Chapter Text
Membrane Labs was only ever quiet in the early morning hours.
It was long after the night shift and the cleaning crew had left. Lights had been dimmed low, doors had been locked tight, and instruments of glass and metal had been carefully sanitized and ordered in neat lines. The sterile white halls echoed only with the soft beeps of experiment monitors left on overnight to take readings. A creature of unknown species chittered quietly in its sleep and fell silent once more. Flowers with petals constantly shifting in color curled closed for the night. A few floors up, a telescope rotated degree by degree, monitoring the course of the TRAPPIST-1 system.
Then. Footsteps.
From the deepest parts of the building came the rhythmic steps of feet rapidly climbing a staircase, tearing down halls, taking corners way too fast. A janitor’s cart left behind in the rush to go home was sent skittering. There was a harsh, indistinct whisper, and the cart was unceremoniously shoved back up against the wall. No microphone picked up the noise. Door cameras recorded nothing but empty air, yet motion sensors triggered them open anyway. Lights sputtered and died, and monitors went snowy with static in the footsteps’ wake.
They halted at an intersection in the main labs. For a moment, the electronics stabilized. Whispers filled the air, voices too alike to properly tell apart.
(– so tonight? for sure tonight? –)
(– tonight –)
(– for sure –)
(– lady will be late –)
(– new guy comes in early –)
(– always early –)
(– professor went home –)
(– for once –)
(– so plan is –)
(– on watch –)
(– on electricity –)
(– on phones –)
(– but what happens if –)
(– it’ll work –)
(– but what if he wakes up and –)
(– when he wakes up –)
(– what if they just send him back to sleep? –)
(– … –)
(– and he ends up just like us –)
The lights flared. Monitor screens tore into static once more, and microphones screamed with feedback.
(– they can TRY.)
~
It was the third floor of the labs that lost power.
It started with the smallest electronics. LEDs and overhead lights went dark room by room. Computers running overnight programs followed. A prototype cooking robot plugged in to charge had its batteries drained empty. Freezers. Incubators. Ovens. Fume hoods. Autoclaves. One extremely expensive electron microscope. All were completely dead in under a half hour.
The air tasted like ozone, like the split second before lightning struck. At the floor’s main intersection, tiny little bolts of energy flared out only to curl back in on themselves. A million dancing sparks of light. Collected all together, the shape they made almost seemed human.
What might’ve been arms spread wide, and the figure fell backwards.
Down through the building, the sparks fell, like lightning striking in slow motion. Through the second floor, demagnetizing a pair of NMR machines. Through the first, narrowly missing an explosives cabinet. Past the first basement sublevel. The second.
On the third sublevel, in a room tucked away from prying eyes, surrounded by abandoned laboratories, arcs of electricity forming what could’ve been a hand reached out for their target.
(– rise and shine –)
It was unlikely that that much power would be needed since neurons worked in tiny little millivolts. However, neuroblockers had to be broken through, and the energy required for that was known only to one person employed at the labs. Better to be safe than sorry. And if being safe meant royally screwing up an entire floor’s worth of equipment and data, oh well.
~
On the ground floor, the half of the electrical system not sucked dry was sabotaged.
The main targets were the various phone lines that started in the junction box at the rear of the building and ran throughout the lab. While the majority of the labs’ employees had company-issued cellphones, the new guy’s had met with a terrible end in the second floor’s garbage disposal two days ago. And if there weren’t any land lines working on top of that, it would take ages before any… ‘incidents’ could be reported.
The strange occurrences at Membrane Labs did not go unnoticed, naturally. Constantly overloading lightbulbs. Computers randomly crashing and erasing hours of work. Cold spots scattered across the tropical temperature greenhouses. Everything that ever happened in the labs was recorded, normal or abnormal. But the people who worked here were employees of Membrane Labs for a reason, and even extraordinary events had to have normal scientific explanations and solutions. The wiring was faulty, so rewire it. The ventilation system was blocked, so clean it out. Computer issues? That was the problem of the eternally suffering IT department.
Tonight would really be pushing it, though.
So wires did not get sliced cleanly through. They were frayed apart, bit by bit, as if a rodent infestation had swept through with extreme telephone-inspired prejudice. It was annoying, really, how much effort even that took. An unfortunate side-effect of landlines being powered from outside sources. Anything from beyond the main doors of the building took entirely too much concentration to mess with. Even water pipes were difficult to affect in any meaningful way. The plumbing was probably the one system in the entire lab that didn’t have a specifically assigned maintenance team.
But now for the final piece of a misleading puzzle. Dozens of caged white mice lined the walls of the pharmacology lab, awaiting tests for antihypertensives or anticoagulants or a myriad of other possibilities. Such a shame the cages were electronically locked on a night when the electricity was just so unstable.
A sea of white fur streamed out the lab door, hurrying to gain distance between them and the cold spot hovering by their cages. It probably wasn’t really necessary to jump through all these hoops for the sake of providing reasonable explanations for anyone who went looking. But. People acted unpredictably when their beliefs got challenged. Better to be safe than sorry. And if being safe meant a bunch of innocent rats got an exterminator called on them, oh well.
~
Security Office One on basement sublevel one was a mess of snowy screens.
The third floor monitors had gone entirely black, and the first floor kept cutting in and out. The lab computer system kept determinedly sending out alerts for damages across the building, but they were dismissed as soon as they popped up. The schedule coordinator for the security officers was going to regret thinking the labs’ defenses were enough to protect the lab at night. Those were meant to keep people out, after all. They didn’t do much against people already in the building. Or against things that were never people to begin with.
A swivel chair spun around twenty times clockwise, then another twenty counterclockwise, the picture of boredom.
“Mice cages in lab A113 have lost power,” the computer stated, the barest hint of irritation leaking through. This warning followed all the others into nonexistence.
Twenty spins clockwise. Twenty counterclockwise.
Tonight was the night. Incidences around the labs had been kept to a minimum for the past year and a half. Hopefully that would be enough to manipulate the living for the final phase.
Twenty spins clockwise. Twenty counterclockwise.
There were so many places where this plan could go wrong. Someone with a working phone could come in early, and if the project head or Membrane got called in…
“All phone lines have been discon-“ Dismissed.
The electricity gathered might not be enough. Or it might be too much. It could be frying every neuron it touched.
Twenty spins clockwise. Twenty counterclockwise.
They had to leave proof. Not of the real truth of course. No one would believe that. They had to leave evidence for a rational explanation. Because if the word ‘ghost’ got brought up at all, it could all be dismissed as one big prank. A very expensive prank, to be sure, what with the amount of damages to the first and third floors. But a prank nonetheless.
One spin.
‘Oh dear, someone’s set all the mice free! What a nuisance!’
One spin.
‘Ugh, the guy broke like everything on the third floor! What a menace!’
One spin.
‘Wow, someone faked neuronal activity on some poor brain-dead creature! That’s so messed up! Just put it out of its misery already!’
The chair was sent crashing to the floor. Every screen in the room flared a brilliant white.
“S-s-s-security office number-number-ber one experiencing power surge-ge – experiencing – surge –”
A pause.
And the monitors dimmed back into snow. The warning was dismissed.
Technically, it would be fake. But just at first. Just until everything forced into dormancy woke up again. As far as anyone would know, a combination of electrical problems and an incompetent researcher would be the source of the whole mess. The plan needed someone that could be poked and prodded into line. Into doing things outside of their reach. And while the initial parts of the plan didn’t technically need a living person present, it was better to have someone there in case they seriously screwed up.
Better to be safe than sorry.
Through the static sprinkled across the parking lot cameras, a single car was seen rolling through.
(– he’s here –)
And if being safe meant some poor schmuck had to take the fall, oh well.
~
The sudden silence of the labs was broken by Research Assistant Cuddy failing to get the main doors open. Through the frosted glass, a figure was seen fumbling with his wallet, his employee ID card, and his keys, only to end up dropping them all. The lab computer – either recognizing a Membrane Labs’ employee or possibly taking pity on the clumsy man if those researchers working on the AI sentience project had gotten their hands on it again – slid the doors open.
“Oh.” Cuddy sent a sheepish smile to the nearest camera. “Thank you!”
“Welcome to Membrane Labs,” came the automatic response, somehow sounding stressed.
Mentally cursing the AI people – because if this one started spouting the whole ‘destroy all humans’ rhetoric like the last one had, there would be hell to pay, and Accounting did not mess around – the researcher scurried off deep into the labs. He was technically two hours earlier than the ‘normal’ time most of the other flex shift employees showed up, but the nature of most of their experiments gave them a bit of leeway when it came to actual hours worked.
“Ya gotta let the simulations run before actually doing anything sometimes,” a fellow flex shift worker – Griffin, whose shifts ranged from two hours to twenty-two – had told Cuddy when the assistant had first started his job at the labs. “Can’t just go splitting atoms apart without a plan. Or splicing eight different DNA strands together. Or whatever they’ll have you do for these hush-hush projects the Professor’s thought up.” The man had grinned, leaning up against a door labeled ‘PEG.’ “We’re trying not to destroy all life as we know it, ya know?”
A door with a kaleidoscope of caution signs slid open, allowing Cuddy into the hallway of labs designated for the ‘hush-hush’ experiments. He was (mostly) sure that the majority of the projects here weren’t all potential world-enders. At least half seemed to be projects the Professor wasn’t ready or willing to show the public just yet. The most recent example: the hover car.
“They will get flying cars when they learn to stop throwing trash out of their windows!” the Professor had declared, like a parent punishing a privileged child due to misbehavior. Last month a dozen members of the morning shift ended up being late due to a fire breaking out on a highway median, no doubt due to a tossed cigarette.
Cuddy turned a corner into Biologics. He kept his eyes fixed straight ahead. A large window spanning the right side of the hallway displayed a small plot of rice. The crops seemed to turn and watch as he speed walked past. ‘Show no fear,’ as their handler had said, her hair a mess and arms bitten from wrist to shoulder.
No, not all the projects here were world-enders, but many of them were very, very unsettling.
Take his own project, for instance.
(– not done yet? –)
(– no, shut up –)
The sensation of being watched didn’t lessen as he opened an unremarkable door leading to a stairwell. The back of his neck prickled as Cuddy descended, but this area of the labs had always been chilly. One of the many quirks of a building that was well over a century old.
Something skittered in one of the air vents. Cuddy sped up.
The labs the stairway ended at were some of the oldest in the building. A majority had been put out of use, no longer able to match the Professor’s lab regulation standards. One of the doors looked like it had been blown off its hinges and then welded shut. Another sealed door constantly emitted the scent of formaldehyde. The hall lights were always on the fritz, and the thermostat refused to respond no matter how hard it got smacked, but at least one of the rooms here was still in use.
The door at the end of the hall was simply labeled ‘PMC’ with a handful of biological warnings. Cuddy pressed his hand to the scanner and winced as his ring finger was stabbed by a needle.
“Fingerprints confirmed. DNA confirmed. Access granted to Assistant Cuddy.”
The bleeding stopped almost immediately, and Cuddy shook the stinging hand, barely remembering to keep it out of his mouth. One never knew when the microbiologists had another ‘jailbreak.’ Those two hundred hours of online lab safety modules were good for at least one thing, though he was pretty sure he was the only one who ever paid attention to them.
Sparks fizzled to nothing just as the door opened.
(– blockers are dead –)
(– still no movement –)
(– I’m GETTING TO THAT –)
Lights and monitors flickered on automatically. This room, at least, had relatively stable wiring. The researcher sorted through the displayed information half on autopilot. Temperature. Heart rate. Respiratory rate. Blood pressure. Blood oxygen levels. Blood glucose levels. Sodium. Potassium. Chloride. Calcium. Magnesium. All within normal limits. Height at 68.6cm. Weight at 7.06kg. Cuddy absently pulled up the growth projections. The sixth month should have put height at 70cm flat. Weight was just slightly behind the predicted 7.15kg value.
The assistant flagged the results and left a recommendation to up calorie intake slightly. The final decision would be up to the project head, Dr. Clay, when she arrived later in the night – or rather the morning – with the rest of flex shift. His job for now was just to monitor and perform routine maintenance.
With a few keystrokes, Cuddy started the booting process for the Functional Electrical Stimulation program. The battle against muscle atrophy was a long and unending one, but the FES at least ensured that the muscles wouldn’t just be rubber bands attached to bone in nineteen and a half years.
He took a deep breath. Released it slowly. Now for the unsettling part.
The tube at the center of the lab stretched from the floor to the ceiling and had a diameter that would leave even a grown man with decent elbow room. The fluid inside was tinted slightly blue, and the lights reflected the color all across the lab. Tubes and wires tangled around the base in an organized chaos, feeding in proteins, fats, carbs, vitamins, minerals, and relaying back vital signs and blood levels. The sheer number of them made the small figure suspended in the tube appear so much smaller.
It was not a six-month-old baby.
Cuddy kept repeating that to himself as he counted electrodes and eyed a muscle chart to double-check they had been placed correctly. It was six months old, sure. And it’s DNA and appearance was that of a human’s, sure. But to call it a baby would be like calling it a person.
And it.
Was not.
A person.
It couldn’t be. A person would have brain activity beyond basic homeostasis functions. If Cuddy went looking, he could find a monitor in here somewhere displaying the total lack of higher brain activity. The figure – with tiny hands and feet tucked in close to its chest and the beginnings of dark, wispy hair growing on its head and a peaceful expression that made it look like it was simply asleep – was just an arrangement of flesh and fat and viscera and bones.
No, Membrane Clone #004 was not a person. It was just an empty shell that had a lot a growing to do before it became useful.
(– almost –)
Cuddy couldn’t help but eye a tube that had been shuffled off into a corner of the lab. The #003 along the bottom was starting to peel, and after roughly a year and a half of being out of use, dust had collected in all the delicate wires and sensors. The design was less streamlined than #004, all sharp edges and wasted space. Cuddy supposed the Professor got better at this every time. The assistant gnawed at the inside of his cheek as he turned back to finish checking electrodes.
He nearly bit through it when his eyes met gold.
(– got him –)
Cuddy was not proud of how high he jumped when he saw the clone’s eyes were open. Stimulation of the muscles might have been the whole reason he was doing this, but that didn’t make it any less startling. He pressed the heels of his palms against his forehead and did his best to remember how breathing worked.
But he was an employee of Membrane Labs for a reason, and curiosity was a trait all who worked here shared. The last time Dr. Clay had checked, the clone’s eyes had been blue.
He turned back to the little clone, wary of anymore movement, but couldn’t help but lean in close. It was the Professor’s clone, after all, so those goggles had been hiding gold eyes all along. The clone simply stared, eyes unfocused and expression blank. Cuddy pressed a hand to the glass, squinting. He had known that melanin production led to the darkening of eyes in infants, obviously, but brown was the most common eye color amongst the Hispanic population. He supposed exposure to UV light could potentially darken the color further…
(– go on then –)
Tiny fingers twitched. Once.
Though amber would be the actual classification…
(– you can do this –)
Twice.
He would make a note of this, and Dr. Clay could check the medical files of the first three clones to see how closely this one matched up. Cuddy nodded to himself, curiosity satisfied and game plan adjusted.
(– show them all you’re alive –)
One little hand stretched out for him.
The researcher toppled backwards with a yelp. He clipped a desk hard and brought a stool, keyboard, and monitor crashing down right onto his stomach. It was a pathetic struggle against the tangle of wires before the initial panic faded, he stopped wheezing, and rational thought reasserted itself.
“What the FUCK!” he yelled, sitting up with one accusing finger pointed at the clone. “I don’t care if it’s involuntary! Don’t scare me like that!” Heedless of the nervous wreck of a man, it merely stretched its arm out further, fingers not quite closing properly. Golden eyes fluttered shut, and its other hand curled around its breathing mask.
(– wait –)
(– don’t do THAT –)
(– oh shit –)
That had Cuddy scrambling to his feet. The FES program occasionally led to wires being dislodged due to jerky movements, but ripping off the breathing mask would be a less than ideal outcome. He refused to screw up that badly on what was supposed to be routine maintenance.
Urgency made him blind, apparently, because he spun on the spot three times before he found the right workstation. This keyboard, at least, wasn’t twisted into a tangle on the floor. His fingers slipped while trying to type commands to halt all electrical signals. He got it second try, but the monitor spat out an error message.
‘Program already inactive.’
“It’s WHAT?!” Cuddy shrieked. He flung an arm out at the twitching clone. “How the hell is that inactive?! I booted you up correctly and all the electrodes are in place and I activated – !”
He froze, ice in his veins and a horrible sensation clawing up his throat.
He…
He never…
He never activated the program.
Words had to be forced out, but this needed to be said out loud. This had to sink into his dumb head. It had to be real.
“It’s voluntary,” he croaked out, “it’s voluntary movement.” A monitor screamed in his ear as the clone – the baby – managed to detach its BP cuff. His BP cuff. Because it was a boy. A six month old baby boy.
(– make him stop! –)
(– can’t, discharged everything –)
(– WHY?! –)
(– because electricity HURTS to HOLD, you ASS –)
But he was an employee of Membrane Labs for a reason, and evidence, proof, verification, confirmation, all were necessary before hypotheses could be accepted. If he was going to ruin a project that had been decades in the making, he had to be sure.
Perhaps it was the ice spreading through his veins and up his spine that had his hands shaking as Cuddy tore across the lab looking for the right monitor. Another station let out an alarm from a disconnected line –
(– over here –)
– and from the corner of his eye, an old dusty monitor tipped down.
He skidded to a halt and tugged the EEG screen back up to eye level. And there it was. His proof.
Frontal lobe. Temporal lobe. Parietal lobe. Occipital lobe. Activity lines scrolled jaggedly across the screen. A stark contrast to the flat lines they had always been. Evidence of thought, memory, emotion.
“Holy fuck.”
The sensor attached to the auditory cortex spiked briefly, and Cuddy couldn’t stop a hysterical giggle from escaping his mouth.
(– yeah, crazy, now get him out before –!)
The baby, writhing with all the coordination of a newborn, broke the seal of his breathing mask.
(– time’s up! –)
(– got your proof –)
(– now GO!)
Cuddy moved. Scrambling to the center of the room, he thought, ‘There's a drainage valve at the base of the containment unit.’ And he thought, ‘the glass won’t rise until the fluid is completely drained.’ And he thought, ‘it takes three minutes for the whole tube to drain completely.’ And then he picked up a stool and stopped thinking.
Cuddy planted his feet and swung. Stainless steel met glass, and the glass came out barely scratched.
The researcher stumbled back, nearly dropping the stool from the stinging vibrations. Panic closed his throat and sent ice running through his veins once more.
And then the ice was everywhere. Stretching down to his feet, out to every finger, clawing up into his brain. He straightened, breaths puffing out cold mists.
“Again,” Cuddy said, and swung. A hairline fracture.
The cold curled in closer.
“Again,” Cuddy said, and swung. A spider web of cracks.
The heartbeat in his ears slowed to a near stop.
“Again,” Cuddy(?) said, and swung.
And the glass shattered.
~
Membrane Labs was no longer quiet.
Mice skittered and squeaked from vents and dark corners. Alarms blared from the third floor where the emergency power had finally recharged enough to get basic systems back online. Monitors spat out damage readings at increasingly short intervals, and the printer in the maintenance department produced page after page of automatic repair requests. Exasperated and mildly fried from the previous lightning cascade, the computer system started wake-up protocols early. The halls flooded with fluorescent light. A creature of unknown species screeched in protest. Flowers with petals constantly shifting in color bloomed open under their sun lamps. A telescope powered down. The employee lounge’s jumbo-sized coffee machine whirred awake.
And working steadily through the reception offices was the sound of a baby crying.
Cuddy picked up the fifth phone he had come across and for the fifth time was met with absolute silence. He closed his eyes and wished he could massage the oncoming headache, but his other arm was busy acting as an awkward cradle.
Baby Membrane seemed intent on making up for six months of silence. He started screaming the moment Cuddy began prying wires off of him and hadn’t let up a single moment since. The assistant had wrapped the infant in his own lab coat to keep the chill away, but the baby’s arms had flailed free almost immediately. It at least kept wandering hands away from the remains of the feeding tube in his stomach, and Cuddy had exactly zero intention of touching that without someone else present.
Phone number six was dead as well. The researcher placed the phone down harder than was strictly necessary, and that set the baby off into louder wails. Cuddy honestly felt like breaking down into tears was a pretty reasonable course of action to take, considering the circumstances, but he wanted someone else to tell him what the hell to do more than he wanted to sob. So the search for anything to get him into contact with Dr. Clay or the Professor continued. Cuddy turned down another row of cubicles, half hoping someone had left a cellphone behind, or – god forbid – a pager.
He was so fired. He was probably so fired that he would never get to work in any lab ever again. Doomed to be one of the mindless drones that manned the counters at a Bloaty’s or something. The researcher wondered if ‘accidentally gave sentience to something that wasn’t supposed to be’ would go under ‘Job Experience’ or ‘Accomplishments’ on a resume.
He could –
Cuddy absently rocked the baby, considering his options. There weren’t many beyond waiting for other employees to arrive for their shifts. He supposed he could head back down and hook the mini Membrane back up to all those machines and monitor vital signs from there. Because if spontaneous brain activity was a thing that could happen, something worse could always be next, like sudden cardiac arrest.
He could –
Cuddy figured Baby Membrane probably wouldn’t go along with that plan. So the next option would be attempting to make the infant more comfortable so he could calm down. A tall order, to be sure, when the lab had exactly nothing baby-related on the premises. But he could probably cobble together a makeshift crib easily enough. On wheels preferably, because 7.06 kilograms got heavy after a while.
And then. Ice. Curling around his brainstem. Radiating outward.
He could hide him.
Cuddy came to an abrupt halt amongst a maze of office cubicles.
Yeah, he could do that, but –
He could drop the baby off at any orphanage. The system was overwhelmed enough that it wouldn’t go chasing after the origin of one more infant. And babies were always picked first and ended up with the nicer couples super desperate for a kid. Bet he wouldn’t even stay there for very long.
The researcher frowned, disappointed in himself for even considering these thoughts. He thought he had more integrity than this, but apparently not if he was thinking that –
Hell, he could head to the richer neighborhoods and leave the kid on the nicest doorstep. Some place with a nice, big yard bordering the woods and not at all like the labs. Easy to pull off, and absolutely zero paper trail to deal with.
Cuddy shook the thoughts away. He wasn’t about to try and hide an entire baby away from Dr. Clay and the Professor. He didn’t think he could even if he tried. There was a lab full of evidence a couple of floors beneath his feet. No, the researcher would stay and face whatever consequences were coming his way –
But what would they do to the child?
That had Cuddy pausing again. What would happen to Baby Membrane? Surely not what happened with the previous clones. Those, at least, had remained brain-dead until the consciousness transfers. There was no way they would –
They could. Maybe they had in the past. He wouldn’t know. He’d only been present at the last transfer. This was an unprecedented situation. Maybe Membrane would give up the child easily enough. Or maybe. He would take him. Send him to sleep. Hook him back up to all those wires and tubes. Block off those signs of thought and memory and emotion. Like they were never there. Like the child was never alive to begin with.
And Cuddy shook his head again, but the idea had caught him. Ice shards lodged in his head. The whimpers of the baby faded away. His feet moved without any input from him.
And then the body that was never allowed to be a person would grow. Not into the person it could have been. It would be just another vessel to carry the Membrane name. And the person that could have been would get erased. Overwritten. And it would all be because of a researcher who placed his trust in someone who had been jumping from body to body to prolong his own life. Whose original body rotted away decades and decades ago.
Cuddy hunched over the baby, breath misting and heartrate slowing. His feet still moved, but the rest of him felt like he was standing on the edge of a cliff. Vertigo making the world spin.
But he could prevent that. He could stop that from happening if he just hid the child. An hour’s drive would take him to the hospital in the next town over. Walk in. Say he found a child abandoned. They would take him. They had to take him. And then Cuddy could slip out in the rush, no ties back to the labs left behind. They would check the child over. Fix him up. Send him out into the world with someone that wanted him. That would let him grow up.
“’m so fired,” the assistant slurred, barely registering the front doors opening for him.
“Thank you for visiting Membrane Labs,” called the computer.
Cuddy trudged out of the lab, thoughts finally falling silent. Except for the constant mantra.
Hide him.
Hide him.
Hide him.
It swirled around his head on loop as he crossed the parking lot. In his arms, the baby was finally silent.
A truck drove up to the parking lot gates.
Cuddy stumbled up to his car and rummaged around for his keys. They fell to the ground, followed by his ID and wallet. (Hide him.) Reaching for them felt like moving underwater. (Hide him.) Counting out the right key took entirely too much effort, as did actually lining it up with the driver side keyhole. (Hide him.) He jammed it into the lock, twisted –
A hand came down on his shoulder.
“Cuddy, are you alright?” came the worried voice of Griffin.
And the ice shattered.
Cuddy blinked slowly, as if waking up from a deep sleep. Backing away from a cliff's edge. Air came easier, and in his chest, his heart sped back up to a normal rhythm. He turned dazedly to his coworker.
“You didn’t respond when I called and – what the fuck? Is that a kid?!” The red-haired man reared back in surprise. “The hell is this all about? Did I miss a memo about Bring-Your-Kid-to-Work Day or something?”
Cuddy snorted. “Not quite. I, uh…” He glanced down at the baby in his arms who was contently sucking on his own newly-discovered thumb. The baby he had been about to run off with and sweep under a rug like nothing happened. All because some insane thoughts got dredged up in heat of the moment. He was a Membrane Labs employee, for now at least, and there was nothing – no proof, no evidence, no verification, no confirmation – that the Professor would… that he could…
The researcher took a breath and shook the remaining thoughts from his mind.
“Can I borrow your phone?”
Behind him, the glass of the front doors exploded outward.