Torched

August 1, 20??

Damien Schmidt’s lab coat was speckled in dried blood, his own to be more precise. His veins were becoming difficult to find and Damien was not a patient man. He jabbed and jabbed at his flesh with a needle as thin as a cat whisker. But still, no blood. He slammed the syringe down onto the lab table and ran his hand through his damp hair. He was sweating, and the lack of air conditioning did not help. His jaw locked and he could feel the frustration churning. He took a deep breath, trying to level out his anger as he glanced down at the papers sprawled on the table. Dust coiled like steam through the slits of the blinds. This once former closet, was now his office. This small kingdom was where he was exiled by his colleagues. Laughed and mocked for his research. His beautiful, esoteric research.

He shuffled towards the papers and glanced over them for the hundredth time. They were packed with years of research, graphs, and notes, all wedged inside a two subject notebook. He was so close to a breakthrough, he could feel it in his stomach. His theory was adapted from the nineteenth century, German archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann. Schliemann was attempting to prove the existence of myth, the Gods, and any aspect of divinity. Damien happened to stumble upon Schliemann’s work during his undergraduate years at MIT, where he was currently hoping to get his doctorate. This discovery, of what he called “The God Gene” would prove the existence of the Gods he read about as a child.

When he presented this hypothesis to his fellow colleagues, his research was thrown in his face. Their laughter rained down like the white pages of his dissertation. Damien demanded they allowed him to do his work. He specialized in organic chemistry, specifically cells and DNA. Damien found that common viruses were capable of injecting sequences of proteins that could potentially remove any “locks” that prevented humans from discovering their godly lineage. He thought it was worth a shot, but his proposal did not go well. After he was brutally made fun of, his colleagues gave him old equipment, ancient practically, to aid his research. He knew they were setting him up to fail. He vowed to prove them wrong, and to show that his theory, was true.

Damien tried one last time to draw blood from his shriveled veins, and finally struck the red gold. He smiled to himself as he turned on the machine he created with the garbage equipment he was given. The device had the ability to trace back through his ancestry, to where his specific genetic code had been created. He placed a vial of his blood into the machine, and turned it on. He watched in a trance as his blood spun around and around within the machine, with a sample of what he thought, and hoped, to be “The God Gene.”

The device continued to spin like a roulette table and Damien sat down in his torn office chair. He sighed and placed his throbbing feet on a nearby stool. He closed his eyes, and began to feel the tug of exhaustion leading towards sleep.

Before he could drift off, the sweetest sound rang through the air. A beep. He sat upright in his chair, eyes wide, mouth parched. The device beeped again, and he rushed towards it. He pulled out the vial of his blood and saw the once red liquid was now glowing a faint purple, like a dying glow-stick. His pulse leaped and rattled inside his ribs. He had done it. After six years of hard work, he had found answers.

That’ll show them.