Chapter 2: The Origination

During World War 2, the necessity for the undertaking of immense scientific endeavors was seen as a matter of life or death. Nationalizing research facilities and cutting-edge laboratories allowed teams of scientists to gather at centralized locations and to receive seemingly unlimited funds in order to pursue technological advancements that could contribute to the war efforts.

After the war ended, and the United States government saw the unbound “success” of its Department of Defense wartime labs, the freshly-funded Atomic Energy Commission immediately ensured that these often-surreptitious labs continued permanently.

The government, riding high on victory, funded a large assortment of both basic and classified research in state-of-the-art facilities that sprouted up all over the country. However, much of that growth was concentrated in middle America, in states like Oklahoma and Kansas.

Oklahoma’s mountainous areas in the Interior Highlands served as particularly good locations for classified facilities such as the AFCA, with the different military branches having significant portions of the land already designated to them that they could wait to contract out to the highest bidder...

It wasn’t long before corporate interests began to dominate much of one of the world’s largest scientific infrastructures through Laboratory Directed Research and Development agreements.

When the Commandant of the Marine Corps activated the Chemical Biological Incident Response Force, or the CBIRF, in 1996, he likely didn’t even consider the possibility that the job description would expand to encompass his fellow Marines serendipitously defending a mysterious payload of extraterrestrial origin as they drove further and further into the heart of the Ouachita Mountains.

Yet when that menacing team of burly, stone-faced marines bearing the CBIRF’s black-red-gold insignia marched into the AFCA dollying a steel container followed by a gaggle of snaky bureaucrats in overpriced suits, Dr. Laiko’s spine shivered with anxiety.

She had only been the Project Supervisor for the Autonomous Discovery Team for about six weeks, but she was already sinking under the weight of the workload. The last thing she needed was another wrench in the project.

Her eyes followed the heavy steel container as the group of men rounded the corner of the hallway and headed towards the Isolation Wing.

Or maybe it’s ... Nah, can’t be that.

Her mind was racing with possibilities when the familiar baritone voice of the Research Manager echoed out from the corner office.

“Amber, you got a moment?!”

Dr. Laiko shook her head clear and took a moment to quickly re-fasten the overstretched hair-tie to her chestnut ponytail before entering the modest office with a customary knock.

Dr. Franco leaned back in the mesh office chair as a disheveled Dr. Laiko emerged in the doorway. His mimicked smile beamed in her direction, and she begrudgingly reciprocated the formality with her own forced grin.

He gestured for her to have a seat in the padded, armless chair in front of his fine-mahogany executive desk. As she complied and proceeded to the chair, he took the time to again admire his subordinate’s impressive figure.

How a woman this curvaceous and physically enticing could also possess the brains to be in her position defied Dr. Franco’s comprehension. Her slender waist seemed to accentuate the unnatural perkiness of her eternally-braless, impeccably-symmetrical 36C breasts, which were usually just barely held in place by her seemingly never-ending assortment of skintight, sleeveless shirts. Her hips were just wide enough to hold the weight of her firm, rounded ass snugly inside of the form-fitting yoga pants that she regularly donned.

Dr. Franco hated how she was only one in the entire facility who could dress so informally. Or how her shirts were always just short enough for her to proudly expose a constant sliver of her stomach’s smooth, ivory skin. And if she reached for something, the shirt would skim all the way up her lightly-toned abs, revealing more of her naturally-athletic frame.

Since the first day that this spoiled brat stepped into his office, he had wondered how many kids this thin little slut had to swallow to even get where she was.

The Director didn’t vouch for just anyone, after all. He assumed that she must have done some real special internships.

In a reality to which Dr. Franco would never capitulate, if someone like him saw this sexy little light-skinned Asian doll out in the real world, he would never have the gall to actually approach her, much less the charisma to bag her.

But the AFCA was Dr. Franco’s palace, and the king ruled with an iron fist lest his sovereignty crumble. He had survived the killing fields of government grants and corporate contracts to emerge victorious from the bloodstained mountain of demolished dreams and sacrificed friends.

He had earned his fucking spot.

And now waltzed in this young commoner with an air of superiority who assumed that she could just enter his palace dressed in some kind of unprofessional, oversexed vagabond costume.

She plopped down in the wobbly chair and gazed up at him with her puppy-dog hazel eyes and waited for his inevitable onslaught.

Dr. Franco slowly removed his thick-framed spectacles before beginning.

“Hey Amber, how is everything today?” He asked with a dismissive shade, refusing to refer to her title.

She stumbled to find the right words.

“Well, the ... We started conditional phase testing on the simulation array found in yesterday’s report. You can find my cliff notes under section 3 heading –”

Dr. Franco rudely put up his palm to stop her before she could finish her setence.

“No need for simulations anymore. They located the Entity last night around 0900 in Alaska with the help of The Monitor. That’s what was in that ominous container that the fucking Goon Squad was just wheeling into Iso.”

Amber sprung to her feet with excitement and threw her hands up in the air as she energetically howled out, revealing a momentary glimpse at the underside of her recoiling tits.

“YES! Seriously?! Then it’s real...”

Dr. Franco playfully smirked.

“Oh, it’s real alright. Doomsday averted?”

Amber pulled her shirt down and anxiously returned to her seat, but remained at the edge of it with her arms now planted on the desk.

Losing herself in the excitement of the moment and forgetting her audience, she blurted out her words.

That’s the plan! With a defined sample we should be able to accumulate results much faster. So, when can we get a look at it?”

He frowned and wrestled for eye contact.

“You’re the ADS, I’ll leave the specifics in your hands. Let the Goon Squad finish with processing first. Remember, we have to comply with the CDC and the Division of Select Agents and Toxins guidelines.

He paused to intentionally give additional impact to his next statement, as if it was just crossing his mind.

“I hope we can afford to wait that long. I wouldn’t want to put you and Cason in harm’s way, after all. The Director just wants results.”

Amber knew what that meant, even if Dr. Franco couldn’t verbally express it. And results are exactly what she planned to obtain. She anticipated many late, fevered nights at work in her very near future.

Internally, she momentarily panicked as she thought about who she could get to take care of her brother, Jason, in her absence, but she quickly pushed that to the back of her mind.

“Okay, then I better get started on the preparations.”

Truthfully, she just really couldn’t wait to get out of Dr. Franco’s office. Ever since she had started, he had given off constantly creepy vibes. It felt like he was always undressing her with his gaze.

Not that she wasn’t used to it. If this had been any other place, she would have made her boundaries clearer.

But, this was the biggest career opportunity of her life. To be accepted as Project Supervisor and Lead Researcher at the secretive Anomalous Foreign Contaminant Area working alongside the Autonomous was everything she ever could have hoped for. And she damn sure wasn’t about to let some pervy old man stand between her and her victory.

Amber stood back up almost as quickly as she had sat down.

Recognizing her discomfort, Dr. Franco decided to assert himself a little more onto the young supervisor.

“Wait, one more thing.”

She halted in the doorway and sighed as she anticipated his next words.

“You know you were late again on Tuesday. It sets a bad example for your team and especially your partner when you can’t even bother to show up to the lab in a timely fashion.”

He shifted in his seat a bit as Amber visibly tensed up before she responded.

“Y ... yes sir. I know. I’m sorry. It’s my brother. He got off his meds again and he-”

His smarmy tone shut her down once more.

“Just, no excuses. Our work here is too important. You know that. Don’t let it happen again or I’ll have to write you up, okay? Don’t make me think that giving you a chance was a mistake.”

He was bluffing. There was zero chance that he was going to say no to the Director. And he insisted that he appoint Dr. Laiko for this role.

Respectfully, she bowed her head and nodded to him with another heartfelt apology before excusing herself to get ready for the lab.

Caso pressed the plastic button on the vending machine and zoned out into his exhaustion as the steaming coffee filled the paper cup to the brim. He was taking the ceremonial first-sip when his new partner and superior, Dr. Laiko, appeared around the corner and bee-lined right towards him.

He took another quick-sip and waved at the genius researcher as she approached. Her reputation had always preceded her.

Without acknowledging his greeting at all, she loudly snapped her fingers and pointed towards the Isolation Wing. Cason had only worked with Dr. Laiko for a couple of months, but he was already used to her being more direct than most.

Shit, this is going to be a long day.

He downed as much coffee as he could without irreversibly scorching every taste bud and tossed the sloshing, half-full cup into the plastic bin next to the vending machines. He scurried to catch up with his speed-walking superior as she furiously scribbled notes with an Apple Pencil onto a smudgy Otterbox-encased iPad Pro.

He caught her stride right as they reached the mechanically sealed double doors.

She finally stopped and looked up from the tablet and confirmed that she connected with his tired, ocean-blue eyes. Cason knew how sparingly Dr. Laiko used eye contact, so he knew in that instant that she was about to relay something critical to him.

She enthusiastically grinned and excitedly gripped the tablet as soon as she had his attention, as if she were about burst at the seams.

She whispered, “They found it” and lingered for his response.

It took him a moment to process what she was telling him, partly because of the playfully subtle way in which she imparted the information to him.

“They ... Wait ... You’re not...”

He further focused into her gaze.

“Are you saying that it’s here?”

Amber giddily nodded.

“I’m saying it’s here. And I’m saying that now we actually have a chance to –”

Cason joined in unison with her to finish the sentence.

“Save the world.”

With a renewed sense of purpose, the two researchers simultaneously pressed their thumbs against the biometric scanners on either side of the doors. The LED indicators on the scanners turned green and the doorway rumbled and whirred before hissing with decompression and gliding open.

They stepped onto the cargo-elevator and pressed 42 to descend to the lowest level of the facility. Almost a quarter-mile (slightly more than a third of a kilometer) beneath the surface.

The Isolation Wing was the smallest section of the AFCA, but as the name suggested it was also one of the most secure.

The 3-inch steel doors that blocked access to the wing could only be unlocked with a simultaneous biometric scan of two authorized personnel on a specially-designated elevator. Then, there was the 10-minute descent to the bottom.

These elevator rides were, thus far, always fairly awkward for Cason. He wasn’t sure if it was because he was intimidated by her beauty or by her brains, but he was definitely intimidated.

Besides, his wife was also a beautiful woman and the mother of his daughter. He was a lucky man.

Still, he hadn’t encountered many women at this level of biomedical research. It wasn’t, he often opined, because of their abilities. On the contrary, he found female scientists to generally be more organized, attentive, and concise.

But the gender makeup of postdoc biomedical researchers was about three-to-one male, and supervisors on those elite teams were even more male-centric.

A lot of it just simply came down to politics.

So, to have someone who looked and dressed like Dr. Laiko in charge of such an important project still astounded Cason. Amber sighed and shot Cason an upwards glance from her iPad, a response to him burning a hole into her forehead with his dazed stare.

“ ... What is it Doctor?”

Cason hesitated at her forwardness. He had to speak quickly.

“It’s just ... are we planning to already box it?”

He couldn’t tell her that he was goggling over her like crushing schoolboy, after all.

She nodded and lowered the iPad. She suspected that the project’s integrity wasn’t primarily what he was thinking about, but she said nothing about it as usual.

“Yeah. If we followed the standard anomalous material quarantine SOP, it will set us back at least two weeks. You know that we can’t lose that kind of time.”

Cason lowered his gaze as he considered her argument, but he immediately found fault.

“Yeah, but we JUST got it. If we don’t take the proper precautions then we could jeopardize everything that we –”

“I know,” she interjected. “It’s a calculated risk. But we need the sample to even have a chance at stopping something as dangerous as the Coadunate.”

He leaned against the corner of the elevator and contemplated the gravity of her rash decision.

“Yeah, I hope you’re right.”

Who was he to go against the word of his superior?

Amber used the sole of her Nike Air to balance herself against the vibrating elevator wall and sighed. She moved her attention back to the iPad and swiped up on the screen.

“Me too.”

Upon reaching level 42, The entrant or entrants were required to sign-in with name and badge ID at the security office in the following plain-gray, steel-reinforced vestibule. Here, a security officer was required to re-confirm identities and authorize the entrants before allowing them further admittance into the wing.

Amber and Cason stepped off the elevator in union. Amber looked at the time on the iPad and yapped out a small “yes” under her breath as she darted towards the security office and banged on the door while jumping and waving.

Cason rolled his eyes.

Moments later, the windowless door raucously clicked and Amber dramatically pushed the handle and shoved it open with her shoulder.

Grant wasn’t actually supposed to open the door to let anyone inside, but he was the Head of Security. He figured he could make the executive call. She took a wide step inside the office and opened her arms for Grant. He embraced his friend and heartily chuckled.

Behind him, 56 flat-screen monitors lined the wall of the office, all of them displaying different active sectors of the AFCA.

After their mandatory prolonged hug, Grant looked her up and down and scoffed.

“Damn girl, how the fuck are you still this hot?”

Amber could always rely on Grant to be real with her. She was so thankful that she had an ally at least somewhere buried inside this facility.

She teasingly grinned at him and properly curtsied before responding.

“Why, by doing nothing at all of course.”

He shook his head and took a deep breath through his nose.

“Some people are just fuckin’ born with that shit.”

She nonchalantly shrugged and pointed at Cason, who remained in the lobby.

“I guess - Hey, were you going to let me and Brad Pith over there into the safe space so I can poke at the new thing?”

Frowning, he winced at her question.

“ ... Pith? What the fuck is a Brad Pith.”

Amber let out a guttural chuckle and slapped Grant’s shoulder. Even though she knew he was annoyed at her bad joke, she also knew that their auras always warmed each other.

She leaned over to spiritedly whisper into his ear.

“Pith is basically the pussy of vascular plants.”

She leaned back and snickered as Grant shook his head in defeat.

“You ain’t ever going to change Amber.”

She innocently smiled, put her hand on her chin, and shrugged again.

“Nope. Who’s up tonight in the stalker room after you?”

Grant shook his head.

“Shane, the new guy. He’s well-trained, but stiff as a board. Why, you planning a late night?”

She sneered and nodded.

“You’ll probably be seeing a lot more of me on one of those monitors over there from now on too. I got work with that big box your military buddies brought in a little while ago.”

He worriedly looked up at the screen labeled “3-A” where the object sat just-inside of the all-white room. He shook his head and started to enter the authorization code to open the passageway.

“Welp, whatever those boys were here for seemed pretty damn serious. But as long as I get to see more of you, then I’ll call it a blessing!”

They hugged one more time and said their goodbyes before she surfaced back into the vestibule where her partner was patiently waiting.

“My apologies Dr. Luna. Shall we proceed?”

Cason looked her over and decided that he was finally going to ask.

“So, you and Officer Brownell. You guys go way back huh?”

Her face crinkled in suspicion.

“Yeah, we do. I met him at OU when I was still studying Business Management before I moved to California.”

She paused and wondered how much of her relationship with Grant she should divulge to her new partner.

She promptly decided none of it.

“ ... He had just returned from Afghanistan and was in the Criminal Justice program. Guess it worked out pretty well for him since he landed this cushy job.”

Grant raised his eyebrows and tutted over the improbability.

“Wow, what are the odds that you two would end up here of all places this close to one another and not even know it?”

She haphazardly shrugged, wanting to change to subject.

“Small world, I guess.”

The door hissed open.

Given that each of the four labs within the wing were defined as Biosafety Level 4, the securest designation possible, once an entrant was granted access to a specific lab, they were required to undergo a vigorous decontamination process. Researchers could freely roam the small interconnected hallways outside of the labs to access the bare lounge area or the shared locker room to store any personal belongings or articles of clothing.

One of the things that always surprised researchers new to this level was just how little clothing people actually wore when not in their respective labs, oftentimes simply tossing a lab-coat over loose undergarments that were easy to slip on and off.

Amber sometimes didn’t even bothered with a lab-coat in the Isolation Wing. When she was in the zone, she had little time to bother with covering herself up at the behest of some horny, self-entitled men.

She was down here to work.

Let one of them try me anyways, she thought.

She sat down on the aluminum bench in the locker room and grunted as she hurriedly ripped off her tight pants and stuffed them into her overflowing locker. She stood up and shouldered it closed so she could lock it back in place.

Right beside her, Cason calmy folded his slacks and button-up shirt and placed them in his neatly-organized locker. He removed his lab-coat from the clothes-hanger and threw it on over his boxer-briefs. He always worked excessively hard to never stare at Dr. Laiko’s hourglass body while they changed, but he also didn’t understand why it was so hard for her sometimes to toss on a lab-coat like everyone else.

Was she just trying to flaunt her feminine charms?

What he didn’t realize is that Amber had to fight even harder than him to remain professional and not ogle at him. Cason was cagey, but handsome. The kind of shaggy, aloof handsome where he didn’t even realize how symmetrical he was. His body wasn’t chiseled or anything, but he was fit and tall, at 6’1, with a smooth tawny-brown complexion and adorably curly black hair. Beyond that, his dick was way bigger than she expected. Every time she stole a look at him during decon, she had to fight the urge to gawp longer.

He was definitely the cutest person in this whole place. And he was technically her subordinate, which added a level of forbidden lust to the equation.

If she was being honest with herself, Cason had become the central figure in almost every one of her sexual fantasies since they had met. She liked to imagine that she had the nerve to just walk up to him without saying a word and sit on his lap while he was in the middle of changing in the normally-empty locker room, where he was most alone and exposed.

And it was the only area that Grant couldn’t see with his pesky cameras.

She would work his oversized dick out of those constricting briefs with her miniscule hands and stroke him until he was hard enough to push her panties aside and somehow work that behemoth of his inside of her.

But this time, in the secluded locker room, they both had other things on their minds.

They nodded in a silent agreement and stepped into the separate shower units. It was imperative that they cleaned themselves as meticulously as they possibly could. No preventative measure was too small. They took the time to scrub non-toxic soap into every crack and crevice.

Cason emerged from his shower first, wrapped in a towel while still patting himself dry with another towel, followed shortly by a glistening Amber with stringy, wet hair. Cason glanced over and noticed for the first time that she had a single, small tattoo on her upper thigh of a broken skull with a rose-wrapped sword impaling it. He thought about asking her about it but quickly decided against it.