Bunch of Amateurs by Jack Hitt

Author:Jack Hitt [Hitt, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-95518-0
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2012-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

VII. Marlboro Time

Around midnight in San Francisco, Patterson and I are on the floor with our fortieth or fiftieth attempt at configuring the 2500-volt transformer so that we can Taser the lactobacillus, get the glow gene in there, and proceed to make Glo-gurt with it. Even here, in this most isolated lab, the group is all around us. Patterson regularly consults old e-mails for advice, downloads one more schematic from another site, consults with a wiki or two. Late in the evening, she calls “Brian,” who’s a whiz at electrical issues, and they confer for forty-five minutes.

“So, Brian’s advice was to turn these around”—she points at two connectors with wires—“and put the load between the power supply and the collector.” So we make our adjustments and continue to find problems with the connections. Work like this is mostly just the tedium of getting things right or attempting to, and for long stretches, the only sound is Patterson cheerfully muttering to herself:

“Something lights up, well, hello.”

“That’s a 15k resister. Again, didn’t work.”

“I’m wondering if I’ve misunderstood which pin is which. If I did, that would be stupid.”

“Things that do not make sense include … what the fuck, yo?”

“Where the hell are you coming from?”

“What the damn hell?”

“Unplug!” she calls out to me, and then stares at the schematic for twenty minutes.

“I would be astonished if they had the wrong drawing.”

“Fuck, this shit doesn’t even say.”

“Plug us in.”

“Again, we’re not getting dick.”

“That’s heating up. Unplug that!”

“So we’re definitely not going to try that.”

We both stare at the tiny board one more time.

“We want red to go here and black to go here, and somebody needs to touch this wire to the base. So if you want to just hold these, I can plug it in. First, make sure you are not touching the lead. Good.”

A viscous snapping sound shatters the concentrated silence of the room. Some lights go out, throughout the building. Patterson pulls the plug.

“I think we killed it.” A hideous yet familiar metallic smell fills the air. “Time for a cigarette break,” she says.

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