Short Story - The Cash Cow's Catch-22 part 1

This is a work in progress - a short story that has potential to be a fuller work... who knows... not sure I like the main character - she/he
is a bitch :-P

can see this as a whole on my web site or over at my area at fictionpress.com

The Cash Cow's Catch-22 part 1

Not trying to brag or come off as pompous but I am the world's leading biochemist at this juncture in time. This assessment coming from world media, international conferences, collegial evaluations, impact of work and all the other traditional and non-traditional means people attach to sentimental bullshit such as who's who and at the top of whatever lists.

And what am I doing with my life?

Racing against a cruel clock and watching the only thing I care for wither and die. Oh I am also the slave of the world's largest illegal drug and organized crime cartel.

Of course I keep up the professional side and front. Wouldn’t be too comforting for most to know that the brightest mind in my field lends their talent to trying to make a synthetic version of the worst drug to ever grace the planet Earth.

Do I give a shit it is killing people slowly everyday making heroin and the like look tamer than caffeine? No I do not. Sorry if you are expecting sympathy. My heart was captured long ago and is held only by one and I'll accept the title of cold hearted bitch, bastard traitor to the human race, aloof scientist, unethical, unfeeling… I really don’t give a damn so just go away if that is the only reason you are here.

See I stopped caring for anyone or thing and became very selfish about six years ago and six years is a long time to learn a skill. I have the cold shoulder and narrow-minded focus shtick down pat.

It has become easy.

I sleep for a few hours. Get up and spend my time looking into production, overseeing the factories or working through some more research. Go and spend a few hours with my love pretending everything is a bad dream. Then sit in the dark drinking and cursing Schrödinger and other names before dropping off into a troubled sleep. Repeat cycle next morning.

Schrödinger… a genius, an ass and someone I have come to loathe. In essence I blame him for where I am today. You see, I believe in the natural laws of physics and the universe. And thus the fucking cat is dead, alive, make-believe and for all I know shaving a mohawk into it's side as we currently speak. I actually almost flunked physics simply because I was bored and spending too many hours that semester in the lab perfecting a purification system based on the newly discovered technology they had brought with them.

They being the demon species Frenicali. The Frenicali came through a dimensional portal some fifteen odd years ago. They brought with them a revolution I'd liken to the dawn of the industrial age, the discovery of fire and the final mapping of the human genome.

I being the hot young stud of the biochemical world latched onto the Frenicali tighter than a leech sucking the blood from a host. And oh I wanted to suck them dry. I and a few others spent every resource and ounce of energy on tearing apart their science and world.

I became the leading specialist on the chemical makeup of the Frenicali. Something about their makeup and structure just clicked with my grey matter. I actually had dreams. Kinda like the Crick and Watson dancing DNA strands, only the dreams were very vivid and detailed allowing me to bypass years of frustration, sweat and tears. And of course to thumb my nose at my colleagues as I watched them eat my scientific dust.

I was hailed as a visionary, a genius, a Midas. I simply had an inside track from God, another calling or just too many late night snacks of nachos and burn your gut out hot sauce. Who knows and fuck if I care. I was on top and the best.

And then it happened. I noted a weird property of the Frenicali's basic chemical makeup. They had a quantum quandary that in our world we have not been able to ever understand or grasp. A key part of their… well it is not blood like our blood but it is the life sustaining fluid that circulates through their system. Well a key part of their biology exists in a true state of quantum superposition.

And that became my world.

I could not believe the idea that Schrödinger's cat could actually exist. In a weird quasi-metaphysical way, in our universe the Frenicali were both alive and dead. Their life liquid existed in two states and by observing it you forced it to behave in one way or another.

Sarah Truscani came to my lab as I was starting to look into this and to confirm this was not some joke. I mean really, people always laughed at the concept of Schrödinger's cat. Many called it physics attempt at a sense of humor or the penultimate catch-22. I personally think the universe is a whoring tease and is having the last laugh and doing it very loudly.

I know the universe is laughing at me.

We'd been working for three weeks straight. Sarah brought a bottle of tequila to the lab one night. She told me she planned on taking a break, finding the solution and seducing me to her bed. All of that to be attributed to the miracle of the bottle she sat on the counter. By the bottom of the bottle we were convinced there was a pink dragon hibernating in the corner along with an indigo panda that kept whispering secrets to us about the Frenicali.

The panda told Sarah and I the key was the dual nature, the superposition. And then it told us for a fun time to have a go at the samples we were working on.

Well the next morning Sarah was dead, the lab destroyed and a videotape from the building's surveillance system was missing. Oddly nothing else was mentioned about the accident. It was covered up conveniently and I went back to my routine with double the work as I was missing a lab assistant.

Two weeks later I was ushered into an office and faced two women and a man. I watched an hour's worth of video tape in silence. I saw the events unfold and how board after chalk board had been filled by me in a semi drunken stupor and highly euphoric state resulting in a very interesting chemical mix. The mix we had ingested by night's end; the mix that had altered our biological system, enhancing it, making us different.

Intrigued I left the office with the tape and began working through the possibilities.

tbc