"I'm telling you, it's a real fetish," John Sanjust said.
John and Mario Vailati stood on a metal gantry overlooking a large, circular glass tank.
"Nah, you're yanking my chain," Vailati said.
"Rule 34. If it exists, there is porn of it somewhere on the internet."
"Yeah, but—"
"Google it," John said. "You'll find tons of pictures."
"I don't get it. What's the appeal in having sex with what's basically a giant amoeba?"
Below them, Subject HA-001 moved around the inside of the tank in a series of undulating waves.
John shrugged. "Beats me. It's out there though."
"I mean, think about it," Vailati said. "It would probably feel like shoving your cock into a beaker of cold snot. How is that sexy?"
"I bet there are websites for that as well," John said.
Subject HA-001's upper body pressed up against the lid of the tank. Twin bulges of what were perfect facsimiles of human breasts, right down to the perky nipples, squashed up against the glass. She stared up at them and kissed the glass with full, bee-stung lips.
John would have thought the mimicry incredible . . . if there was any subject being copied. Subject HA-001 had taken on the body shape of a typical male fantasy—tall and busty, ridiculously well-stacked, like a Pamela Anderson or Kim Kardashian—and no-one knew how or why. Well, the top half of her was a male fantasy. The bottom half swelled out into a soft, undifferentiated blob of protoplasm. She was a human-sized amoeba with transparent light-blue skin. John didn't need to possess a PhD to know she—it—shouldn't exist.
"Don't tell me you wouldn't mind shoving your dick up between those puppies," he said.
"Language!" Danielle Sullivan shouted up from the monitors below. "This is a place of serious work. I will not have potty mouths in my laboratory."
"Sorry, Mom," John said.
It was a team joke. Danielle Sullivan was middle-aged and chunky. Blonde curls framed a round, homely face. She was from the American Midwest and about as conservative as they came. Until he'd met her, John hadn't thought people like Sullivan existed outside of lazy parodies of American culture. He'd even made an ill-advised quip about it not long after they'd been introduced.
"I didn't think it possible for biologists to come out of your neck of the woods. I thought they were still having problems accepting the Theory of Evolution," he'd joked, poorly.
"We're not all gun-toting crazy whahoos," she'd said. "And where's your top hat and tails—left them back in London did you."
Touché.
Sullivan might have sounded like she was more at home baking apple pies, but she was a fastidious and highly efficient researcher, if a little unimaginative. That was both the positive and negative of her military background. John suspected that was why he'd been brought in. It was easy to joke about that classic oxymoron, American Intelligence, but they knew enough to seek out someone who could think outside of the box.
Unfortunately, this little problem required being able to think a little further than outside of the box. A lot further . . .
* * * *
The lab went into lockdown at 9:45pm on a Tuesday evening. John was working late and the only person in the lab. He was studying images from the electron microscope when a warning flashed up on his monitor screen informing him of a containment breach and that the lab was entering lockdown mode.
If this was a film or videogame there would have been flashing lights and wailing sirens. That was because films and videogames were designed to generate excitement. In a dangerous lab environment excitement was a bad thing. Personnel needed to think clearly and fast, and flashing lights and blaring alarms were not conducive to clear and rational thought. No doubt an alarm was going off somewhere and highly trained personnel were springing into action, but John, despite being in the lab, was superfluous now. The breach had been detected and the doors would have been locked and sealed the moment it was detected.
John sat in eerie silence and looked at the polite warning message flashing on his computer screen. He wondered if they'd let him compose a final email to his mother back in London.
* * * *
John had been in Miami for a conference on protists when the US military had made him an offer he couldn't refuse. It was his first paper since receiving his PhD and he wasn't sure what interest the US military had in "Cytoskeletal Features that aid Oxygen Diffusion in Large Protists". Some amoeba, like the infamous brain-eating amoeba,
Naegleria fowleri
, were hazardous to human health, but John's area of expertise was the giant amoeba,
Chaos carolinensis
, and they were harmless . . . unless you happened to be a diatom or similarly microscopic organism.
He'd assumed there'd been a mistake and told them so.
"You are an expert in gaseous absorption and transfer in single-celled organisms?" Vailati had asked him. This was before John knew who Dr Mario Vailati was. Back then he'd been another nondescript man with thinning grey hair and a lab coat.
"Well, yes"
He had been studying it for the past three and a half years.
Then you're exactly the person we want.
"Why not Professor Robert Feldherr? He's the expert in this field and he lives in this state."
"Professor Feldherr doesn't have the requisite personality traits for this project."
That was from the military type in the smart uniform who looked as stiff as a shop mannequin. Translated from military-speak what he really meant was: Professor Feldherr is old, knows his own mind, and is far less likely to follow orders without question than a fresh-faced young limey. That was John Sanjust. They wanted him for his expertise, but also because they knew he'd be easier to control than an irascible old professor.
* * * *
John hoped it was a false alarm. He would have prayed as well, but he was an atheist and couldn't see the point.
He knew there were two critical fail-safes. The first pumped super-cooled gas into the room, dropping the temperature down to around -190 °C in a few seconds and turning the whole lab into a giant ice box. That was if they wanted to preserve and retrieve any of the samples.
If they weren't interested in retaining anything, or were
