Earlier that same day, Susan Mills had set off for work at her usual time of 7am. In an email she had sent last night to a colleague, she had declared that her return was prompted by the desire to save her ‘stand-in’ from an early start. The truth was that after a day spent at home, reflecting on Tuesday’s awful events, she was keen to get back to her research project and her ‘babies’ as she affectionately termed them.
No one in the world had ever lavished so much love and affection on black soldier fly larvae as Sue had; monitoring their temperature control like a hawk, reviewing and moderating their food quantities and sources, even addressing them on a range of topical subjects. Once she had sung to them – ‘Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend’. She had watched Gentlemen Prefer Blondes the night before and had even thrown in some Marilyn Monroe puckering and shimmying, out of sight of the security cameras. However, that day’s yield had been three per cent down, so she couldn’t afford to repeat her performance, however liberating she had found it.
And she was better off at work anyway. Sitting at home as she had yesterday, attempting to write up her recent results and catch up on academic papers, had been difficult. All she had thought about was Brett Ingram, his easy charm over lunch – he was the kind of man who really made eye contact with you, made sure you knew he was looking at you, spoke to you, not at you. Only some men could carry that off without making you feel uncomfortable. People assumed it was connected to how good-looking he was, but Sue thought it was linked more to his integrity and professionalism. She didn’t dwell on the fact that, when one of the lab helpers had made similar eye contact with her some weeks back, she had felt compelled to have him replaced. That was justified. After all, he had a body odour issue and an unfortunate twitch.
But the incident with Brett had been so upsetting that Tuesday’s events seemed jumbled in her mind; the lunch, his introduction of the speakers, then his collapse and prompt demise. And, even after the paramedics had confirmed that his heart really had stopped, Brett’s eyes had continued to focus on her. She was sure of it. It was an unfortunate twist of fate, his head having finally settled itself to one side, his face and, therefore, those eyes, open but unseeing, pointing in her direction.
In the foyer, Sue went through the security measures to enter her place of work; she swiped her pass, entered her personal code, washed her hands thoroughly and covered her hair with the regulation net, before repeating the process at the second set of doors. These stringent requirements were more than a little ironic, she thought, as she scrubbed away at her hands and nails. They were soldier fly larvae she was tending, not, despite her nickname for them, premature babies. In nature, there would be no sanitised environment – quite the contrary. And more than that, here they were deliberately exposed to a wide range of ‘dirty’ products for their nourishment. Some days, it was blood or unwanted body parts from a range of animals sourced from the local abattoir, other days organic household waste and, only occasionally, used coffee grounds from local cafés. Even so, she had to be squeaky clean, to ensure she did not contaminate their surroundings or invalidate her own experiments.
As the second door slid back and Sue glided through it, she felt a sense of peace; memories of Tuesday receded as everything appeared in order, the machines containing the larvae, laid out in neat rows, emitting their usual low-pitched hum, the floors clean and clear of any equipment. She had been away for almost forty-eight hours, but nothing had gone amiss.
Sue went through her usual morning routine, checking on every container. One of the most important aspects of her role was to monitor the temperature to which the larvae were exposed; the optimal conditions from previous research suggested this was around thirty-five degrees Celsius and seventy per cent humidity, although part of her testing regime was to find the best combination. And so, as she walked the lines like a sergeant major, she checked that each vat was set with a slight incremental increase, when compared with its neighbour. Although she set the temperatures herself, even she had been known to make mistakes, albeit rarely, so it was always better to check. Then, when she selected her samples for testing in the lab upstairs, she could plot the results with confidence, by reference to the precise circumstances in which the larvae had been encouraged to develop.
Today was a significant day for batch 5061 and 5062 and she paused longer to stare into the vessels which housed them. After fourteen days and, having increased their body weight five thousand times over, the fat wriggling, burgeoning larvae were to be chilled and dried, before their final incarnation as poultry or fish food. Sue was to be the one to administer the coup de grâce, the flick of the switch to lower the temperature to between ten and sixteen degrees. With that downward dip, she would ensure that each one of those larvae never developed into an adult fly, never acquired glistening thorax or tapering abdomen, never grew gossamer wings or sweeping antennae. Did that make her a killer? If so, she was a killer of thousands – hundreds of thousands. Was there even a term for that?
Some people, some sentimental people, who equated the life of an insect with that of a human, or even another mammal, might assume that she preferred not to think about the consequences of her actions, as the smallest movement of one digit condemned the larvae to death. On the contrary, this was the point at which she felt the biggest sense of achievement. Her offspring had been raised successfully, passed all relevant milestones under her care and were now dispatched to fulfil the next part of their journey. They had value only because of their position in the cycle; they had been created in the first place only to fulfil this role. In this sense, Sue was playing God and she rather liked it.
Around midday she picked up a message that the police wanted to speak to her and could she make herself available tomorrow? Not unexpected in the circumstances, but still unwelcome. There wasn’t anything she could tell them. She’d sat down and Brett had died. It was nothing to do with her. What more could she say?
Then, at 5pm, just as she was preparing to send 5061 and 5062 to their final resting place, a message arrived on her phone. She read it through, then frowned, rested one hand against the nearest container, the gentle, rhythmic motion helping to restore her equilibrium. After a moment, she read the message again, before putting her phone back in her lab-coat pocket.
Normally, she liked to say something – inside her head of course – to help the larvae on their way, but now, today, this moment, the words wouldn’t come. Instead, she pushed her glasses up to the top of her head, leaned in close, peered at the dial and then lowered the temperature on the first vat, repeating the process with its neighbour. She emailed the lab technician to ask him to come by in thirty minutes and bag up the larvae.
Then, murmuring ‘Sweet dreams,’ she removed her lab coat, dropped it into the nearest bin for washing and padded out of the building.