Thread: It was just one... (Bevatoria and skittish_butterfly)

As far as Elizabeth was concerned, the lab was empty. She was in that place in her head where nothing mattered but her work. Keeping the complex interactions and molecular chains straight while also juggling different combinations and binding temperatures to find exactly the right mix took everything she had -- which was a lot -- with no leftover neurons for things like social niceties or paying attention to the science fair level projects the others in the lab were probably screwing up. To Elizabeth, the others were gone. Just her alone, perched here on the cusp of greatness, so close to the perfect behavioral feedback loop, she could feel the medal around her neck already. The positive loop was already working. She'd tested the compound quietly in a foreign primate lab paying with her own graduation money to keep it secret and private. She wanted to wait to announce anything until she had the negative loop working too, until it was totally ready and totally safe and her place in the pantheon beside her father would be secure, all before her 21st birthday if all went well over the next year. Of course the positive loop would be called something trivial, like the Good Habit Cure in the media, but even that alone without the accompanying negative loop for Bad Habits and even with its rough edges still unpolished would shake the world if she bothered to announce it right now. Imagine the educational benefits. Imagine people taking a pill to make them enjoy eating healthy food, or exercising. All she needed was the trickier negative side to balance the loop from growing out of control over time, and, well, there were more problems too, like applying more than one feedback loop at once without them interfering and amplifying each other, and... but Elizabeth was so close! And she wasn't even a grad student yet, technically still just a Junior, and a young one at that. But her dad didn't get the Jenkins Annex and the Jenkins Prize and the Jenkins Institute for Advanced Biological Research named after him by sitting around waiting until the dullards around him finally gave him permission to soar above them intellectually. He just did it, and Elizabeth was a Jenkins too, couldn't help spreading her wings to fly and look down on the pettiness and triviality beneath her. Plus, she hadn't gone soft like her dad. Just another 10 milliliters and she might... The buzz behind her was too annoying and too close. It pulled her head away from the equipment and out of the realm of ideas. Elizabeth pushed her glasses up her pert nose, blinked her brown eyes at him with school-marm level annoyance and then, quite by accident as she was so distracted, knocked her unclosed water bottle onto yesterday's half-eaten sandwich beside her as she rounded on him. He was smiling. He smiled too much, as if he somehow thought it would get him a pat on the head from her, or like he thought it would excuse his constant interruptions. She looked down at his fancy loafers, clearly over the tape line she'd laid down 5 feet back from her workstation the previous week. Grant, how many times have I warned you about contaminating my station with your DNA. Do you have any idea what could... no, you don't obviously. I've got my own carefully filtered out, but it would take weeks to fix if you were to so much as sneeze right now. So stay back. Elizabeth watched for some sign he understood, some sign he wasn't just nervously checking to make sure she was keeping her normal research on pace -- she finished it a month ago and parceled it out to him in little bits now and then to keep him off her back, so he wouldn't know what she was really doing. He wouldn't have a clue if he knew, few would at first. Grant showed no sign of comprehension, just smiling some more, which made her frown and tighten the hair band in her pony tail again, making sure she wouldn't lose any hairs in her equipment herself. Her DNA would be fine, but the proteins would be a mess. Probably best to wear a hair net, but her long dark shock of hair, pulled back so tight, was her once big source of vanity, the famous Jenkins' mane, like her mother's had been back when she was briefly even more famous than her dad. No, hiding her hair wasn't an option. Any more than common sense was an option for Grant, who just stood there and kept talking, the breath of his every word jeopardizing her work. Fine, fine all right! I'll come to your party, I promise, if you'll promise to go away so I can finish my work without you contaminating it anymore. I won't stay more than half an hour tops, and I can only come at 830 so don't give me any crap about being late or whatever. I don't have time for it. She pulled up her jeans over her hips as they had slipped just a bit. Maybe she could get her dad to buy her some new pairs for her next birthday. With Grant finally dealt with, Elizabeth turned back to work, stopping to take a bite of the soggy day old sandwich. Disgusting, but she didn't have time to get dinner if she was going to have to waste time at his party too. She had no plans to stay long enough for his big announcement, certain it would be pointless and trivial, another one of his minor disasters spun out as tedious victory, like curing appendicitis in tape worms. She took another bite of the soggy sandwich, flipped her pony tail back out of the way over her shoulder and got back to the important work, shaking the world.