Nucleic † Dennor

Promoted

When Lukas Bondevik finally got a his promotion from assistant-microbiologist to master-microbiologist and geneticist, he nearly flung his old identification card across the lab. He was so sick of staring at the words "assistant microbiologist" on his badge, as if he were some sort of novice. Lukas was no novice. 

Lukas had always been a science prodigy, whether is was acing all his biology exams in university or getting his first job at a prestigious, prominent lab in the city at the age of twenty-two. No one was more serious or more in love with their profession than Lukas. The scientists at the lab even commented on his brilliance, stating how they had never had such a young scientist be such an important figure so early in their career. It was as if he had been studying his entire life. He was even better at his job than the scientists who had been working there for years. 

Now that he was twenty-three, this promotion was like a second step on the staircase towards "chief of biology", which Lukas intended to become by age thirty. The chief of biology basically ran the entire laboratory, and every floor contained in the building. No floors were off limits, and he could oversee every project being conducted in his facility. That was the dream. 

Lukas had been working towards getting his promotion for a year now, and all his long hours in the lab had finally paid off. Though nowhere near where he wanted to be in the future, he was still happy with his accomplishment.

As an assistant-microbiologist, Lukas only had access to the five floors of the facility that were above-ground. Lukas knew there were at least twenty more floors below the surface level that were restricted to assistants because there were experiments and labs being done on those floors that are super top-secret. Now that he got his promotion, he had access to fifteen floors below surface level. He nearly had a heart-attack in excitement when the chief told him about it. He had always wanted to see these top-secret experiments. Were they coming up with cures for diseases? Were they cloning things? Were they growing organs from stem cells? Lukas was curious. 

Now that it was his first day on the job with access to the fifteen floors, Lukas made sure to wake up early. He could barely sleep the night before. Waking up at 5am, Lukas paced around his room in excitement, though never showing the emotion on his face. No matter how much his inner biology nerd wanted to come out, his face would never allow it. He was cursed with a resting aloof-face. 

It wasn't until 7 that he decided to eat breakfast and leave his house. Work didn't start until 9 but he felt like if he didn't leave his apartment  he was going to explode in anticipation. Grabbing his lab coat and shoving it into his backpack, Lukas strode through his front door and began his ten minute walk to his favorite coffee shop. Lukas lived downtown, so his walk to work luckily wasn't very far. Every morning, he would get his coffee, sit down in the shop and read or do work, and then procceed to the lab. Never once had he broken the routine. 

One of the reasons why he loved the coffeeshop so much was that there was always this cute, crazy-haired man that sat in the shop every morning and read the newspaper. Sometimes Lukas would look up from his book and the man would be staring at him, so he would hide his face further in the pages of his book to hide the pink on his cheeks. But this morning, the man wasn't there, and Lukas couldn't help but frown a little in disappointment. 

After Lukas got his coffee, he sat down in his usual chair in the corner and began reading a book about botany. Every few minutes he would peek up from his book in hopes that the man would come walking through the door and they could share their usual awkward glances with eachother. Sometimes the stranger would offer a friendly smile, and Lukas would attempt at smiling back, but he was pretty sure he often sent back a look that made him look like he was in pain. 

After reading a few chapters of his book and finishing his coffee, Lukas checked his watch and realized work started in 20 minutes. Work was only a few blocks away from the coffee shop, so Lukas decided to take his time walking there. When he finally got there, he checked in with the secretary and was immediately greeted by the head of the genetics department, who had been given the job of giving Lukas a tour of the 15 floors he now had access to. 

~

After an entire work day of absorbing the information he learned from his tour, Lukas on top of the world. He had been shown literally every square each of each of the fifteen floors and what was on each of them. One floor was dedicated to biotechnology and creating new medicines, another floor was printing organs out of 3D bio-printers by using stem cells as the base for the creations, and another was dedicated to studies on brain trauma, in which they had actual brains from donors who had died of complications and wanted their brains to help further scientific research. Lukas had never geeked out so hard before in his entire life.

When he finally reached the last floor he had access to, he frowned. He wanted to keep going! Everything he had seen so far was so cool, and he couldn't even imagine the stuff that was on the floors beneath him. The floors beneath him were labelled top-secret-secret and were only allowed to be accessed by the chief and by the heads of each department of biology in the complex. Lukas's dream of becoming head of the microbiology department and then chief of the entire complex was partly due to his curiousity of what was on the lower levels. It must've been groundbreaking science. 

After the head of the genetics department finished giving Lukas the tour, he told him that he could bump around and explore the floors for himself if he wanted. Lukas was honored. He spent the next few hours hopping from one floor to the next and thoroughly reading each file of the experiments he looked at. 

When the day was finally over and it was time to leave, Lukas decided he would stay a few minutes longer on the 15th floor, which he personally thought was the most interesting. It was the bio-printer room, where the scientists had successfuly printed skin tissue and were now working on printing a set of lungs. Lukas found the entire process fascinating, and could not help himself from staring at the machinery with amazement and looking at all teh crazy things it had created. Lukas found himself staring at a 3D printed nose when he suddenly heard a loud, deep-throated scream coming from somewhere in the facility. Lukas suddenly became aware of how he was now alone, on the fifteenth floor, way past the time that he was supposed to leave. 

Who had just screamed though? It sounded deep, and it sounded like it was coming from a floor beneath him. But Lukas didn't have access to the floors beneath him. The scream had sounded almost inhuman, like a screech from a beast that was lying in the depths below. Lukas froze as soon as he heard a second scream. This time it sounded like whatever was down there was in pain. 

"What the hell?" Lukas muttered under his breath, his heart slightly racing at the creepy noises from below. He had never heard a sound as desperate or painful as what he had just heard. Lukas heard the sound again, but this time the scream was cut off and muffled, as if someone were trying to silence it. Slightly freaked out and definitely concerned, Lukas decided to go up to the lobby and ask the chief about it. It surely wasn't an experiment, right? 

The scream had the hairs standing up on Lukas's arms, so when he got into the elevator, he felt slightly better about getting away from whatever creepy being was on the sixteenth floor. After swiping his identification card and pressing the button for "lobby", Lukas took a deep breath. When the doors re-opened, the lobby was dark, and the receptionist and all other people who were working there before were gone. Lukas checked his watch. It had been an hour since the lab closed. Whoops. Lukas decided he would just talk to the chief tomorrow. It couldn't have been that urgent, right?