4.6 | Dark Ages ✓

- 0 5 : 0 4

  

– 0 5 : 0 4

IT STARTS WITH a good intention.

The brainchild of two well-meaning men—Taehyung, the leading expert in bioengineering; and Jimin, the leading expert in biomedicine.

All these Taehyung manages to glean while his colleague works himself into near hysteria over a mug of coffee. Where he'd been unable to keep the truth about time-travelling from the girl, he's careful around Jimin. He nicks the man's wallet off the table when the latter isn't looking, and manages to find a business card that proves that Jimin really is who he says he is.

Surreptitiously, he slips the card back and slides the wallet across the table again. Jimin still doesn't noticed. Hunched over his mug, he's dousing his coffee with spoonfuls of sugar until Taehyung pulls the jar away from him.

"Why don't you tell me what happened?" he asks quietly.

Jimin stiffens. Then he drops the spoon and wraps his shaking hands around the mug. "I didn't mean to do it—I swear I didn't," he says at last. "I know you told me never to show him our research, but Marlow and Whittington had been mocking us in the staff room. About how we were washed-up scientists and wasting university resources with our project. And when I overheard, I just—I snapped. I had to prove him wrong."

"What did you do?"

"I..." Jimin gulps. "...I told him the final equation of our Strand."

Taehyung stares at him, unable to find anything to say.

Jimin lets out a frustrated sound and buries his face in his hands. "I didn't mean to do it! I didn't realize that Marlow would be able to replicate it, or that he would use it to further his own research! I didn't know! It's not stable—our strand. It's not stable. When you inject a dose of Strand F into the human body, our systems adapt to it the way they do with vaccinations. After all, it worked for you—"

Taehyung freezes. "What?" he blurts, before remembering that he's supposed to be in the know. But he's overwhelmed by disbelief. Strand F was in him? Was this why he'd adapted to his surroundings so easily and defeated the zombies with killer instincts?

Is this why I can time-travel?

Thankfully, Jimin doesn't notice his slip-up. "You can use it to improve life. But when you use it to create life—" he chokes on his words, "—when he used it in his experiment to clone humans, that must've been where it went wrong."

Something tugs at the back of Taehyung's mind—one of the earliest memories from his previous jumps. Rumor has it that a scientist developed a superior species of humans, Jungkook had said. Only it didn't turn out as he'd planned and he created a generation of Frankensteins instead. The rumor had been right all along. Two scientists created the Strand, but only one scientist created a generation of Frankensteins.

"You should've seen the university," Jimin continues, in a shaky voice. "There was blood everywhere. Everywhere. I went to our labs to save our experiment and found the place destroyed. Marlow was there, except it wasn't him. Oh, it looked like him at first glance. He'd worn his usual lab coat and glasses, but then he walked with a limp and made some awful noises. He staggered towards me and groaned about how he'd gotten it wrong, all wrong. Then Whittington came in and told us that there was a creature turned loose on the third floor—was it any of our experiments, by any chance? Marlow made some moaning sound at that, and I thought he was going to say something, but he didn't. He just lunged at Whittington. He bit him here—" Jimin raises a shaking hand, tapping his finger across three of his knuckles. "—three fingers, clean off. I didn't stay. I just turned and ran, because I knew. I knew."

Jimin cuts off on another choked sob and bolts up, beginning to pace rapidly again. His eyes take on a haunted look that Taehyung's long associated with anyone who's experienced some form of trauma.

"They're real," he mutters to himself. "You read about them in science-fiction and see them in movies. You think about how fascinating it'll be to live in this kind of apocalyptic time. You don't ever think that it'll happen. But then it does, and it's real. And it's all our fault!"

Mind still reeling from the truth, Taehyung watches the man pace in front of him. It's a wonder Jimin hasn't gone mad after seeing what he saw and knowing that their Strand had resulted in this.

But this revelation is something else for Taehyung.

All this while, he'd been misled into believing that he and Jimin had been responsible for creating the zombies. But all they ever had was an idea—a well-meaning one, at that. It had been ripped away from them the moment Marlow saw fit to use it in his own experiment, and the downward spiral to hell from there hadn't been of their doing.

Marlow is the villain of this story, he realizes, not us. But what do you do when the villain is dead and all that's left is the aftermath?

As Jimin passes him again, he grabs the man by the sleeve and pulls him to a halt. Jimin jumps, clearly startled out of his self-loathing reverie, and stares at him with wide eyes.

"Listen to me," Taehyung says urgently. "This is not our fault."

"What?"

"Not our fault. Our experiment was a success. It was Marlow who failed, do you understand? Marlow who stole our research, Marlow who used it for himself, Marlow who created a race of unkillable monsters. It was Marlow."

"Yes, I know, but—"

"But that doesn't mean that it wasn't our idea, or that we can't try to fix it," Taehyung finishes calmly. "Don't you see? It's our Strand. If we were smart enough to create it, why can't we figure out a way to destroy it?"

A sudden flare of hope lights Jimin's eyes. "Destroy it? You really think so?"

"I don't know, but we have to try."

Jimin nods furiously, as if clinging to this new solution like a lifeline. Taehyung watches him closely for any further signs of hysteria, but it seems that the worst of it is over. With a quiet sigh of relief, he grabs their empty mugs and heads for the sink.

"Get some rest," he says to Jimin over his shoulder. "We'll figure out how to save the world in the morning."