Chapter 10

Roger visits the nerd factory to check on his science.

Mercer stared at himself in the mirror. He smoothed over his thinning hair and splashed water onto his plump face, noting the crows feet around his eyes that had deepened noticeably over the past few months. Working on the Pink project had aged him considerably.

What was it about that man that made him so terrifying? Of course there were the surprise visits, the probing questions about lack of progress, the subtle threats...that was normal; practically every client did that. Science was sometimes...well, more art than science, and breakthroughs were made when they wanted to be made. Mercer was used to unhappy clients, and he was normally no pushover. He had mastered the art of taking no guff while simultaneously selling the dream (he was also very much the sort of person to use the phrase ‘take no guff’ with a completely straight face). Eagle Scientific was a serious company which took itself very seriously, with lots of serious scientists and serious investors. Even when projects ran behind schedule, they always delivered in full in the end and the results spoke for themselves. It’s how they stayed so successful in a field populated by supergenius competition. Besides that, Mercer had a lot of letters after his name. One doesn’t get to be a head scientist in a company like Eagle Scientific by acting like a pussywillow (yet another oft used gem in Mercer’s vocabulary).

But Roger Pink was like no one Mercer had ever dealt with before. Whenever they experienced a setback, instead of becoming angry, he would just smile, shrug his shoulders, and offer them more money. It was, if anything, the most unnerving thing he could possibly do. Mercer could handle anger, and shouting, and threats. But understanding and pats on the back and “oh well, that’s life, eh?”...that was entirely new territory. It set Mercer on edge.

Prior to the Pink project, Mercer had been happy, healthy, and rosy cheeked. He enjoyed his job. Bioterrorist viruses were a fun challenge to make. Engineering unnatural abominations via in situ hybridization allowed him to flex his creative side. Super powerful biomechanical exosuits were a snap to build. His life had been great, his work fulfilling.

Now, the face that stared back at him from the mirror told a very different story. High blood pressure, nervous tics, fainting spells at the mere mention of a certain color...it was a complete transformation. He no longer even had the desire to write nasty letters to his HOA about his neighbors’ obvious breaches of conduct by allowing their hedges to grow several inches too high before trimming them; it used to be one of his favorite pastimes.

“You can do this,” he told his reflection. “The project is only slightly behind schedule; it’s nothing you haven’t dealt with before. He’s only a man.”

A man who made Mercer sick to his stomach with unease, but a man nonetheless.

Mercer took a deep breath and pushed his way out of the bathroom. He made his way past the offices, through the cubicles, and down to the lobby, where (and here Mercer swallowed hard and steeled his resolve) Roger was hitting on the receptionist.

“So I told him, look Mr. President, I’m flattered, but I just don’t have that kind of time,” Roger was saying, one crimson clad elbow resting on the desk while his other hand was on his hip.

The receptionist giggled girlishly, the fingers of one hand in front of her mouth while she batted her eyelashes at Roger. “That is so funny,” she said, laying a hand on Roger’s arm.

“You think that’s a good one, wait until I tell you about-” Roger began, but Mercer cut him off before he lost the nerve to speak.

“Mr. Pink,” Mercer said. “So glad to see you.”

“Mariachi!” said Roger, seemingly unperturbed by the interruption. Mercer felt his eye twitch. He had long ago started to feel that Mr. Pink got his name wrong on purpose. “Just the man I was hoping to see!”

“I expect that you would like a status report,” Mercer said.

“Perceptive as always,” Roger replied with a smile that was far too genuine, straightening up from his lean.

“Oh, Mr. Pink, you forgot something!” exclaimed the receptionist, holding out a piece of paper with what Mercer could only assume was her phone number. Her name was Candee, or Tiffanee, or something like that. It definitely had two e’s in it. “Call me.” she mouthed.

Roger took the paper and slipped it into his pocket with a wink that was less than innocent.

“Right this way,” Mercer said, suppressing the urge to vomit. They crossed out of the lobby and into the maze of hallways that led down to the production facility. “Let’s start off with the good.” Mercer consulted his clipboard as they walked. “We cut down significantly on production costs with a few simple reagent substitutions, we now have a way to formulate the analgesic for homeostatic regulation so that it doesn’t explode in temperatures above thirty-two celsius after five minutes, and the majority of animal test subjects exhibit very promising results for almost every formula...before we euthanize them for safety reasons, of course.”

“Remind me again why you guys don’t use the reagents that I suggested?” asked Roger.

“To be quite frank, Mr. Pink, a significant portion of those reagents are either unfeasibly difficult to come by, have a half life of less than a second, are preposterously radioactive, or simply don’t exist.”

“How did I use them, then?” Roger asked innocently.

“I don’t know, sir,” Mercer replied in a slightly exasperated tone. “But for example,  I do know for a fact that narwhals do not come equipped with microscopic, uh, ‘salsa monkeys’ as part of their neural physiology, nor would there be a cost-effective way to extract them even if they did.”

“Oh,” said Roger. “Well, I won’t lie to you, I was on some serious s**t when I wrote down those formulas anyway.”

Mercer thought back to the pile of napkins, toilet paper, and scraps of torn clothing that Roger had submitted as the basis for the Pink project. They were covered in outrageously complex mathematical equations and semi-coherent scientific ramblings, punctuated with rude depictions of both male and female anatomy (frequently at the same time). It had taken three teams of scientists with PhD’s in Neurobiology, Biochemistry, Quantum Physics, and Evolutionary Genetics several weeks to decipher them enough to start work. Mercer shuddered, but all he said was: “It is not for me to judge, Mr. Pink, but we have had to find alternative components.”

“So what’s the bad?”

Mercer shifted uncomfortably.

“You said ‘let’s start with the good’,” Roger pried. “If there’s a good, that means there’s a bad, right?”

There was no way around it. Mercer hoped all of that psyching up he had done in the bathroom had worked.

“Well, as I said before, we have experienced great success with certain species of our animal test subjects.” Too much success, in Mercer’s opinion, especially when some of the mice had figured out how to escape their cages. There were still reports of little white blurs of super fast mice in the break room in building A, and one of the researchers had recently discovered that the ants had been using geokinesis to build  their tunnels, resulting in actual architecture instead of just dirt hives. They had little underground huts with roofs and everything, and that wasn’t even mentioning the palace they built for the queen. “While there were some species that didn’t take quite as well, we are making great strides every single day in learning how to properly mutate the animals. Essentially, our knowledge of the research matter increases nearly exponentially with every experiment that we do. However, we have discovered that the more complex an organism is, the more difficult it is to mutate. For example, we’ve had very little difficulty with insects. But when we move to an organism like a monkey…” Mercer didn’t like to be reminded of the monkeys. He could be a cruel man, but he did have some semblance of a heart hidden away underneath his mad scientist exterior. They had tested flight on the monkeys, with unexpected side effects. The cleaning crews had been mopping up chunks of simian anatomy for weeks. When Mercer found an eyeball underneath his desk, he had to excuse himself for the day or risk hysterics.

Mercer swallowed as he pushed open the doors to building’s main laboratory. “As we move higher into the branches of the evolutionary tree, it becomes increasingly difficult for the mutation to remain stable. In short, Mr. Pink, we still cannot keep the human test subjects who experience significant results alive for even a reasonable period of time. There’s always inevitably some fatal malfunction.”

“I see,” was all Roger said.

The following silence was almost tangible, begging to be filled. Mercer kept walking, then stopped when he realized he had left Roger behind. “Mr. Pink, I realize that this puts us slightly behind the proposed schedule, but I can assure you that-”

“Sh, sh sh sh,” Roger shushed gently. He put his hand on Mercer’s shoulder.

“Mr. Pink?” asked Mercer, confused.

“I’m practicing what my therapist referred to as ‘taking a moment’,” said Roger, his eyes closed.

“Mr. Pink, I’m not sure that-”

“Come on,” reassured Roger. “Take a moment with me.”

Mercer, uncomfortable and very out of his element, reluctantly closed his eyes. They remained silent for several minutes, Roger maintaining a gentle yet incredibly firm grip on Mercer’s shoulder.

“Okay,” said Roger gently. “Let’s just dissect the situation. Get academic with it.”

Mercer said nothing, and Roger continued. “So I hired you guys to mass produce my formulas. It should have been pretty easy given the fact that they’re already formulated and tested, even if I was on more illegal substances than an aging rockstar on world tour when I wrote them down. Hell, that’s actually how I came up with most of them. Now, to help you guys out, I paid you a ludicrous amount of money. Several times your actual fee, if I recall correctly.”

Mercer thought back to how strange it was that not only was Roger completely correct, but that he had paid the entirety of the company’s fee and the project’s budget in bars of solid gold. Eagle Scientific was not in the habit of questioning anything about their clients, their intentions, or their methods of payment, but Mercer had seen Roger’s payments with his own eyes on several occasions. It was like looking at a prop treasure vault from an action movie; crates full of gold bars as far as the eye could see. Not only that, but each and every bar smelled very faintly of something that Mercer couldn’t quite put his finger on. Shrimp, perhaps, or fish. It was odd enough that Mercer had been almost tempted to break company policy and inquire about it. He very well might have, too, if Roger didn’t give off the impression that he was a very big shark in a very small pond.

“-so there’s that,” Roger was saying. “Which really isn’t a big deal when you think about it, but is sort of the clincher on top of everything else. So let me sum up exactly what I’m trying to say here. It’s been how long since the project started?”

“Eight months,” said Mercer, a man looking over the edge of a cliff.

“Eight months,” repeated Roger, absentmindedly looking at an array of test tubes filled with multicolored liquids. “And in that time, you didn’t really get anything done that I couldn’t have done myself. It was easy to give the project to you guys because of the manpower involved, but in the end I could have done it. Would you say that’s an accurate assessment of the situation?”

Mercer slipped automatically, and ultimately unwisely, into damage control mode. “Now Mr. Pink, you must realize that in the grand scheme of the project, we really haven’t lost that much time.”

Roger rubbed his chin as he picked up a tube filled with a red solution to read the label. “Time is money, Mandela. And although money is nothing more than a means to an end, I really hate wasting time.”

Here it comes, thought Mercer. He’s going to offer to pay us more money, or to up the budget again, or something like that. Why can’t he just get angry and shout like a normal person?

“I think I’m just going to have to light a fire under you guys,” Roger said. With no warning, he grabbed Mercer by the throat and pushed him backwards onto a benchtop, shattering glassware and breaking some very expensive electronics. As Mercer gurgled and scratched at Roger’s hand, Roger dumped the contents of the test tube into Mercer’s open mouth. Mercer’s cheeks bulged as he did his best not to swallow any of the concoction. Roger switched his hand to cover Mercer’s mouth, and with his free hand pinched Mercer’s nose closed with enough force to make the capillaries in his nostrils burst. Mercer kicked and flailed but Roger was too strong, and Mercer felt the chemical mixture slip down his throat. With a final shove, Roger released him.

Mercer fell onto his knees. His throat felt like it was burning away, like he had swallowed a cup of molten lava and it was eating away his insides.

He choked and spluttered, fingers scrabbling at the intense agony. Suddenly, the pain ceased. It was like it had never happened. Mercer felt good; inexplicably good. Great, even. He stood up slowly, clutching the granite benchtop to steady himself. As he looked, he saw scorch marks form around his fingers on the black resin. Heatwaves radiated from his hands. He held them up to his face, incredulous, and they slowly, gloriously burst into flames. Instead of burning his hands, the fire felt good on his skin, like holding them under a pleasantly warm faucet.

“Ha!” Mercer laughed, a little crazily. “Hahahaha!”

He began to shake with manic energy when Roger’s hands caught him around the throat. Mercer grabbed onto Roger’s wrists, intent on burning him until there was nothing left but ash, when he realized that Roger was wearing fire-proof gloves taken from a nearby desk. He clawed at Roger’s wrists, twitching as he lost oxygen to his brain, then finally fell still. Roger let go of his body and he crumpled to the ground.

“Huh,” Roger said, pulling off the gloves. “Who’d have thought.”

There was a knock on the office door of Dr. Eliza Chan, director of the entire genetics department at Eagle Scientific. This was unexpected because Dr. Chan was an incredibly busy woman and required that all of her visitors have made appointments at least two months in advance with her secretary, who would let that time period pass and then allow the tentative appointment to sit in the state of ‘pending approval’ for a further month, just to see if the person who made the appointment was either determined or important enough to make the appointment worth Dr. Chan’s time. Dr. Chan was a very busy woman. She also had an incredibly short temper, and was known around the department as The Gorgon, which was saying something given the general disposition required to work for a company that specializes in evil inventions.

There came a second knock, solidifying the fact that there actually was someone knocking on her door unannounced, and also that the person on the other side of the door was about to be a very sorry person indeed.

Chan swung the door open with her signature expression; a pinched, sour look that was rumored to be able to turn people to stone.

“Dr. Eliza Chan, right?” The tall, white haired man on the other side of the door gave her a handsome grin.

Chan narrowed her eyes. “Who the hell are you? And how did you get in here?”

“Oh, your secretary was kind enough to let me borrow her badge.” Roger rested his elbow against the door frame and leaned on it, badge dangling from his hand.

Chan craned her neck around Roger to try and see her secretary’s desk. “Sylvia?” She snatched the badge from Roger’s unresisting hand. “You have five seconds to get out of here before I call security.”

“Oh, don’t do that, babe,” Roger stepped inside the room. “I just need a little favor, is all.”

Chan, a blackbelt in karate and not intimidated in the slightest, narrowed her eyes once more. “You will leave this location in a stretcher if you so much as think about touching me,” she hissed.

Roger, still leaning against the doorway, held up a small vial filled with a dark red liquid. “Aha, I don’t think so, doll.” His eyes flashed an intense blue, and Chan suddenly felt her anger melt away. This nice man only wanted to ask her a small favor.

“I need you to run some tests for me.” Roger’s grin filled the whole world.

Author's Note

If Mercer hadn't been so nervous, he might not have gotten all choked up.