Hydrogen, Chapter 3

Mike was given a clean bill of health from the doctor looking over him, and was released the next morning. Happily, all of his blood work had come back negative. Since it was a Saturday, Mike decided to put off looking for work until the end of the weekend. He returned home to his little apartment and did his weekly cleaning. It had always been a ritual for him to ignore the mounting mess, and to finish it all at once on his days off. It made him feel good to start with a big mess and turn it into something neat and organized.

By noon the dishes were done, the garbage was taken out, and his bedroom, living room, and bathroom cleaned. He sat down in on the couch and turned on the tube. He thought about going out and getting a copy of the paper, but decided to do it the next day. The Sunday paper always had more employment listings. He wondered if his next job would be as terrible as his last one. He frowned. He had worked his way through college for seven years to get a doctorate in microbiological engineering, something that continued to fascinate him. After graduating however, he found that the market for his field was glutted and the best job he could get in the state of Ohio was as a research assistant. This angered and depressed him so much that he decided to pursue his research on his own while working part time in a menial job. He didn’t want to leave the state he was born and raised in, because of the close bond he had shared with his parents and sister. It had been painful to live two hours away from them while he was getting his degree.

So he had gotten a part time job at a movie theater, rented an apartment with an adjoining workshop in the seediest district of town so he could afford the rent, and began to work on his research. At first it was a struggle to pay the bills and to work the equivalent of one and a half full time jobs, but then he met Amy. She was seven years younger than Mike at only eighteen, but she had seemed much more mature than most teenagers. Though she wasn’t the type he usually went for, she had been very pretty with her long dirty-blond hair and aristocratic face. She had a sexy pout she used sometimes when they were having sex that always drove him crazy.

They had met at the movie theater where they both worked. Since they both worked behind the counter as snack vendors, they had a lot of time to talk, and while their interests were very different, Mike found that they got along pretty well. Amy was an uncomplicated girl. The fact that she was only eighteen hadn’t hurt matters any; Mike had always liked younger girls. After only a few weeks they were dating, and in just two months they were living together. She moved in directly from her parent’s house; it was her first time living away from home.

Mike liked their arrangement very much; it meant that he had someone else to help pay the bills, which allowed him to spend more money on his research. While cheap to pursue in comparison with other fields of study, it still ate almost all of his free money. Most of all, though, he loved sharing his daily life with someone else who he cared about. He also enjoyed having sex with a pretty girl almost every night.

Then the accident happened. His mother, father, and little sister, his entire living family, was killed in a car accident. He somehow made it through this tragedy, but his relationship with Amy suffered for it. It seemed to him that she didn’t understand his depression at this loss. It seemed like she thought less of him for it.

            It wasn’t surprising, really. He had met Amy’s parents only once, and the experience hadn’t seemed like a big deal to either of them. Amy didn’t talk with them the way Mike talked to his family, and he guessed that they weren’t friends. They certainly weren’t close; in the fifteen months Amy had lived with him, she had only visited her parents twice, and one of those time had been to ask for money.

As the time after the tragedy wore on, Mike noticed his girlfriend becoming more and more distant, until almost ten months after the accident she decided to move back in with her parents. They had a quick talk, decided to take a “break” in their relationship, whatever the hell that was, and that was that. Two months later she broke up with him outright while they were at work, and the following Friday he was fired from his job. Her uncle was the manager.

It had all seemed too much for him at the time, and it felt like the last tie he had to what he considered his life was gone. Family, girl, and job: all were destroyed, and he felt like he was floating in a sea of nothing. So he read about suicide on the internet, went out and bought a cheap .25 caliber handgun, and decided to put a bullet into his brain.

And then he was saved. He still found he didn’t have much to live for, but he knew life was better than death now. He had experienced the fear of impending death, and he never wanted to face it again.

And there was his research. Though his branch of science wasn’t really in the public eye, he was on the cutting edge of his field. He still got a few scientific journals every month, and nobody had gotten any farther than he had yet. He knew that this wouldn’t change in the near future; his process was much different than anyone else’s. Mike also suspected he could make a breakthrough if he only had the proper funds and equipment.

Mike stopped. “Just what in the fuck is keeping me in Ohio now?” he wondered. “Nothing really,” He decided. He faced reality; His family had died over a year ago, his girlfriend and his job were gone, so what the hell was holding him back now? Nothing at all.

Mike smiled as he realized that he wasn’t going to be getting a paper after all. The classifieds were the farthest thing from his mind now. On Monday, he would call an acquaintance that worked at the college he had attended and see if there were any good jobs in his field elsewhere in the nation. Hell, he was even open to working out of the country if need be.

As long as the position was in a related field, Mike knew he would be able to get permission to work on his current project. Though it was beyond his current means to make any real progress on it, the expense for his research to any company would be piddling.

For the first time in a year, Mike felt lighthearted. He suspected that his life was going to change very much in the very near future.

Dran stopped at an observation hall a week later, to look in on the subject of his last mission. He sweet-talked one of the observation girls there into uploading him the latest reports of the human, and carefully read it over in his compartment. Dran noted that the LifDev had been entirely successful, and he smiled at a job well done. There was more, though, at the bottom. There were orders for future STAT interventions, in the Technologies division.

Dran lay on his hammock and reflected thoughtfully for almost an hour. The report on Mike had intrigued him. He then got up and started walking towards STAT headquarters. He had a division reassignment request to submit.