OBSIDIAN SKY

It was just after 11:00 p.m., and Adam Haddad stared at the clock wondering if he had waited long enough. The last student he’d seen enter the lab, a sleep-deprived doctoral candidate fulfilling a late-night request to prep the next iteration of a novel mRNA vaccine, had left just ten minutes ago.     Finally, Adam convinced himself that he had the lab to himself.

He rolled his chair from the desk across the room to the refrigerator in the opposite corner. He rummaged through the contents inside to uncover a carton of eggs in the back. He retrieved them before rolling himself sideways across the back of the room to an available biosafety hood. 
   One last time, he paused and checked the door. Satisfied, he turned on the hood, and the machine hummed to life. Cursing the noise, he carefully opened the egg carton, reoriented the contents, and doused each of the eggs with alcohol from a squeeze bottle to sanitize them. 
   The next part would be tricky. 
   With a pair of tiny, sterile scissors, he began to cut open the first egg. Careful not to tear the membrane underneath, he slowly removed the small section of shell covering the air sac. Then, trading the scissors for a pair of forceps, he gently opened the membrane. Easy now. Taking care not to rupture the yolk, he inserted a spoon into the egg, pushed the embryo to the side, and inserted a translucent pipette into the allantoic fluid.
   Eureka. 
He chuckled to himself at his use of what he always thought was a cringeworthy saying. Yet, for once, it actually felt appropriate. Withdrawing the pipette, Adam now held 10 milliliters of yellow liquid more valuable to him than an equivalent volume of gold. 
   With the care of a surgeon, he began to ease the contents of the pipette toward an open plastic collection tube waiting on ice. As he worked, he found himself reminiscing on the COVID pandemic he had lived through as a teenager. He remembered clearly how the fear wrought by an unseen, biological force combined with the politicization of every proposed reaction had driven the United States of America to the brink of ruin. Trust in the government and scientific institutions seemed unrecoverable. Even by the pandemic’s end, the general public would still not agree on something so fundamental as how dangerous the coronavirus actually was.
   With the Betacoronavirus pandemicum strain that been replicating over the last several days inside this particular carton of chicken eggs—the virus Adam now held in the pipette between his fingers—there would be no such ambiguity.
   One egg down, eleven to go.
   The trick to engineering the perfect communicable disease, as the Professor had taught him, was to develop a virus that killed, yet did not kill so quickly that the vector would die before having the chance to infect the next victim. Such was the Achilles’ heel of the Ebola virus, which burned itself out before it could ever spread globally. Half of the victims who contracted the virus would be dead within days. In contrast, SARS-CoV-2 had infected an estimated 70 percent of the world’s population—but the lethality rate barely reached 5 percent. 
   The perfect “Goldilocks” virus had become the Professor’s goal. Engineered to balance lethality with communicability, it would wield the best, or worst, of both traits. The hundreds of dead mice that Adam had incinerated that morning were proof enough that the Professor finally had it right. Next would come the “human trials.”
   Inserting the pipette into the second egg, Adam lifted a second volume of the yellow liquid and prepared to add it to the tube. He was already getting more efficient, and he estimated he would be finished within the hour.
   Then he froze. 
   Did I imagine that? He could have sworn he’d heard a noise from outside the room. Was someone coming? For a full twenty seconds, Adam stared at the door without moving, listening. 
   Finally, hearing nothing more, he let out a breath, and continued to move the pipette toward the tube. Then, the door flew open. The same young woman who had been in the lab before hurried in, her jacket sliding off her shoulder as she rushed. 
   “Jesus Christ, I need sleep,” she mumbled, making her way straight toward the desk directly behind Adam. 
   He remained still, staring at her, mouth slightly open. 
   “There they are!” She grabbed a set a keys from beneath a stack of loose papers, then hurried back toward the door without looking his way. 
   Adam was stunned. His heart pounded as he realized his apparent invisibility to women had finally played to his benefit. It had always been his brother, not he, who had the gift of attracting the attention of the opposite sex. 
   Realizing he was still holding the deadly virus, he quickly squeezed the fluid from the pipette into the tube with the contents of the first egg. 
   Holy shit, that was close. 
   By the time he had finished extracting the virus from the remaining eggs, he had filled three tubes. He placed them into a centrifuge, spinning them for ten minutes before extracting the now clear product from the harvested fluid and distributing it into two separate vials.

   Adam checked the clock. It neared midnight. Almost done. 
   The vials holding the final product would be collected later by the Professor, as per the plan. It would be the Professor himself who would stage an origin for the virus far more horrifying than a wet market or lab in China—whatever the official story had ended up being with the last coronavirus. This time, the terror would be unworldly. 
   Adam snap froze the contents of the vials with liquid nitrogen, then carried them to the freezer for storage. Inside, he found the tray with the label he was looking for, removed the vials it held, and replaced them with two identical ones. The job was finally complete. 
   The Professor would be pleased.