Things don’t always go as planned.

You wake up early in the morning, a few hours before your 48 hours are up, and slide out of bed to use the restroom, and you happen upon Joy sleeping in a cot nearby.

She is a beautiful young girl, no doubting that. You got to the kitchen and find coffee brewing, and you see that Maria is already there with her laptop open.

“Good morning Maria, what is it, 5 AM?”

“Something like that John,” she replies, in a dejected tone. Your recently acquired sense of empathy is pinging here, something is more wrong than she is letting on.

You pour some coffee and add some hot cocoa to it and sit with your long time friend and colleague. “What’s wrong Maria?”

“We are almost out of time, I think we will lose control of this whole thing soon,” she replies. “Too soon.”

You give her an odd look, “lose control to whom?”

“John, you and Kira, your results made it to the CDC, and to the WHO,” she replies. “Our findings are on the desk of the President, and you know how he and his VP are on morality, I am worried they will shut us down, fire the staff, put Kira into therapy and you into prison.”

“I think our clock is ticking, we have to find out more information sooner rather than later,” Maria replies. “You and Kira will need to do the stage three testing starting today, as soon as you can. Only actionable results can change this.”

Well fuck, you could see the problem.

“I will talk to Kira, we will start first thing,” you reply. “Somehow I will get Kira on board.”

“Thank you John,” she replies. “By the way we were able to track your baseline over a twelve hour period, and we saw a noticeable difference. We can see brain activity not normally seen, and your sperm count is off of the charts, way off the charts. I am not sure Kira being on the pill will be enough to prevent pregnancy.”

That gives you pause. Why wouldn’t birth control work? You know how the pill works, it is very close to perfect in function.

“Also John, I am bringing in another girl who is has the disease and her father who is a registered donor,” Maria said. “If I can convince them to have sex, we could test against the close relation factor.”

You are impressed, Maria did some good work here. Now you had to get ready to talk Kira into taking a different partner this morning. That was not going to go over well.

“I know it isn’t good John, I know it will hurt, but we will have the CDC here tomorrow, maybe the next day,” she continued. “We have to have more to give them, or this ends.”