(This is the fifth in the X series, and is intended to be read after "Xhalation", "Xcogitate", "Xemplify" and "Xpectation".)
The day started with Va junking a two hundred thousand dollar scanning electron microscope. It got worse from there.
She didn't really want to try the electron microscope, but they were running out of ways to analyze the new street drug that had been blowing up the greater metropolitan area over the last few months and burning up an increasing amount of police manpower. She'd broken something like seven gas chromatographs, a good dozen or so discrete analyzers, four mass spectrometers, and a wavelength dispersive X-ray fluorescence spectrometer that was probably going to cost most of her department's yearly budget to replace. They would probably fire her over it, if every other forensics lab in the country wasn't getting the exact same results.
It didn't matter what they used--every computer that tried to analyze a sample of the drug they were calling 'X' crashed immediately, spitting out screen after screen of binary gibberish until they finally pulled the plug. Rebooting the machines and reinstalling the operating system didn't help, either; as soon as someone turned it back on, lime green ones and zeroes scrolled down the monitor like they'd somehow replaced the state of the art chemical analysis tools with the cheap CRT monitor from an Apple II. Engineers around the country were scratching their collective heads in disbelief.
That left chemists like Va falling back on the techniques that predated the computer era, digging through old textbooks she got from the library to refresh her memory on manual flame tests and the best way to perform titration. To make things doubly difficult, many of the tests had to be performed inside a hermetically-sealed chamber using a glove box; as one X-head after another came in drooling and stumbling and barely able to string two coherent syllables together, the lab protocols got stricter and stricter for working with the stuff. Va took fewer precautions with cyanide than she did with X now.
And all of it resulted in a host of inconclusive results. Va still wasn't sure what it was derived from, whether the lawnmower scent reported by users was genuinely chlorophyll or some other chemical, what parts of the brain it affected or why it built up in the sclera and the vitreous humour of the eyes. All she knew was that a bunch of politicians who couldn't tell a pipette from a pipe cleaner were accusing her profession, her department, and her personally of gross incompetence for not being able to figure it out faster. And she was getting sick of it.
Which was why she decided to try the electron scanning microscope. Va hoped that she could at least get some kind of visual impression of the chemical composition of the drug, something she could compare to known plant toxins and hallucinogenic animal secretions and hell, she didn't know, irradiated lithium samples or something. She started by heating one of the vape cartridges in a distillation flask until she had boiled off most of the liquid, leaving nothing but a fine green powder at the bottom of the glass vessel.
She took that and prepared it on a laboratory slide, making sure every grain was firmly affixed to prevent contamination--Va didn't know exactly how much X constituted a mind-altering dose, but she suspected that breathing hard around this thing could wind up leaving her a brainless masturbating zombie for the better part of a week. Since the lab didn't have its own electron scanning microscope, she drove her sample across town to the university and spent about twenty minutes flashing her credentials around until someone let her have access to theirs. Thankfully, it was a state college, and they had a lot of motivation to help a government official solve a major public health crisis.
She shrugged off the technician's attempts to help and mounted the slide into the vacuum chamber herself. Everything seemed to be going great until she evacuated the air; as soon as she clicked on the little button on the screen that said 'Pump', though, the program flickered and died. Va already knew what was going to replace it before the numbers even began to scroll.
She sat and watched the stream of ones and zeroes fill the screen, staring at them expressionlessly and wondering exactly how many pieces of laboratory equipment one woman could break before they started to take it out of her salary. She was just beginning to calculate how long it would take her to pay for a two hundred thousand dollar scanning electron microscope on a forensic chemist's salary when it occurred to her to wonder what the binary code actually meant.
Five minutes later, and Va had pulled out her laptop and hooked it up to the USB port on the electron microscope, unworried about any potential risk of contaminating her own computer with the same kind of bizarre bug that had crashed all the lab equipment. None of the techs had reported any problems with the, the virus or glitch or malware or whatever it was infecting their diagnostic machines. It was just a problem with the devices that had been in direct contact with X.
