Word Count: 11,684

Yes, it’s not that much more than yesterday, but today was quite a busy day. There was hardly any time for writing, so I got the normal 1667 in. I’ll make the loss up by going to 15,000 words tomorrow – shouldnt be too much of a chore if I push myself to do it.

It wasn’t until three months had passed that I began to see repercussions. I had asked Shane to remain in the hospital while I researched the strange bacteria on his body, and ended up with all the information I needed about a week after that. By that time, I noticed that several of the hospital staff had fallen ill, but nobody could determine what it was they had fallen ill with. I suspected a cold, because they were huffing and sneezing, but it wasn’t that simple. After about a week, they were showing far more severe signs. Shane was gone by then, released into the open world – but now I was regretting that I’d ever allowed him to leave. I had allowed him to leave on a strict probation basis. He was to take several doses of a special antibiotic daily, and come back in a month. We’d see if that purged the bacteria. As of now, it was unclear what they were doing to him, but they were obviously quite resilient if they could survive the SEM chamber.

Nevertheless, I felt at the time that Shane was perfectly harmless, and that the bacteria would remain around him. After all, I was yet to catch any sickness, and I’d been around him more than anybody else. It was logical, then, that I was either immune to this new strain of bacteria or that is was not lethal (even if it could be contagious). The latter was the most plausible, because I believed that no human had ever been exposed to this kind of bacteria before.

I gave Shane the special penicillin as a result of a very important medicinal scare that happened several years before. A young schoolgirl in Sweden was killed because modern medicine failed to treat her. But the bacteria inside her were not normal. They had adapted and ceased to succumb to our antibiotic treatments. The world faced a could-be epidemic of antibiotic resistant bacteria. What was worse – this had been a growing fear even several years beforehand. Experts were not surprised, and I was angry at those experts for knowing but not attempting to kill the problem before it stuck. Luckily, those same medical experts were able to develop a new type of antibiotic dubbed “emeticillin” that cured several strains of resistant bacteria already known to the world. Emeticillin then became the standard treatment for bacteria already resistant to penicillin and methicillin. What the world hoped for next was a cure for the common cold, but even time wouldn’t permit us a cure for such an elusive disease. The goal was to ensure that nothing ever became as common as the common cold, and with Emeticillin this common disease immunity was almost guaranteed. Granted, I knew that the common cold was a virus, but that would never stop people from confusing viruses and bacteria.

Nevertheless, emeticillin was my shortcut to victory. It had to be injected, so I have him a prescription and he would buy the necessary tools to inject himself daily. I told him that he might feel queasy while medicated, but to avoid vomiting at all costs, or else the injection would have to be repeated. I didn’t know for sure, but simply in order to keep him on the drugs, I told him that he might perish a second time without the emeticillin. I’ve always thought he saw through that and didn’t take the medicine some of the time, but I can never know now. There aren’t many ways to ask a dead man if he took his medicine.

As I sat eating my lunch those days after Shane had been released, I felt empty. Not because I wasn’t actually eating my lunch so much as looking at it sit on the plate, but because of a bitter emptiness that plagues us all at some point in time. There is a hole in our hearts – which made me think of the painting above me – and that hole is caused by worry. We worry, especially for those we needn’t worry about. I, especially, was worried. I was worried about myself, and I was worried about Shane. But more importantly, I was worried about the hospital staff. They looked so pale, and who would treat them if they fell ill? They could not treat themselves, I thought. They would be far too weak. And then I was worried that I would have to care for the hospital when everybody fell ill. I would become the hospital’s repairman literally instead of figuratively, and I doubted there would be any sort of pay raise that came with the job.

For my own sake, I made sure that by the end of the week I was at the seat of the SEM again. In one month’s time Shane’s cultures had grown to enormous proportions. I saw white cover the blood agar plates where the cultures were being grown. I had put the plates in the freezer to slow the growing, but that didn’t seem to have any effect. I knew something new now: The bacteria were resistant to freezing temperatures. I wasn’t sure if that was what allowed them to survive in the cadaver chambers with Shane’s pseudo-dead body, or if they had gone inert and stored themselves in a spore-like protective shell for the duration of the cryogenic freezing, but that would be the next step after I knew how these organisms were functioning.

I took a small sample of bacteria from an agar plate and put it on a metal slide. I put that metal slide, in turn, on a larger piece of metal, and put it into the SEM’s vacuum chamber. Turned it on. Sat down. Watched the screen give a picture. I thought, it’s going to take hours to find the bacteria with this machine. But it didn’t take hours, it took minutes. Miraculously, the bacteria were still alive the second time. They had completely decimated any skin cells of Shane’s that were left, and seemed to be carrying those dead cells along with them as though they knew it was their prize of battle. Now the landscape was dominated not by two types of cells, but by three. I was astounded – in the process of a month these bacteria had differentiated into an entirely different species! Now I saw two types of bacteria that were moving, and one that was not. It appeared more rigid, and looked like a frozen water droplet. It seemed to have no way of moving. The other bacteria were pushing the frozen bacteria along. Another type of bacteria looked like they had wings, or fins, made of flagellum. The final appeared perfectly normal, and didn’t seem special. Whatever they were, they were all a ghostly, angelic white when combined into a large mass.

I began to imagine these organisms colonizing on the human body. Perhaps they were already on mine. I imagined them strangling a person to death. If I had more time, I could see how they would grow to envelope an object. I would learn later what that looked like – it is a horrid, yet beautiful site. The bacteria wrap entirely around the organs… nothing in the body is untouched, like a magical spider web made of pure, simple life…

                I could see through them with the SEM. I saw their insides moving about, suspended in organic fluids, and felt like a magical higher-dimensional creature looking down on a Flatland. That was when I made my discovery: They had several organelles, but they lacked DNA. They were not, then, functioning at all. I wondered what a virus could do with such a cell. There would be no DNA to replace. A virus could inject its harmful genetic code into as many of these as it wanted, but nothing would ever come of it. Before I could look into it any longer, my time with the machine was up. I decided I would look further into this under a normal microscope.

                However, one of my patients was having a temper tantrum and broke some equipment. I went to deal with that, but it was a much larger issue than I had initially bargained for. The forty-year-old man was acting childish not only because of a mental illness, but because a family member had come to visit. A fight ensued between them, and I didn’t very much want to get in the middle of it. I asked them to break it up, but they wouldn’t quit – eventually, I did have to use force to separate them and have the relative forcibly thrown out of the hospital. He was allowed back inside when his temper had cooled. I didn’t bother finding out what the fight was about, but I was sure I would find out soon. And I had a feeling that, somehow, my personal microscope was involved. If so I was prepared to me more than a little bit angry – somebody wouldn’t be getting their medicine that day if my microscope, which had been in that room, was broken.