’s chest. “I want the truth.” Another poke. “Behind schedule means you guys were screwing around like you usually do at work.” Poke, poke. “Now continue.”
Danny rolled his eyes, rubbed his chest, and admitted “Well, yes it was something like that.” He proceeded to tell a very abbreviated version of the story, which made it seem like he and Kevin were incredible scientific geniuses. Kevin chimed in from time to time, adding spectacular sound effects and occasionally re-enacting some of the more exciting elements of the last few hours.
Halfway through the story, Maggie grabbed a bottle of vodka out of her freezer and poured herself and the boys a healthy helping of Grey Goose.
“So you have the formula with you, then?”
“Yes,” said Danny, “now all we have to do is figure out how to get full credit without Lexi grabbing the formula and all the rights there- in.”
“There in? What are you, a guest star lawyer in of ‘Law and Order’? There- in. Give me a break,” Kevin ranted.
Danny snapped his fingers. “Wait a second, can’t Maggie ‘discover’ the formula here on her own time. How does your non-disclosure agreement work at the university, Maggie?"
“She’s Dora Fountain aren’t you love?” Kevin asked with a massive grin on his face.
“What, who’s, oh, great, another alias I have to remember. So tell me who is Dora and how does she relate to this mess?” asked Danny.
Maggie explained that she took steps to ensure the university wouldn’t take any discoveries she created away from her. Everyone on staff had signed a non-disclosure contract. Maggie signed her form “Wilma Flintstone” when she was first hired, and it wasn’t until a new computer system was introduced into the university’s legal department that it was discovered that there was no Professor Flintstone. Further, when it was revealed that Maggie was the one employee who hadn’t signed a non-disclosure contract, she received a nasty note from the legal department. She told them she would send off a new form right away. But she’d made a frantic phone call to Kevin who hacked into the university’s personnel files and switched her name and information with that of the head cafeteria worker, Dora Fountain. According to the university’s legal department’s files, Dora was a professor of biochemistry, organic and inorganic chemistry while a Maggie Penny was in charge of ordering ground beef at the cafeteria. Cafeteria employees were not required to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Kevin kept this information on file for a week and then switched Maggie back as a full professor, and she no longer was required to place orders for condiments and baked goods. However, for an entire week, the food in the cafeteria improved 110%.
Maggie had signed the nondisclosure form as Dora Fountain and sent it off with her apologies for a poor sense of humor. Legal acknowledged the paperwork and told there were no hard feelings and have a nice day, Ms. Fountain. Apparently, in addition to not having a sense of humor, the legal department in addition to not having a sense of humor had a poor memory for it failed to recall that it had been Maggie who had signed the paper Wilma and not Dora.
“So if they check, Maggie has no agreement, but Dora with her priceless recipes for mystery meat, has a non-disclosure agreement. I’m pretty sure we have a winner here for our discovery of the century.”
“But wait, won’t Lexi know their ingredients are the formula? Won’t it be obvious it all came from Lexi’s lab?” asked Maggie. “And how can I explain that I’m using their ingredients?
“Yes, but as luck would have it, the ingredients are things that can be found in almost every grocery or health food store. It’s pretty much all-natural. Lexi can’t claim the formula is their property since none of it was made from Lexi products. It’s fucking brilliant!” crowed Kevin.
Danny was so excited he was hopping about on one foot.
“Hey Roger Rabbit, settle down. Just what is in this formula anyway?” asked Maggie.
“Well, it has numerous all-natural ingredients. A plethora of ingredients you might say.”
“You just had to give him that a word- a -day calendar, didn’t you?” sighed Kevin frowning at Maggie.
“It was a joke. I didn’t think he would actually read the damn words every day. I figured he’d use the back as scrap paper or something.”
“Well, you’ve created a word monster. Not to mention he’s upped his score in Words with Friends considerably.”
“Hey, we are off topic again,” moaned Maggie.”
“Again, what is in this formula I came up with, and how long have I been working on it?”
“Let’s see,” mumbled Kevin. “It does have quite a few ingredients in it, and all natural as Danny, the word monster, has already said.”
“Yes it’s got quite a few natural type things in it since the basis for the formula per Lexi management was all natural. They want to come out with an all-natural face cream in response to the bad press nano-technology has been getting and whether or not it should be regulated. Blah blah blah. So we had a variety of oils, coconut, sunflower, and rosemary essential. These are natural antioxidants for the skin. As a side project, if time allowed, we were to create a concealer, again using natural oils such as vitamin E, castor oil (ugh) and grapefruit seed oil. We also had the ever popular healer, aloe, in gel and liquid form. For the prevention of wrinkles and dry skin, we had the usual, natural fruit extracts from custard-apple or bear’s heart, mango, and strawberries. For under the eye treatments, we had almond oil and honey, mint leaves with lime juice and rose water,” intoned Kevin.
“Hey, rose water, I think I dated her in college, kinda a shrinking violet. Ha. Hey, is that what we had all over the counter? I wondered why it smelled so good in our section. I thought they had a new air freshener around,” laughed Danny.
“I had to make it look like we were doing something so I kept rotating ingredients around and ordering supplies. I thought at least one of us should pretend to be doing something.”
“Yes, and you picked the right person for the job. If you want something done and have it look like a work in progress without actual results, call on Kevin Montgomery,” sang Danny.
“Well, dumb-dumb, it kept Conner off our backs for nearly a year.”
“Yes, and I am eternally grateful. Oh, and there was that other ingredient. Who knows, maybe that was the secret ingredient for the whole thing.”
“What ingredient was that?” asked Maggie.
“Why yours, the vial of stuff you gave me to try on my hair. So actually, Maggie, you are a big part of this project after all,” Danny said looking at her thoughtfully.
“What vial? What do you mean for your hair? Oh, God. You never listen to me, do you? You aren’t listening to me now, are you?” Maggie said in an apparent calm voice. This should have been a warning to the boys. However, Kevin was too busy trying to wet nap himself clean, and Danny was staring off into space with a more than usual blank look on his face.
“How about DKM Inc. or KMP Ltd. or something. They both sound cool and ominous. Or something catchy like, Reverse?” Danny said excitedly to Maggie. “Get it, like reverse aging. Or we could just use our initials.
“You idiot. Sorry, I mean you, idiots!” With that Maggie grabbed one of a half dozen fire extinguishers from the wall and clanged it against a worktable.
“Sorry, I must have missed something. Maggie, why are you upset? You look upset Mags. What’s wrong? These titles were just off the top of my head. We can use whatever you want. Honey, honey bunch, sweetums. Uh-oh, she’s not melting, Kevin I suggest we slowly and carefully make for the nearest exit.”
Kevin, who’d seen the approaching storm, was already inching toward the garage’s service door.
“Freeze both of you, or I will blast you. I have enough in here for both of you,” said Maggie aiming the fire extinguisher in the general direction of Danny and Kevin.
“Of course, dear. Let’s sit down and talk about it.” Danny purred in his silkiest most apologetic voice.”
“Idiots, idiots, idiots. Both of you are complete clueless baboons.”
“Now that’s a little harsh, isn’t it Maggie?” Kevin said as he continued to inch toward the door.
“I told you not to move,” Maggie said as she banged down the extinguisher on a worktable, causing either part of the extinguisher or the table to splinter off and fly across the room.
“Yes ma’am,” Danny and Kevin said in unison as they followed the projectile with their eyes.
“Now that I have your attention, once again, I’ll ask you, what vial? Describe it to me.”
“Um, you know, that vial you gave me yesterday or the day before to use on my hair like the others. It was one of those large vials with a black and orange cap. And it also had a black and orange sticker on it. I just threw what was into the mix with all the other things we were tossing in. I may have some left, I don’t know if I used all of it or not,” said Danny but remembering something slightly different.
When he had opened the vial’s cap and took a whiff, it reeked so badly that he couldn’t bring himself to save any for his hair. Thinking if he used it on himself, he would smell of that toxic skunk smell forever, he had dumped all of it into the mix. He’d then tossed the vial into the HAZMAT bin, not realizing it and the container had the same colors.
“Do the colors orange and black usually mean anything to you?” Maggie asked Danny.
“Weren’t those your university’s colors for a while before they got changed to something even uglier?”
“Idiot, an orange diamond with black lettering is for hazmat labels. The lettering read to analyze. I thought if you forgot what I told you about that vial, the colors would remind you to treat it with caution. I only wanted you to analyze the contents of the vial. The waiting list for the university’s mass spectrometry lab was booked solid for the week, and I thought you could sneak my vial in after-hours at your lab.”
“You mean I could’ve put something hazardous on my hair? What are you trying to do, kill me?
“Well, Mr. Outraged, if you had actually listened to me, you would have known not to put it on your hair but to analyze it like I asked.”
“Well, in the future you should remind of these things, and I’m sure I had a good reason for not quite catching everything you said about the vial. What day did you give it to me?”
“What difference does that make? It was the day before yesterday!”
“Ah ha, it is partially your fault. I remember now. You were wearing that slinky blue dress with the revealing neckline. Your hair was up with the little wisps hanging down in that sexy way. How am I supposed to concentrate on anything when you are wearing that dress and looking that hot?” said Danny in a righteous voice.
“Oh sure, blame me and the dress for your incompetence! Maggie paused, readying for another blast but then came to a realization. “You actually remember what I was wearing and that I had my hair up?”
“Yes precious, you looked stunning,” said, Danny, as he crept closer to Maggie and took her hands in his.
“Wait, wait we are off point again,” said Maggie.
Kevin, who’d been holding his breath for the last half minute in anticipation of a two- ton Maggie explosion, let out a whoosh of air.
“So Maggie, you’re to saying that the vial was not for human use?”
“Well, I didn’t know. I was combining nanoemulsion with some all-natural ingredients I was tinkering with, but it kept strangely breaking apart into globs. I wasn’t sure what the problem was, and then I spilled a Coke all over my notes before I could enter them into my tablet. Since I kept using different ingredients to see how they reacted to each other, I had a hard time remembering the ones I had finally used and how much of each I put into the formula. It’s the one I’ve have been working on for the last six months. That’s why I asked you to analyze it for me because I wasn’t 100% positive what I actually used in my final formula. And now you tell me you ate part of it and rubbed it all over your bodies.”
At the mention of nanoemulsion, Kevin started to sit but forgot there was no stool nearby and collapsed on the floor with a thump.
“I don’t feel so well,” he said, checking his pulse.
“We have machines running around in us at the subatomic level, and God knows what else?” Danny asked in a whispery voice. He gazed at his bare arm as if to trying to see the nanotechnology running around atop of his arm hair. “Christ, I’ve got the Fantastic Voyage running around in me or, even worse, the Andromeda Strain. I can feel my blood turning to sand right now.”
“Get a grip, Kensington. It’s not as scary as it seems,” Maggie huffed. You guys use nanotechnology and nanoemulsion in a bunch of your products. So do all your competitors. I wouldn’t eat them, but women rub that stuff on them all time to look youthful. It’s just the latest delivery system for a product to be directed to the desired layer of skin. It’s what your mad scientists at Lexi are aiming for with their hottest wonder cream.”
“Yes, the overpriced gunk is meant for women. God knows what it will do to us strapping young men. What if it gives us man boobs and we start to cry during those sappy jewelry commercials?” wailed Danny who was quickly losing his grip on any type of rational thought.
“I didn’t put estrogen in it, you jackass,” snapped Maggie.
Danny stared hard at Maggie for a few moments and then pulled her to one side.
“I’ve been thinking about this and how it will change our lives. It looks like a good thing, but there are always unforeseen consequences that arise.” Danny sighed as he hugged Maggie tightly, and when he pulled away, he wiped a tear from one eye.
“What is going on, Danny? You are scaring me.”
“Maggie, honey, baby, this is so huge. I think when something this good comes along, something bad always counters it. Kevin and I discover this formula and next thing you know someone dies. If sci-fi movies teach us anything, they always say knowledge or power or any type of gain comes at a price, usually a horrible price. You know what happened when both of us got promotions at work. Bam! The rug got pulled out from under us. I can’t survive a repeat of that. I don’t want you to be some casualty to this discovery. I couldn’t live with myself. I think we have to say our goodbyes now.” He then lowered his and head walked out of the barn, pulling an open-mouthed Kevin with him.
A not so faint “What a fucking idiot,” could be heard from the lab.
“What the hell was that all about?” Kevin asked.
“I’ll explain in the car. Have a seat,” Danny said as he opened the door and waited for Kevin to slide in.
“Things are weird and dangerous now. There’s this new formula, and it’s going to take you and me places. Maggie can’t come with us on this new journey. She’s got a career at the university and you and I, well, we don’t know where we will be. We could be sleeping in a haystack one day, or running for our lives the next. I won’t have her living a life like that.”
“Running for our lives, sleeping in haystacks? What the hell are you talking about?” asked Kevin. He then exited the car, walked around it several times, and then opened the rear door, slid in, reclined and started muttering.
“What the hell? What the hell have you just done? Have you gone completely insane? Oh God, that’s one of the side effects of the formula, sudden insanity. Has it happened to me yet? How can one tell? If you think you are insane, then you aren’t, but if you think you are sane, there’s a good possibility you’ve gone around the bend. I feel pretty good. In fact, I feel damn normal. Phew, that’s a relief. No wait, that’s a symptom. I have gone bonkers along with you. We need help. We need to be sedated first. Go in and tell Maggie we are nuts. Well, nuttier than usual. She’ll help us. Ahhhh I can’t breathe.” Kevin moaned as he looked for a bag in the car to breathe into. After searching the back seat, he gave up, sat back and felt around on his wrist to take his pulse.