by Brian Nelson
At his weekly meeting with Jack, he had to admit that he was lost.
“Yes, I’ve noticed,” Jack said.
Great, he’s noticed.
“In the other areas, though, you’re doing quite well. In fact, I’m impressed by how much you’ve assimilated in just a few weeks. The propulsion and data-processing groups both say you’ve been a great help. But the replication group tells me that all you’ve done is ask questions.”
Eric felt the silence grow too long. He wanted to tell Jack that the equations were just too complex, that he lacked the basic genetics background, and that he just didn’t have time to learn it and keep up with all the other groups. But he didn’t say those things, because it was clear that Jack wasn’t interested in excuses. Indeed, it was clear that Jack was testing him. He would have to learn to swim on his own. If not, Jack would let him sink.
“I’ll work harder on it,” he said.
Jack gave him a reassuring smile. “Keep pushing and I think you’ll start to figure it out.”
Over the next week, he redoubled his efforts. But it got him nowhere. He just grew more and more distraught. He lost his appetite and started popping antacids to settle his stomach. And all the while, the inner voice grew more insistent. Just accept it, Jack made a mistake hiring you. Just tell him you aren’t cut out for it. Go work in the industry, like all the other mediocre PhDs.
He tried to tell the voice to shut up, but as each day passed without progress, it was harder to keep quiet. The voice seemed to know the truth: that he was not really a scientist. He was merely a faker, an impostor.
* * *
It was late Friday afternoon when she appeared. He was at his desk, and she ducked into his cube. “Hey, I know you don’t know me,” she said, “but I need a big favor.” She was hunched over so no one could see her head above the maze of cubicles. She popped her head up like a gopher, scanned the floor, then hunched down again.
Her badge read, hunter, jane, phd genetics.
There must be over six feet of her. Tall and fit, with tanned skin stretched over muscle. She was dressed in a hodgepodge of influences: expensive running shoes and army fatigue pants that clashed horribly with a purple Fisher Scientific T-shirt, the kind they gave away free at conferences. And he thought he heard a hint of a Southern accent that she was trying to cover up. No makeup or jewelry. Her ears weren’t even pierced. And she had beautiful, thick blond hair, the kind that most women would kill for, but it was disheveled and messy, as if she couldn’t care less.
“That depends on what the favor is,” Eric said, although he was intrigued.
“Here, this is Olex’s cell number. I’m leaving town for the weekend; I’ve got a triathlon and I need to escape without him seeing me. Call him and find out where he is. Please. Make up a story. Anything. Tell him you need supplies or something. If he sees me leaving, I’m dead.”
“Who’s Olex?”
“Who’s Olex?” she said with disbelief. “Wow, you must be new. Olexander Velichko? The devil of the Ukraine?”
Eric gave her a vacant stare.
“Evil incarnate?” she offered. “The unhappy blending of Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and Lord Voldemort?”
Eric shook his head faintly. She kept going.
“The man who steals other people’s work and publishes it as his own, then uses his station and fame to get away with it? The man that no one has ever seen laugh, and who relishes any opportunity to ridicule and torture his underlings?” She pointed at herself. “I give you exhibit A.”
“Sounds like someone to avoid.”
“Precisely. If he sees me, he’ll keep me here all weekend. Then no triathlon, which I have been training for … for three months.”
“Well, you’re in luck,” Eric said, pulling out his phone. “I have a trick for you.” He entered Olex’s phone number and typed a few commands. “Olex is up on Connecticut Avenue, north of Woodley Park.”
“Wait—how’d you do that? Olex’s phone is encrypted. You’re GPS-ing people without their permission?”
Eric gave her a knowing smile.
“That’s illegal,” she said, shocked, “and super illegal on base. And your name is …?” She squinted at his badge. “Eric Hill.”
Eric’s smile vanished. If she told the marines, he’d be in big trouble. They all were under the navy’s jurisdiction here, which meant military law.
“Very cool,” she said with a big grin.
Eric exhaled so hard it pushed up his hair. “Technically, I’m GPS-ing his phone’s IP address, not the phone itself.”
She gave him a yeah, right, buddy kind of look. “Call it what you want, it’s totally illegal.” She smiled again, and now, since she didn’t have to worry about Olex, she hopped up to sit on his desk, cupping her hands over the edge and leaning forward, arms locked at her sides. Her triceps emerging like thick cursive T’s.
“So you’re Jack’s newest NUB?”
“NUB?”
“Yeah. You. Me. All the postdocs and lab techs. We’re called NUBs. Olex heard it from one of the marines: ‘new useless body.’ It’s an insult, of course, but one that we’ve proudly embraced—at least for the short time we’re here.”
He gave her a quizzical look.
“Until we’re fired. You know your life expectancy is about the same as a fruit fly’s, right? We’re cheap labor. They churn us and they burn us. I’ve been here two months and I feel like a war veteran.”
“That bad?”
She nodded emphatically. “That bad. Just wait till the last day of the month. That’s when they do the re-opt—reorganization and optimization.” She enunciated it dramatically. “It’s a purge—a few people get promoted, a few more get demoted, and a whole bunch get a cardboard box and their final paycheck. Looking out over the parking lot, you can watch them go by. It ain’t a pretty sight.”
Eric looked down at his notebook and thought of the four hours he’d just spent trying to understand a single equation—unsuccessfully.
Reading his expression, she said, “But I’m sure you’ll do fine. After all, that trick with the phone was pretty good. You saved me!”
At just that moment, a short, plump Asian man popped his head into Eric’s cube. He wore thick glasses and a Spider Man tie. “There you are,” he said to Jane. “Nobody’s seen Olex.”
“Oh, I know,” she said, hopping off the desk. “Eric cleared that up for me.” Then she said, “Eric, this is Ryan Lee. He’s an idiot.” She said it so casually that Eric thought he misheard. “Ironic, actually,” she continued, “since he works in Artificial Intelligence. So I guess that means you create Artificial Idiocy, isn’t that right, Ryan?”
“And this is Jane,” Ryan said, not missing a beat. “The only daughter of a Marine Corps colonel who desperately wanted a boy. As you can see, he didn’t change his child-rearing strategies when he didn’t get what he wanted. The result: it looks like a woman but acts like a man.”
She punched him on the arm.
“I rest my case.”
The banter continued, with Jane teasing him about his devout belief in the universe according to the prophet Stan Lee. He reminded her that arctic camo could not be used like blue jeans for mixing and matching.
When their available stock of insults had been exhausted, Ryan said, “So, Eric, what do you do?”
“Apparently, nothing well,” he replied. “I just joined Nanotech.”
“Oh, you’re Jack’s new architect? I don’t envy you, brother. That job sounds like a headache.”
It struck Eric how much both his visitors knew about the politics and the personalities of the lab—things he was thoroughly ignorant of.
“I was just telling him about the re-opts.”
“Oh,” Ryan said, shaking his head. “You’ll find this place is crazy. We’re all under the great eye.” He ma
de a circle with his thumb and forefinger. Eastman and Behrmann know all. If you go even three days around here without making a contribution, they notice. And then there is the great maelstrom of evil: Olex.”
“I warned him already,” Jane said.
“Whatever she said is a gross understatement. Olex gave me hell for two months. Tried to get me fired. Luckily, Eastman found out the truth about me—right, Jane?”
“About being an idiot?”
“Au contraire—that I’m a genius.”
Jane rolled her eyes.
“Now Olex can’t touch me.”
“Unfortunately, he’s right about that,” Jane said. “Ryan has something going on—super top secret—that has Eastman excited.”
Ryan crossed his arms and gave a smug grin. His bravado was so incongruent with his short, pudgy stature that Eric couldn’t help but smile. He decided right then that he liked him; in fact, he liked both of them very much.
Jane looked at her watch. “Shit! The race!” She threw her weekend bag over her shoulder and was out the door. Ryan raised his eyebrows twice and said, “See ya around,” and he, too, was gone.
* * *
When Eric arrived at the next Nanotech team meeting, the room was too quiet. There was none of the normal premeeting chatter—no talk of sports, politics, or science news.
That was when Eric saw him, sitting at the head of the table.
He had the look of a man who is chronically underfed, with frail, papery skin that pulled at his skull and created a hollowness around his eyes. But his most distinctive feature was a thin black goatee that gave him the look of a Spanish conquistador. But he wasn’t Spanish. He was Ukrainian. This was Olexander Velichko.
Sitting beside him was Jane, scribbling notes on an iSheet. The seats closest to Olex and Jane were conspicuously empty.
Eric took the seat next to Jane.
“Ah, someone with guts,” she whispered, then added, “Jack asked him to help with your replication problems.”
At that moment, Olex looked up, straight into Eric’s eyes. Eric felt an intense uneasiness. He had dismissed much of Ryan and Jane’s grievances about Olex as hyperbole. Could anyone really be that bad? But now it was occurring to him that yes, perhaps someone could.
Olex leaned over to Jane. She whispered something in his ear. Olex stroked his goatee, and Eric saw his lips silently form the name Hill. He nodded slowly, examining Eric.
Eric shifted a little in his seat and looked down, suddenly very interested in his pen. At that moment, to his relief, Jack arrived, and the meeting began.
Isaac Zyrckowski started by reviewing the mutation problem and some recent experiments he had done. Isaac was an older postdoc who had gone back to graduate school in his midthirties. Ryan called him “the professor” because he favored a tweed jacket complete with suede elbow pads. Isaac was smart but permanently disheveled: untucked shirt, frayed pant cuffs, and hair that rose up from his scalp as if by some static charge.
Just as he was presenting his first slide, the door opened, and Bill Eastman himself stepped in. Isaac stopped midsentence, but Bill waved him on. “Continue, please. I’m just auditing the class.” He said it in a lighthearted tone, but no one laughed. Eastman’s appearance was painfully obvious: he was worried that the Nanotech team was going to miss its deadline. The fact that they had wasted almost a month on the replication problem had gotten his attention.
Isaac cleared his throat and continued. People were excited about his work because he might have solved at least some of their problems.
But he spoke only a few minutes before Olex waved his hand dismissively. “Please, please, just shut up. It’s all wrong. All of it.” He had a thick Slavic accent, and for a second Eric assumed that the blatant disrespect was a product of his poor English.
Olex put his fingertips to his forehead and closed his eyes as if he were suffering from great pain. “You strike me as a very ‘highly functioning’ ignoramus,” Olex began and on it went. He gave a vicious dissection of Isaac’s work, explaining with amazing clarity why it would never work, how his experiments were flawed, and how the team was right back where it had started. All the while, Isaac stood facing the audience—all forty-five members—his look of defiance slowly withering. Soon, he looked like a little boy who has lost his parents. His jaw quivered for a moment when Olex forced him to acknowledge that he had been wasting their time “with your mental masturbations.” He nodded and apologized, looking as if he had somehow shrunk in size.
Olex seemed ready to go on, but Jack cut in. “I think you’ve made your point, Dr. Velichko. Let’s refocus our attention on the problem, shall we?” Olex made the slightest bow with his head.
Olex’s attack had been cruel, yet the scientist in Eric had to acknowledge his awesome perspicuity. Bill and Jack must have known Olex’s reputation—that he was impossible to work with, condescending, and utterly egomaniacal—before they hired him. But they had hired him anyway. In fact, Bill had made him chief of the Genetics Team. Which meant they felt he was worth it. And that was what Eric had just witnessed. Olex, a geneticist, had just walked into a Nanotech meeting and, within minutes, had identified a major flaw in their work.
Jack continued: “Arundhati and Jian-min did some experiments last week. What did you find?” Jian-min Xu stood up confidently, apparently undaunted by the thought that he might well be Olex’s next victim. He was a handsome young man, well put together, in a suit with matching tie and pocket square—overdressed for the crowd, yet he seemed to radiate poise. Eric noticed Jane rolling her eyes as he prepared his presentation. With a lift of her nose, she whispered a quick impersonation. “Did I mention I went to Yale?”
Jian-min began, his voice confident and cool.
Eric had been briefed on Jian-min and Arundhati’s experiments but was struggling to understand them. Still, he didn’t want to appear clueless in front of Bill Eastman, so he racked his brain for something to say, some insightful question to ask. But since he barely understood the material, he could think of nothing. Olex seemed to perceive his mounting anxiety and eyed him suspiciously. At that moment, Jian-min posed a good idea. Well, Eric didn’t really know whether it was a good idea or not, but people were smiling and nodding, so he nodded, too.
“Hill,” Olex said, “tell us why you like that idea.”
The room grew very quiet.
Eric felt a heat on his cheeks, as if he were sitting too close to hot coals. He was screwed and he knew it. He wanted to say that it wasn’t fair, that they were asking too much of him.
“I guess I don’t know,” he admitted.
“Well, what is it about the relationship between the higher magnetic field and the graphene ribbon that makes you think the idea has merit?”
Eric shook his head. He had no answer. He couldn’t even bullshit his way out. Anything he said would just expose him further. Now Olex had a self-satisfied smirk on his face. “Hill, do you know the replication impediments of Grätzel cells versus Bregnin photovoltaic cells? Do you know why zigzag graphene nanoribbons should replicate more easily than diamondoid? Do you even know how magnetism will affect the replication cycle?”
Eric looked around for a moment, but no one would make eye contact with him. Jane kept her eyes down at her iSheet. Jack Behrmann’s expression was unreadable. But Bill Eastman had a disappointed frown on his face. Now they all knew what the whispering voice had been telling him all along. Faker. Impostor.
“It appears that good trees do not always produce good fruit,” Olex said.
* * *
For the rest of the afternoon, Jack thought about the confrontation between Eric and Olex. Several things about it had upset him, though his anger and frustration were focused not on Eric Hill or Olex Velichko but on Bill Eastman. Around midnight, he went to meet Eastman in “the brig,” the NRL’s biocontainment chamber. He boarded an elevator o
n J level and, inserting a special key, hit the button for Q level. The elevator car chimed rapidly as it descended into the earth: N, ping … O, ping … P, ping … Then there was a long pause. Jack waited. He was still descending, and he felt his ears pop as the elevator plunged deeper and deeper underground. Over half a minute passed before it chimed again. By then he almost felt the weight of all that earth and rock above him. Jack found it soothing—a caveman’s sense of protection.
The elevator opened. Outside was a small antechamber, with high concrete walls and a massive stainless steel door. The door read, in huge stencil font,
Deck V
BIOCONTAINMENT LABORATORY (BSL-4)
Etched into the door was a large yellow biohazard triskelion. A notice on the wall read:
authorized access only.
violators will be subject to disciplinary action
under the uniform code of military justice (ucmj).
Jack swiped his pass card. He felt the deep thud as the door unlocked. Then came the hiss of rushing air. Stepping inside, he felt his clothes being tugged forward by the negative air pressure inside—one of the deck’s many safeguards to keep nasty things from escaping. He walked down a narrow hallway that reminded him of a giant Habitrail. It had glass walls and a glass ceiling. As he walked, inverted U-shaped brackets slid back and forth around him, dousing him in ultraviolet light to break down any stray viruses that might have hitchhiked in on his skin or clothes. Then he was sprayed with a thin mist of chemicals.
From this prep corridor, Jack could see the main lab with its forty-foot ceilings, long rows of “benches”—biochemical workstations—and, every twenty feet or so, an emergency shower and “dunk tank.” Across the lab, he could see the test-animal vault, now just empty cages waiting to receive mice, rabbits, cats, dogs, chimps, bonobos, and gibbons. The lab was not yet complete—that would take at least another month. But Jack could already imagine how it would look: scores of technicians in yellow and red pressurized suits, playing with some truly scary stuff. As he walked past the cages, he realized that the animals would have front-row seats to the action. He imagined the larger primates behind soundproof glass, watching their distant cousins—likely uneasy, but not quite grasping their inevitable fate.