Ephemeral Permanence

Ephemeral Permanence

by Ticklefish

dedicated to barb

*****************


"Albert!" the man in the lab coat smiled and extended a hand. "What on Earth brings you back here?"

I couldn't help but smile in return and shook his hand warmly.

"Hello Will," I replied, "You do remember paging me, don't you?"

"Well yes, but I was expecting you to ring not trek all the way up to the mansion."

I shrugged.

"Oh, I figured I would. It's been a while. Besides.." I lowered my voice to a whisper. "This is about 'It', isn't it"

Aside from ourselves, the lab was empty but I didn't want to take any chances. What we were working on had the potential to make us famous, not to mention very, very rich.

He smiled again and by way of reply took me to a nearby table. As with the rest of the laboratory surfaces, it was covered with papers and equipment. William was a brilliant scientist but he was often too busy pushing back the boundaries to pay much attention to his housekeeping.

Sitting in a rare clear space on the table top was a rectangular shape covered with a white cloth.

"Er...what am I supposed to be looking at, exactly?" I asked.

He didn't answer but instead removed the cloth with a flourish to reveal a cage.

"Ta-da!" he cried excitedly.

I looked inside.

"A dead rat. Nice."

William looked horrified.

"What? Nonono..oh, damn it to Hell!"

I felt a bit cross. Umbrella wanted to keep the location of this facility secret and so it was hidden deep in the Arklay mountains. It had been a major pain getting here and now it looked as though my time had been wasted.

"If I'd wanted to see a dead rat, I could have stayed in the city. We have loads."

I spotted a pencil from the detritus on the desk and picked it up.

"You don't understand," protested William, "it was alive just a few minutes ago. I had the thing working!"

I poked the furry corpse. The rat lay upside-down, its mouth open and the eyes glazed.

The man continued talking.

"Everything was going brilliantly. It even survived the T-Virus, I don't see how it could possibly be dead."

I froze.

"You infected it with the T-Virus?" I asked, trying to feel as nonchalent as I hoped I sounded.

He ran his fingers through his hair, not improving it any.

"Of course I did, but it had no reaction at all. The treatment made it completely immune."

I quickly moved my hand away from the cage, leaving the pencil where it was, and tried not to imagine a tingling feeling in my fingers.

Umbrella was often described as a pharmaceutical company and it's true, it was. It made medicines, beauty products, all that sort of thing. But its main business was in weapons.

Bio-weapons, in fact.

They made custom-designed viruses and diseases. They manipulated genes to create mutated beasts for the battlefield. Their business was death for profit.

No wonder then that the existence of the building I was standing in was a closely-guarded secret. If the general public got wind of even some of the things being worked on in there, there'd be a national uproar.

And the T-Virus was Umbrella's pride and joy. Few were unaffected by it and for those that were, death came far too slowly.

I'd worked on it myself over the years and knew enough about the thing to know that I couldn't have been contaminated. Still, it was going to take a lot of scrubbing in the shower before I'd feel even remotely clean again.

Will heaved a sigh and sat down heavily in a chair. He looked forlorn and fed up. Taking care not to go too near the cage, I rummaged through the papers on the table. There had to be something written there that could provide salvation.

I've always been quite clever. It sounds like bragging but it's the truth. All my life I'd known I was smart, it was one of the things that set me apart from everyone else. So as I stared at a piece of foolscap, littered in badly-written jargon, I could feel my mind ticking, putting the pieces together and coming up with a solution.

I needed to, this was my future.

S.T.A.R.S. had been my idea. I had wanted to do some good in the city and it seemed like the perfect thing. An elite police force able to handle all the big stuff standard uniformed officers couldn't.

I also had an ulterior motive. The corporation was developing bigger and nastier creatures and the risk of civilian casualties was becoming ever greater. All it would take was one small accident at any of the labs and we'd have a bloodbath on our hands.

S.T.A.R.S. was put together with a view to stopping such a disaster before it happened.

But they weren't good enough. Oh, they had their skills but against some of the horrors Umbrella was coming up with, they'd be ripped to shreds.

Literally.

But this thing that William and I had been working on could have solved all of that. It was a virus that interacted with the human body, boosting its efficiency to obscene levels. In theory, a person using it would be noticeably stronger and faster than otherwise physically possible.

William and I hadn't always liked each other. He was almost, but not quite, as clever as myself and that has caused problems in the past.

But we had put that aside in the interests of developing the virus and we'd become good friends.

The way things were going, though, our friendship might end up being the only thing we made that worked.

Then a small scrap of notepaper took my attention. Scribbled in pencil was a RNA sequence. It was useless in itself but it served as inspiration for my brain.

"Will.." I said slowly, still working it out in my head, "what if we linked the third stage to the human chromosomes?"

"Chromosomes?" He echoed in disbelief.

"Chromosomes!" He then repeated, his eyes lighting up as he saw where I was heading with this.

"Chromosomes." I agreed, feeling smug.

It was over five hours later that I left the building to go home. I was tired and my eyes felt sore but I was happy. We had spent the time bent over the lab equipment and it looked as though we were finally onto something. I only left because I had an annual review with one of the unit members in four hours.

I was going to need some seriously strong coffee.


***


"Would you like another drink, Albert?" Her accent grates on my nerves and something inside of me snaps.

As fast as a snake, I lunge for her, seize her by that slender neck and lift her bodily off her chair.

Or at least I try.

I manage to get her to stand but I'm unable to lift her any further.

She doesn't give me any time to think about it. A small fist is rammed into my stomach and I fall to the floor winded.

No, I'm not that badly hurt. I've had worse. But I shouldn't have even noticed it. I'm usually much stronger than this.

I'm usually much faster than this.

A small voice in the back of my head tells me that I shouldn't have any problems at all if I wanted to kill this woman. But I'm not so sure. Something is very, very wrong.

I still feel angry though and my patience has gone, burnt away in an instant.

"Where the hell am I?" I growl through clenched teeth.

She treats me to a contemptuous look and sits back down in her chair.

"Oh dear, oh dear. You mean you haven't guessed yet, Albert? You disappoint me. I thought you were cleverer than that."

I am clever. I am more intelligent than any other person in history. I have worked out what must be going on.

But I really don't like the answer that my brain has come up with.

"I'm dead, aren't I?"

A small, cruel smile is my only reply.

"Which means," I continue, "that you're either the Devil, which I doubt, or you're dead too."

A conclusion drifts into my consciousness. It leaves an unpleasant taste in my mouth but there's no escaping it. The woman can only be hanging round me for one reason.

"And I killed you." I say.


***