Another Fiction Friday: CONTAGION PLAGUE: a Gripping 1st-Person Thriller Written In One Go, Stream-Of-Consciousness-Style!!

The vault door clanged shut with my shoulder behind it, the automatic seals engaging. But was it too late? Had the contamination already escaped? I sank back against the corrugated steel wall of a door, looking up at the red warning light. It was hooked into the air filtration system. It stayed dark.

For how long?

I should start at the beginning. I'm Jorgen Haeckler. No that name sucks. I'm Tristan Owsald, a top researcher who some see as too cocky, too arrogant - a token personality flaw to make up for how sheerly capable and competent I am in so many other bewildering arrays of areas that have nothing to do with how great a scientist I am. I wiped Sharon's lipstick from my mouth, and looked at the dark streak it left on the back of my hand. At this moment - was she still alive?

For how long?

Her lipstick on my hand was dark red, like the warning bulb. I looked up at it again. The tiny, coiled filament waited in its vacuum for the juice to hit - the signal that would set all the alarms singing.

I've lost my train of thought. I was telling what you need to know. I was telling you about me.

I'm tall and lean, with soft, sandy hair and hard eyes. I graduated from a combination of the top universities in the world, on a special degree program with an accelerated course of applied research that resulted in me being awarded the Nobel Prize upon graduation. A coup, but I took it in stride. My work could save billions, but I'm more concerned about the billions it could make. So when the government tapped me to head up a top-secret project, I wasn't interested - what's in it for me? But ultimately, the irritating guy they sent to recruit me pushed my buttons a bit, and the challenge the project presented was too appealing for my ego to resist. There I was.

And now here I was - sitting on top of a catastrophe that had just about stopped waiting to happen!

The warning light stayed dark.

One red glass bulb, between me, and all the blood of all the world on my hands. I could still recall my first day on-site. It was only 7 months ago.

How had it all gone so wrong so fast?

"Well, if it isn't the whiz kid himself? Welcome aboard, Dr. Owsald." Lemuel Sarkass held out a meaty hand, which I shook perfunctorily.

"Thank you Dr. Sarkass. How about bringing me up to speed on what we're doing here?" My eyes betrayed no hint of my irritation at this "whiz kid" bull-shit!!

"Well, as you know, DNA is the foundation of human life. But here, we're trying to do stuff with it that the reading public wouldn't understand." Sarkass's actual explanation was way more technical. I'm cutting you guys a break, here.

"Sounds risky." I observed. "What are the risks?"

"Well, the risks...first, you need to understand we've got a first-class crew of people here, a real cast of characters with all sorts of individual quirks and motivations, and various tangled backstories and loyalties. Most of them are young hotshots like yourself, and the team in general is a volatile cauldron of sexual chemistry, but they're all absolutely tops in their respective fields. They know what they're doing. And as a team, we've developed all kinds of protocols to keep any of the risks from happening, so as long as nobody has built in any secret overrides to further some covert scheme of theirs for personal gain, which then backfire in unexpected ways unleashing some unforeseen catastrophe, we can be pretty complacent that none of the risks are going to materialize."

"Go on." I prompted. "What risks?"

Sarkass spread his beefy hands, a bit sheepishly. "Well, you know, basically, the risks are...zombies."

"Zombies!?" I cried, incredulously. "Oh, come on. It's been done!"

"What risks do you suggest?" Dr. Sarkass countered, defensively.

"Well I don't know. Anything but zombies." This was turning into a project I did not want to be associated with. I saw myself as a trailblazer.

"How about this," I offered. "DNA is basically a long, twisty snakey thing. What if the risks of what we're doing are - if things went awry, there would be a certain risk that the DNA itself might become sentient, punching its way through its nuclear membrane and bursting through cell walls, converting more and more neighboring stands of DNA and linking up into bigger and bigger strands, eventually weaving into huge rampaging strands of DNA that could rip their way out of the body and act on their own - giant strands of independent DNA, self-sufficient DNA that no longer needed a host body to survive?"

Sarkass scowled, thoughtfully, rubbing his chin with porky fingers. "That is certainly one hell of a risk," he mused, approvingly. "The death for the subject would be excruciating."

"Horrifically so." I was warming to the premise. "And since we're talking DNA here, the giant visible rampaging strands would only be half the problem. With the visible threat would come an invisible one."

"The rogue DNA would shed microscopic copies of itself," Sarkass continued, "...copies that would drift through the air, seeking new hosts to burrow into?"

"And convert. Precisely." I nodded with grim sangfroid.

Sarkass's brow furrowed worriedly. "Something like that could work its way through the entire population of Earth's organisms - infecting each organism's own DNA from the inside! Meanwhile the fully mature giant DNA strands that would be birthed from the death throes of those unfortunate hosts would attack and batter down any defenses we could erect to keep them out." Sarkass whistled, admiringly, with a touch of alarm.

I was ready to bring it home. "Eventually, there would be nothing left on Earth but naked strands of giant DNA, interlocking in new spiraling forms sprouting from the ruined foundations of life as we had known it - every formerly living thing's body mass, reduced to a wreckage of burst cells and pulped tissues."

"Not even any molds or bacteria left for decomposition..." added a young, stunning female researcher, walking by. Her white lab coat clung to her every curve, like an unusually well-tailored lab coat.

"That's Sharon DeGras, senior researcher and chief of containment," noted Sarkass, as Dr. DeGras walked on, waving over her shoulder distractedly in a manner simultaneously charming and insolent.

"She's sharp." I noted appreciatively. "And 100% right about the microorganisms," I added, returning to the grim premise we'd been examining. "All life on the planet is substantially identical at the genetic level. Nothing would be safe."

"That's some risk!" Sarkass said again, under his breath.

"Thank you." My voice was curt, matter-of-fact. "Now: what measures are we putting in place to keep that from happening?"

Sarkass stepped back, clearly unprepared for what was just as clearly the obvious, inevitable next question.

I shook my head in disapproval. I could see I was going to have to take matters into my own hands!