Lab Gremlins
Cedar Sanderson
Published by Stonycroft Publishing, an independent imprint.
Copyright © Cedar Sanderson, 2017
Cover art and layout by Cedar Sanderson, Cedarlili Art
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Publisher’s Note: this is a fictional work. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s fevered imagination, and any resemblance to real places, persons, or events is strictly coincidental and should not be construed as reality intruding on fiction.
This story began with the missing autoclave baskets. They were real. The rest of it? Only the names were donated by friends and fans, and much appreciated by the author!
Avaunt the Gremlins
“Lab gremlins? Seriously?” Steven looked up at his boss. He was in a disadvantageous position to be talking to the older man, since he was currently sitting on the floor criss-cross applesauce. He hadn’t heard his boss come into the lab, and it startled him when Julian abruptly announced that they had lab gremlins.
“Why else would we be missing three autoclave baskets?” There was a smirk barely visible under Julian’s neatly trimmed mustache and full beard. “Mice?”
“Er.” Steven scrambled to his feet. “I have no idea. It doesn’t seem like they are something the cleaners would be tempted by, and besides, they can’t come in this part of the lab.”
“And I assume you wouldn’t leave them in the outer lab.” Julian shook his head and repeated with gloom and doom in his tone, “Ergo, we have lab gremlins.”
Dr. Julian W Thompson, and you didn’t leave out the W, Steven had learned since he’d started working in the strange little R&D lab tucked deep inside the plant, was something else. Steven had been a little intimidated by the man at first sight, since Julian had glowered in the corner during his interview, letting the Quality Assurance manager do all the talking, until the very end. Then Julian had leaned forward and pierced Steven with his deep-set gray eyes and a compelling steady gaze.
“What are your opinions on quantum chemistry, Mr. Taylor?” He’d asked.
Steven remembered freezing, and then blurting out. “Subatomic entanglement is a bit beyond me, and I hadn’t expected to encounter it as a lab tech, sir.”
Julian had snorted, and leaned back, and Steven had walked out of the interview convinced that he’d lost the job in that moment. When he was called the morning after with an offer, it had taken him a full minute to collect himself to answer the HR lady on the phone with an enthusiastic affirmative. It had been six months since graduation and he was on his last thin dime of savings and contemplating leaving science entirely.
Now, standing in the tiny restricted-access windowless lab that had become his second home over the last six months, he was wondering if it would really be so awful to go back and accept that offer of a Waffle House management position. “We’ll take anyone with a degree!” they’d told him cheerfully. “It means they can finish things!”
Finishing things was more than Steven could say about his tenure in the lab. His shoulders slumped. “I’ll use the two I can find, but I just don’t understand how things keep going missing.”
“I’ll order more. You need how many?” Julian sounded oddly solicitous for a change.
Steven did a quick mental calculation. He used the expanded metal - aluminum, to be exact - baskets, which were really boxes with a lot of holes in the sides and bottom, to run bottles in the autoclave for sterilization, sometimes with media in them. “Four, sir?” He responded finally. He’d been tempted to ask for more, for these invisible gremlins his boss was teasing him about, but the man had been grumbling about the budget recently.
“Six.” Julian said firmly. “And we need to do something about the gremlins.”
Steven agreed, even if he didn’t believe in gremlins. Something was happening in the lab. The baskets, a pipetter, little things like coming in and finding beakers standing on the bench when he was roundly certain that he’d cleaned and wiped that down prior to his departure the evening before. Julian denied having removed, or moved, anything, and the whole thing was getting to Steven along with the uncertainty of just what the lab was working on. How could funding keep coming if, well, they weren’t doing anything? Julian was keeping records, but he didn’t talk to Steven about what he was recording, and Steven’s mystification grew with each batch of media made, incubated and then... nothing. Steven had started job searching already, even though the place he’d gotten was a plum assignment, according to his classmates he’d met with after starting there.
“Um, just what do you do about gremlins?” In the meantime, while hunting, he needed a paycheck. And if that meant playing along with a gremlin-hunt, he was game. “A havahart trap?”
“A what?” Julian’s bushy eyebrows climbed high up his bald dome head.
“A humane trap. So we could, um, relocate them?” Steven wasn’t sure how big they were supposed to be, but he’d seen some pretty damn big trash pandas in his apartment complex’s dumpsters late at night. He had also seen the catch-and-release traps being used as stairs by those raccoons, so smart critters knew how to avoid being caught by them. How smart was a gremlin? He shook his head. He was starting to buy into Julian’s joke way too much.
Julian started to laugh, a surprisingly high-pitched cackle for a man of his size and bulk. “What’re you going to bait one with, a autoclave basket?”
Steven shook his head sharply, and then pushed the thick lock of hair out of his face. He needed to get a haircut, but kept forgetting when he had the time. “I was actually thinking about peanut butter.”
“They aren’t mice, or even rats. “ Julian’s chuckles subsided and his face went all serious. “I’ll get the trap and bait it.”
“What are you going to use?” Steven was becoming convinced his boss was nuts, but he was still curious.
“Wait and see.” Julian tapped the side of his nose with his finger. “Wait and see.”
The trap, and Steven’s baskets, showed up a week later. It had been an uneventful week, other than some snarling by Julian over the missing quartz cuvette for the spectrophotometer. Since it was one of the few tests Steven had been certified on, he was afraid his boss would blame him, but Julian had just slammed out of the lab and stormed off to his office, leaving Steven to run the assay on the media samples. It took longer with only one cuvette, but at least it was data collection. Steven wondered what he’d do if the results ever altered. Run it again to make sure, he decided. Julian would probably say Steven hadn’t cleaned the cuvette off properly and that had thrown off the results. Steven moped, until the big box showed up outside the lab door.
Ray who delivered the receiving rapped on the reinforced glass window in the lab door. The only two people who ever came in the lab were Steven and Julian. Steven wasn’t even sure anyone else had badge access to it, and Julian had told him the code was only valid for the two of them. They used a sort of two-step authentication: swipe the badge, tap a code into the keypad when it lit up in response to the badge. Then, and only then, would the door click and unlock. Heaven help you, Steven had learned, if you didn’t grab the door and push it open quickly enough. It would re-lock and you’d have to go through the process again. Also, if you held the door open and unlocked for too long, an alarm would go off. Which made bringing receiving into the lab an exercise in moving quickly and hoping it wasn’t too big an order drop.
Now, he opened the door and grabbed the b
ig box, sliding it into the lab and pushing it behind him. While using his foot to hold the door open, he swiveled his body out far enough to reach the stack of smaller boxes and repeated the sliding motion. Finally, he stepped back into the doorway and let the door fall shut behind him. He’d set off the alarm a couple of times in his first weeks, until Julian had showed him the technique for receiving the stuff quickly.
Now, he grabbed the scanner and started the laborious process of receiving the boxes and their contents. The only good thing about this system was that he could use the computer program for printing labels. All his media making, waste destruction, and assays were strictly paper. The fat lab notebooks filled a half dozen cupboards in the lab, but Julian had snorted and shaken his head when Steven asked about using the Laboratory Information Management system for more than inventory control.
“There’s such a thing as too much data retention, m’boy,” he’d said. Steven had blinked in surprise, remembering his professor’s lectures on data integrity, and how software had revolutionized lab record keeping, and then shrugged and kept the lab notebooks as carefully as he could.
The trap was certainly big enough to hold a raccoon, Steven decided when he’d cut the cardboard box away from the wire and metal contraption. He would have thought that if there were animals that size in the lab, he’d have seen signs of them. He pushed the trap as far out of the way as he could get it, surprised at how heavy it was. Then he turned his attention back to receiving the other inventory items that had shown up. It wasn’t his job to ask questions. He’d been hopeful, working in an R&D lab, that he’d get a boss who would use him as a laboratory assistant - that would be fantastic on his resume later - but Julian either grunted as his only response to a question, or mumbled absent-mindedly, “Don’t ask, you don’wanna know.” Steven had given up after just a few weeks of that.
He still had a nagging feeling that more was going on in this lab than he had figured out. First of all, why the biological media in what was supposed to be a chemistry lab? Chemists didn’t grow organisms in agar or whatever else they mixed up to suit the pickiest of organisms. Biologists and chemists had, he’d grasped during his years in school, a friendly rivalry and no real connection, unless you counted the odd biochemist. Steven’s decision to dual major in biology and chemistry had been born from a desire to make himself marketable after school, not a quixotic yearning to become a bridge between the two disciplines. He’d quickly figured out after joining the workforce that chemists got more jobs and made better money than biologists. This lab, though... He scanned newly-labeled reagents and arranged them in the cupboards in alphabetical order as he’d been taught. Microbiology and chemistry rubbing shoulders.
The lab was small enough that if there had been more staff, rubbing shoulders would have been literal. When Julian walked in, the room seemed even smaller. It wasn’t just that the scientist was a big man - at well over six feet, he was - or that he carried a more-than-amply padded frame around under that height. He was a big personality, Steven had realized. His first impression of the man had been of a quiet recluse. Well, the recluse part might have been right. Steven had no idea what Julian did after work. Nightclubs seemed unlikely.
“Steven!” Julian’s booming voice filled the room. “The trap came!”
Steven closed the cabinet and composed his face. His boss might be brilliant, but he also had a lot of Captain Obvious moments. He turned around. Julian was hauling the trap up onto his nice clean bench, and Steven winced. He’d have to clean that again. And if there were scratches, it would be harder to sterilize. But it was Julian’s lab, and the man could do what he wanted. Steven put his calm mask on and joined his boss to look at the new toy.
“Hopefully it’s big enough.” Julian was playing with the door mechanism now. “And this isn’t going to hold. Fingers and thumb…” he mumbled.
“Are you going to leave it there?” Steven asked. He couldn’t help himself. The silly thing was just going to be in the way wherever it was, but on the bench... Julian was taking this whole joke too far.
Julian looked up, peering through his shaggy eyebrows. “What? Oh, no, we’ll put it back where you had it. Good place for it. But first, I’ll have to do something about this latch.”
He went back to fiddling, and Steven headed for the autoclave. If anyone had told him a few months ago that the stinky, steamy oven of doom would be his happy place, he’d have scoffed. But there was something satisfying about making everything dead, dead, dead. And melting plastic into warped blobs instead of petri plates. Besides, the noise of the steam in pipes drowned out his boss when he was in the more ominous Mad Scientist moments of talking to himself.
By the time Steven was ready to knock off for the day, his boss had the trap back in the corner, with the incongruous bait of an old reagent bottle sitting on the trigger plate. Steven bent over to peer into the trap and recognized it. He’d found it while cleaning the lab during his second week and had asked Julian about disposal.
“Where’d you find that?” Julian had asked, turning the small brown bottle around in his fingers. He’d pulled a pair of reading glasses out of his pocket and shoved his lab glasses up on his forehead. “My, my, that would be before you were born, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes, by about twenty years.” Steven had already looked at the expiry date handwritten on the yellow label. The label was still securely on, but crumbling at the edges, and Steven happened to know that Kodak had long ago gone out of the business of chemical reagents. “I found it up in the top cupboard.”
“Well, put it back, then.” Julian had handed the bottle back to him. “And make sure you keep the doors closed.”
Now, that ancient bottle was standing on the trigger plate in the trap. Steven shook his head and headed for the door. Not his circus, not his monkeys. He was just a minion, and his boss would be the one to take any heat.
The Mystery of the Shattered Bottle
Later that evening, he sat at the island in the apartment kitchen on a ratty barstool, eating a slice of pizza and telling his roommates about the whole thing. “Swear to ghu, he’s gone right around the bend and thinks he’s going to catch a gremlin.” Steven took another bite of the greasy glorious cheesy foodstuff. “Mpf. I come in tomorrow and there’s some green dude in that trap...”
“Man, I know you aren’t allowed to take your phone in there, but maybe you should make an exception tomorrow.” Jay opened the fridge and pulled out a can of soda. The three of them were all standing in the kitchen eating the pizza Steven had brought home.
Tony shook his head. Easily the shortest of the three of them, the stocky, dark-haired man was also the most serious. “Better not. Sounded like there was instrumentation the cell could interfere with.” He worked in the University labs, so he would know.
Steven shrugged. “Not that I have seen, but with Julian you never know.”
“Doctor Thompson has an, um, reputation.” Tony looked at the remains of his slice with an expression like he’d forgotten he was holding it. He took a big bite.
“I’m not surprised.” Steven, having finished his second slice, contemplated the remains of the extra-large pie and reached for a third. “He’s not right. I still have no idea what his research entails. Other than a lot of media.”
“The media is a bit weird.” Tony commented when he’d had a chance to swallow. “He’s known for his research in molecular bonding and nanoflasks.”
“Nanoflasks seem like a waste of time.” Jay grinned. “Wouldn’t hold enough to be worth the effort.”
His friends groaned, and the conversation degenerated into jokes about drinking until they had finished the pizza.That night, Steven slept soundly, only waking once to the fuzzy recollection of the cute airplane-eared gremlin from an old Bugs Bunny cartoon, wing-walking while swigging out of a tiny flask. He rolled over, punched his pillow, and resolutely thought about how to calculate the volume of a funnel which was being drained at a certain rate per second. That did t
he trick and he was out like a light until morning. He slept a little too hard, actually, and it was only when Jay pounded on his door and shouted about shutting the damn alarm off that he sat bolt upright and looked at the time.
“Shit!” Steven hurled himself out of bed and snatched clothes from the pile on the chair. They were usually less dirty than the pile on the floor next to it. “Sorry!” he called to his roommate, who didn’t answer. Jay worked late and was probably already asleep again. He was still pulling his shirt down when he ran out the door and down the steps to the parking lot. He had to make a mental effort not to speed on his way to work, because he knew as long as he beat his boss to the lab, there wouldn’t be sarcastic comments. Steven thought of himself as thick-skinned but Julian’s roasting, even when gentle, could be remorseless. It wasn’t worth a ticket, though, to avoid being called a millennial for the rest of the week.
He pulled into the small back lot he preferred and breathed a sigh of relief. No sign of the green Subaru Julian drove. Steven collected his access pass card from the glove box where he always left it overnight and headed for the side door. He could go in the front entrance, but this way there were fewer people to give him funny looks. Why they had combined a lab and a corporate office in one building was beyond his pay grade, although he supposed it was a cost-cutting measure and it wasn’t like they worked with anything particularly dangerous in the lab. He scanned the card and punched in his code, peering into the darkened lab through the window on the door. The lights came on as soon as he entered, triggered by his motion. Pulling on his lab coat, Steven stopped and sniffed.
Why did the lab smell faintly of vinegar? He looked at the benches. Everything was as neat as he’d left it the night before. Frowning to himself, he headed for the small desk where his laptop was sitting. As he came around the bench, he caught himself with one foot in the air, grabbing the bench for support. A bottle lay on the floor, broken. The smell was stronger here. Steven backed up and went around for the broom and dustpan. The brown glass bottle was unlabeled, a big violation of lab procedure. Whatever had been in it was dried up, leaving only the smell hanging in the air despite the air handlers that hummed overhead. Steven dumped the evidence in the broken glass box.
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