Tripple Chronicles 1: Eternity Rising by M. V. Kallai Page B

voice.   “ Mmm Hmm, I see,” he said to the voice on the phone that had
just informed him that fourteen candidates for his assistant position would be
arriving at 2:00.   Lee hung up
without saying goodbye, sat up straight, and placed both hands on his
desk.   The images of this morning’s
failure were racing across his mind.   He would start resetting for the next trial of the experiment this
afternoon. An assistant’s help could keep him focused on the extreme science
behind the project rather than the mundane maintenance of it.   He needed the assistance, certainly,
but knowing that he would have to interact with someone new and share his lab space created deep
anxiety in the pit of his stomach.   It was twisting into knots.  
    He ignored
this feeling for a moment to concentrate on another feeling, also taking place
in his stomach… hunger.  
    “Camden,” he
said out loud as he remembered their lunch appointment.   He looked at the clock again…perhaps
expecting it to display a different hour than it did minutes earlier.   12:27.
    Where is Cam? he thought to himself. He should have
arrived over twenty minutes ago.   It wasn’t like him to be late.   This realization added more pain to the first discomfort in his stomach
and he frowned.   Two of Camden’s
best qualities, in Lee’s opinion, were his promptness and predictability.   And that was because it was easy for
his logical mind to deal with these traits.   Most people were irrational and emotional.   Lee wasn’t able to relate well to that,
which is why he chose a solitary life.  
    He sent an
electronic message to the lady at the desk in the front of the building; he did
not know her name.

 
    I will be leaving for lunch in twenty minutes. Send the lab technicians
in twenty-three minutes to clean and reset my equipment.

 
    Lee did not
like being there when the technicians worked so carefully to clean and maintain
his equipment.   He didn’t
understand the small talk they always inevitably attempted or why they cared
how his day was going.   He
certainly didn’t care about theirs.   The technicians, who were hired by Camden, did not know the full nature
of the projects that went on here, but they enjoyed sharing their theories with
one another as they worked.   Their
guesses ranged from chemical bombs to creating new animal species by sewing
together random parts of other animals.   Of course, they were way off, but the speculations gave them a laugh and
made their jobs less monotonous.
    Lee spent
the next twenty minutes carefully removing all biological samples, solutions,
and data from the lab. He would lock them in one of the back rooms. He alone
had a key.   As he worked, he
wondered again about Camden.   He
made up his mind to call him after he secured his workspace.   Lee frowned again as he transferred the
lifeless embryos to special freeze chambers.   Most scientists would not save their failures, but Lee
assumed that he would one day figure out how to control life and death, so
these embryos were candidates for future re-animation.   Recycling
at its best , he thought.   No
one else knew he did this, not even Camden.  
    Camden did
know, however, that Lee chose to work with human tissue, when possible and when
his experiments didn’t require an accelerated life cycle. And even then, he
worked with mostly just parts. When he did need a whole body, he called the
nearby prison, which was so far, discreet. When he worked with monkeys, rats,
and other animals, he went to his stock of small animals kept in a frozen
stasis or ordered them specific to an experiment. He used the bare minimum of
these stock animals simply because he did not enjoy the responsibility of
nurturing living beings.
    “Each
animal’s physiology is different,” Lee would say, “If I am successful with a
rat, it was still just a rat and does not necessarily equate success with a
human.”  
    Now and
then, speculation of the inner workings of