One
The slim Asian woman sank into a chair, exhausted. Ignoring untidy stacks of paperwork, she rummaged about briefly in a desk drawer, pulling out a nutrient bar. It had been one thing after another, all day, she reflected, and now, finally, she had some time to relax—
Motion sensors registered her movement, and the computer console flickered into life.
“You have three urgent messages,” the computer’s calm female voice told her. “Do you want to look at them now?”
Yukiko eyed the screen with hostility. She tore open the bar’s wrapper.
“Are they important?”
“They are registered as highest priority. You now have four urgent messages.”
Chewing a mouthful of nutrient bar, Yukiko sank back into her chair. Ten minutes until her samples stopped spinning in the centrifuge, ten minutes of blessed peace hopefully unbroken by Meridian’s new trainees- they were terrible, it had been a nightmare, handling them while Meridian was on holiday— and now this.
Well, at least she had the software to scan her emails for her.
“Summaries,” Yukiko commanded, closing her eyes.
“One: A forwarded message from Stephania Virage to you and many others, she wants to know if you prefer jambalaya to perogies for dinner on the 28th. Two: A forwarded message from Magdalena Virage, a discussion of whether to rent a laser karaoke machine or a dancing exoskeleton for Christmas. Three: a forwarded message from Magdalena Virage, same contents as message one, but she adds that a third option for dinner could be stew. Four: Stephania Virage—”
“Enough! I don’t have time for this crap! What, do they think I have nothing to do all day but check my email?” Enraged, Yukiko threw her lunch down on the desktop, causing a stack of papers to slide from the desk’s edge into a nearby recycling bin.
“Dammit!” Those papers were important, if she left them in the bin the janitors would make them vanish overnight. She leaped to her feet and began to rummage in the bin.
An acned face poked around a corner, apologetic.
“Um, Yukiko?”
It was Kevin. Yukiko’s heart sank. Please let it not be a disaster, she prayed. Please, let nothing be destroyed—
“Um, I thought I would go ahead and pick the white bacterial colonies from the plates, like you said, and I set up the robot fine, except the plate lids were still when the picking head went down to inoculate the plates. And, um, the pins on the head are all kind of crunched. Is there another picking head?”
Yukiko eyed Kevin balefully. That picking head had cost a thousand credits.
“No,” she said. “You’ll have to do them by hand.”
Kevin looked at her, astonished. “But I need two thousand colonies! It will take all day! I can’t sit and pick all day! What if I can’t finish by five?”
Yukiko stared at him. Exactly what did he think scientists did? Science wasn’t glamorous, it was a lot of hard work, some of it mind-numbingly tedious. Biologists often couldn’t just stop at the end of the day and put their projects aside— the organisms didn’t stop growing just because it was the end of a workday.
She opened her mouth, but was interrupted by a shriek from down the hallway, followed by a loud crash and the sound of broken glass.
Behind her, the computer chimed.
“You have four urgent messages. Replies are requested to all of them.”
Yukiko put her hands to her eyes. The voice of Sunni, the other trainee, drifted down the hallway to her: “Oh wow, look! It’s eating a hole in the floor!”
Damn all trainees, anyway, Yukiko thought, savagely. She pointed out the door.
“Go help Sunni,” she barked, and Kevin darted away.
She looked at her timer. Four minutes left until her samples finished spinning. Well, if this newest catastrophe took longer than four minutes to deal with, she’d just have to spin them again- thankfully they would be stable for a while at room temperature. She rose to leave, and the computer chimed again.
“You have four urgent messages—”
“The hell I do!” Yukiko snapped. “They want a reply, try this: tell them not to bother me when I’m at work unless it’s important! I don’t give a flying rat’s ass what they want to do for Christmas! And in future, delete messages from any of the Virages except Yves!”
She stomped out of the room to find out what was eating a hole in the laboratory floor, her lunch and the fact that she had only listened to three of the four email messages completely forgotten.
Copyright
Elizabeth Bent 2005