That same day, Gabriel's father Robert was facing a crossroads of his own.
As Robert arrived at the lab, he saw a few of his employees loading their cars with belongings. He quickly got out of his car.
"What's going on, guys? Where are you going?" Robert asked in a confused tone.
"We're leaving," said one of the scientists.
"Leaving? Why? You… You can't! We're close to making the breakthrough we've been working so hard for! If you leave now, all our years of work would go to waste," said Robert, but his pleas seemed to fall on deaf ears.
"Robert, that may be true, but we have mouths to feed and bills to pay. We haven't been paid in three months. You, at least still have your job with the university, we don't. And we have job offers that will pay us," said the other scientist.
"Just give me a little time. You'll get paid soon, I promise."
"Soon isn't soon enough, Robert. Too many promises have been made, and none of them followed through. I'm sorry, Robert. We're out."
As they packed up their final few things and were about to get in the car, Robert shouted, "Wait!"
The two scientists stopped.
"If I can get both of you your full pay by the end of the week, would that keep you here?" said Robert.
"And we'd continue to be paid on time like regular employees?" asked one.
"Yeah, of course," said Robert.
"Then we'll stay," said the scientist, while the other nodded in agreement. Robert breathed a sigh of relief as they stopped loading their cars and returned to the lab.
However, as Robert made his way to his office, he sat at his desk, opened the drawer, took out a bottle of alcohol and a glass, and began to pour. He was stressed. He knew he had no way to pay his team. But he needed them. Without them, it was over. Everything he had worked so hard to achieve would come to an abrupt end.
As he brought the glass to his lips, he remembered the moment when he got Derrick's card. He immediately put the glass down.
Twiddling a pen in his fingers, Robert was torn. He didn't want to call Derrick, but it was looking like he had no other option. Either call Derrick and take his offer... or lose everything. He hoped there was a third option.
Dr. Robert James sat alone in his lab, elbows on the cluttered desk, his forehead pressed into the heel of his palms. The fluorescent lights above buzzed faintly, casting a pale glow over the room filled with idle machines and half-dismantled prototypes. The faint hum of a refrigeration unit was the only sound beside the ticking of the old analog clock on the wall. He took a glance at it.
1:43 p.m. He had been lost in thought for hours and he hadn't eaten since breakfast.
Papers were spread across the desk in a haphazard way. Some of them were dotted with calculations, some were failed grant applications, and others were half-written letters of appeal. At the center of it all sat the notice from the university:
"Final Warning: Lab Closure Imminent Due to Non-Compliance with Funding Quotas."
He tried his best to appeal that one. The award he had won last year should have given him enough clout to keep his lab funded for at least three years, but for some reason, it hadn't. He couldn't stop himself from feeling bitter about it. This year, university funding went to Dr Wentworth and his theoretical nonsense. They would rather fund a theoretical physicist than someone who was working on a physical result? It felt almost targeted at him.
Robert had always known research was a battlefield, but he never imagined he would be cornered like this.
He had spent the last five years developing something that was would do such good to humanity that sometimes he could hardly believe it. He'd tested it, and he knew it could work. There was just a minor problem of the foreign DNA replication and integration into the human body without destroying it. The data was sound. His staff believed in it. He believed in it.
But no one else seemed to.
He picked up his phone again, scrolling through his contact list like a man searching for a lifeline while stranded at sea. The earlier calls replayed in his mind, each one was more disappointing than the last.
"Too theoretical," said the private investor from the tech consortium. That was fair, to be honest, he made that call as a hail mary.
"Come back when you have something to commercialize," said the venture capitalist in San Diego. That call made him feel particularly disgusted, like his work had been reduced to numbers on a checkbook and had somehow fallen short of expectations.
"Interesting… any military applications?" asked the firm in D.C. When Robert said no, the line had gone cold almost instantly. Being rejected by Bio-deon Tech when a year ago, they were all over his work, was disheartening.
It wasn't new to him, he'd spent the last six months calling every name in his contact list. University donors. Research philanthropists. Angel investors. Climate tech firms. Most barely listened. Some promised to "circle back." A few had the gall to ask more than once if the work could be weaponized.
"Could it be used to overheat machines remotely? Destroy infrastructure from the inside out?" one had asked. Another person had asked about the possibility of creating super soldiers. That had made him laugh at least, as he wondered if they thought he was a scientist in a comic.
Robert had said no. Unequivocally.
And that had been the end of the conversation.
Now, the desperation was gnawing at his resolve.
It always came down to one of two things: profit or power. And his research promised neither in the short term. Just slow, deliberate progress. Just the potential to change how the human body healed, how previously debilitating injuries could be healed, or how medics could stabilize trauma patients in disaster zones. The kind of change that took time, patience, and imagination.
None of which the funding world seemed to have.
The phone slipped from his fingers onto the desk. He leaned back in his chair, staring at the ceiling, counting the spiderwebcracks that had formed in the plaster near the fluorescent tube. He remembered the day they'd first installed that light. At that time years ago, the lab was new, full of promise. That was when the university had granted him space and a small team. Before everything became about numbers and money.
Robert rubbed his temples. There was one contact left. One number he hadn't called in so long that he even lost it at one point. The name alone made his skin crawl.
He turned toward the bottom drawer of his desk, the one he hadn't opened in a year. That drawer was supposed to be that number's personal prison. He had no idea why he hadn't thrown it away months ago, but with a quiet sigh, he slid it open and pulled out a small, crumpled scrap of paper. The handwriting was nearly illegible, scrawled in ballpoint ink from a life he had buried long ago.
DERRICK
Derrick was no investor. He didn't own biotech companies or attend fundraising galas. Derrick was a man who made things happen, for a price. When he knew Derrick all those years ago, he was just getting started in the criminal world. However, even then, he stood out for how ruthless and ambitious he was. He was a facilitator and thug-for-hire who had graduated from car theft, selling drugs and debt collection to full-time service under someone whose name Robert had never even heard. Even when he was in that life, Robert had never been high up enough on the food chain to know the boss' name. He did not need to. Undoubtedly, knowing the boss' name would be a leg up but it would have also meant danger.
Back in their teenage years, Robert had hung out with Derrick. Theirs was a friendship of necessity. They had to band together to defeat bullies and gang members. They grew up in the same neighborhood and were once so close that his parents knew Derrick and the same was true the other way around. Long enough to know what the world looked like from the gutter.
They had both grown up in a neighborhood where cops came late, and ambition was more dangerous than poverty. Robert had escaped because he had parents who supported him and he found a way out through textbooks and scholarships. What made him sad was that Derrick was just as smart as he was. However, in a cruel twist of fate, Derrick's parents were too busy to support him. So instead, he had stayed and learned how to leverage fear and climb up the ranks.
This didn't mean he felt bad for him. Derrick was smart enough that he could have made a decent living even without an advanced degree. They still stayed in touch until he realized that Derrick didn't want to just make a decent living, he wanted to be filthy rich. After he fought with him about how he was contributing to the situation by recruiting little kids, he cut ties with him. Until the last time they met, they hadn't spoken in over eight years.
But Derrick had made a joke the last time they met, a year ago, at the function: "If the whole science thing doesn't pan out, you know where to find me."
Robert had laughed then. It didn't feel funny now. He had run so far away only to find himself right back where he started.
He imagined what the call would sound like. The rasp in Derrick's voice, always just short of a threat. The way he'd draw out his words like he was already thinking three moves ahead. Which he probably was.
"Robert James. I knew you would come running back. Damn. Thought you forgot about us little people."
"So. What are you building? Something hot? Something I can sell to someone with fewer questions?"
Robert's skin crawled. He knew what this meant.
Even though earlier he had made it sound like he would stay out the lab, Derrick and his boss wouldn't give money out of the goodness of his heart. He'd want ownership. Leverage. A cut of everything. Or worse, he'd use Robert's invention for something darker. Smuggling. Torture. Military contracts on the black market. Robert could protest, but Derrick would smile that lazy smile and say something like:
"That's not your problem anymore, Doc. You just make the miracle. I decide how we use it."
And once he was in, there would be no getting him out.
Robert stood abruptly, walking to the lab's center where the prototype sat like a sacred object. It was surrounded by a small glass cage. Although it wasn't visible, there was an array of lasers trained on it to prevent anyone from running off with it. The prototype was still a tangle of coiled tubing and thermal sensors. However, he could already had plans to make it into something smaller, something liquid. He could see the promise it offered. He toyed with the idea of giving up as he ran his fingers along the top of the glass box.
The soft hum of the lights above continued to butt into his thoughts. He couldn't beat the idea of letting the project die. It was his idea, practically his baby. He had given too much to it to turn back now.
If he didn't find money, the project would die. That was the hard truth.
But if he brought Derrick into it...
He imagined Derrick's crew in this very lab. Smoking cigarettes while they looked over his equipment. Gutting his research for profit. His team might leave. His credibility would probably vanish, lost in the consequences of his bad decision. He wondered briefly if it would be better to return to Bio-deonTech. The university might turn a blind eye to Derrick's presence if the money flowed, but eventually someone would ask questions. And when things went south, because with Derrick they probably would, Robert wouldn't be a victim. He'd be an accomplice.
He sat back down, heart pounding. He thought about it carefully, but it seemed to him that there was only one decision he could make.
"God help me," he said once he made his choice.