1 The Death and Resurrection of one Theodin Reed

"Lisa, how far is he?" Rita muttered turning to Melissa Wong, her lab assistant and once upon a time, her best friend. Rita looked at the gigantic glass cylinder in front of her intimately, it was filled to the brim with a liquid murky substance. You couldn't see properly in it, but you could see that there was something in it.

"You mean the specimen?" Mellisa insisted.

"No… I mean…" Rita stopped herself midsentence as Lisa kept raising her head up, whispering, "They are watching us, they are always watching." Alerting Rita to the camera's all around them.

Rita bit down hard on her lip, then she looked down at her tablet. She examined the specimen's vitals,

and if everything was actually going as planned. According to her tablet and digital assistant again, as she liked to refer to it, everything was going as it should be. But Rita, being Rita? She was still nervous.

This nervousness trickled down to Melissa, who most of her friends just called "Lisa". Melissa was Korean by birth but had spent a lot of time in China, especially Hong Kong her mandarin and Cantonese was so good, you could've mistaken her for a local. This was her very first job and after spending almost 10 and a half years in college, working hard and praying for a job just like this one. This was her dream job.

She had met Rita at the University of Hong Kong and for the most part? They had become really good friends, but things between them hadn't been good, for at least a couple of months now. Her friend and her mentor had become obsessed with not only finding perfection, but eclipsing it and her desire and appetite for it? Had become almost insatiable.

Rita kept double and triple checking, she pulled the vitals out of the screen, they became a holographic image, in a single seamless motion. She zoomed in and out of this image, waiting for Melissa's response, she was holding onto her 16inch tablet which had replaced most of the wooden clipboards, watching anxiously at Rita.

She watched Rita manipulate this holographic image, until it became smaller and smaller until you could see RNA (RiboNucleic Acid) strand after RNA strand, merging together to form DNA (DeoxyriboNucleic Acid), she watched the molecular computer, input new information via nanobots in the mRNA (Messenger RiboNucleic Acid), after checking vitals and the overall progress of the specimen. Because whenever a cell needs a new gene, it translates (changes) the DNA first from one form to the other, into a signature messenger RNA (mRNA) sequence and subsequently? Into a chain of amino acids, that form a protein.

So they were changing the molecular structure of the human body, at a cellular level. Well at a protein level, changing the building blocks of the cell, inputting an artificial replacement in a human sized jigsaw puzzle.

"You mean it. RI I mean Doctor Vallery, it." Lisa wasn't sure where their friendship stood, but ever since the onset of Rita's bizarre behaviour, she had decided to keep those too separated, because Rita had become almost like a drill-sergeant lately snapping at anyone over trivial things.