A sample left in the lab...

In Z's haste she left behind two microscope slides....

Diana arrived at GeneSci early every weekday, hours before her colleagues. She found the quiet easier to concentrate as she worked through the long list of Crispr-CAS gene splicing experiments. The project was searching for a human gene fix for a mutation present in some populations that led to higher chances for breast and prostate cancers.

Cleaning the microscope lens, she rested her hand on the table. Hearing a crunch, followed by a stabbing pain in her hand, she looked down at the pool of blood from her sliced thumb. In the red stained mess were four broken glass slides and petri dish cover she hadn't seen. The petri dish was labeled with a code denoting a splice of ruminant and human genes. The slides were unlabeled but looked clean. "They were probably blanks", Diana said to herself.

She knew the proper lab procedure was to report all biohazard exposures, but she had a long list of tests to run. Diana didn't want to spend the day talking to safety management and possibly lose her job over a dirty lab with safety protocol violation. Worst yet was the mandatory quarantine. Besides, she thought, the ruminant splice had not proven viable anyway. Destroying the evidence she sent the glass shards to the incinerator and bleached the counter.

Her Monday seemed to go faster than normal, but her ribcage and crotch itched with fierce intensity, reminding her of the poison ivy she caught last year hiking. Under her skin the morphing genetic brew of the lab gene splice and Sunny and Z's virus strain were overtaxing her defensive cells, changing chromosomes as the next generation of the virus fed.