Dust curled through the flashlight beam like smoke. He sat on an overturned crate near the center of the lab, the journal balanced across his knees. The hum of the building had grown louder - steady, electrical,almost alive. He told himself it was power bleeding from some forgotten line. He opened the book again.
[Excerpt - Doctor's Journal - 12 May 2032 - Vector Overview]
I spent most of the day with the HRV-13 documentation. Rabies was chosen for its tropism - the way it travels directly along nerves.We modified its surface glycoproteins to carry synthetic regulators capable of forcing quiescent cells back into the cell cycle. No genome editing. It simply talks to the cell until the cell remembers what to do. Theoretically,HRV-13 can awaken dormant tissue: nerves, muscle, even glia.Potential: repair spinal injury, reverse atrophy, maybe restore cognition. We added an internal timer - a protein feedback loop meant to shut replication down once repair markers normalize. Self-limiting.Elegant.I prefer hopeful.
He glanced up; the emergency lights along the ceiling flickered, just once. A monitor glowed for a heartbeat, then died. He went back to reading.
[Excerpt - Doctor's Journal - 13 May 2032 - Pre-Clinical Notes]
Containment revised again. Class-3 suits, full respirator seal, negativepressure chambers for any exposure beyond serum. The viral substrate is stable at -80 C. Under microscope, HRV-13 particles fluoresce
faintly blue when bound to neural tissue. I watched them climb an axon today, slow and deliberate, following the electrical gradient. For a moment I forgot to breathe. Carver would remind me: beauty is not the same as
goodness.
A soft thud echoed somewhere above the ceiling tiles. He told himself not to imagine footsteps.
[Excerpt - Doctor's Journal - 14 May 2032 - Ethical Brief]
Administration insists all test subjects remain non-sentient until secondary review. I signed. The models are too promising to wait.Tonight
I will calibrate the incubators and prepare the nutrient media.Tomorrow we begin life again in miniature.
He turned a new page. A faint fingerprint smudged the margin.
[Excerpt - Doctor's Journal - 15 May 2032 - Personal Addendum]
I dreamed of my son. He was sitting at the kitchen table, drawing a sun with too many rays. When he looked up, his pupils glowed the same blue I see under the microscope. I woke with my hands clenched around nothing.Work begins in the morning. If this vector does what the data promise,maybe I will sleep again. Hope does not feel like a title. It feels like a dare.
He closed the book. The hum overhead deepened, then faded. There were more pages, and somewhere below them, more truths. He tightened the straps on his pack and followed the glow of his flashlight into the dark.