The fiery leaves of autumn blazed their brightest just before November, before the cinder silence of snowfall swallowed their vibrancy and exhaled frost across the barren trees and staunch evergreens outside the office. As the sterling silver of winter’s cloak settled upon the Midwest and the hearths call of the holiday depleted the halls of employees, I toiled anew. I dismissed the annual Christmas and New Years summons from my parents and extended family – I had only just gotten this contract settled and I could better afford to celebrate once things were underway. Besides, there was a grad-school nostalgia of working in the lab alone that administrative duties were already beginning to rob me of. I enjoyed the fume-hood hum of the buildings engines while I warmed my hands in the sink washing petri dishes. The dry crispness of desiccated air, marked with that acrid phenol hospital smell and the sweet lacquer of ethanol undertones. It was a familiar aroma I always found myself experiencing a little longer than intended and somehow never quite enough.


Florescent fantasies of experiments conceived by imagination and a checkbook out of wedlock found place in one of our conference calls, when I proposed the use of microfauna to explore a resolution to our issue. I had used them before in my graduate studies to positive effect and ZakuraTech had an internal supply available at discount. Trying to grow skin from scratch was expensive and the cell populations would die off in waves. Half of the ‘crop’ was aged and withered before we could even postulate harvest. But with microfauna? We could extract whole pelts and sort out the details of growth and death. The ‘copy / paste’ with flesh seemed to pique Hayes’ interest a bit, so I went with an angle of using them to simulate damage and healing from all manner of maladies. Did our treatment work with burn victims? Cauterize one with a hot plate. Industrial accident? Gunshot wounds? A hole punch or an automated stapler could serve as an adequate surrogate. The suggestion of sulfuric acid was enough to sell him on the prospect and the shipment of withering, eager specimens arrived by weeks end.


Though, to my disdain and disgust we suffered the same set back almost immediately. Mange. Filthy, vile gray spots of discolored fur – an itchy infestation that heaved its unseeming blight across hide and hair, defiling pelts and ruining the quality of our samples. The itchy attrition was the consequence of microscopic mites whose voracious, chitinous advance proceeded from cage to cage unheeded and unnoticed until it was too late. We had to act quickly by aggressive culling and sterilization to catch it. Euthanization was cheaper and more certain than an expensive regimen of Selamectin – which might have left some lingering strains ready for a second round. We scrubbed the cages with bleach, washed lab with peroxide and blasted everything in sight with UV lamps. Nothing was crawling away from that microcidal holocaust.


Batch two was inspected through and through; dilute lime and clean cages. And still festering patches of gray set our little associates scratching at unwelcome guests burrowing into their supple hides. I fumed and I fumigated and no number of tiny necks broken nor bodies disposed of abated the growth of those tepid splotches. As our calendar bled into the cusp of April, the lab techs were complaining to me that the stink of scorched flesh and the ash-breath of the incinerators rasping whispers were embedded in their clothing and soaked into their pelts. With the third batch on the way and my jaw sore from gnashing and barking at underlings; I decided to investigate the matter personally.


After all, the solution to a problem is often well at hand, if you know just where to look.

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A big change up in art style coming from  kclt
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Chapter 1 – Acquisitions

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