Well that stinks. Sometimes Reddit will kill a particular /r/writingprompt for, reasons. I found out that one of my flash fiction stories – Project Guillotine – ended up in the virtual trash can. So, I present it here for your amusement – I might develop this into a short later on:
Project Guillotine
“Well, that’s it Pyotr.” I sat on a rusted lab stool next to his workbench. “Word has come down, the funding’s stopped. Just enough left in the budget to give everyone a ‘severance bonus.’ Three hundred American dollars. What a joke.”
“Enough to buy a bottle of whiskey and a rope to hang yourself.” Pyotr smiled at me, exhausted. “Convenient.”
“I’m glad you appreciate the gravity of the situation.” Good old Pyotr – I came to appreciate His Eastern European gallows humor. It gave him the strength to pull all-nighters in the lab on biotech projects that would never see the light of day. It let Pyotr grin in the face of impossible odds. Years of toil, hope, dreams – for nothing!
“Tell everyone to save their money. We’ve got one last card to play.” Pyotr clicked a mouse button, bringing up a lab report to display on the lab wallscreen. He stared in triumph at the graphs and tables, things I could never understand as a lab administrator, then looked at me. “What are you waiting for? Go, go!”
“Gather the lab employees? They’re cleaning out their desks. It’s over, sir.”
“Not yet. Tell them to stop. We’re not going anywhere.”
“Pyotr, they’re figuring out how to feed their families. Now is not the time for another silly lab argument.”
My lab director slapped the stained black surface of his workbench, a sign of his annoyance. “This is no lab argument. Do as I say … Go!”
The other scientists, my lab rats, straggled into the room with glum faces and downcast eyes. “What’s this all about?” Cheryl asked. “I have to update my resume.”
“You’ll do nothing of the kind,” Pyotr replied. “Everyone here? Good, let’s begin.”
He clicked another button and the holoprojector sprang to life. “I’m pleased to report that we achieved a breakthrough on Project Mercury. My last calculations report success, we’ve overcome the Aptamer-functionalized agents problem. Now we can truly deliver treatment to the right cell and the right person, as promised.”
“So what?” Miguel sniffed. “Our budget comes from the university and the university said ‘no more work, period.’ They don’t care what we do.”
“Ah, but they will care.” Pyotr grinned back. “They’ll have to. We’ll make them care.”
“How and why?”
“Before we go any further,” the lab director raised his voice, addressing everyone in the room, “I need to know something. How far are you prepared to go for a guaranteed bonus of ten billion dollars?”
My jaw dropped. Ten billion? Actual dollars? Pyotr’s lost his mind, I thought. We don’t have that kind of money! I opened my mouth to tell everyone about our budget troubles, but Cheryl spoke first: “A very long way. All the way.”
Miguel nodded, adding: “If you’ve got something that takes care of us, now’s the time to hear it.”
“Excellent.” Pyotr showed us a 3D model of the Mercury agent. “One hundred years ago, Dr. Paul Ehrlich said we could cure cancer with a ‘magic bullet.’ It would only kill the specific tumor cells it targeted. We set out with Project Mercury to create a uniform targeted therapy, something that would specifically target molecular defects responsible for a patient’s condition. This has been our goal and the goal of many other scientists in the journey toward treating human disease.”
“We know all that,” I said. “So what?”
“But as we used to say in the military,” Pytor continued, like I hadn’t said anything, “‘If the enemy is in range, so are you.’ A magic bullet for curing disease can also create disease. All it takes is a few different numbers in the wrong places.”
“That’s insane,” Cheryl said. “That’s biowarfare. You’re literally talking about using Project Mercury as a bioweapon. We aren’t chartered for military or defense applications. That’s over the line for me.”
“They’re using money as a bioweapon on us!” Miguel answered. “What else are we supposed to do? The enemy is at the gate!”
“I refuse to be a part of this,” Cheryl crossed her arms. “No way am I going down in history as ‘Unit 731 – the Next Generation.'”
“Your objections are noted,” Pytor smiled. “But remember that we’re not targeting mass populations. In fact, I’m saying Project Mercury should only be focused on a select few. We should be taking the fight back to the only people with the power to make things right again.”
“Who?”
“You know who they are,” the lab director said. “We’ve been talking about them for years. The super-rich? They have absolute control now. That’s why they pulled our funding, nobody cares about our research on rare diseases and treatments. ‘Let the poors die, we’re doing just fine.’ In the olden days, when other ultra-rich refused to make changes to wealth inequality, life had a way of balancing things out.”
Pytor clicked a button and displayed a new graph, pictures of the top thousand-richest people on the planet. “I call it: Project Guillotine.”
That’s the story for now. Love it? Want to hear more? Tell me on Reddit. The new Weekly Interactive Top Ten is up, and I’m off to continue working on Cinderellavator. Write on!
