Cat Talavera yawned, reached for the big can of Red Bull, and stared at the computer readout. Around her, the lab hummed, electrical devices in constant combat with silence. Her eyes grated like abraded flesh on asphalt.
Cat yawned again, chugged down the last of the Red Bull, and returned her attention to the lines of As, Ts, Cs, and Gs. These—which the computer obligingly classified—were documented and cataloged as distinct introns, or genes. Other sections of DNA were marked as epigenetic regulators. She’d narrowed down the genus and species of Fluvium’s mysterious algae: Oscillatoria fracta. Except that her specimens contained an extra three thousand base pairs never documented in Oscillatoria before.
She’d been at it for two days now, taking time only to retreat to her hotel, sleep, choke down a quick meal, and return to the lab. She’d processed the DNA, amplified it, and decoded most of the genome. As much as she longed to get back to Grantham—Who’d have ever thought?—the perplexing section of DNA taunted her.
Out of habit, Cat began coding base pairs. She’d long ago memorized which patterns-of-three coded for which amino acids. One by one, she input them into the computer, building a model protein just as the transcription RNA did at the ribosome inside a cell.
Three hours later, even the Red Bull had nothing more to offer her. Her eyes had gone numb in her skull; her back felt like a pulled pretzel. She hit the enter button on the program she’d written, waiting while the computer began comparing known proteins with the one she’d laboriously recreated from the mysterious DNA.
To her immense relief, the computer tagged a match. A close match. She clamped her eyes, trying to will her exhausted brain to focus. She stared, fought through the fog, and shook her head.
No way!
Desperately weary, she figured she was imagining things. Pushing her chair back and standing up, she swung her arms, ran in place, and did a couple of jumping jacks. Her pulse and respiration up, she sat again, and studied the screen.
In disbelief she shook her head. “Dios mio! No es possible!”
Cat walked to the safety cabinet and gazed through the window at the innocuous jar. She impulsively crossed herself. “Bless, you, Falcon.” He had been the one to suggest treating the jar and its contents with caution.
Once again, she ran the sterilization cycle, then she incinerated the samples she’d removed from the jar.
Only then did she fish her phone from her purse and press in the number.
“What’s happenin’ Cat?” Edwin’s too-cheery voice came through the receiver.
“Tell Falcon I’ve finished with Fluvium’s jar.”
“What’s in it? His drink for the afterlife? I been reading ’bout these Egyptians. All that shit in the tombs? It was so they’d have plenty of supplies in the afterlife. But only a small jar like that? Most of them dudes had big pots full of water and wine and stuff.”
“Some kind of drink,” she said ironically. “Edwin, you need to ask Falcon what he wants me to do with this. I’ve already destroyed the samples. Should I destroy the jar, too?”
“Okay, Cat. You’re leaving me in the dust here, girl. Destroy the jar?”
“Sorry. I’m tired. Not thinking well. The jar contains a kind of algae.”
“The guy took algae with him to the afterlife? What was he going to do? Toss it into his swimming pool so he’d have a reason to hire a pool service?”
“Edwin, we have a highly technical term in microbiology to describe organisms with characteristics like the ones I observed in Fluvium’s jar.” She made a face. “We call it ‘Really. Really. Scary. Shit.’”