The Zen Gene (4 page)

If the fan had been turning his arms would have been sliced off like two long sticks of salami at the deli. His head hit hard and he lost consciousness for a while. When he woke he was dazed and in a lot of pain and nearly passed out again. He forgot about the pain when he realized he was trapped upside down inside the vent. He came close to having an all-out screaming fit of hysteria but managed to regain control of himself. He struggled and pushed until his body moved back and little by little he worked his right arm free of the grate.

He rested for a while because he was having trouble catching his breath in the tight dusty confines. He was wondering what to do and thinking about the fact no one knew where he was.

In desperation, though he was stuck head down inside the shaft and it was hard to move at all, he managed to free his other arm from the grate. He began to search along the sides of the vent as far as he could reach with his fingers until he came across something that felt like a crack.

He realized it was a folded seam in the galvanized sheet metal of the vent. He tried to judge where the crack was relative to his foot and began to kick furiously with the heel of his sneaker. The noise was deafening and the dust he loosened made breathing difficult. He stopped frequently to catch his breath but fear soon had him back at it. It took long agonizing and painful minutes until he felt the metal seam begin to part and spread open. It took more long choking minutes to widen it enough to work it back and forth with his free hand.

When the whole section of vent gave way and split open he kicked like a madman until he was able to squirm and wriggle his body backwards and out through the opening. Half in and half out of the vent he twisted around so he could sit upright in the open hole and this allowed the blood to drain from his head and let him catch his breath.

He was relieved but then he realized he had another problem. When he stuck his leg out of the vent, no matter how hard he stretched it, he could not feel the floor below. He did not know how far down it was or what piece of machinery was waiting to impale him. He sat for a long time trying to decide what to do.

It was not a decision between two courses of action because when he tried to climb back up the vent he discovered he could not. There was nothing to grab onto the vent had smooth metal sides. Being the only logical choice open to him, he got ready and held his breath and jumped into complete darkness. He remembered wondering how he would explain his injuries to Andrea.

He got lucky, the floor was only a few feet below him and mercifully clear of debris but that was not the end of his problem. It took him a scary half hour of feeling around in the dark to find his way up to the main floor of the factory, and though he knew they were not true, during that half hour of blindness the stories Andrea told him about them experimenting on children came back to haunt him.

That first time inside the building he had been badly spooked. When he found the stairs to the main level he ran around inside the factory like a caged rat until he found an emergency exit with a push bar that would open. He was glad to see the blue sky and his trusty bike that day but like most kids he was more curious than cautious and that first time going inside did not deter him from going back.

He climbed the concrete stairs from the basement and stepped through the door stopping to marvel at the amazing light show of streaming sunlight angling down from the ruined roof onto the floor of the factory. For two city blocks random columns of brilliant golden sunlight poked through holes in the roof creating a fantasy realm of dust-speckled beams.

It reminded him of St. Mark’s Cathedral downtown. Andrea took him there a few times and told him he was baptized there but he could not remember that. To him it was a building with pictures on the windows and a lot of soggy old people that tried to touch him. They stopped going and Andrea admitted that she only took him there to “keep up appearances,” whatever that meant.

She did lots of stuff like that, he could not understand why she did those things but he found it easier to go along with her rather than have her repeatedly try to explain it to him and getting upset when he still did not understand.

He walked into the section of the building that housed the rows of chemistry and biology labs.

The lab he used was closest to the basement stairs. He picked it because of that and it contained the best stainless steel work counters. The room was fifteen by twenty with one boarded up window. When he began the project he cleared and then maintained the pathway on the concrete floor from the basement stairs to the door of his lab. He wet mopped it with bleach and water every few days.

He was careful not to track contaminates into the lab because you never knew what spores might be on the dust and thus traveling in the folds of your clothes. It would be ironic if, after having searched everywhere for the Hantavirus it showed up accidently in his lab media and made him sick. There were plenty of rodent droppings in the building but as far as he could determine not the virus.

In every direction the factory floor was mounded with loose and drifting piles of debris that came from the ruined roof and deteriorating walls. No matter how hard he tried to avoid it each time he walked in the building he would raise dust storms in his wake.

There had been several laboratories to choose from and he picked Bio Lab Eight because of its counters and proximity to the basement door. He spent weeks cleaning the lab and scrubbing the stainless steel countertops with bleach.

He decided to paint the floor with white garage-floor enamel because he could not get the old concrete clean enough for his purposes. The lab once had lots of equipment but it had all been removed when they closed down operations; he saw the outlines of equipment that once sat on the floor and countertops.

When the lab was clean and ready for use he began to search the rooms in the building for useful equipment. There were pieces here and there and though he didn’t always know what they were used for he dragged them to his lab.

A month after he began his project he came across a locked storeroom with a jackpot of instrumentation. It took him a noisy exhausting hour of bashing the lock on the door to get in but once inside he found all kinds of cool stuff. He dragged the bigger pieces using an improvised dolly made from a skate board.

As he learned more about genetics online he tried different experiments and steadily found or improvised the equipment he needed to do them and soon he had a well equipped biology lab. It was well equipped except for a few key items which he could not find. He could not obtain an optical microscope or a computer that wasn’t ancient but while he was searching he found something amazing in the basement beneath lab three.

It was only accessible by a locked stairway inside the lab and when he first saw it he did not understand what it was until months later when he saw a photo of the same machine online and discovered that it was a scanning electron microscope.

It was after midnight on a school night when he found the photo but he could not wait until school ended the next day to go back and see it and he snuck out. The first thing he did was search the device for a manufacturers tag, it was an Electroscan, scanning electron microscope, the date of manufacture read Mar 1997, but any hopes he had of using it were dashed when he read the power requirements. A diesel large generator could not supply enough power to operate it.

He retrieved the key to his lab from its hiding place behind an old polished brass fire extinguisher which hung on the wall next to the door. He unlocked the door but before he opened it he plugged in the ends of an extension cord poking out from under the door and waited until he heard the fan inside. It was a household fan he found on Recycle Sunday. It was missing one side of its safety grill but it worked.

It was big and efficient and strong enough to supply two psi of positive air flow inside the lab without drawing much current. The positive air pressure helped to discourage dust infiltration when he opened the door. The factory behind him was a million cubic feet of disintegrating building and there was dust and debris constantly circulating in the air.

While he was putting the lab together he also searched for a live wall receptacle to run equipment. In five years he never found a single hot receptacle, though he actively searched whenever he went exploring in the building. Like everything else, when they decommissioned the building they shut down the power supply. The only place he found live power was in the security shack at the front gate of the factory and it was a long way from lab eight. He bought five one-hundred-foot extension cords from Canadian Tire and laid them on the ground from the guard shack to the lab. It cost seventy-five dollars to buy them. He had the money but he forgot there was sales tax on top of that and he had to think up a good reason to ask Andrea for five dollars. There were times he almost gave up on the whole idea because things like floor paint and extension cords were costing a lot of money. When he laid the cords on the ground he worried its bright orange colour would attract attention and he painstakingly covered every inch of cord with dirt or other junk to obscure it.

He replaced the key behind the fire extinguisher; it was a bit of luck when the last workers left the factory they inserted the keys into the lab door locks. The individual laboratories were all built as standalone sealed structures within the factory and time and exposure to the elements had not wrecked their roofs like it had the main factory roof.

He slipped a pair of elastic shoe covers over his sneakers before he entered. He stole a few from the swimming pool change room last July. They were for use at the pool to keep people from tracking dirt onto the pool deck with street shoes, they also worked well at stopping him from tracking dirt into the lab.

He opened the door and was pleased when he felt the gentle puff of positive air flow. Walking into the dark room he went to the main work bench and clicked the switch on the power bar. Three low volt LED lights came on and pulled the lab and equipment out of the murk into sharp focus. He waited a few moments for the computer monitor to flicker to life before he booted the computer. He found lots of monitors on sight but they were all ancient CRT types and they sucked power like crazy.

The one he picked was the newest of the bunch but even so the resolution was fuzzy and indistinct no matter the refresh rate. On his travels through the ruins of the factory he never found a usable computer so he built his own based on an old IBM desktop.

He used IBM to control and monitor the electrical power distribution and processes in the grow room. He built it with bits and pieces of hardware people threw away and the only part he could not find was a decent motherboard. The motherboards and chip sets he found in the factory storage room were of no use because of their age. He solved the problem by removing the board from his home computer and convincing Andrea it was blown and needed to be replaced. It took a while to get her to spend two hundred dollars for a new one but he used his best motivator. He needed it to do homework.

That ploy worked almost every time but he was careful not to over use it because it could lead to a discussion about his grades. He smiled as he recalled the day they went to Cyclops Computers at Hillside Mall and she put the new motherboard on her credit card. The guy who sold it to them winked at him and grinned when Andrea wasn’t looking and Tyler thought about trying for a new more efficient power supply but he did not like the colour her face turned when she saw the bill for the motherboard.

The monitor woke giving off that weird smell of old electronics and when the IBM booted it grudgingly displayed a colour bar graph showing temperature and humidity readouts over time in lab seven, the grow room next door. The readouts were for the three dishes of agar growing version x. He could see the last dish in the row was showing a temperature decrease of .07 degrees. He read back through the trace and it showed a sine wave of variation over time which he knew matched the refrigerant compressor cycling on and off in the bar fridge. It looked like every time the fridge cycled the last dish would lose a percentage of heat and the losses were adding up. This was unfortunate because he did not want to lose any of the variations of this generation. He checked to make sure the fridge was not cycling at the moment then turned the switch to start the agitators in the solution tanks.

He thought about writing a subroutine to automatically shut the fridge down during agitation but he was afraid it would have little effect and would require him to leave the computer running, which would use up any electrical savings. He could not hear the agitators vibrate but he saw the voltage drop by the usual amount. He counted to fifty while they vibrated and as he was watching the last dish lost another full degree.

Hazen Michaels

Zen sat with her legs up and ankles crossed on the kitchen table eating an apple trying to force herself to concentrate on reading the first section of her homework assignment. She was bored senseless, her mom was away working, and there was no one around to talk to. She called her friend Becka earlier but she could not talk because her mom answered and said she was expecting a call. She could not understand why Becka did not have a cell phone like everyone else on the planet.

She stared drearily out the kitchen window and sighed, she was supposed to rake the leaves before her mom got back and she craned her neck to see if the maple was finished dropping them. She knew from experience there was no point in starting until they had all fallen.