The Pride of Parahumans Read Online Free PDF Page B

more complex chemistry of living things. A
large portion of the section of the ship that had been allotted to
my work space was taken up by a variety of different laboratory
instruments that had nothing to do with my official job on the
ship, and quite a bit of the stuff I actually needed could be used
for my hobby too. Fortunately my lab is in one of the few parts of
the ship that has something resembling gravity, the room rotates on
an axis perpendicular to the ship's engines. When the ship is under
burn the room stops moving so that the "floor" is oriented towards
the drive so that the acceleration provides gravity, when the ship
is coasting the room spins so that the samples within stay at the
bottom of their containers. Sometimes I found it ironic that a
place that contained at least four centrifuges was itself in a
centrifuge. To get in or out the giant centrifuge had to be stopped
temporarily, which upset the samples if prolonged for too long so I
would jump in and trigger the motor to start back up again before I
was even through the door all the way.
    The room was dominated by a large
refrigerator, a glass door and several compartments inside that
maintained their contents at different temperatures ranging from
slightly above zero degrees Celsius to under 50 below. A set of
cabinets held a spectrometer that could just as easily be used for
living or non-living samples, a miniaturized Polymerase Chain
Reaction thermocycler, a DNA sequencer, and a wide assortment of
various micropipettes, pipettes, beakers, flasks, test tubes, and
heating elements. Water unfortunately had to be carried in a large
carton, no plumbing.
    This particular day I drew two sets of four
petri dishes from the fridge, one set with several spots of white
or blue bacteria, the others covered with a green algae. I
carefully lifted two blue colonies from each of the bacterial
plates and suspended each colony in a separate microfuge tube of
solution, I separated the cells in each of these tubes from the DNA
they held via microfilters and centrifugal force. I then
transferred the fluid to new tubes and added a mixture of enzymes,
salts, and fluorescent marked primers to the solutions. Then I
placed the tubes into the rack in the thermocycler and set it to
run a five hour cycle.
    While waiting I scooped a teaspoon of algae
from each of those dishes, and placed them on a hot pad for ten
minutes. Once they were dried out I tasted a bit of each sample.
None of them tasted particularly good, my bacon-flavored nutrient
algae apparently still had a long way to go.
    After I had finished the impromptu test of
the algae I'd modified I decided to wait out the remainder of the
PCR cycle reading some science-fiction novels from the 20th century
on my tablet. It astonished me how humans dead for so long could be
both so prophetic and so wrong. Naturally, there were five minutes
left on the timer when someone decided to interrupt me. I felt a
rather jarring vibration along my jaw signaling that someone was
trying to contact me on my subvocal comm and I bit down on my right
to answer.
    Who is this? I demanded feeling a bit
annoyed.
    It's that "horny panda" as you call
him . Came the reply. I swear, Denal's subvocal pickup is as
obnoxious as his real voice. There's something I want you to
see. Come up to my cabin .
    I've already seen your genitalia, several
times. I remembered the lab coat, goggles, mask, gloves, and
pants I had just put back on in anticipation of the continuation of
the experiment. And I just got dressed again, I'm not taking
this stuff off now.
    What? Oh, you're in the lab aren't
you. Denal actually sounded surprised, almost like he had
something different in mind this time.
    Yes, and I'm in the middle of something
that could potentially shake the belt like nothing since the
revolution. That wasn't completely true to be technical about
it. The machine would hold the samples at a stable temperature
until I came to retrieve them if I had to leave, but