Philosophy, and Torching a Corpse

Part Two: Cody

Part Two

"But!"

The phone clicked off on the other end. Cody kept the phone to his ear until the dial tone began to beep intermittently, further indicating that the call had ended.

"Why is he always so dramatic?" He thought, hitting the red button on the phone, silencing it.

He was then in his office as a researcher at Biogenic Pharmasuitcles. His main task was to oversee the testing of new and emerging drug compounds on entirely willing and well-paid volunteers. Generally, these drugs were formulated from plants, while some had been created specifically in the laboratory. The idea was to test the drug, record the results, and determine if there was any significant benefit in their use. If there was, it was patented, either the drug and/or the process involved, followed by further human trials before finally bringing it to the market. Cody couldn't resist seeing the irony between what he did on the job and outside of it.

In front of him was a laptop. The hard drive was segmented and encrypted, even searches and video feed had been protected from end to end, running Windows on part of it and Linux on the other. It was a literal separation of business and pleasure, with his own private projects being researched and added to the Linux section, while his work-related materials were accessed from the Windows operating system. To him, it allowed a relatively seamless and efficient way to go between both his public and secretive activities from a single device.

Suddenly, a knock came at the door. Cody pushed a button on his laptop, changing the image of a body strapped to a table, the skin blistered and boiled, to a Word document on a recent design for novel blood thinning therapy.

"Yes?" Cody answered in a professional tone.

"Doctor, I have two of the new interns, they are waiting for you in the lobby," an equally professional voice said from the other side of the door.

"Ah, that's fine. Please tell them I will be with them shortly."

"Of course."

Cody leaned back in his comfortably plush desk chair. He looked at the wall in front of him, its surface covered in the degrees and certifications he had earned over the past ten or so years. He was considered a prodigy, very young to have reached as far up the proverbial ladder as he already had. He then looked back at the monitor. He leaned forward again and pressed one of the buttons on the keyboard, causing the image to return to the grisly depiction he had been studying earlier before having called Jeff.

"Strange, I do miss it, how things were back in the day," he thought. "I had less back then, it was so much more of a struggle."

He began to recall how he had first gotten interested in the narrow field of science that had later formed into his primary passion. Afterward, he had found a way to apply some of these skills to a proper career, one that he liked, but was nonetheless glad to punch out of at the end of each day. The fact was that there was a real difference between running an experiment that one had chosen, and those that one was told to go ahead with, especially considering Cody's particular temperament.

He remembered about his first human subject, some strange he'd picked almost at random, about the admittedly flamboyant outfit he had worn, and the rather brutish weapon he had used in the process. Then again, both had served their purpose, so too had the name he'd chosen to go by when with his victims, X-Virus. 

Later on, he'd even managed to kill his only adoptive parent. It wasn't so much that Cody wanted it to go that way, rather, the man had found out about Cody's first killing and had reacted negatively as most normal people would. Getting rid of him then had merely been an act of prudence.