When the older woman from earlier (whose name she’d learned was Wilma) escorted her back to the lobby, Amelia had been told that she had three hours to collect what she had brought with her to her hotel room and return to the facility for orientation.

This was all progressing shockingly quickly, but Amelia’s experience in professional-grade lab studies was admittedly pretty limited. Her internship had been within Chetburg Community College itself, and she doubted that she could gauge what was and was not SOP in a corporate biocomp lab based on that experience. It was entirely possible, she reckoned, for onboarding to regularly progress this swiftly at these startups. More than anything, Amelia was still just relieved that she wouldn’t have to badger her mom for more money when she got back to the hotel room.

In fact, she could actually give her good news for once. She had landed the position! She was going to be doing serious, possibly even groundbreaking work, presumably in a field that would have some use for the fact that she could rattle the chemical formula for chitin off from memory. 

She ignored the growing stiffness in her joints as she began the trek back to the hotel. Wilma had said the company would reimburse her for her travel expenses, but she still only had enough money on hand to afford one bus trip to or from the hotel to the boardwalk. She certainly didn’t want to carry her (admittedly pretty meager) luggage back on foot, so that meant she would be walking back.

‘It’ll be good exercise!’  She could almost hear her mother’s voice ringing in her head.

—

Dr Kuchak hardly said a word for the rest of his shift that day. He tried not to wear his discomfort on his sleeve, but it wasn’t easy as these raving hyenas picked out this poor girl’s “treatment plan” like a vacation itinerary. He doubted he had succeeded. His moral indignation was probably still evident, as hypocritical and unearned as it was.

He silently cursed his “promotion”. He wished he could’ve stayed wrapped in the plausible deniability of the sequencing lab forever, and never had to materially confront reality if he didn’t want to. The reality of what being a “Bioindustrial Solutions” company even entails could’ve remained idle water cooler gossip with his rotating staff of lab assistants and temp researchers. He could assume they were making consumer-grade pharmaceuticals, and the contradictions faded just enough for him to sleep at night. Now, all of his most dire suspicions about his work’s true purpose came into focus, and in retrospect, active denial was the only thing that kept him from admitting it much earlier:

His work for the company had had obvious pharmacological implications. The compound that forced serotonin receptors to remain open long after their bonding availability would’ve otherwise been exhausted. The artificial proteins that directed the overproduction of phospholipids targeted at transforming neurons into soft, warm fatty tissue. Had he ever actually believed that was meant to be an over-the-counter painkiller?

No. Not really. Not if he was honest.

“Bioindustrial Solutions” was a buzzword. A euphemism. Their business was the mass production of workers. The panacea to solve the labor crisis, in a world where the free workforce couldn’t afford to rebuild itself, and industrial automation had buckled under the stress of a shattered global supply chain: chemically altered, full-time breeders, pumping out generation after generation of bodies to feed into the mouths of industry.

And he had given them the tools to do it.

As he returned to his desk in the lower levels and gathered his things to return to the motel, he successfully managed to stifle another gasping gag before his own guilty conscience forced his lunch onto the floor.

‘You can’t afford to panic yet.’ he rationalized to himself. ‘You haven’t done anything you can’t undo, right? Just get out of here, find a source to leak it to, and your hands will be clean by this time tomorrow!’

Even for a man with as much experience with denial as Liam, the assertion rang hollow.

—

Amelia was red-faced and panting by the time she reached her hotel room. Personal automobiles had become prohibitively expensive to own and maintain, making possession of one a relative rarity. Still, it had only been a decade and a half since the mighty sedan roamed the highways in droves, and the car-centric infrastructure would require a lot of long exhausted industrial capacity to refit. For now, a simple trip across town was going to be an all-afternoon affair if you couldn’t afford a bus ticket.

Before she could do anything productive, Amelia found herself on her back, staring up at the ceiling fan wearily. She briefly dissociated. A split second of bodily relaxation, and the lactic acid in her muscles felt like it was already trying to eat her alive. She wasn’t certain how long exactly she lay there trying to get her joints to stop throbbing, but eventually, she managed to drag herself over to the land line and punch in the number for home.

—

Liam usually gave off a much less intense energy outside of work. Or at least he used to. His friends and colleagues at the university had described him as something of a prankster, and even kind of a nuisance back in the day, when everything was a lofty theoretical discussion about bioethics or the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

Waiting in a Waffle House booth at 5 PM on a Wednesday didn’t used to qualify as serious business before the collapse, but nowadays if you’re going to leak information to a journalist, the list of non-condemned public areas you can meet up in is tiny and shrinking. The Waffle House was a beacon of economic certainty, an unshakable edifice that would likely withstand the very end of the world itself. The younger, less serious Liam would’ve scoffed at the thought that he would be doing corporate sabotage at the very same Waffle House he once used to get absolutely blazed in at 3 AM. But here he was.

On the subject of corporate sabotage, his contact had arrived: a friend of a friend from the Pepsi Post (who had bought up the Virginia Pilot after the last air bubble finally escaped the corpse of print journalism). She was a tall, professional, inscrutable woman in her mid to late thirties, pressed blond hair and shoulder-padded power suit lending her the kind of air of pre-collapse professionalism that tended to stress Liam out. Still, she undeniably cut the figure of someone you meet to leak sensitive information to. A real reporter’s reporter.

She looked down and regarded a seated Liam impassively. 

“Mr. Kuchak, yes?” she inquired flatly.

“‘Doctor’ Kuchak” he corrected instinctively, before he could stop himself. 

‘Way to be a condescending asshole for no reason, dipshit!’ he screamed internally. ‘‘Oh, sorry lady I’m leaking classified information to, you actually don’t have my full legal name and title correct. Here, take my fucking routing number and blood type while we’re at it!’ you petty, arrogant idiot!’

The conversation plowed forward irrespective of his spiral of self-loathing.

“Right, of course. Well, I’m Rebecca Algorp, investigative reporter for the Pepsi Post Virginia Beach circuit. It’s a pleasure meeting with you Dr. Kuchak. I understand that there are some…”

She concealed the smile of a chef preparing a rare ingredient.

“Ethical concerns with your employer’s conduct that you’d like to bring to my publication’s attention?”

—

“Sorry. Right, yeah mom. Sorry mom.” Amelia said, fighting back tears.

“Don’t ‘sorry’ me, missy! ‘Sorry’ is for things that can be fixed, which does not include signing yourself away to a full-time position without even knowing the salary or benefits. Are you seriously such a child that your only concern was getting your own bedroom!?” the older woman on the other end of the line shouted.

“But I… but…” she said, barely audible.

“But what? You think you’re going to get to keep playing bug-catcher in the woods? As, like, a long-term vocation? When you said you were going east for a job, I assumed you meant a real job. One with a company that has a website! And files taxes! How is it that my fucking useless shut-in daughter somehow managed to find herself on the bottom rung of an obvious scam business within a week of leaving home? Where did you even find this fucking garbage? I can’t find shit about these people online.”

Through the sobs, Amelia managed to answer. “...I…” *sniffle* “...saw it in a…” *sob* “...newspaper.”

“Oh great!” her mother exclaimed sarcastically. “Warren!” she called out to Amelia’s stepfather. “Did ya hear that! She answered a fucking classified ad! In the newspaper! Like a–”

*click*

Amelia had heard enough.

—

“And right now we have… what exactly? A bunch of anecdotes and conspiracy theories from an obviously intoxicated chemist, who maybe saw some coworkers saying some inappropriate things about their new hire?”

Intoxicated? Please, Liam had taken that edible hours ago.

So obviously, the attempt to reach out to the press had been going less than stellar.

“Doesn’t your company have an HR staff to deal with this kind of thing?” she inquired coolly.

“No, you’re not listening!” Liam was trying his best to maintain his cool, but he was learning in real time what a bad whistleblower he made. “I know what the compounds they’re synthesizing are capable of! These are actual medical crimes! Violations of every possible form of human autonomy on an unthinkable scale! They’re trying to turn people into livestock!”

Ms. Algorp quirked an eyebrow and grabbed her bag, obviously moving to leave.

“Dr. Kuchak, I understand these dire economic conditions have us all on edge, but please.”

She stood and pushed in her chair, dabbing the last bits of syrup from around her mouth with a napkin.

“As much as I enjoy having my breakfast-for-dinner paired with listening to some burnout rave about fanciful claptrap pulled from a cheap porn knockoff of a Tom Clancy novel, I’m afraid extraordinary claims have not stopped requiring extraordinary evidence. At least not for reputable publications like the Pepsi Post.”

Liam was stunned. “No, wait! Please, I…”

“Dr. Kuchak, if you don’t have any actual credible information for me, I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do for you.”

She smiled condescendingly.

“You really do seem like a smart guy. I hope you get the help you need.”

And just like that, she was out the door.

—

The bus ride back to the Fabacea building was agony. Not just because Amelia had failed to secure a seat and was now standing awkwardly in the aisle, but also because she had managed to cram all the earthly possessions she couldn’t bear to leave back at home into a single oversized duffle bag, the strap of which was now wearing a groove into her bony shoulder.

As the bus pulled up outside the fifth Waffle House they had passed since leaving her hotel room, a disheveled-looking man in his early thirties boarded. He was visibly out of shape, and his swarthy complexion was somewhat undermined by the obvious lack of sun exposure. Even still, Amelia couldn’t help but note that he looked kind of cute, in an overworked, professorial kind of way.

That first impression was replaced with mild alarm as the man caught sight of her. His expression of distant frustration immediately shifted to a strange kind of concern, and he shuffled over to her at a disconcerting pace.

“Please.” he whispered. “Go home.”

“What?” she gasped, rather taken aback.

“I know what they had you sign.” he said, as softly as he could. “It’s not too late for you to leave. I promise, the consequences of cutting ties now–”

The bus screeched to another stop. Riders percolated on and off the bus quietly.

“Listen buddy!” Amelia had taken the split second to muster up a day’s worth of indignance to this stranger. 

“I am so sick of people telling me that me following my dream job is stupid, or dangerous, or a waste of time!” she snarled “It’s my life, and I’m going to spend it in the field I choose! No amount of hazing or browbeating or taunts or threats are going to change that, got it?”

“No, you don’t understand! The position isn’t what you think!” he tried in vain to explain himself.

“Yeah, I know it’s not glamorous, and I won’t be able to finance anything crazy lavish anytime soon. But you know what? It’s what I love doing! Sometimes that’s worth the indignity of working a little bit in the trenches!”

“What? No! I mean, the position literally–”

Another piercing screech marked their arrival in front of the abandoned Rainforest Cafe (that still didn’t have a company sign out front).

Before Liam could explain further, Amelia was already off the bus, her indignation giving her the strength to carry a thousand duffle bags if it meant proving all of these assholes wrong.

Having exhausted all other routes, Liam decided that he too would have to return to work after hours. If the world wouldn’t listen to his warnings without a more comprehensive description of the wrongs being committed, so be it. Maybe he could still save this poor girl from her fate.

With that, he stepped off the bus and into the first day of the rest of their lives.