Invasive Procedures by Aaron Johnston

much now,” he said, “but you should have seen it before we got here. Awful. Just awful. Graffiti, trash. Really disgusting. We’ve come a long way. And we’re not normally this disorganized either. We wanted to have it all finished before you arrived, but we had an incident a few days ago, lost one of our labs, and we thought it safer to speed up the project. We stopped renovating out here and put all of the staff in the Core.”
    “Of course,” Monica said, as if this were all to be expected.
    In truth, she had no idea what he was talking about. But she didn’t want to let on. The man was clearly unstable. Angering him with unwanted questions would only worsen her situation.
    “Ah, here we are,” he said, parting the last sheet and approaching a pair of doors.
    He pulled one open and motioned her inside.
    It was a vast room with vaulted ceilings. Blue lights hung along the walls and bathed everything in a deep blue hue. There were at least twenty people in white paper lab suits, moving about, looking into microscopes, sitting at computer terminals, labeling test tubes. Some looked up and noticed them, but most went about their business without paying them any attention.
    Galen smiled wide. “Impressive, don’t you think?”
    Monica said what she thought he wanted to hear. “It’s amazing.”
    He gave a soft laugh. “You’re humoring me. Please, Doctor. You’re safe now. You can speak your mind with confidence. I brought you in because I respect your opinion. What do you think?”
    She looked around at the workers. “It’s very . . . clean,” she said finally.
    He laughed heartily this time. “You amuse me, Dr. Owens. I suppose I can’t expect you to know what we’re doing here just by giving you a peek.” He spread his arms wide. “This is the Core. It’s where we work our magic, so to speak.”
    He lifted a test tube off one of the shelves and read the label. “Gary Miner. Santa Clarita, California. Thirty-six years old. Huntington’s disease.”
    He handed it to her. She looked at the label. “What is it?”
    “That, Dr. Owens, is Gary Miner, a young man with Huntington’s disease.”
    Monica looked at the milky liquid inside the tube.
    “Don’t look so concerned, Dr. Owens. We didn’t melt Mr. Miner down. What you’re holding is a tissue culture, a sample of Mr. Miner’s DNA. From the date on the side here I see that we extracted it only a week ago.”
    He took the sample from her and placed it back on the shelf. “Our sequencers here will identify the composition of his DNA and locate thefaulty gene. Here, take a look.” He took her hand and led her to a large boxy computer where several men stood working. His hand lightly tapped the side of the computer. “It may not look like much, but these models pack quite a punch.”
    He pointed to a video monitor, where four letters raced repeatedly across the screen in random order.
A, C, G, T
.
    Monica understood what she was looking at. DNA was composed of four chemical components: adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine. Each of the letters on the screen corresponded to one of those components. The order of the letters as they appeared must be the order of the chemical components along a single strand of DNA.
    “I see the wheels inside that head of yours turning, Dr. Owens.”
    “You’re decoding someone’s DNA.”
    He smiled. “At lightning speed. We have to dye the tissue sample prior to loading it into the sequencer. Each of the four base molecules reacts differently to the dye and turns a separate color. That’s how the computer knows what it’s looking at. The software then recognizes the colors of the sequence and, voila. Fascinating, don’t you think?”
    Monica nodded obediently.
    Galen rubbed his chin and looked at the sequence thoughtfully. “Hm, let’s see. It looks like we’ve got a female here. Red hair. Tall. A little on the heavy side . . . Oh no. Oh dear me. Poor girl.” He looked at Monica with a frown.