Twenty-Seven Minutes

In this line of work, you think about death every day. You have to. You sign the waivers and the non-disclosures, you take out the insurance policies and attend the procedural briefings. Every day is another opportunity to die. The risk is high. We signed on for this.

You also have to be an asshole. That's my own private theory, but it fits with everything I've seen working here over the past fifteen years. There are a million ways to put our skills to better use. You could work in vaccinology, join an NGO, specialize in regenerative medicine, teach or tutor or test. From a moral and ethical standpoint, anything—anything at all—would be preferable to this line of work. You have to be a risk-seeker, a narcissist and a misanthrope to stomach this job. I don't mean that in a judgmental way. We all exist somewhere on the asshole-to-not-asshole spectrum, and this job attracts people at one particular end. I came to peace with that a long time ago.

I am sealed in the experiment room. A remote alarm has triggered in a monitoring station a hundred miles distant. On the balance of probability, there's a good chance that the exposure is routine, unserious, just another precaution. Only I know different. I take my mask off (no point being uncomfortable now) and thumb the intercom for ten seconds until it's answered. False alarm, I explain. I answer the questions that follow, the same answers I've given a hundred times before, but the first time they've failed to be true.

Twenty-seven minutes.

Assuming that my napkin math about aerosol generation, dispersion and body weight are half decent (they usually are). I could round to a half-hour, but I didn't spend half my life studying to tolerate that kind of imprecision.

Twenty-seven minutes remaining.

It's all relative of course. Twenty-seven minutes could be an eternity. The worst pain you've ever experienced, your body wracked with spasms, your hands balled so tight that the cramp is almost a relief from the agony. The best sex you've ever had, slow and unhurried. The slow, empty moments as you stare down a sterile corridor and wait for the oncologist to come back with the results.

Twenty-seven minutes. It's not an eternity today, not by any means. Today, twenty-seven minutes is a heartbeat, a single breath, a momentary flash of light that barely registers in the eye. Nothing worthwhile is possible within the next twenty-seven minutes. No heart-warming resolution, no starry-eyed reunion. It’s obvious, inescapable, a plain fact of reality. After all, there aren't really that many choices in a situation like this, are there?

My parents live hours away, on a good day, and today is not a good day. It's Christmas Eve. The roads are already swollen and congested with revellers, distant relatives and the homesick. My car is a piece of shit, so no heroic fantasies of powering down the motorway in time for a final hug from mum and a firm grasp of the shoulder from dad. Especially not since the dementia. The mum and dad that live in my mind's eye no longer even exist.

I can feel my throat swelling. It's probably psychosomatic, but then again, we weren't likely to document every side effect, were we?

There's Chloe. I still think about her every day, but not in a good way. Her memory is like a lingering taste of bile, edging its way up my throat, an unpleasant by-product of something once enjoyed, and now regretted. I'm probably still in love with her. It doesn’t matter.

I could phone someone, some friend, some distant family member, assuming I made my way back to the locker room. But how would that call go? "Hey, how are the kids that I don't care about? I regret the way our lives diverged and I wish we could go back to a decade ago. By the way, I'm dying. Hope to see you at the funeral."

As for the hospital... well, safe to say there's nothing the hospital can do. I am too good at my job.

Twenty-seven minutes.

This is before I factor in the rigmarole of cleanroom egress, the decontamination procedures, the man traps and safety locks. There are alarms to decommission, failsafes to override. I'm sure I could do it, but it would take time I don't have.

No. Twenty-seven minutes, and they will be spent here.

Five minutes I've been standing here, five minutes at least. Just thinking.

Twenty-two minutes then.

There is one possibility, I realise, and the longer I dwell on it, the more appealing it becomes. I work through the possibilities, mentally revisiting every procedural document I'd ever read, every seminar and safety drill, every TV show and pulp fiction novel and half-baked fantasy I'd ever had while working twelve hour shifts in the lab.

None of them offer any appealing outcome beyond... this.

And it's decided. In an instant. No real deliberation required. Almost pre-meditated, it seems, something my subconscious had been desperate to do all along. That's how decisions always work, a flash of intuition revealing the only possible course of action, and then a series of post hoc justifications designed to make it feel like every decision receives a fair hearing. It doesn't. There are no fair hearings to be found.

Nineteen minutes.

The alarm stops, turned off at some distant control panel. The door unlocks into the staging room. I ignore the decontamination shower and the disposal chute, and walk straight to the specimen cabinet to take out the one remaining vial. It contains a clear fluid, like drops of condensed water. Precious cargo now.

My hands are shaking, but it's not from anxiety, from nerves—those are long gone—but from the exposure, as the pathogen works its way into the myelin sheathes of the nerves scaffolding the hands. Always the hands first, progressing from the peripheral systems inwards.

I walk into the men's bathroom and kick the stall door open. It ricochets on the wall and comes clean off its hinges. It wasn't locked in the first place, but it felt good. I hesitate above the toilet bowl. I only have one chance at this. The deadline weighs heavy on me for a moment, just a moment, and I doubt myself. With good reason.

The water here is heavily treated, I realise, and these little fellas do not survive well in contact with the myriad filters, bleaches and ultraviolet treatments they'd need to navigate. It was a stupid impulse. I was swayed by the idea of death by toilet. Impulse is always to be resisted. Better to let cold, hard logic be my guide.

The air is a different matter, and frankly, always the weak link in a high-grade lab like this. HEPA filters are a big con. With a little extra consideration, the choice is obvious, especially given how I was exposed.

A dimming of lights. The locking mechanism on the centrifuge failing to fully engage. Aerosols generated by the rotation, imperceptible until the motor stops and you see the vial sitting askew, the viscous liquids already tracing a path over the rim of the tube.

Serious, but not existential, as long as you were wearing the full protective get-up. Which, of course, I wasn't. You run the same procedure over and over, you get comfortable with the risk, you relax. It shouldn't have been possible anyway. I could introspect and blame the failure on my complacency, but really, why the fuck was there a power cut in a level four lab?

Fourteen minutes.

Besides, it doesn't matter how it happened. Equipment failure, poor maintenance, simple oversight, deliberate sabotage, act of god, or good old-fashioned complacency, the outcome is the same. And I'm good enough at my job to know that there is no doubt here, no chance that I eked through without harm. Scientists rarely deal in certainty, so it pays to believe them when they do.

I'm sure the tribunal will apportion their share of blame, make me sound like a real drooling idiot. They always do. They’re charades, these tribunals, a way for an illegitimate industry to stay legal by routinely throwing the failures under the bus.

I return to the staging room. The door to the central aisle is locked. I walk to the store cupboard and rummage through a pile of tools until I find the flat-bladed screwdriver I know resides there. I force the flat edge through the door seal and jimmy it open. It is easier than it should be. It isn't the first time.

I walk to the control room. I drag the stool over to console and stand on it, wobbling.

I feel a low-grade cramp in my calf muscle, spreading, growing, the fibers succumbing to the lactic acid build-up one-by-one. I have a few minutes until they stop working.

I try to unscrew the vent cover but my hands are shaking too much. To hell with this. I punch the panel, over and over, until it's a concave mess that I can pull outwards and leave hanging from a single desperate screw. My hands are cut and bloodied, but I can barely feel them. I reach into the vent as far as arm will allow me. Further, my hand feeling for where the vent turns through ninety degrees and begins its snaking journey to the outside.

I withdraw, pull the vial from my pocket and reach back into the vent. I lean as far as I can, stretching my arm to its limit before crushing the delicate glass in my hand. I let the wet splinters fall into the vent's unseen darkness. My legs buckle and I fall heavily from the stool, thudding off the console and hitting the ground.

Twenty minutes elapsed, maybe? I could have timed it, could have been more precise. But my intuition feels good. The progression seems correct. This is not my first rodeo.

I pull myself up, slowly, painfully. My joints feel like they're seizing in place, my nerves feel aflame, a dozen vivid sensations that the calculating part of my brain dreams distantly of noting down and submitting to a journal. I slump onto the console. I log in with a palsied hand, relying on muscle memory more than sight. I work through the menus and sub-menus, ever deeper, until I find the systems responsible for ventilation and, more importantly, purging. I override half a dozen warnings. No hesitation. Hesitation is for amateurs. There is a roaring sound from somewhere distant and muffled, and it's done. I have vented the lab, fully, completely.

I scroll back through the menus until I find the weather interface. It wouldn't have changed my decision, but it's gratifying to see the strong northeast wind.

I am a lucky man. I vomit blood onto my hands. Four minutes.

Small red lights flicker on, one by one, in a row across the dashboard. The alarms are sounding now, the warning lights illuminating the room. The red feels almost festive. I watch the progress on the dashboard. It's just numbers on a screen, but in my mind's eye I can see the wind blowing across the fields and through the wooded bank that surrounds the lab, I can trace the billowing pathogen as its miasmic form spreads through the streets and housing estates, into the city. I trace the projection in front of my face with a shaking finger.

I try to breathe but I can't. Paralysis combined with pleural effusion, the most common cause of death. Right on schedule.

Twenty-seven minutes. Just enough time to take you all with me.