Endosymbiotic Theory

When the bomb drops, Nick and I are the only ones in the lab. The dozen or so other members of our unit check out at five o'clock on the dot, eager to get home to their warm beds and TV screens, the things they use to distract themselves from the reality of what we do every day amongst the whirring centrifuges and petri dishes. A few of them have wives or husbands waiting for them; the project leader, Hansson, has twin sons still mercifully young enough to avoid the draft, but all kids grow up eventually, and the war doesn't show any signs of stopping.

Nick got married right out of high school and was divorced by his second year of undergrad. His ex, Tammie, had been sightseeing in D.C. when the first bombs fell. I had been the one to convince Nick that it was his spousal duty to attend the funeral, though he protested that certain obligations don't carry over once the papers are signed and the possessions split, and besides, it wasn't as if there was anything left of her to bury. The nuke must have fallen right on top of her, vaporizing her whole tour group as they posed for a photograph in front of the Washington Monument. After that, things went sour fast. The government – what was left of it – was looking for the brightest minds the country could offer, and that was how Nick and I, both of us with only a half a year of doctoral research under our belts, had gotten snapped up and flown out to a top security research facility in Sacramento with explicit instructions not to tell anyone the truth about what we did for a living.

The nukes were no picnic but, as Hansson explained, the real future lay in biochemical agents. We had, he claimed, very good intelligence that the Enemy was already on its way to developing bioweapons that could wipe out our entire civilian population in a manner of weeks. It was our job to beat them to it.

There was no time to ponder the moral implications of releasing an unkillable strain of anthrax on a country most of would be hard-pressed to point out on a map, but this was war, so all was fair.

Over the next few months, we grew to appreciate our colleagues at the lab. Most of them had been child prodigies like us, but instead of getting washed up and average like so many others, they were here, putting together the weapons of the future with tech none of us even knew existed outside of science fiction stories.

But the bombs kept coming. Our radars could never pick them up in time to warn a city that it was about to be turned to dust. The Enemy's planes seemed to jump in and out of time, beyond all thought or reason. One of the lab girls, Rebecca, had a boyfriend who worked as a programmer at a base in New Jersey, and he would sneak us reports about his progress whenever any was made, which was rarely. Three months after the project began, he was explaining a major breakthrough the guys upstairs had made when the video fizzled out and the audio blew. We later learned that a coordinated attack had taken out the entirety of the East Coast. No warning, no survivors, no fairytale ending for poor Rebecca.

The night the bomb falls, the rest of the team goes home dejected. Nick and I elect to stay. The work is the only thing that keeps us from going crazy. On gloomy nights like this, we like to fantasize about what could be, about the monument we'll get if we pull this off. Nikhil A. Thakur and Jesse H. Sullivan, the heroes of the century.

Nick is poised over a petri dish, pipette in hand, in the middle of some vulgar joke one of the lab techs had told him, when a smell like sulfur fills my nostrils, my ears pop, and the lab explodes into blackness.

In those moments of unconsciousness, I have faint dreams of being jostled and spun, feeling like the house in The Wizard of Oz as it twisted and tumbled through the tornado. My only conscious thought is that I still want to hear the end of the joke Nick had been telling. Hey Sully, what's the difference between a G-spot and a golf ball?