#did you know it takes like weeks to sequence dna but the world record is 5 hours

[thecorpuscorpse]

#6- An Anonymous Source

CW: Knife use and blood, some 'fighting', mild kidnapping

It had been two months since the sealed letters began showing up on Villains bedroom window at night when they weren't there. Each one with a different wax embellishment on the front, made of paper worn with time, and never signed. The swirling perfection of the calligraphy was unlike anything Villain had seen before, just like the words they formed. Five letters were stacked on the desk, and the sixth Villain held by the lamplight, eyes scanning over words they always wished to hear. In brief moments, they almost believed them.

The life they lived was not as tender as the words directed at them. There was no beauty in bloodshed- not anymore, at least. Yet, whoever seemed to be hiding in their blind spot thought otherwise. With how long they ran Headquarters, it was refreshing to have a little spice in the routine of wondering who thought so highly of someone as lowly as them.

After sending their squads out for recon, Villain remained tucked away in their office at headquarters to keep an eye on cameras when one detected movement in the server room. Villain knew each employee schedule inside and out- after all, they arranged each one. Within the orchestrated machine-like facility Villain spent so many years building up, the blaring alarm was akin to grinding gears.

Hero.

Every so often, Hero would figure out a new password Villain set, or intercept shipment plans that then would lead Villain to foil Heros plans, and the process would repeat in a few weeks. It was so hard to find good help nowadays, so Villain found handling Hero a nice break from handling paperwork. There was monotony in routine, but at least they could take their impatience with their anonymous admirer out on the other.

"Dammit... now of all times, Hero?" They snapped as they stood from their desk.

As much as the alarm irked them, Villain was more irritated their work was being interrupted. Scanners failed to pick up any DNA trace, leading them to another dead end. Somewhere, someone saw Villain and thought fondly of them. For a while, the simple knowledge of it was enough to qualm the loneliness, but now was more of a curse. They called the author a coward. They called the letters a trap. Yet, Villain headed down the hall to pursue a perpetrator after they stayed up until four in the morning... again... to read the letters in hope something would tell them who claimed to adore them so.

The door to the server room was ajar, main lights turned out. The dull glow of blinking red, blue and yellow lights cast shadows on the wall in varied patterns. The main lights were shorted, forcing them to identify misplaced figures in the dim light. It only dug further into Villains impatience with the matter. Against the low hum of the computers, a tinny clank echoed near the back wall.

Villain kept steady strides slow, mindful of the linoleum under their shoes and how quiet their breath was. Silence, as well as any leverage, was better than none, and it worked to Villains virtue when it guided the blade to the turned back of who they knew was tampering with their tech.

"I don't have time for you tonight, Hero," Villain said as they pressed the knife against their spine. "There is plenty of work for me as is without you getting involved."

Dressed in all-black, which happened to be quite flattering for the Hero, they tuned after setting their tools down and raising their hands. Villain took a step forward and pressed the edge to their throat.

"That's why I figure I'd lighten the load~" Hero said, offering an innocent shrug. "By-"

"Yes, yes, thwarting my recruitment of more people through disrupting our log system," Villain droned, pressing the blade harder. "Now really, I do have pressing matters to attend to."

There was a static in the air, and not from the whirring machines around them. The more Villain stood in it, the more irritated they got. It showed in the quick right cross-swing of butt-end of the knife towards Heros head before the move was blocked by Heros hand.

"Wow, whats the matter with you?" Hero mused with a shit-eating grin as he twisted Villains arm into a lock behind their back. The knife clattered onto the floor. "Not very like you to 'not have time for me', Villain. Plus, what a sloppy execution."

"You don't know me, Hero," Villain hummed with a smile in their voice, flexing their hand under Heros grip. "So I'll show you a real sloppy execution."

Villain dug their heel into Heros foot, and used the momentum to twist them to slam into the server paneling. With the grip loosened, Villain snaked away and went for the knife. It was only a second more before Villain was swept off their feet- literally- and hit the ground.

"Yeah, that was pretty sloppy too," Hero said as they went to further restrain the fallen Villain. "You're making me jealous, don't tell me there's another Hero you have to go cause havoc for~ Ugh, I'll be heartbroken!"

Villain struggled against Heros grasp, writhing and twisting their body so they could never get a solid pin. While Hero had their brawn at their side, Villain knew it was only a matter of leverage.

"I do, but they aren't a Hero~"

They took the moment Hero stalled in their attempts to pin them down to get their lets out to kick Hero back, knocking the wind out of them. Villain went for the knife again and came up behind Hero to hold the knife to their throat again.

"Bullshit," Hero gasped out, though an amused smile graced their stupid face. "I can barely tolerate you as it is."

Villain contemplated for a moment. What harm would a white lie do when they didn't even know who was writing the letters? There would be no one else to go after. It would be nice to pretend- Villain did it enough as it was.

"Oh, you should hear how they talk about their love for my vile and vulgar ways Hero. How they adore the plans of misery I make for the thousands," Villain gripped Heros hair and tilted their head back to look at them proper. "And the tongue they have..."

"Then why aren't you with them now?"

"Because I'm dealing with you," Villain said as their jaw set. "A thorn in my side since we crossed paths, and always coming back like a damn infection," They brought the edge up against Heros neck. "You are pestiferous- a plague in my life every time your head pops up." Villain narrowed their eyes, bringing small beads of blood against the blade. "And I think I'm going to purge the source tonight."

"Then do it."

Below them, there was a rumble followed by a blaring alarm from what Villain assumed was a few floors down. It only took one distracted second for Hero grab Villains wrist and flip them over and onto their back before they dove behind a rack of server blocks. There was a flash, and the room filled with smoke. The colors against the smoke were disorienting, yet once Villain got hold of their knife, they could barely make out a figure escaping through one of the vents.

"One thing after a-fucking-nother..." Villain hissed as they ran out from the server room and towards the blaring fire alarm down below.

Once done dealing with the aftermath of a blown-apart storage unit, Villain trudged back up to their office and collapsed in their chair. It was now six in the morning, and looking at the camera they had set up to face their bedroom window at home- no letter to be seen on the window. They pushed their hair back with a sigh, before deciding to freshen up there, and continuing their monotonous work for their empire, with breaks reading loving words Villain needed to hear after such a long night.

---

The seventh letter was different than the rest.

It had taken longer than the rest to arrive- almost a month later than the last one, when the others came once or twice a week. Nights were seemingly endless when Villain would simply stare at the window from the camera. They knew if they were home, they wouldn't arrive, and so they worked long into the night, going home every few days to make sure their plants were watered.

Unlike the other ornate and delicately put together envelopes, the newest came in a simple black one. The handwriting was reminiscent of the others yet the words scrawled unsteadily. The droning news anchor in the background discussed the impending weather as Villain attempted to make sense of everything they were reading.

What was said was not the romantic poetry they were used to, of regrets and promises they wished to keep to Villain of seeing them, of truly being with them and being sure there would be nothing keeping them apart anymore.

The signature at the bottom made Villains heart sink. Not because of who had written the confession they read. Not because it was from someone they wouldn't have wanted at all. But because it wasn't a signature at all.

Except a smear of blood.

Villains head felt light, the corners of their vision hazing a little as they tried to make sense of what it all meant. They sat down in their chair, still staring at the letter before them. It wasn't until the news anchor interrupted their broadcast with breaking news.

'The beloved and respected savior of our beautiful city, Hero, has officially been pronounced dead today by coroners after their body had been returned to city officials by an anonymous source. Further details the cause to be released.'

"No..."

They took a long look at the radio, eyes wide in disbelief as their mind began to piece everything together. In a moment, they were at their sequencer and after they got a sample of the paper, pulled out their knife. What little blood left from their fight with Hero remained, and they flaked off the dry remains in the other bottle. Time blurred as they waited, walking crop circles into their carpet while the machine processed the samples.

They didn't see anyone on the cameras the night before. No sound, no disturbance. First nothing was on the window, and when daylight broke, there it was. They hadn't dealt with Hero recently, which they only grew to notice the more they thought.

They couldn't settle down, and any time their office door was knocked on, they would simply throw a book at it and tell whoever it was to bother them tomorrow. Word must have gone around because soon the knocking stopped and Villain was left alone with the machine, which whirred just like the servers did their last night with Hero.

They were pulled out of their mind when the machine stopped, and the face glowed green with the information Villain already put together in their walk about their office.

DNA Sequencing Completed- Results: 100% Match

---

Villain drummed their thumb against the steering wheel of the car. Occasionally, it would follow the tempo of their racing heart, or the shake in their muscles from the adrenaline in their blood. The timer they set on their phone for five minutes was halfway through. Villain regretted even permitting that much time to wait. It had been too long already, and with any more time, they could be too late.

Three minutes and no sign. Villain shifted in their seat, instead now tapping their foot and squeezing their hands together. The last they slept was indistinct, waiting for the right moment to make their next move. A drastic one, which would leave more loose ends than they would like, but it was just as a drastic situation they had on their hands.

Four minutes and Villain was getting ready to get out and handle the ordeal themselves. They checked to make sure their gun was loaded, as they did a dozen or so times before even though they hadn't used it. Before they reached the door handle, the passenger side opened to Villains relief.

"Very good. Hurry up." Villain said, gesturing with the gun to get in.

Five minutes was all Villain needed. As they sped off, the silence was cushioned by the low hum of the car. Villain didn't know what to think. What to say. What if, in the time they were gone, Hero was too? The thoughts were heavy as Villain drove, until their passenger pulled them out of their head.

"I shouldn't be doing this..."

"Then why are you." Villain said, rather than asked.

"Well, you told me with a gun to my head that you hunt me down and kill my girlfriend in front of me, then send my body parts to various family members."

"Good memory, and I will if you make any attempts to run."

"Good to know..." The accomplice said with a tight-lipped smile before looking down at the bag.

"And... I'm helping someone, aren't I?" They asked after another moment of passing silence. "Someone you care about?"

There was a thick lump that sunk into Villains throat. It irked them to know they had to get outside sources with such a high risk, but they were pushed to no other choice. They offered a single, but humble nod before turning off onto a dirt road.

"What the fuck did you say you did again?"

"I'm a first assistant," they said as they shuffled the medical bag on their lap while twisting the handles nervously. "Not quite a surgeon, but I'm getting there."

"Of course, I pick up the intern in the operating room..." Villain uttered as they watched the road. The car, being small, only allowed the young surgeon to hear the remark clearly.

"The operating rooms of the ICU," they huffed a bit too confidently for Villains liking. "Much more intense and less room for error. I mostly make sure the room is clean but I do help with sutures, and other general care."

With a less than patient sigh, Villain parked the car in the driveway and looked the young surgeon square in the face, gun held towards them with a finger threatening pressure on the trigger.

"Keep your attitude in check, and keep them alive." They said flatly. "Both the person I'm bringing you to, and your girlfriend."

It had just been the two of them since Hero showed up battered, beaten and bloodied just two weeks before. They hadn't gotten better and while Villain was good at many things, medical diagnosis weren't one of them. They took leave from work to get Hero somewhere more secluded than Villains home closer to the city.

When Hero was awake, Villain limited themselves to one question because Hero would get winded from speaking too much. Day by day, they learned how Hero wanted things to be different, not only for themselves only, but between the two. How they grew to love Villain, admire them and respect them, to want them yet be restricted from doing so. Hero detailed how they convinced a select few to assist them in faking their death with a glow which made Villain hopeful, but then Hero fell asleep before telling them how it went, and hadn't woke up since. It'd been three days.

With a nervous nod in understanding, the two got out of the car, and Villain walked the man to the house with a gun drawn on them the entire way. Sleepless nights were still to come, yet there was a bit more relief in knowing Hero stood more of a chance now. Villain hoped they didn't make a mistake, for Hero wouldn't be able to survive it.

[sandsofdteam-moved]

Do you mind me asking more about the grave you are working on?

Archeologie sounds so interessiting, getting a glimpse at the lives of people from a time long gone.

So much is different, but there is still so much that is similar

(Why did this turn out so dramatic xD)

yaaa no mind at all! I'm going to be a little vague because a tad bit of sleuthing could give u my actual irl info if I go into detail, but with that being said:

I'm currently on a research trip sponsored by my school to excavate what's thought to be a cemetery, but there's technically no historical record of it, so we don't really know much about the site. By major (and prior research experience) I'm a computational biologist/geneticist, so going into this I had no idea what to expect, but it's been so much fun!

We've found many graves so far, with skeletons ranging in age from an unborn fetus to what was preliminarily assumed to be an old lady, and we've spent the last 3 weeks excavating a large (about 10m x 7m x 1.5m) pit and taking those bones out from it! This week, we have an osteologist (a person who studies bones) who's flown in and so today I was shadowing her and learning how to put together some bones and what things are important to look for when analyzing them. Something I learned today is that the reference population/numbers that the osteologist normally uses isn't really applicable to the skeletons that we've found here because those are for white people in Europe, whereas here it's a lot more diverse in terms of where in the world people were essentially imported from for cheap labor in colonial times, so we need to figure out a different method of calculating the living stature of the man that we found. This is our last week of work before going home, so I'll (hopefully) be working with the osteologist to process all of our skeletons :D My primary interest isn't in osteology, but rather ancient DNA, so I'm looking to maybe be involved in the process of analysis of samples from our skeletons so I can get a full look, from start to finish, of excavating a body, handling it with care both physically and culturally (for example, we had a panel of religious leaders come to survey and essentially give the ok to excavate since we aren't totally sure of the buried peoples' religions, so we wanted to give them their deserved respect by covering all the possible religious beliefs we could), sampling from the skeleton (which is a rigorous and extremely precise process), and then doing the lab work to purify, sequence, and analyze those samples. Right now, since the bodies have literally been taken out of the ground in the past week and a half, we don't have a lot of information but hopefully that'll change as the research process progresses further!

I would highly suggest taking a look at archaeology if you're interested, it's a lot of fun! There's honestly something for everyone: like I said, I'm primarily a biologist but ancient DNA is a great way for me to merge it with my other academic interest in colonial history. Other people I've met with have combined it with management, history, computer science, English, human biology, political science, and so so so much more. It's such a wonderfully wide field that even if you're not a big fan of the physical labor that comes with fieldwork, there's something that you can do to contribute!! I've said it before but little me would've been really fuckin happy if she saw that I was essentially doing the job of a paleontologist but with people, because I can contribute to understanding the very convoluted history of places like where my mom's from, somewhere that has been fucked up by British colonialism and where social tensions run high—there is a shared history between the contending groups, and archaeology can give the unifying history a research-based backing :>

[kyle-valenti]

burnout only feels like burning

2.7k / Summary: kyle valenti doesn't have the same quarantine as his friends; an exploration of kyle's trauma during covid as a doctor. (tw depression & other triggers you’d imagine with this subject)

read & comment/ ao3

A little like the virus itself, Kyle’s relationship with his mask begins with worry, annoyance, and then pain. He’s more than happy to have the proper N-95 mask as they begin to get their first case at Roswell General but then a couple more patients trickle in and within a few days his skin is irritated and itching. Maybe it’s the news, maybe it’s the texts from his friends that he’s increasingly missing, but when the Regiment starts spouting off about how COVID is a joke he thinks it might be affecting his nerves too. By week three his former red mark left by the mask has become a permanent feature to his face and by week five it’s not a mark but a bruise instead. Blisters and cracks in his skin litter his hands from over-washing. His feet become so overused the pads of his feet feel numb and bruised and he wears through an entire pair of shoes.

Positivity has fled from his life by week seven and now he’s inside of a survival mode he’s never experienced. He thought after last year he’d be used to anything the world (or universe, rather, given all these aliens) could throw at him. Now what feels foolish, he had believed that there was nothing that could be worse than the previous pain of losing a patient or finding out his father had experimented on people’s lives. 

When he’s out of ventilators and CPAP machines because Albuquerque needs them more and he has to choose whether or not to save the life of an eighty five year old or a thirty two year old he remembers from high school, he breaks.

 Guilt is one thing, grief is another, but the pure rage he feels knowing that Max Evans is out on the town patrolling as some fucking cop and not someone who could heal most of this hospital makes him want to commit actual murder. Maybe trading the blood of an alien on his hands would feel less heart-wrenching. But no. Max had brought back Rosa and had paid the price. Quelling his anger, he went back to work.

 He slept at the hospital most nights in the height of it. Sure the couch was rough, but it was better than the other on-call doctor beds down the hall. Three twelve hour ER shifts of a usual work week doubled to five days of thirteen hour shifts. Soon there’s a week where he pulls double shifts for an entire week when one of his nurses is urgently hospitalized herself. Hospital directors had left them with no PPE except contaminated masks to reuse. Maria, Isobel, and Rosa are in the forefront of a drive to make and donate masks to his hospital after some social media posts that he doesn’t even see until the cloth masks arrive and his medical assistants give him their handwritten note. It makes him smile, but smiling feels so foreign that he almost wants to break from that.

 Visitors are no longer allowed which means Kyle isn’t allowed to use his bedside manner to comfort the family of patients. He has to facetime mothers, spouses, and children and hold the phone over a patient who can’t breathe without machine assistance and pretend that everything is fine and that there’s still hope despite the hypoxia and lack of rising vitals. Ignore that if the patient goes into cardiac arrest more than once, the kindest thing to do given prognosis is to let the patient pass. Resuscitation and DNR (a patient’s begging request to not be resuscitated) becomes a word he uses in his daily work and not simply for intense surgeries.

 Exhaustion isn’t a deep enough adjective to describe the fugue state he goes into. File to file, room to room, ventilator to next… he isn’t surprised when his body starts to wear down. When he no longer feels hunger and instead feels all too hot and dizzy. Telling himself it’s just because of how much he’s exerting his body while covered in layers and layers of protective clothing doesn’t help the fact that he’s starting to have more trouble breathing as he walks the hallways at a fast pace. When he begins to cough, he does what he promised himself he wouldn’t do and drives out post-shift to the desert cabin of Max Evans.

 Part of him is too desperately tired to knock, but when he arrives on the property with the cop car idle and the house dark and at peace for the night, his fury greets him with the embrace of a long-lost friend. Knuckles pound at the wood and Max answers the door with surprise and a general look of defense, and Kyle tries not to immediately punch him in the face at the fact he looks like he had woken up from a comfortable sleep.

 “Heal me.” Kyle manages to spit out.

 “I—what’s wrong?”

 “Beginning stages of respiratory distress, fever, nausea—what do you fucking think?”

 “Kyle—,” Max starts to say, the hesitation deepening, and that does it.

 “No. I have not asked you for anything in all of this, Evans. Anything!” He shouts, voice hoarse. “Not when people got sick, not when they started dying, not even when we started having to let people die on purpose. And you know what? I wasn’t going to even come and ask you now, but I can’t get sick when I’m the one here fucking saving lives out of the two of us and you’re just cruising the streets handing out goddamn traffic tickets.”

 Max’s face isn’t stony like it usually is when Kyle’s yelling at him; this time it’s crushed and guilty but not nearly enough. “What kind of hours you work this week, Evans? A nice 8 to 4? Did you get facetime with Isobel or your mom, maybe binge through a few books and movies after you’re home? Did you sit down and eat a nice dinner and or go over to drink a few beers with Guerin since you can’t get sick? Even get a nice eight hours of sleep in your own bed in your nice quiet home?”

 No response.

 “I am not asking to sequence your DNA like Liz. All I am asking is for you to let me heal people since you don’t want to.”

 A night breeze is all that makes noise for a moment as Kyle catches his breath and glares at Max, who stands quietly but is staring down at his boots before he finally looks up and nods. Max steps forward then, and Kyle sees that his eyes are actually filled with tears. Temper deflating, but still not subsiding entirely, given that not much else is able to be done; Kyle lets Max place a hand on his shoulder and feels the extremely weird feeling spread throughout his body. Something more electric than anything else, which God knew made a lot more sense concerning his powers and how the body operated with electrical nerve impulses, but that is a train of thought better left for another day. He wants to just walk away, and he almost does, but he still mutters a “thank you” before he does so.

When his nurse dies a few days later and he watches as the staff double bag her body to take to the morgue, he escapes to his office and crashes on his couch with sobs. There’s no one here to support him. He can’t go to his mother’s home and collapse into one of her comforting embraces without risking infecting her. He can’t get wasted at the Wild Pony with Maria when it’s closed. He can’t visit Rosa or Arturo at the Crashdown. Keeping his friends and family safe meant keeping them away from him. Keeping them safe meant he needed to stop pushing his head into his hands to try and control the sound of his crying and get back to work at saving the lives around them.

He gets put on leave by the hospital administrator when he’s almost arrested for decking Wyatt Long in the hospital parking lot as the idiot stood outside with a sign rallying Regiment members to make sure the hospital was told it was killing people on purpose for the election. If Jenna hadn’t been the officer on duty he would have been cuffed and put on record, jeopardizing his license, but there was some self-preserving part of him that desperately wished for his practice to be over anyway. He’s not even sure how Jenna handles it, honestly, all he remembers is her dropping him off at his house from her patrol car like she had been nothing but an uber. No matter how angry and adamant he gets, his boss refuses to bend, saying it’s for his own good given the connections the Long’s have in the town and how Kyle has worked almost 74 of the past 76 days.

Alex is the first to visit him, unannounced. When the doorbell rings Kyle is mindlessly pretending to watch some tv show in his living room that’ll distract him from his consuming thoughts about patients, so he doesn’t get up to answer. He checks his silent phone to see if he was forewarned of a visitor but sees nothing. Unsure if it’s his boss or a patient’s family, he forces himself up onto his sore feet and opens the door after grabbing a regular mask off the coffee table. Black face mask on and standing further out from the door on the porch is Alex, the usual gruff hello turned into something soft. “Hey.”

Kyle heaves a sigh. He had wondered when the pity visits would begin. “Hey. You really shouldn’t be around me, you know.”

“I’m clearly a minimum of eight feet away in an open space while masked.” Alex smarts back. “Either way, I’m worried about you.”

Scoffing, he shakes his head. “Don’t fucking worry about me. Worry about getting sick, because if I have to see another person I care about die, I--,”

“Kyle.” the other says too kindly, the sort of pacifying voice Alex reserved for only the most dire situations. “I have no idea what you’re dealing with in specifics, but my experiences do overlap with yours in some places.”

“And?”

Maybe it came out a little too rude, because Alex raises a brow, but then sighs instead. “And I’m just checking in to make sure you know people care about you.”

“Thanks, Manes.” Kyle huffs in return, managing not to roll his eyes because focusing on being blunt and abrasive was so much easier.

“Just be careful.” Alex interjects before Kyle could close the door and turn back to his show. “Dealing with the trauma of what you’re dealing with gets dark very quickly.”

“Because I punched Wyatt Long?” he spits back sarcastically.

“No, because the suicide rates for healthcare professionals are drastically increasing along with the rates of PTSD diagnoses.” Alex says flatly, ever one to be unfazed by sarcasm. “And I’ve lost more active duty members to suicide than I have combat.”

Kyle pauses, caught. Maybe Alex had known he would be, because there isn’t some way he can give a smile and reassuring wave with him like he could his mother or Liz. While Kyle hadn’t actively thought of a plan, he couldn’t pretend he had noticed signs of depression the second he was alone in his house. 

“The quiet is the worst part, right?” Alex says, all but reading his mind. “Not always because of the flashbacks, although those are horrible, but because if things are quiet then--,”

“--people are dying.” Kyle finishes, his voice raspier by the end of the three words. “Yeah, well, mine still are.”

“They’re going to.” Is what felt like a cold response, but somehow gave Kyle the understanding he’s been craving. “They’re going to die and because of your profession you’re going to be able to save some of them. Which will make you think you’re responsible to save all of them and because you’re a good person you’re going to feel guilty in ways that no one will understand for being human and failing to.”

“Failing is all I do lately.” Kyle replies. “Usually the wins feel higher than the losses as a doctor, but with this-- and no one outside of it cares. They go outside and yell about how this is about a fucking election and when it’s not the patients, it’s the hospital pretending they don’t have enough money to buy us proper protection. Or the government saying this will all go away and that it’s just a light cold.”

Alex gives a small nod. “I know. I also know telling you the same advice that you’d give another doctor of trying not to burn out and instead taking a small rest is useless. So I’m just going to drop off these dvd’s and make you report back to me the difference when you’re done.”

Star Trek and Star Wars. Kyle finds a smile tug on his lips. Alex leaves with one on his as well.

When he gives a response to Alex a few days later on how Star Wars is better not more than a few minutes later Deluca is texting him with recommendations on joining her Buffy the Vampire Slayer rewatch. There’s something sweet about the fact that people have been clearly talking about him, even if definitely borderline creepy with how nosy his circle of friends can be, but he sighs and lets Maria add him to the group chat she has with Rosa and Liz where they review each episode after the fact and even chimes in every now and then. Isobel gets added not long after due to an Instagram story Maria shares and then the group has moved onto Friends after everyone shoots down Liz for suggesting Grey’s Anatomy on behalf of Kyle. Alex is also in there, even if it’s rare he chimes in with an opinion, but once they start Friends his commentary about how much he hates Ross that gets the entire group riled up does tend to make him laugh. Even Kyle agrees with Forest-- whose opinion had been shared by Alex-- that Chandler had all too many queer-coded scenes with Joey.

His mother facetimes him daily, which given how they both don’t exactly go out much starts to become monotonous, until she begins to give in and talk about memories she has of their father. Tidbits she never would have shared with him about their adult life when he was a child or teenager. He in turn facetimes Rosa and shares some of the memories of their father as well, which as much as she tries to pretend she doesn’t want for Arturo’s sake she clearly does with the million questions she asks every single time and the small smile she gives him at the end of their calls.

Liz updates him on her work which is a nice reprieve from everyone’s normalcy and lack of medical jargon sometimes, especially when she gives him inside info on covid vaccine studies not yet published to the general public yet. Everything in him wants this more than anything else in the world right now and he texts her almost every day asking if she’s heard more news even when he knows things take time. She’s a good sport about everything, even when he shares in a very angry rant about Max Evans and how they could have helped so many more people so much more quickly with his DNA-- however selfish that might have been.

When he goes back to work, he feels refreshed, even when it makes things hit like a freight train once more. Lost in a sea of inadequacy, his feelings extend past the pandemic. Even when things return to a level of normalcy and the cases subside he gets alien medical drama thrown in his face once more, and he starts to wonder if he’ll ever recover. If he was wrong to choose this calling. If the fact he can’t help Max or Maria is a sign from above or his father that it’s time to make some career move or change location like his mother and Liz. But, like he tells Michael Guerin. He can’t think he can face his future children and say he walked away from this. Or let people die by quitting, just like Rosa warns. And so he stays and tries to heal both other people and himself.

[jurassic-tales]

Jurassic Park III - Amalgam Testing

RECORDING TRANSCRIPT SUBJECT: AMALGAM TESTING - DAY 01 ISLA SORNA OCTOBER, 1997 DR. KAJAL DUA: Okay, so we successfully finished sequencing the Corythosaur...and the Ankylosaurs and Ceratosaur are in the can, so to speak. I would ask if we can finish and get out of here before we break the Gene Guard Act anymore, but...those new papers say different, don't they... DR. HENRY WU: Here's what we're going to do next...I'm going to call this 'Amalgam Testing'. No matter what happens, I want this 'testing' to be recorded as a 'failure'. DUA: Why, what...Wait, 'Spinosaurus'? There isn't even enough bones in the world, let alone... WU: I know; we have next to nothing...Only enough material to sequence a third of what we need. But if we introduce other specimens... DUA: Hence 'Amalgam'. This is going to turn it into a hybrid. WU: Yes. Technically all of our clones are 'hybrids' with frogs, but our Dilophosaurus proved that more - experimental - hybridisation was possible. DUA: So what, do the same with the Spino? WU: Not exactly...We know next to nothing, but what we do know is that it's related to two other animals we do have material for; Baryonyx and Suchomimus. DUA: Three dinosaurs in one! WU: Exactly. It will be a challenge, but Masrani intends to honour Hammond's wish of a fully functioning theme park and we need to be prepared for every kind of project he may throw at us. DUA: 'Challenge' is an understatement; with the combined DNA, we'll have no guarantee of size, of metabolism...we can't even be sure that we can keep the female chromosome! WU: That won't matter; we're only going to breed one specimen. DUA: Yeah...One... DAY 45 NOVEMBER, 1997 DR. HENRY WU: What happened? DR. KAJAL DUA: It bit him; it's only a few days old, but it nearly took his hand off. WU: Fascinating. DUA: He lost a lot of blood, but he'll live. But that goes to show what happens with accelerating the growth hormones! WU: But showing signs of developing strength already; that's new. DUA: Merging three dinosaurs together might do that...! Looks like the 'amalgam testing' worked...For now. WU: It will need to be under constant supervision. DUA: And you're asking me to do so...? WU: I'm asking everyone to do so. DUA: That's fine...Until it starts being able to run around and pick us off, one-by-one! WU: You make it sound like a monster. DUA: Hm...I suppose I'm just worried if we can control it or not. WU: We will control it...We'll need everyone we can to run every test possible. DUA: Well, you'll be glad to know I already ran one basic test; congratulations, Doctor...It's a boy! DAY 67 DECEMBER, 1997 DR. KAJAL DUA: For the record, I did think the cattle prod was a bit much. DR. HENRY WU: It was necessary. Has it been feeding? DUA: Yes...Feeding well, drinking well...He definitely likes fish. But even with the amount of food we give him, he still snaps at us. WU: Sounds like a behavioural issue; in time we may need more than just a few volts. DUA: So that's how we're proceeding then; he gets stronger, we fight harder...? WU: It needs to learn who's in control. DUA: I agree. But as he gets older, he's going to learn that he can take control very easily...quickly. Dangerously. Two of our team are already in intensive care; what happens when we actually lose someone? What happens when it's just you...? WU: I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. For now let's just stick to the testing. DUA: Let's give him a chance to recover, first. WU: We don't have the time...Unless you don't want to...? DUA: Well, I will but...I don't like the way he looks at everyone... WU: It's had a taste of human blood; you might look like a meal. DUA: I wish it was. It's like...there's hatred in those little green eyes. In between every test, there's pure anger glaring at us. DAY 88 January, 1998 DR. HENRY WU: The data we're getting is incredible; testosterone levels, resilience, muscle and bone density... DR. KAJAL DUA: Yes, unfortunately we're running out of restraints. WU: The sail is a wonder in itself... DUA: You know we're putting hum through unbearable pain by your demands...? WU: I bred this hybrid for survival. I need to know its breaking point. DUA: Well, lucky for him the anaesthetic wears off faster than it used to... WU: Don't you want to know as much as possible? DUA: Of course, his behaviour is of my professional interest, which is why it's frustrating that we can't observe him close-up without him wanting to kill us! WU: And yet you still seem to care about it...? DUA: You're not here all the time, Dr. Wu; I've been through observing his early days of cowering in the corner of his cell to listening night after night to his deafening howls...calls that can't be answered because he's all alone, no doubt. WU: I haven't heard anything like that. DUA: That's because a week ago he became quiet. I've been watching the night footage and he's not sleeping as much as he used to...He rests, but he's always on guard. And look at this from last night...He's barely three months old and he's worn himself out buckling the bars of his cell and smashing the concrete wall. WU: It could break out. We need a deterrent. DUA: With what? Since he learned he can maim us, he's had no fear. WU: All creatures are afraid of fire, Dr. Dua... DAY 102 February, 1998 DR. KAJAL DUA: The force of his bite is going to match a Tyrannosaurus. DR. HENRY WU: That will be the Crocodilian DNA I included; a little something for the fusion to hold together. DUA: Well, your cocktail may hold together a bit too well; I don't believe it's exaggerating to say that when he gets to adulthood, he could cause an extinction-level event on the island. WU: That's the potential I was hoping for. DUA: As long as he keeps to himself, other predators don't intervene and no more humans appear - which I know is unlikely since San Diego - he should fit in with the ecosystems. WU: I hope it doesn't stray too far to the forests in the South-West... DUA: Careful, Victor, that almost sounds like you care about him...! WU: I don't want it encountering the Tyrannosaur couple. We may need it for further research when Masrani's plans develop. We're well behind the perimeter fence at least. As long as that holds up, most of the other assets should be safe. DUA: I see. Well let's say the fence fails, the aviary will be the next at risk...Those are the accidental Pteranodons we don't want flying free, if I remember right. And then that's on the river; what if he gets off the island? WU: Let's not get too speculative, Dr. Dua. There's no if when...Wait, what's that...? DUA: Shit...That's them, isn't it; they're coming! WU: Hm...It was only a matter of time. We've got the necessary data; We need to get going. DUA: What about the Spino? WU: What about it? DUA: We're just going to...leave him? WU: We'll have to. DUA: Okay...I'm releasing him now. WU: What?! DUA: Yes, he'll break out eventually, but if you don't want them finding out about the testing, then this is just speeding things up...Then there'll be no survivors. WU: Using him as a weapon! DUA: Surprised you didn't think of that first. WU: Well, I'm...surprised that you did! DUA: I won't be long. WU: Dr. Dua...Make sure you're careful; when Masrani's park gets on its feet; we'll need you. DUA: I'll take that as a 'thank you'! I'll meet you at the boat. WU: Good luck. ((Originally posted in five parts on my non-Tumblr blog here))

[mymoodwriting]

Blooming Eyes

F!Reader x Poison Ivy!Suho

Genre: Poison Ivy AU

Warning: Murder, Blood, Needles, Seizure, CPR, Abuse, Gunshots, Poison

Words: 5.7K

Chapters:

One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven | Epilogue

Prompt: Meeting an alien is one thing, but it’s a whole other thing when such a creature seems to fancy you. There was so much you wanted to do, but one decision changes your life in a way you never could have imagined.

A/n: This took a lot longer to write than I thought, but oh boy did I do things.

    You slowly opened your eyes, sunlight against your face. You were comfortably laying in bed, the sheets soft and warm around you. You probably should have woken up, but you were too happy and cozy where you were. So you opted to close your eyes and drift back to sleep. Even if you didn’t know it, that warm fuzzy feeling was familiar and not in the best way.

♥♥♥♥♥

Five Weeks Ago

    Suho was nice enough to provide you with a few blood bags, since you were constantly running tests. You thought it would have only been one but you needed to figure out just how much blood you would need to use. Too much could kill both cell structures and the host, whereas not enough would wield the same results. It took a while, and this time you absolutely refused to use any test subjects, it would be pointless anyway until you figured out the right dosage. You wound up falling asleep in your lab quiet often. Usually you’d wake up on your own and just get back to work, but on one occasion, the most important one, Suho woke you.

“Your work ethic always impresses me.”

“What?”

“Come on. You’ve been working a lot lately, I’ll let you get some proper rest.”

“No, no I’m fine.”

“Y/n-”

“I got it! I got what you wanted.”

“What.”

“Look.”   

    You pulled up your most recent results on the monitor, then showed him a sample under the microscope.

“I got it. The right combination. I just need a test subject.”

“I see. You’re sure this will work?”

“We have the same knowledge, you’ve seen the results, you know it will.”

“And where is this serum?”

“Here?” You showed him the vials. “I managed to make three before I passed out.”

“I see.” Suho grabbed one. “What about the side effects?”

“Um… I don’t know, the chance of success is ninety nine percent, but I don’t know what effects it will have on the body. I don’t think it will be comfortable considering this will be a form of metamorphosis. It’s why I need someone to test it out first and-”

    While rambling you hadn’t noticed a vine creep over and hand Suho a syringe, let alone notice him loading it up with the vial’s contents. Before you knew it the needle was in your chest, in your heart, and emptied out. You stared down at the syringe, watching as it injected you with the serum, then looked up at Suho, panic starting to rise. He merely smiled, cupping your cheek.

“Don’t worry darling, I’ll keep record of the side effects for you.”

“Why… why would you…”

    You started shaking and collapsed into Suho’s arms. You weren’t sure if it was going to hurt, but the shock of it all made you pass out. Suho kissed your head, removing the syringe, picking you up in his arms and taking you upstairs to the bedroom. He laid you down in bed, you were still shaking, and had worked up a sweat.

“Write that down for me Cupcake. She’s shaking like tree branches in the wind, and worked up a cold sweat. Although no signs of deterioration or anything like that, and this is minutes after coming in contact with the serum.”

    Cupcake typed away on the laptop in the room, before curling around Suho’s arm. It tugged on him for a bit to get his attention.

“She’s going to be just fine. She’ll be better too, just give her time.”

    You spent days in bed, a few times waking up in a haze, but you were never conscious long enough to remember. The initial shaking stopped after a few hours, although what came next was some trouble breathing. It became shallow and uneven, despite that you still wouldn’t wake up on your own.

“Y/n!”

    Suho had been working when he felt it, your heart stop. He ran down, nearly slipping but the nearby vines kept him steady. He rushed into the room, picking you up in his arms, checking your pulse, and not finding one. He quickly started CPR.

“Come on, come on.”

    He wasn’t sure if he actually did something or not, but after a moment you took in a breathe. It was calm, and soft, if he hadn’t been so close he might not have noticed. Without much thought he hugged you tight, making you whine from the pain of the bruised rib.

“Sorry, sorry, I just…”

    Suho was laying you down when it finally hit him, your breathe. He couldn’t help but chuckle and truly kiss you for the first time.

“Just as I thought.”

    It wasn’t until a few days later that you finally woke up. The bit of sun that peeked in from the curtains warming your face. You opened your eyes, filled with a childlike wonder. You got up, looking around, the place foreign and yet familiar. You ultimately fell out of bed, unable to stand up, but crawling towards the curtains. You stopped when the plants opened them for you, letting you bask in the full light.

    You wound up falling asleep again, a blanket draped over you, like a cat laying in the sunlight. That’s how Suho found you, becoming amused and somewhat concerned all in one. He gently shoke you awake. Your eyes fluttered open, and you looked around. When you saw Suho you smiled and snuggled against him, relaxing and dozing off again.

“Well aren’t you adorable.”

    Your stomach growled and you jumped awake, confused over the sound and the feeling. You looked to Suho, unsure of what was going on or what to do.

“I see… you’re a lot less human than you thought you’d be, but still hungry like one, well, like me. Come on, let’s get you something tasty to eat.”

    Suho helped you to your feet, watching you stumble after a few steps. He caught you before you fell, another chuckle escaping his lips.

“Guess you forgot how to walk too.” You tilted your head to the side, confused. “It’s okay, we can work on that later.”   

    He pulled you close and picked you up in his arms bridal style. You couldn’t help but smile again, wrapping your arms around his neck and leaning against him, very content. He stared for a while, just watching you, but your stomach growling again made him move. You had your eyes closed but when you heard water splashing you opened them, looking around for the sound till you found it. You looked down, staring at the water, trying to reach down to touch it. You weren’t going to give up so easily, not aware of Suho’s words, and ultimately slipping out of his hands.

    You fell into the water below, at first feeling a bit hurt, but quickly overjoyed by the water. You started splashing it around, forgetting Suho was even there and soaking him in the process. He said nothing, merely watching you, seeing how you acted like a child being shown water for the first time. You absolutely loved it, it even felt wonderful, and laid down, rolling around a bit in the hallway. You did eventually calm down, just laying in the water with a content smile on your face.

“Did you have fun?” You nodded eagerly. “I guess cleaning you up is the better option, and keeping you in bed until you’re better on your feet. Come on.”

    You happily let him pick you up again, playing with your wet hair on the way. He got you into the bathroom, having you sit and wait while he ran a bath and warmed it up. You started laughing and he looked over to see one of the vines fixing up your wet hair, although when he was about to make a comment it snapped over and pointed at him, basically glaring at him.

“What? Cupcake, she’s fine… can’t you tell what’s up with her? A combination of two different DNA sequences, it seems her plant side became dominant throughout the metamorphosis… she’s still somewhat human… she’s like a flower when it first blooms, young, and innocent, so she doesn’t know anything… yes her previous memories and personality are still in there somewhere… no, I won’t change her right now… this is important information! Why did the plant side take over? We don’t know… don’t give me that look… okay, okay, I know why but that’s not the point here, she needs to grow like this, if not now then eventually… besides I’m curious to see what she’s like this way… you’re all wonderful, and she’s just like you in this state, except there’s just a bit more… I want to know just how much more.”

    While they were having a conversation you had been playing with one of the flowers that had grown on Cupcake’s vine. It smelled so nice and the petals felt soft. You tried to grab it but when you pulled on it the vine flinched, and you felt hurt too.

“Come on my little Flower, the bath is warm.”

    You looked over when Suho called, noticing the bath full of water. You rushed over and got in, fully clothed. The water felt nice on your skin and you laid back until only your head was above it. Suho remained stunned for a moment then started laughing, helping you out of your clothes that were now very soaked.

“You really like the water huh?” He kissed your head. “I’m glad.”

♥♥♥♥♥

    The first few days were filled with wonder as Suho taught you things, and you were just being fascinated by everything with childlike wonder. He really did enjoy that side of you, to see you so happy and at peace, with no care in the world. 

“Flower?”

    It became a habit of yours, whenever he left you alone, to find you sitting on the floor by the window with the sun shining on your face. That of course was the morning habit, any other time he’d have to find you outside in the garden. He worried about you stumbling into the greenhouse but lucky for him it seemed that you avoided it, and the plants kept you from it too.

“Come on, you can go outside, and I’ll bring out breakfast.”

Really?

“Yes, now go, and no splashing in the halls.”

Okay

    Despite being able to communicate, it wasn’t like before. It was strange but it made sense, plants didn’t talk like humans, so why would his precious little flower. All the plants around him, he just understood their emotions well, and to him he always knew how to translate it, so the same applied with you, even if you weren’t fully aware of it. Although you weren’t mute, making a few noises to go along with what you were feeling on occasion. 

    Since you had matured a bit, Suho decided to take you out with him. He kept it minimal at first, introducing you to a handful of people, but eventually he started taking you along to be his plus one at extravagant parties. Even then, introducing you as a geneticist, no one really knew who you actually were. 

    You were surrounded by people with money, a lot of it, so they weren’t the type to keep up with anything relating to your field, they were just impressed by your intelligence, at first anyway. They probably wanted proof of your knowledge, but coming off as mute surely made them happy, easy to assume then you were just arm candy for Suho, which then gave all the girls the idea that he wasn’t taken. Of course you were none the wiser to those things, merely happy to be with Suho, wherever he was.

    He didn’t see anything bad about it either, or pick up on the flirting he so clearly received. He was there to socialize and make some new friends, his profession demanded it. His work wasn’t a normal one, and no one really knew it either. The rumor was he was in the business of granting wishes, for a price, but not exactly what one would expect. It’s why he was always invited to those big gatherings, sometimes working and fulfilling a wish, while also getting new customers. To those around him, he was just a really good talker.

“Thank you for coming, it’s always a pleasure to have you.”

“Of course, and I believe everything worked out for you tonight?”

“Yes, and I have you to thank don’t I?”

“You would.”

“Then shall we discuss matters going forward in my office.”

“Lead the way.”

    Suho took your hand and had you come along as you went up to the second floor. The party that evening had been in this gentlemen’s home, any access besides the first floor having been restricted throughout the event. You were a bit tired after everything, a little moreso than usual since you didn’t get as much sun as you should.

“Wait for me here Flower.”

    You stayed in a little waiting area upstairs, looking around the room at all the art and beautiful designs. You stood by the window, staring out at the night sky, even though you loved the sun so much, you couldn’t really see it, just feel it, but it was nice to be able to gaze at the moon. When the door opened you jumped a bit and quickly turned around, you knew it wasn’t Suho, but smiled nonetheless. It was the lady of the house.

“Oh, you’re here.”

    She walked over to a table that had a spread of alcoholic beverages. She poured herself a drink and offered you one, but you shook your head.

“Are you really mute?” You nodded. “So how does a girl like you end up with someone like Suho.”

    The question caught you off guard, not just because you didn’t understand what the point of it was, but also because you didn’t know the literal answer. All you really remembered was opening your eyes, and moments later meeting Suho. You didn’t even know him that well, you just knew he was good and would look after you. While you were lost in thought you didn’t notice her rambling.

“You can’t even talk, then again I bet my husband would love that from me too. Actually, do you even know him? Or are you some hired foreigner? You’re not even that good looking to begin with, probably what he could find since this whole party was last minute too. What does that Suho even do? I’ve heard he can get you anything but how exactly does he… hey! Are you even listening?”

    She stormed over to you and grabbed your arm, startling you out of your thoughts. You stared at her, a little frightened. She stared at you, a smug smile forming on her face.

“You’re not even who he says you are, just some dumb girl he probably found in some institution. You certainly don’t deserve to be anywhere near a man like him.”

    She was upset, you could tell by the way her voice had gone up, but you didn’t understand why. You tried to get her to let go of you but her grip only got tighter.

“You need to show some respect! I didn’t just find some rich guy, I worked hard to be where I am! And you? Some low life, you shouldn’t be in my house!”

    She was scaring you, and being so close you could smell much more alcohol on her. You tried to get away again only to be slapped. She let you go then, somewhat surprised by her own actions. You grabbed your cheeks, tears building up.

“Are you going to cry now? You pathetic little girl!”

    She shoved you back and you crashed against the wall, knocking over a painting. You tried to get up, wanting to leave the room, but she just took offense to it. When you tried to run she threw the glass on the table at you, and it shattered when it hit your head. You collapsed to the floor, curled up.

Home. Home. HOME. HOME! HOME! PLEASE! Please…

“Get up or-”

    She stopped midway when the door opened, Suho and her husband coming in. Suho ran to you, curled up and sobbing on the floor. You were still screaming, begging, to go home. He gently reached over to pet your head, assure you that everything was alright, then he felt the blood. Anger boiled inside him, he summoned a vine and wrapped it around her throat, hearing her struggle to breath.

“What the hell! Suho… Suho is that…”

“You humans are quite pathetic and shameless when you’re drunk. How unfortunate that your wife is no better, and fell from the balcony.”

“What are you-”

    Suho had other vines open the balcony doors and then threw her out. The husband screamed and ran over to see. She wasn’t dead, yet.

“What the hell did you do! How did you even-”

“Go finish the job!”

“What?!”

“After all you got into a fight with her drunk self and choked her out before throwing her off the balcony. You’re still pissed aren’t you? Now go finish it!”

    Suho didn’t even wait for him to leave the room, his attention back on you, sitting you up. You were still sobbing, arms wrapped around yourself, shaking just as bad as your first days of the change. He gently caressed your cheek, and held your head to heal the injury. You couldn’t even meet his eyes as you cried, still too freaked out. He didn’t say anything though, just pulled you close, and you held on tight.

“Sh, sh, it’s okay now… you’re okay… let’s get you home.”

    He put you to sleep on the journey home, erasing the nights events from your mind. You were so happy and joyous, it blinded him to the reality of the world around him. It was a dangerous place, a cruel one, especially for his little Flower. That needed to change, he was working on it, but he would need help, your help. He didn’t want to dwell on that thought for too long, undressing and getting into bed with you. Even while asleep you knew he was close and snuggled against him for the night.

♥♥♥♥♥

    Suho got up early in the morning, needing to check to make sure that last night went as he said. He let you sleep a bit more, asking the plants to keep an eye on you for the time being. He wasn’t gone for that long, but when he heard he could hear you in the midst of a giggling fit. Some vines were wrapped all around you, tickling you, even while you were half asleep.

“Ay, what are you up to now. She’ll surely pass out.”

    He got into bed as they let go, although you kept laughing for a while, eyes shut with a big smile on your face. He didn’t want to see it fade so soon so he continued the tickle attack, only stopping until you asked. You leaned against him catching your breath, making a noise of content when the curtain was pulled back.

“How’s my little Flower this morning?”

Fuzzy

“Still sleepy then. You can sleep more outside, you need your morning sunlight.”

    He wrapped you up in a blanket and carried you outside, laying you down somewhere that the sun hit nicely. You would still need to eat so he went off to prepare something, talking with the plants on his way.

“What was with the tickle fight?”

She woke up feeling worried and scared even if she didn’t know why. We just helped her focus on something else.

“Why would she feel like that?”

Did you already forget what you did?

“Huh?”

You made her like us, and she has your blood in her veins too. She’s connected to all of us, just like you. The memory of what happened last night may not be in her mind, but we all know, therefore she knows, always, deep down.

“Ah, you’re right, it’ll be harder to help her through things like that.”

Maybe don’t put her in those situations in the first place.

“I didn’t know that would happen.”

When you first started socializing with humans you didn’t take her. You left her at home with us. You could have continued but-

“I wanted her to see the world. I was traveling to wonderful places.”

You could have done all that when the only danger she’d face was a sunburn.

“I get it, I get it okay.”

Get rid of the humans, and then they’ll be no problem.

“I know, but you won’t like it.”

What?

“I need y/n for that part, and I know you’ve all grown attached to the little flower.”

Can’t… you have all that knowledge, why can’t you do it?

“I have it, but I don’t understand it like her. I’d have to study it myself first to make all the pieces fit together in my mind, and that could take a while but she’s already done it. So like I said, you’re not going to like it.”

How long?

“She studied for years, what do you think? Besides, I don’t want to mingle with humans for so long. They’ve always left a bad taste in my mouth, made it worse last night. The sooner they’re gone, the better, just like you said.”

But…

“Look I already know how to do this, it will only be for a while alright. After that I’ll get Flower back, okay?”

So… are you just going to kill y/n then?

“What? I… no… where’s Cupcake?”

With her, they’re also close with Flower. Although we are sure they still care for y/n.

“Yeah… I’m not going to hurt her, that was never the plan… this was never the plan actually… but I would have to change a lot in her mind first in order for everyone to be happy, and I don’t have that kinda time right now. So it’s one or the other for now, even when the change is complete.”

Fine, we’ll talk to Cupcake but let’s not do anything rash.

“I know, I want to make sure she’s alright before putting her to sleep for the time being.”

    You were still sleeping when he went back out. He sat down next to you and gently woke you up, the smell of food helping you open your eyes. He fed you for the most part, making sure you had as much as you wanted. Despite his work he had you stay close to him that day. So it was the first time you got to be in his office. You liked the books he had although you couldn’t read them, they were just pretty.

“Flower, it’s late, we should be getting you ready for bed.”

No

“What?” 

    You ran out of his office, Suho remaining at his desk dumbfounded. After a moment he got up and out, knowing you wouldn’t really get far.

Suho she knows.

“Knows what?”

That she won’t wake up tomorrow.

“I…” He sighed. “I should have know she’d get a feeling about this. Where is she?”

Outside. Don’t be rude.

“I know.” 

    He stayed by the house for a while, seeing you out in the garden, hugging your knees to your chest, your sobs whispers in the wind. When he finally decided to approach he was slow, not wanting to scare you again. He sat down next to you, looking up at the moon.

Sorry

“You have nothing to apologize for Flower, this is something else.”

No more sun

“Just for a while. I know it doesn’t make sense to you right now, but it will, I promise.”

Promise

“Yes. Now come on, you’ll probably get sick out here.”

    Suho picked you up and carried you back inside, a few of your tears staining his clothes. When he set you down on the bed you grabbed his hand, looking up at him, trying to make the tears stop.

“This isn’t goodbye Flower, I just need you to be safe.”

    You hugged him tight, whimpering a bit. He wrapped his arms around you and kissed your head. He rocked you to the sides and lulled you to sleep. Once he was sure you were asleep he tucked you into bed.

“I have some paperwork to deal with, it might take me all night, look after her please.”

Will do.

    He was for the most part prepared for what would happen when you woke up in the morning, or at least he thought. The amnesia was something he didn’t understand at first, and it worried him given that it could be permanent, or his Flower unintentionally doing something as well. But given that your memories slowly came back, he knew he just needed to be patient.

♥♥♥♥♥

    You jumped awake, a bit of panic in the air. You stared down at yourself again, terrified, and when you had more clarity you jumped out of bed. You remembered the layout of the house now, you knew where to go, and you ran to your lab. When you got there some of the plants were trying to get you to slow down but you were in too much of a panic.

“Don’t touch me!”

    You grabbed a scalpel and poked your finger to get some blood, putting it on a slide and getting it under the microscope. You were so scared for the results, and you didn’t want to believe them either.

“That’s not possible…”

“What’s not possible?”

    You jumped when you heard Suho’s voice in the lab, stepping away from the microscope. You were a bit shaky, still freaked out over what you saw.

“The… my cells… are still mutating… despite… I don’t understand…”

“You’re a smart girl, you’ll figure it out?”

“What? I… I just changed my genome...and that of a plants… and added your blood to… your blood… you… your blood is it’s own living organism… and by changing both DNA sequences I created a perfect environment for it to grow and thrive… both sets would have rejected each other eventually if not for your blood and… it’s caused mutations on both ends so… so that death doesn’t occur.”

“That’s pretty great then isn’t it?”

“No! No it’s not! I… if the mutation continues… all my human cells… I won’t be human anymore… not even a little bit… how… how did I miss this? It should have been obvious from the start that your blood would cause mutations to my DNA in order to accommodate itself and not kill the host… how…” Then it dawned on you. “You… you knew from the beginning didn’t you! You knew this would happen and made sure I never realized!”

“It was your idea to use my blood.”

“Without knowledge of the mutation it was the logical choice! You knew that! You did this on purpose! I could have found another way!”

“What does it matter now? You did it.”

“Is this what you want? To completely destroy humanity? Even in the ones you save!”

“The ones I save? That’s cute.”

“I… no, no I can fix this. As long as the mutation isn’t complete I can fix this.”

    You ran over to the fridge. You had two other vials of the serum, with them you could reverse its effects. You were scared and calm, but despite everything you weren’t in control. The plants grabbed you and pulled you away, restraining you, while Suho grabbed the vials.

“No, no, no, none of that darling. It’s very cute of you think I’d let you ruin such a masterpiece.”

“I don’t want this! Please, please just let me go. I’ll make more for you and tell you how but please, please, I don’t want this.”

“But I do. In fact, I’ve always needed you, just you.” Suho went over to the sink and emptied both vials. “And no one else.”

“NO! NO! NO! NO! What are you doing! It’s going to take me weeks! Months! To recreate that.”

“Who said I want that? Like I said, I don’t need anyone but you, and you’ve already done what I asked.”

“This is what you wanted?”

“Don’t you remember now? All the good times we’ve spent together? This whole world will be ours soon enough.”

“Were you ever going to kill me?”

“What?”

“You could have had me working on a way to wipe out humanity a long time ago… instead you had me create this serum… it’s a waste of time… and it’s only purpose was to change me… you were never going to kill me… were you? Not like everyone else…”

“Of course not, I needed you to-”

“Did it ever cross your mind? I thought I was just your means of escape…”

“It started that way at first… but I spent months in your head remember… I saw every memory, every emotion… you deserve better…”

“And is this, better?” You started screaming. “Is this how you show someone your love! That you care! Cause this isn’t it! You’ve kept me locked up here for months! Made me a witness to countless deaths I don’t even remember! Forced a smile on my face! You don’t love me… you just think you do… you don’t know anything… anything about… any-”

    You felt your legs give out, but the plants held you up. Your head was on fire, and you felt like you were going to pass out. Suho grabbed your chin so you could look at him.

“We’ll talk about this later.”

“You’re… you’re just proving… my point…”

“It’s you who doesn’t understand… I’m saving you, from the day we’ve met that’s what I’ve done.” 

“I don’t…”   

    You passed out, the plants letting you go so you collapsed into his arms. He held you tightly, petting your head, rocking you to the side.

“You’ll understand eventually… in time… I promise.”

    After a while you snuggled against him, happily whining. You opened your eyes, the room around you a bit unfamiliar. You looked up at Suho, his smile bringing on to your face.

“There’s my little Flower.”

Hi

“Let’s get you some sun okay, we’re going out today.”

♥♥♥♥♥

    You didn’t care much for how long it had been, or the trip, you just wanted to be with Suho. He wound up taking you to another person’s rather fancy house. You were okay, but for some reason you felt a bit uneasy.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you Suho.”

“Likewise. I’m quite impressed. People don’t usually find me, I find them.”

“Well I am a persistent man, and I have an offer you can’t refuse.”

“That’s where you’re wrong I’m afraid, I can refuse. What you want is guaranteed, but it all depends on if you can give me what I want.”

“Of course, of course, shall we talk in my office.”

“After you. Flower, I’ll be a moment.”

    You sat down and nodded, just happy to be close by. The house was nice, as was every place Suho took you too, but it was never as nice as home. A sorta house maid came in and greeted you, offering you some water. You happily took a glass, always finding water extremely refreshing and tasty. Although after a while you started feeling sick. You got, but that just made you dizzy.

Su… Suho…

    There was a sudden pain in your chest and you found it hard to breath. You collapsed to the floor, seizing. Everything started to hurt, and you didn’t know why. The maid was suddenly in your field of view.

“It’s alright y/n, you’ll be fine in a few minutes.”

“Get off her!” You were barely conscious in Suho’s arms. “What did you do to her!”

“Let her go!” A gun was suddenly pointed at Suho. “Now!”

“You vile humans!”

    A vine disarmed her and threw her across the room, Suho focused on more important matters. It wasn’t hard to figure out what had been done and that you were burning from the inside out. He rolled up his sleeve, knowing you’d need a blood transfusion, even if the effects wouldn’t last long. If you could scream you would, but you were caught up in the pain. Eventually it stopped hurting so much, but you barely had the strength to move. 

Home…

“Yes, yes I know Flower, we’re going-”

    Suho’s words were cut short as a bullet went through his shoulder. He fell forward with you in his arms. Vines suddenly covered up the wall where the gunshot had come from, but he was losing blood fast. As he tried to heal another gunshot, from inside the room, hit his chest, the maid. Suho was about read to choke her out when he was grabbed by another and pulled to his feet.

“Sehun?”

“Come on we have to go.”

“What are you… what about-”

“We don’t have time!”

“No! No we-”

    Another gunshot, it missed but still very close. Suho couldn’t fight his brother and was dragged outside, still bleeding, his focus on you instead of healing himself. Although he could do nothing as he disappeared with his brother, far from you.

♥♥♥♥♥

    You laid on the floor, vision a blur, your breathing uneven. You felt like you were dying, tears streaming down your face. Eventually someone put an oxygen mask on your face, and it brought you relief. You wished it was Suho, but of course it wasn’t, instead the lady who had poisoned you from the start.

“Just breath, breath and… what’s wrong… why isn’t it working?”

    You felt worse, a new type of poison being fed to you. It was like you couldn’t breath anymore. The panic gave you strength and you shoved her away, getting the mask off and taking a deep breath. You didn’t know, she didn’t know, but your respiratory system didn’t work the way it used to, after all, you were barely human anymore.

    You tried to crawl away, you just felt that if you could get outside you’d be alright, but that didn’t happen. It had all been planned long ago, and this wasn’t some random opportunity for Suho. Men in black stormed in and you were grabbed. You screamed in agony but that didn’t seem to be their biggest concern. You just wanted Suho but he was nowhere to be found.

[wanderingthroughwonder]

Miranda’s Fic Recs

I’ve been wanting to do this for a while because I just have a lot of fics in different fandoms that I truly enjoy. These are mostly long fics because that’s what I read the most. Fandoms included: Teen Wolf, Harry Potter, MCU, Star Trek, Kingsman, and Avatar: The Last Airbender. Find them below! (Some fanfic spoilers ahead)

So I’m starting with completed fics and then I have a few not completed fics at the end that I’m just really liking.

Embers by Vathara

Rating: Not Rated, Word Count: 704,200 Fandom: A:TLA

Dragon’s fire is not so easily extinguished; when Zuko rediscovers a lost firebending technique, shifting flames can shift the world....

This is an Avatar: The Last Airbender rewrite. It’s Zuko centric and it splits off while Zuko and Uncle Iroh are on the run and Zuko learns of healing firebending. The world building is so good and interesting and the whole fic does a great job of reimagining the A:TLA world. You meet a lot of new characters that are super well written and fit the world nicely.

The Debt of Time by ShayaLonnie

Rating: E, Word Count: 715,940, Fandom: Harry Potter, Ship: Hermione/Sirius

When Hermione finds a way to bring Sirius back from the veil, her actions change the rest of the war. Little does she know her spell restoring him to life provokes magic she doesn’t understand and sets her on a path that ends with a Time-Turner.

This fic is so good and I’ve reread it before. I love Hermione centric fics and this is definitely one. When she goes back in time she goes through school again with the Marauders and it’s so good you guys. I think the fic does such a good job of showing her grow with these new people. The relationships in this fic are so intense and I love them.

Hook, Yarn, Sinker by pprfaith

Rating: Not Rated, Word Count: 65,675, Fandom: Teen Wolf, Ship: Stiles/Peter

Stiles is happy with his store, his hobbies, his friends. Peter’s just trying to figure out how to raise his nieces and nephews without fucking them up too badly.

Paths cross.

This is the first in a series of fics. It’s a Human AU with aged up Stiles and friends but with little kids Derek, Laura, and Cora. This fic is a good time and sweet and honestly low stakes which is so nice to have these days. I think a lot of Steter fics are more intense and I enjoy them but this is such a nice change of pace where you really get to know the characters in these fairly different circumstances. The whole series word count is 161,859.

A Sequence That You Never Learned by AnnaTaylor

Rating: E, Word Count: 64,624, Fandom: Star Trek: AOS, Ship: James T. Kirk/Spock 

“Spock,” Jim breathes out, completely overwhelmed by the gesture—not quite believing that Spock knows him so well, that he’s already started researching, that he trusts Jim with a member of his own endangered species.

When Jim gets it in his head to adopt an eight-year-old Vulcan, Spock presents a logical solution to the issue of Jim’s of humanity: marriage to a Vulcan citizen.

This was one of my first Spirk fics and I honestly love kid fics. Vulcan kids are so different from Jim, but I love the idea that Vulcans still love him anyway. This is such a great Fake Marriage fic.

If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out by mia6363

Rating: E, Word Count: 13,232, Fandom: Teen Wolf, Ship: Stiles centric but technically Stiles/Peter 

Commander Stilinski looks like he fell out of a propaganda video, his armor still smoking as he pulled off his helmet and handed it off to First Officer Argent. He had a few bruises down his neck but his smile was bright.

“Glad to see you safe and sound, Mr. Hale. I’d hate for Derek to lose a member of his family.”

“I told you,” Derek snapped at his superior, “he’s not worth this, Commander.”

This is the shortest fic on my list but I love this take. It’s got a Star Trek vibe and I LOVE how everyone is made into these different aliens. Stiles being human here is so interesting and it reminds me of those “humans are the craziest of the aliens” posts. It’s got multiple POVs and I think they’re written really well and do a great job of coming together.

Where Thou Art, That is Home by ShanaStoryteller 

Rating: Various, Word Count: 94,108, Fandom: Teen Wolf, Ship: Stiles/Derek 

Stiles is 10 when he saves the Hales from their burning home and Derek from a wolfsbane bullet, and this establishes a pattern that seems to continue indefinitely.

“Then he’s facing a burning home, and he wraps the hood of his sweatshirt around his mouth before he pushes the door open and steps inside. There’s Mr. Hale asleep - he hope asleep - on the couch, next to - Stiles thinks that’s his brother but there are so many Hales, who can keep track. He rushes over and starts shaking him, can see the rise and fall of the man’s chest so he knows he’s alive, but he’s not waking up. He shoves away his hood so he can shout, “Mr. Hale! You have to get up, there’s a fire! Mr. Hale, get up!” Nothing, he’s not even twitching, both of them taking in deep even breathes like they’re having the most peaceful of rest, and Stiles is going to cry. “Wake up, wake up, wake up!”

There’s a moment where all Stiles can here is the blood rushing in his ears and not the roar of the flames or the creak of wood, then with a violent, silent pop it’s all back and both men are gasping awake, eyes open and jumping to their feet.”

This is another series! It creates a Hales Survive AU and it’s got BAMF!Stiles. The Hales in this fic are so interesting and it’s an expanded family from what we see in canon. Magic!Stiles is written so well in this fic and things get intense but it’s so good.

Counterpart by sara_holmes

Rating: M, Word Count: 217,400, Fandom: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Ship: Steve/Tony 

coun•ter•part [koun-ter-pahrt] [noun] 1. a person or thing closely resembling another, especially in function. 2. a copy; duplicate. 3. one of two parts that fit, complete, or complement one another. 

Just because Hydra used the DNA of a Captain America from another dimension to create a lab-grown, six-year-old super-soldier, it doesn't mean that said six-year old super-soldier is biologically Steve's, right? 

(Where Steve wants to ban Clint from bringing things home from alternative dimensions, until he doesn't.)

This is an amazing kid fic. Things are so messed up because of how the kids was raised up to the point they find him.I love Tony so much in this fic but also you sympathize a bit with Steve. The kid whose name I will leave out is my absolute favorite. This is also a series!

Fallout by Whisper91 kingsman

Rating: E, Word Count: 164,971, Fandom: Kingsman, Ship: Eggsy/Harry/Merlin 

As far as the rest of the world is concerned, Gary 'Eggsy' Unwin is a registered Dominant. It's on his driver's licence. It's on his National Insurance card. Hell, it's even on his bloomin' GCSE certificates. And the fact that it's all a load of bollocks is a secret Eggsy had intended to take to his grave. 

Course, he hadn't been expectin' a bloody sub-drop to sweep in and knock him on his arse in the wake of the Valentine Massacre. Turns out grief and adrenaline ain't a good combination.

I really enjoy the dynamics between the three of them. D/s fics are always so amazingly well built and I love fics like this where they’re hiding their dynamic. I think this fic does a great job of going further with the D/S world and giving it more biologically. I just reread this fic recently because I love how it’s done. 

It’s Insanity But... by rosepetals42

Rating: M, Word Count: 71,477, Fandom: Teen Wolf, Ship: Stiles/Derek 

The doorbell interrupts what had turned out to be quite the epic shoe hunt but, really, he’s grateful for the break. Or at least, he is until he heads down the stairs to grab the door, trips over a stuffed animal of some kind, bashes his head on the wall and barely manages to catch himself from falling down the entire flight of stairs. As with all things, Stiles would like to state, for the record, that this is Scott’s fault. 

Or: Scott and Stiles are raising seven children. Derek is the entertainer they hire for a birthday party (not a clown though, he’s very specific on that fact.)

This fic is such a good time! I love two bro’s raising kids together. It’s a hilarious setup and also just so good for the Stiles and Scott dynamic. Each chapter is like a slice of life. Some chapters are more about the kids and some are about Stiles and Derek. It’s just a fun fic and I love that it’s still got werewolves because I think a lot of fics that focus more on regular stuff go full on human AU. Keeping werewolves is much more fun and it’s so well handled here!

So Wise We Grow by Deastar 

Rating: M, Word Count: 81,248, Fandom: Star Trek, Ship: James T. Kirk/Spock 

”Commander Spock, we have located your son,” the Vulcan lady on the screen says, which would be great, except Jim can tell by the look on Spock’s face that he’s never heard of this kid before in his life. “If it is expedient, the child will be sent to join you on the Enterprise within the week.”

This fic is two long chapters. Again, I love kid fic and this one does such a great job. We’ve got pining and hurt/comfort and all kinds of good feels here. There’s one line about t’hy’la that is just *chefs kiss* so good and hits you hard.

Play It Again by metisket 

Rating: T, Word Count: 63,206, Fandom: Teen Wolf, Ship: Stiles/Derek 

In which Stiles goes along with one of Derek’s plans and ends up in an alternate universe as a result. He should’ve known better. He did know better, actually, and that means he has no one to blame but himself. “Laura wants to lure the kid in with food and kindness and make a pet of him, like a feral cat. Derek wants to have him arrested for stalking. They’re at an impasse. (And the rest of the family is staying emphatically out of it in a way that suggest bets have been placed.)”

This is fairly Stiles centric. It really looks into the emotions of jumping universes. The alive Hale family is so good and it’s magic!Stiles which is always interesting. What I think makes it extra good is that in a lot of universe jump or time travel fics it’s more about adjusting to how things will be now. But this fic does that while also having the new universe with its own problems. It’s just fun to see Stiles deal with all these things.

Happy Lights by LadyShadowDrake

Rating: E, Word Count: 108,237, Fandom: MCU, Ship: Mixed 

An interdimensional portal opens over New York and drops a tentacled alien in the middle of Central Park. The Avengers are called out to investigate, and hopefully return the visitor home. Steve has been brushing up on his diplomacy, but he never expected to be a liaison to an alien in such an intimate capacity, or that the alien would be so friendly, and the unusual visit turns into the world's best team-building exercise.

This is a series that is so much fun. The alien (aka the colony) is so interesting and sweet in the long run. I love seeing the team grow and as you go through the series you really get to see more of them coming together. This is just a playful fic that you can have a good time reading.

Magpie by waldorph

Rating: E, Word Count: 57,648, Fandom: Star Trek: AOS, Ship: James T. Kirk/Spock

Spock met Jim when he was 7 and Jim was 6. It has since been generally agreed that this was a mistake (or: the one where they grew up together and things are simultaneously better and worse for it).

This is such a deep dive of both Spock and Jim. It’s them growing up together and it splits off some as far as events that happen in canon. It ends before they become Starfleet. I think this fic creates such an interesting bond between Spock and Jim. I also really love where it goes as far as Spock not having grown up alone on Vulcan.

These are the unfinished fics. The first two are in progress and the last one seems to be abandoned.

Survival is a Talent by ShanaStoryteller 

Rating: T, Word Count: 353,015, Fandom: Harry Potter, Ship: Harry/Draco 

In the middle of their second year, Draco and Harry discover they're soulmates and do their best to keep it a secret from everyone. 

Their best isn't perfect. 

~ 

“Are you trying to get killed, Potter?” Malfoy drawls, stalking forward. Quick as a serpent himself, he reaches out and grabs the snake just below the head. It thrashes in his grip, but is no longer able to bite anyone. “This is a poisonous snake, and I doubt anyone brought a bezoar with them.” 

Harry glares. He opens his mouth, and feels the beginning the snake’s language pass his lips, and this isn’t what he wants, what’s the point of insulting Malfoy if he can’t understand him – 

Malfoy’s eyes widen. He slaps his hand over Harry’s mouth, “Potter, what the hell–”

This fic is in progress updated within 2020. It’s a rewrite of the Harry Potter series where Harry and Draco are soulmates. As you can imagine, that changes some things. I love this so much, I’ve read it like 3 or 4 times now. The characterization is amazing and I love the differences we see. Harry is Indian in this fic and the way it ties in is so good. You really get to see the difference in culture as well between muggleborns and blood traitor families and the purebloods.   

You great unfinished symphony (you sent for me) by ketchupcrisp

Rating: E, Word Count: 227,792, Fandom: MCU, Ship: Steve/Tony and also the whole Team 

The last thing Steve Rogers ever expected to see on a Wednesday afternoon was his (their) dead submissive tumbling out of a portal and practically into Phil’s lap, very much alive and frantic about Soul Stones and timelines and some other version of the team.

This is an AU but like literally. Tony comes from the universe we know into a D/S universe. The worldbuilding here - again like I think a lot of D/s fics excel at - is so good. It starts with everything a mess and things are intense. There’s multiple POVs which I think is really helpful in a fic like this where the relationships are so tangled. 

Born From the Earth by venusm 

Rating: E, Word Count: 277,602, Fandom: MCU, Ship: Tony Centric, Steve/Tony 

Tony Stark's born an omega in a world where that means he's supposed to follow certain social rules. He becomes Iron Man anyway: Fuck biology.

If only his biology (and the world) would quit fucking him back.

To start off, some warnings: this fic gets a bit messed up. It’s an Omega verse in the worst possible way at certain points. It’s not a fluffy fic. It also doesn’t get that far into the Stony stuff because it’s unfinished. Honestly I’m worried this writer has died and I’ve gone through the comments and looked for them online to see if they’re out there and just not writing but I haven’t found any proof of that. BUT ANYWAYS. This fic is intense but it’s such an interesting take on Omega fics. It gets pretty dark but that darkness is pre-Steve and I’m hopeful that one day it might get finished so I can see where it was going to go. 

[fixomnia-scribble]

Blue Bloods 9x21 “Identity”: Ramble Notes

Hello! It’s been an age since i had time to do a Ramble. I had an unexpected afternoon to myself, so join me, won’t you, after the spoilery cut.

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Officer Cosgrove! This is her third outing. I like her. For a drop-in Exposition Fairy, she manages to invest every line she gets with real personality.

“You can’t be out yet, Mr. Janko.” – this is a very loaded line. Jamie knows Armin’s calling from the prison, which means that he knows a) Armin is using precious phone money and time to place the call, which will certainly be b) monitored and recorded by staff, and c) news that Armin is calling a cop will be all over the place in short order. If it was some sort of emergency, the call would come from a Warden, to Lena or Eddie. So…no wonder Jamie’s curious and playing along with Armin’s rope-toss. Armin’s very good at it, clearly, offering just enough plausibility, but his voice and appeals do give him away. He’s laying on all the heavy appeals he can think of. I think Jamie’s interested, but putting his poker face through a workout, trying to see how much Armin will say.

Also, for those still playing Continuity Bingo at home: Yes, Armin was supposed to be released last year if he served his entire sentence, AND was housed at Fort Dix, not Otisville. Though Otisville makes sense for his prisoner category, too.

Also, did time take a wrinkle after the intro sequences? DNA tests come back while they still have a suspect in the investigation window, and Jamie gets access to a locked prison just because he asks? These both take weeks, in urgent circumstances. Months to years in non-emergencies.

Twins? Really? I mean, twins come up in investigations all the time, but it’s almost impossible to write them fictionally without falling into terminal cliché or overblown dramatics.

Seriously, with the “These days, dating someone for a week is like being married to them” followed by “Ask any of my exes – I’m a good boyfriend”? Oh, no, not creepy at all…

That is…quite the security monitor. Is this how COMSEC looks in Bay Ridge? It’s a far cry from the little monitor in the kitchen, or the tablet by the door! At least they stick a lampshade on it.

Ooh! Are we going to have Elegant Neighbour Lady bonding with Henry over their family shenanigans? And how in the world is Henry so shocked that Donna wants to press charges?

“Hey! Sis!” (Oh, not this again. Speaking of family.)

“Wait, both you guys are here?” Yes, because we have devolved into an English parlour farce, including an innocent fiancée having vital information withheld, so that miscommunications in Act 2 may commence. At least the Previously Married Siblings are united in their concern. In fact, I’m impressed how quickly and firmly they shut down that whole conversation – and how Jamie took it without getting yelly, though I could do with some Yelly Jamie, I’ll admit.

Now, I can see how the NYPD and an Innocence Project-like organization could be at odds over specific NYPD cases, but the shared goal  is surely the correct carriage of justice THE FIRST TIME ROUND, not after decades of expensive incarceration and bungled evidence? I will say, though, that I think Frank’s right about trimming Nicky’s flights of fancy about how much power she might have over the narrative momentum and political positioning of a police-critical organization. Especially as a Reagan. (I thought Nicky graduated last year? But of course, she took time to work. And what about her NYPD application that was such a big deal? Another Continuity Bingo square.)

That look on Frank’s face? I felt that. I’ve been on the receiving end of that. It’s a hollow sort of triumph, feeling like you may have won an argument, but you haven’t won any real support or confidence, and you’re going to be made to wear every bit of fallout. Or maybe I’m projecting…

OMG Eddie’s face commiserating with Paco, for having a rude and messy eater for a partner…and “He drives slower than my grandmother, and she’s been dead ten years!” ought to be a classic Eddie Moment.

Eddie took Jamie’s confession extremely well. And Jamie seemed to realize that he’d gone too far and was trying to own up and walk things back. It’s not a bad point to make, per se, trying to have Eddie’s side of the aisle a little less glaringly empty. But there are good reasons why it should be so.

That was Cosgrove again, walking past Danny and Maria’s desk! Hey, girl.

Yes, twins can make for amazing amounts of administrative lint in police investigations, it’s true. My PoliceDataClerk Brain says: how much work and confusion could be spared if all multiples had “Twin” or “Triplet” etc on their ID? But no, that’s quickly over-ridden by CivilLiberty Brain going: we absolutely don’t want that level of information out in the public arena, for so many reasons…

Oh, Henry. I’m glad you got Betty’s necklace back, but knowing what’s right is not a sign of rehabilitation but a moment of lucidity. Addiction is far more complex. And also, really? Putting Donna on the hotseat like that, with the light show that the entire neighbourhood can see, and then pushing your sentiments onto a family already in crisis? Not cool, Pop. Family ain’t the magic ingredient.

That said, they did a good job making Alexis look like she could be anyone’s well-loved grandkid stuck in addiction hell, because a lot of them are just that.

I do love the establishing shots of Nighttime in Manhattan.

A woman’s touch indeed: Eddie looks very cozy in Jamie’s apartment. Will and Vanessa are so damn sweet and hilarious together.

Again with the time-wrinkling: can we assume that it’s at least a month to the wedding, in BB time, if Jamie was just dealing with Armin’s furlough request, and Eddie’s just now thinking of putting a slideshow together?

Wasn’t that the sweater she was wearing after Jamie came to check on her, the first time she took down a suspect, and she told him she needed him, and he stayed? Oh, my heart. And it just pinged again at Eddie and Lena wanting desperately to believe that maybe it’s possible to make some new family memories…I still don’t think Jamie’s 100% taken in, but he’s the one who took the bait at first, and he put it into Eddie’s hands, and he’s going to abide by her decision.

Dinner looks amazing, and IT’S GETTING COLD, HENRY. Sean’s been awesome this whole episode. Give the boy more lines. And at least if Nicky’s pulling the Reagan equivalent of Juliet Capulet becoming personal assistant to Mama Montague, it’s nice to see Frank shutting everyone up so she can take a breath and do some work…or not? Wait. Let me rephrase: nice to see Frank speaking to Nicky as grown adult with the capacity to understand and navigate complex situations that can’t be neatly tied up.

“Even the Jankos should be able to pull this one off.” Oh, ouch. Also: you are absolutely definitely not allowed to hug in a Medium Security Visiting Center, at least not up here. But Eddie ain’t no fool, however much love she may still have in her oft-trammeled heart. And Jamie’s quiet, “Right behind you,” speaks volumes. He was there as a witness as much as a support, and rightly so.

ID by kissing: the Shoop Shoop method of forensic identification. Poor woman, but scene well played.

Aww, man, Alexis. I was afraid of that, especially when Armin’s plotline ended with him showing he hadn’t overcome his own addictions, either. Ugh, and again with all the neighbours in Bay Ridge clustering. And Henry? NO. Unless she was placed in an exclusive, locked-in and high-security rehab facility, she’d have had access to more drugs in prison and very few ways to pay for them.

I could rant about the ethnicity politics of this show, but that would be a level of Discourse which has been entered into by many others…except to say this: could a Reagan please fall in love with a person of any ethnicity but Euro-white? Because I would love to see some of the layers get pulled back for real when that person comes to dinner. Reference intended.

And yep, there’s the crazy twin hyperdrama. Cue the Dead Ringers theme.

This has been A Ride from start to finish.

[agent-kentauris]

im really happy with how this WIP is going right now. it needs work especially with timeline-ing, but i’ll be offline for awhile and it will be a few weeks until i can come back to it, so im gonna put it here on tumblr for now, then probably ao3 once the whole thing is done.

[[WC 5000]]

This is how it feels to watch your best friend fall.

--

It starts simply.

One day you get a call.

It’s a professional interest.

Your IGNR talk - you were working on neural progenitors. I’ve found a way to control for the effect you mentioned. It goes like this. Can any of your people confirm?

Who is this?

David Sarif. We met at a conference last year.

You don’t remember.

You’ll always regret that.

--

It’s an academia thing. It isn’t obsession.

It’s late nights, because there is so much to do. He in America, you in England. Skype is a long way away, but Picus has experimental ways to talk, he in the air around you like the ideas, alive. Nano-scale artificial epidermis. Direct epiretinal enhancement. The implication of replication of optical illusions in eye prosthetics. There are things beyond the imagined.

It’s an academic thing. It’s early mornings, because the time difference exists. Though time, you say the first time an early morning effortlessly becomes a late night, time too is purely academic. An exercise in human imagination. Overclocking, he says. Hm? says you.

Overclocking biomechatronics for heat preservation in low temp environments. Read a study about it.

You look up, though he’s thousands of miles away, and smile, because you remember writing that one.

It’s an academic thing, though.

It’s an exchange of ideas.

The mutual pact of similarly minded people walking in the same academic field.

--

He admits that he was nervous. To call. The first time.

It’s astonishing. You can’t imagine him any less than he is – absolute.

Nervous? Him?

You’re the damn head of the field, he says.

It’s personal.

The academia is slipping.

Let’s not talk about this again, you say.

Alright.

Trick yourself into believing he sounds relieved.

--

It goes like this.

It’s academic.

It’s academic.

His struggling company goes public and you, with a handwave, get him a pass to Tai Yong’s first industry showcase. You owe Ru a favor. It’s a bad position to be in. You present your joint paper on nerve interfaces. He’s alive on stage in a way that captivates even the jaded. Nerve interfaces become unquantifiably fascinating, become the future, become something…with more potential than they possibly have. He paces and points and invites conversation and we are all, for the moment, involved. Way up there, are you beside him, or is he beside you? It doesn’t matter. You owe Ru a favor but you and he are side by side. These places your are at, they equalize.

The paper, you tell yourself, is academic.

The pride when Ru, without prompting, invites him back next year is...

Personal.

It’s a tradition. The start of a tradition. Every year. You and he, at the top of the new world order.

You’ll miss it when it’s gone.

--

It’s personal.

The integrated workspaces are a given, by now. There was a time when you could work alone, and there was a time when you wanted to, and there was a time when you didn’t. They’re all past. He is a given, outside any conscious choice. Sometimes, it is hours of silence and one typed out what do you think of this, and sometimes, it is a day and a half of discussion you don’t understand when you look back over your notes except one or two sparks of engineered brilliance. Sometimes you don’t take notes. Debate for the joy of it. Scholastic. There is something you missed about the theoretical. And so, the integrated workspaces become a given. The audiolinks. The shared screens. The general document access. A bloody security nightmare, says your IT team. A fucking security nightmare, says his.

But.

It’s acknowledged that you both work better together.

It’s acknowledged that it’s simple synergy.

It’s personal.

In those quiet moments when there is no work to talk about he mentions his family. His company is small enough that it is still a family. You don’t tell him that will change. It might not. Given the way he speaks of them…

You learn their names, slowly. Athene, Josie, Vasili.

You learn to know them as well as anything else you know.

They are an extension of his life, and so you extend a degree of interest towards them.

It’s a personal thing, nothing more.

--

Lies.

--

Lies.

It’s familial.

--

It’s familial.

He’s supposed to be there.

It’s a Nobel prize, for god’s sake.

Is the concern misplaced?

Likely.

Unlikely.

Likely.

I’d like to begin, you start.

Your aide enters the back of the room, panicked eyes. She waves.

Excuse me, you say, immediately, to the titans of the industry.

There’s been an incident, she says.

You are on the next flight.

Your titles and persuasions mean nothing to the doctor standing resilient in front of you. An obstacle unpersuaded by a final desperate do you know who I am?

He’s family, Athene says, squeezing past the doctor and through the door, gesturing, grabbing your arm.

You’ve never seen her in person, but you’d recognize her anywhere.

David’s done a good job bringing things to life, as always.

An assembly line accident, Athene says as you walk.

Will he survive? you ask.

There are several more of them sitting in the waiting room, heads in hands, half-asleep.

One looks up.

Maybe, he says, with a light Russian accent, and shrugs. Maybe not.

Your aide reminds you that the Nobel committee called while you were somewhere over the Atlantic.

They aren’t family.

They don’t matter anymore.

--

It’s industrial. David’s new arm. The first model. Nothing like the best available at the time, the most realistic, the most integrated, and yet…

You look at the schematics, and the plans, and the design philosophy and it is breathtakingly industrial. Conceptual. Its potential for adaptation far exceeds everything else. It isn’t designed to perform, it’s designed to change. Constantly. It is replicate of a living thing so closely that but for the presence of alloys and angles, you’d forget what you are looking at. It will be an industrial standard, if not today, then tomorrow.

He doesn’t look happy with it.

“I…” he says, trailing off. Two months of rehabilitation therapy and he still has difficulty lifting it. It is industrial, not intuitive. He’ll adapt. He’ll make it better.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this, he says. This was supposed to be yours first.

What? you say.

The schematics were for you.

He shows you. Months of work, kept off your shared workspaces. Biomechatronic prosthetics designed for you, designed for your leg, your knee.

The arm he created will become an industry standard. This, though…

This is science fiction.

He flexes his prosthetic fingers with difficulty. This is just an adaptation, he says. Not a good one, either. But that one…that’ll work.

--

It doesn’t.

--

They call it DDS.

--

He has several folders full of the research on your shared servers. Studies based on your DNA.

If you were more astute perhaps you would have noticed, then.

If you were less lost you might have noticed it then.

You could have saved him.

Stopped him.

One or the other.

--

It’s academic.

It has to be.

It’s all you can handle, at the moment.

The first year of recovering is hell. The migraines. The dizziness. The flashback imprinted memories of those first few days of seizures, the first sign that anything was truly wrong. You should be glad, people say without thinking, that it was only the control chip they implanted. The chip is one centimeter by one centimeter. You had it for twelve days. You can’t see straight for a month. You can’t leave the house without sunglasses for four months. Walking was never easy for you. You don’t recover enough of your balance to stand for half a year.

You miss the Tai Yong conference.

He presents a paper on rejection syndrome.

You can’t even listen to the audio recordings without the migraines getting bad enough to black your vision out.

You don’t hear from him for a year, because, you can’t.

The flashbacks lurk so quietly.

--

The things you ignore for the sake of your survival.

He’s shaking during a presentation in New York ten pm local, and another one in Berlin one am local. At home, in the dark, you leverage your connections to discover he took a Concord between both places.

He calls you. You don’t pick up.

Did you sleep? you wonder.

We’re getting there, he says in a BBC interview at seven am local. It’s all theoretical, but we’re doing genometric sequences. If we can find the right code, we can reverse DDS. Universal augmentations.

They’re taking questions from twitter.

You make a fake account.

Augmentations? you ask.

PR says it’ll be beyond prosthetics, he says, looking at the camera. There are lines under his eyes and he can’t hold steady but his voice is unwavering. I agree.

The things you ignore for your survival.

The new American Recession rippling out across all the Illuminati’s plans. One emergency council meeting after another. They call you to several. Why don’t you go?

Picus reports financial news. One day, SI is down fifty points. The next day it is not. The things you ignore. The council in intrigued. Ru is annoyed.

He calls you. You don’t pick up.

Find out what is going on, they instruct.

He calls you. You don’t pick up.

It’s DARPA contracts, the council’s military insiders eventually discover. DARPA contracts and military money. They’ll be keeping an eye on him.

The things you ignore for your survival.

The Tai Yong conference gets moved from Shanghai to Hengsha. DI sends representatives. So does SI. Sarif himself is busy, it seems, working on personal projects.

Vasily comes to England for an official Darrow-Sarif Industries collaboration. No one tells you. You learn about it when the paper is published.

--

It’s a wake up call.

It goes like this.

Dowd says, in New York, then?

Morgan says, the new kids don’t take too well to old money.

Ru says, the new kids?

Lucius voice breaks in, commanding. Hengsha is the seat of our power in this regards, and you, Ru, our primary control mechanism on that sector. It will take place at TYM’s headquarters.

Rand says under his breath, if Hugh will leave London, that is.

The things you’ve ignored for your survival. None of them admonish Rand for his remark.

“Forgive me,” you say. The voice-scrambler controls for the way you struggle with the efforts of still being awake right now. “We’re discussing…?”

There is a moment of silence on the line.

Perhaps it’s disbelief.

Perhaps you don’t care.

David Sarif’s recruitment? Dowd says, a question in his tone.

Ru is far more blunt.

Are you with us? she asks.

“No,” you say. “When?”

There is another moment of silence on the line.

There is no room for sympathy at the top of the world.

Next week, Ru finally says. No one else says anything.

Ah, you say. Next week, then.

It’s a wake-up call.

It’s four a.m. in David’s part of America.

s’David, he answers, slurred in the middle of a yawn.

“Tai Yong is going to ask you to meet with them in one week. Don’t say yes, David.” Urgency infects the speed at which you speak, making it less likely that he will understand. You can’t slow yourself.

Hugh? he says, sleepy, surprised, in shock. Is that you?

“David, listen to me-”

Now he’s awake. It’s instant. He’s furious. You can’t get a word in edgewise. Where have you been? Where have you goddamn been?! It’s fury covering up for something sadder, though, something that tinges his voice with a nervous tremor you haven’t heard since- since- since I’ve found a way to control the effect. It goes like this.

“DON’T,” you insist, your voice harder than it’s ever been with him, “tell them yes.”

It stops him in his verbal tracks.

If it injures him, you’ll forgive yourself.

And yet, the quiet you suffer far worse than the preceding tirade.

“Why?” he asks.

You don’t have an answer. Only urgency.

“Please, David,” you say instead.

He’s fast on the uptake. Maybe too fast.

“Is someone threatening you?” he asks. It’s an academic interest, you tell yourself.

You open your mouth to say something, then close it.

Is someone threatening you?

Are they?

Who are they threatening, exactly?

What’s wrong? What’s so wrong?

What is so wrong with you?

“I’m asking you this as a friend,” you say. “I won’t ask again.”

A bit of a laugh from David. This time the disbelief is present.

“Are you threatening me?” he asks.

“The only threat,” you say, “is Tai Yong Medical. You will not go.”

“Fine,” he says coolly. It’s another thing you’ve never heard from him.

Nonetheless, it is perhaps the most relaxing thing he could have said.

“David-” you start, not knowing how to explain.

Except.

He’s hung up.

On you.

Two weeks later the council convenes and invites you so they can berate you for your absence at TYM’s headquarters, and then they proceed to talk about integration steps for their latest member, and where he will fit in, and what rank Sarif will be given, and you are certain that the DDS should no longer be causing extreme dizziness, yet. You can barely keep your world still.

It’s a wake-up call.

--

It’s the first time you’ve stepped foot inside his Detroit headquarters. It’s the first time you’ve come into contact with it. Sarif hasn’t connected it to your shared workspaces. Why would he? You’re never online. It’s cold, and gold, and alight in an inorganic way. The lights are replicas of something that used to come naturally, to him. The angles celebratory in their unfamiliarity with nature. We are something more than real, the construction says.

Much of this was paid for by DARPA contracts, you think.

There are several lightboard pillars displaying the history of biomechatronics – no, augmentations. You’re on one of them.

Hugh Darrow’s groundbreaking work with human enhancement has altered the very fabric of society.

It would not be a mistake to say that he changed the world as we know it.

Past tense.

You’ve got time.

You’ve got time to stop this.

You don’t recognize him. His new augment is solid black, with silver in the joints.  The lines of it are sharp, and unapologetic. Artistic. Aesthetic.

The industrial is a memory.

Athene sees you before he does. She’s past shock, going straight to anger.

“You,” she hisses, eyes flaring, cutting David off mid-sentence. “Absolutely not.”

David leans off her desk as she snaps around it, a security officer in her wake.

“Hugh?” he says, tone empty. “What are you doing here?”

Athene holds up a hand. “You don’t have to talk to him, David.”

The security officer at her side crosses his arms. Your own security bristles in response.

“If you don’t mind,” you say.

“Oh, but I do,” she says. “I very much do.”

You look past her, towards David. He meets you with a tired stare.

His eyes are silver, too.

It’s a shock.

What happened?

When did it happen?

Why weren’t you watching?

“David,” you say.

He says nothing.

“If you want to speak to Mr. Sarif,” Athene says, “you’ll need an appointment.”

“That’s beneath you, Athene,” you inform her.

“I don’t think you have a right to say that,” she says.

The jab lashes at some vulnerable part of you, stings, because, there is no defense. Perhaps it’s beneath her. Perhaps it was beneath you, to wait so long, to stay away so long. To live as if underwater for so long.

Perhaps it wasn’t.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter.

This is more important.

“It’s about Them,” you say over her shoulder.

“Who?” she says.

You watch him. You still know him. Under the framework of these past few years, under the new things and the learned things, it’s still him. Considering, calculating, weighing, even though he’d already decided the moment he heard you. He taps his hand against the side of his desk as he thinks, but his subconscious has already decided.

The only thing you don’t know is what conclusion he’s reached.

You would have assumed…

But he went to meet them.

And you don’t know anymore.

You can’t guess anymore.

His eyes should be bright under the lights in the office, but instead they are muted and dull.

He nods his head towards his office.

“Come on,” he says. “Athene, let him through.”

Her eyebrows shoot up, and she gives a half-laugh.

“Athene,” he repeats. “It’s about Hengsha.”

She locks into neutral with alarming speed. Every tell concealed. How bad was it? What happened? What was he told, and why did he buy it, if Athene is…? The piece don’t add up. The concern is growing. Spiraling. Now is not the time to lose control.

Control it.

She steps back wordlessly.

Your security looks at you.

“Wait here,” you tell her.

Back then, there was no danger.

--

It should be a relief.

“They’re called the Illuminati,” you begin.

Everett. Lucius. Ru, Rand, Dowd. The Council of Five, Versalife, Picus. Everything David knows, everywhere he comes from, everywhere anyone who is anyone comes from these days is under their influence. All under their purview. All under their control. Their goal? The new world order. You tell him everything.

He laughs at first, then he grows quiet, then he grows somber. He stops pacing around the office and sits across the desk from you, and watches you, and fidgets with a pen in his hands.

When you finish, he stops twirling the pen through his fingers.

“You’re telling me this why?” he asks.

It’s the only thing he says.

You don’t have an answer.

“You aren’t curious as to how I’ve come to know about their plans?” you ask, deflecting.

“Easy,” he says, with a shrug. “You’re one of ‘em.”

“I could be a rebel, fighting against a corrupt system,” you say, in jest.

In jest.

“Corrupt?” he asks, and he’s dead serious. “From what they said, sounds like they’ve got the right idea.”

You can’t speak for a moment. You never expected he’d agree with them.

“I know you don’t believe that,” you say, when you can.

“Why not?” he says, shrugging again. “Tai Yong’s on the forefront of innovation. So are you. They’ve got the money and the power to make it work. To do what we have to so we can get it done.”

“They-” you say, slowly, struggling to work past the flat astonishment at hearing him say anything in line with Illuminati beliefs. “They believe in... they believe in control, and stagnation, and they will never let humanity achieve our potential, never let you achieve your potential, David, surely you must understand-”

“What makes you think they won’t?” he challenges, leaning back into chair. “What makes you so sure about that?”

“You can’t be so naïve,” you say. “Look at the larger picture, David. Your work with human enhancement has the potential to alter the very fabric of-”

“-society,” he finishes, rueful smile. “You’re gonna have to do better than that, Hugh, I wrote that damn paragraph.”

“It applies,” you say. “Doesn’t it?”

He pushes himself up.

“You’re wasting your time.” he says, with an air of finality. “I told them yes. I meant it.”

He walks around you, towards the door.

“David, you can’t trust them-”

“Then I can’t trust you,” he points out. “You’re one of them, aren’t you?”

A sudden, sore pain encircles your throat.

“David,” you protest. “I’m not here as an Illuminatus. I’ve never been here as an Illuminatus.”

“Haven’t you, though?” he says, tilting his head slightly.

“No,” you say firmly. “I haven’t. And I’m hurt you would think that of me.”

“Think what?” he says. “I’m not the one accusing them of being all that bad. Athene?” he adds, pushing the door open. “We’re done here.”

It’s not fear. Why would it be? The Illuminati are…are not that bad? Correct? They are a part of you and they have never been the threat to humanity. Chaos has. And yet…it’s something.

Imagine him, with cold eyes, and control. Looking down at the world from someplace disconnected. Imagine him, unchanging. Unevolving.

Static.

Cessation.

You’ll lose him.

It’s not fear making breathing a conscious act, it’s not fear making you feel the impact of your heart rate. It isn’t fear making your voice rise. It isn’t, you tell yourself. It’s not. It’s not fear, because it’s not possible he’ll go through with this. They are antithetical to him. The two cannot coexist. They’ll destroy him. Everything that is him. The telos inherent.

“David, it’s critical that you listen to me,” you insist.

“I did,” he says. “Next time you want to stop by too late you feel free to.”

He gestures towards the waiting area, a please leave sweep of his augmented arm.

“Me, I’ve got work to do,” he says.

It doesn’t make sense.

It doesn’t.

This hurt encircling you doesn’t. His decisions don’t.

“This can’t be what you want,” you say.

“Would you know, Hugh?” he asks. “It’s been three years. Would you really know?”

You haven’t heard it counted out loud.

“Three years?” you repeat.

It’s a sarcastic snort. “Almost. You weren’t counting the days? I was.”

“Don’t make this about you,” you say. “I was injured.”

“Yeah, I know,” he says, Athene appearing briskly beside him with a scowl on her face. “You really thought the best way for me to figure that out was from your press secretary? It was my design, Hugh. You were my friend.”

Past tense.

“Don’t pretend as if you don’t still care,” you say, feeling like you’ve lost a battle that was suddenly more important than you realized. “This issue doesn’t go away because you feel slighted.”

“Slighted?” he says, looking away, nodding. “That what you think? Is that what you think?” He bites on his lip. “Huh,” he says. “Slighted. Who’d have thought.”

“You need to leave,” Athene says, her voice a hard line, the security behind her an ultimatum.

Walking in a straight line is difficult. Walking in a straight line and making it look as if it takes no effort is not possible.

He moves aside, and does not look at you.

“David,” you say, not knowing what to follow it up with, not knowing what to say. You have to say something. You have to stop this.

He gives you a tight, professional Picus-polished smile, and clips back into his office. Athene shuts the door behind him, keeping her eyes fixed on you the whole time.

“Why is he doing this?” you say, half to yourself, half in the hopes that Athene will answer.

“You should already know that,” she says, walking back over to her desk. “I’m not inclined to help you figure it out, Mr. Darrow.”

It’s not encouraging. But she is answering. And David is not.

“Please,” you say. “They’ll be the end of him. I know they will.”

Her steps falter, for a beat.

And it is opportunity.

A chance.

It might be a chance.

“What has he told you?” you ask.

“I’m not at liberty to discuss that,” she says, but she turns around to face you. “What do you know?”

Oh god, it is a chance.

“Much,” you say, talking fast, because if you miss this chance, and if this is the last one, you will never forgive yourself. “I know that they and he are not alike. Their natures are dissimilar. I know that the he and they can’t coexist, that they have ulterior motives far beyond anything he can understand. No. Beyond anything he will allow himself to understand. I know this can’t be what he wants.”

Her eyes soften, a bit.

“I was worried it might be so,” she says. “Tell me everything.”

“No,” you say, an instant reaction. David is a different matter from all the other people you know. He’s different.

“It isn’t safe for you,” you add, in response to her newly crossed arms.

“Then I suppose,” she says, “you’ve done all you can. Thank you for your concern, Mr. Darrow.”

It’s slipping away. It’s getting away from you.

“I…” you say.

“Yes?” she says.

“I…no.”

“Hm,” she says, and crosses the rest of the way to her desk.

The sound of her typing accompanies you to the lift.

You reach it. You press the call button. You imagine David in ten years, twenty. With every passing minute the outcome seems worse. The two cannot coexist. And the Illuminati is too powerful to be brought down by one man.

They’ll kill him.

Will they kill him?

It’s not like them to waste an asset.

It’s not like him to be controlled.

What can’t be controlled can’t be called an asset.

The chaotic can only be a threat.

Who is being threatened, here?

It doesn’t matter.

All that matters is the man sitting twenty feet away alone in his office, and all that matters is that if you leave, you’ll never be this close to him again. The personal stake is academic. The academic stake is irrelevant. The thing invoking fear and causing your chest to tighten and calling forth the seizure-fringed flashbacks is something far deeper. Something essential. Something deep-rooted and complex and related, perhaps, to love. No. It’s something simple.

You can’t lose him.

Not to them.

The lift arrives with a ping, and it becomes a conscious thought.

I can’t lose him. Not to them.

You don’t realize it then, but it is perhaps the first time you’re aware that you can lose to them. That you and they are distinct. That your losses are not their losses.

That your gains will not be their gains.

The doors have opened. And now, they are closing.

Your security says, Mr. Darrow?

You turn around. Athene is looking up.

“Well?” she says.

--

It’s money.

That’s all it is.

That’s all it comes down to.

You’ve underestimated the depth of his research into DDS.

The media has grossly underestimated the depth of his research into DDS.

He’s been killing himself over this, she says, hardly pulling her punches. She takes some pity on you, though. When she says this, you know she means you.

Half the company is devoted to it. He’s determined to beat it. He blames himself, she says. For what happened to you.

He couldn’t have known.

Don’t play that game with me.

He couldn’t have.

It comes down to money, though. He’s burned through his resources, his connections, reached the end of every route he knows and he still hasn’t solved it.

It’s a last resort. They must have known. The Council has offered him the power to reach a higher level of enlightenment.

He’s taken it.

All you have to do, she says, is offer him an alternative. Any alternative. Coming from you, he’ll take it.

Athene accompanies you back to SI, back to the lift.

She holds to door to his office open for you.

The frown flashes fast across David’s face. “Don’t-”

“Neuropozyne,” you say. You’ve invented the word right then and there. Even the merest idea of the drug is still only a concept. You say it with confidence, as if it is a certainty.

“What about it?” he asks, with a suspicious that is only tempered by Athene’s presence.

“You don’t know it,” you tell him. “We haven’t released any information about it. But it’s designed to treat DDS – minor cases, at least. We could work with it, though.”

“Yeah?” he says, still leaned over his keyboard, still unwilling to engage.

“We could have it commercially viable as soon as the end of the year,” you say, the promises coming wild off the top of your head now. Why not?

“I would have heard about it,” he says.

“You wouldn’t have.”

“Yeah?” he says again, this time pushing his chair back, and resting his arms on the sides. A false air of open congeniality.

“Yes,” you affirm. “Because I only invented it a moment ago.”

It is the highlight of your arrogance. The breadth of your assumptions. A desperate hope that you can take this leap and some god-forsaken-how, your intelligence will catch you.

He regards you for a second, then two, then more. You catch yourself breathing too quickly.

The wearied lines in the corner of his eyes disappear as he breaks out into a smile.

“God, I’ve missed you,” he says. “Where the hell have you been, Hugh? You got a lot to catch up on.”

He’s out of his chair and across the room in an instant, grabbing your free forearm and pulling you into a hug, always the one for the importance of tactility, and he says come on, I’ll take you on a tour of the place, and Athene’s dangerous edge dissipates, a bit.

It should be a relief. It should all be a relief.

Instead, it is the first time you’ve felt fear. True fear.

Your goals and their goals are no longer the same.

And you are well aware what happens to their enemies.

You are well aware of what happens to their traitors.

--

The council is lousy with misunderstanding.

Dis-understanding?

Un-understanding?

They’ve only heard yes for far too long.

You watch it defy their framework of understanding so uniquely.

Lucius and Rand are ready to write David off. Morgan and Ru are taking a long game stance on the issue. Dowd seems caught somewhere between American patriotic pride in Sarif and aristocratic perturbation.

“I can convince him,” you tell them. You are lightheaded with the defiance. It is a risk beyond any other. Beyond anything you’ve taken since…

Since your skiing incident, you think.

Oh, how have you missed that adrenaline.

You tell them that you can convince David, and they trust you.

The risk is heady, but you don’t think about what happens if-

When that trust becomes eroded.

When that trust becomes eroded…

Well. We can’t all live forever, can we?

Best not to let them catch on, then.

[iol247]

The drivers of President Ramaphosa’s big lockdown decision

Opinionista • Dirk De Vos

Each one of us is an important data point in the largest and most expensive experiment of all time.

On Monday 23 March, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that from midnight on Thursday, the country would go into lockdown for 21 days. This was done in an effort to halt the spread of the runaway SARS-CoV-2 virus which causes the respiratory disease known as Covid-19.

Essentially, during that period, the whole country, other than essential services, will come to a stop. The cost of the decision is impossible to calculate and the damage to an already weak economy will take decades to recover from, if the country makes the right decisions.

Hundreds, if not thousands of firms, the good and bad, will go out of business and with it an already dire unemployment rate will go up. Whole swathes of the economy, including those that had enormous job creation potential, like tourism, might never fully recover.

In making this decision, South Africa joins a raft of other countries, mostly in Europe, doing some version of the same thing. The US is presently under a 15-day lockdown. 

South Africa is different in one respect: it implemented its lockdown far earlier into the trajectory of infection than other countries did. Indeed, Boris Johnson, the UK prime minister, announced his government’s measures just hours after Ramaphosa’s announcement, but did so after 6,650 people had tested positive for the virus and after 335 patients, who had also tested positive, had died.

In South Africa, with 402 testing positive as of 23 May, (see: South Africa’s confirmed coronavirus cases jump by 128 to 402) no deaths have yet been recorded.

The UK government’s decision is a departure from its earlier policy of attempting to slow the spread of the virus, do more to isolate the vulnerable (older people or those with compromised immune systems), but then to allow the majority (around 60%) of the population to become infected, get sick, recover and by doing so become immune and thereby halt the further spread of the disease (so-called “herd immunity”). That approach would have also allowed the UK economy to largely continue as before.

The UK and the US approach was radically changed following the publication of the so-called Imperial College paper Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID- 19 mortality and healthcare demand. It pointed to the danger that mere mitigation would result in health systems being overrun at around the same time by serious and critically ill patients, particularly those requiring intensive care unit (ICU) treatment. 

The paper predicted that the result of mere mitigation efforts there would be as many as 250,000 deaths in the UK and 1.1-1.2 million in the US. In addition, it is not clear whether having been infected does provide immunity. Clearly, this horrifying prediction was completely unpalatable, and it forced a reversal of existing policy in both countries. The impact of the Imperial College paper has gone far beyond just the UK and US. It would almost certainly have been a key factor behind the Ramaphosa government’s decision on Monday.

Something about the SARS-CoV-2 virus: It is a coronavirus – a relatively simple RNA virus (as opposed to a DNA virus). Chinese scientists were able to publish the virus’s genetic sequence less than a week after they isolated it. (Read: The race to produce a vaccine for the latest coronavirus) Just six other coronaviruses are known to infect humans, causing normal colds, but two of them, the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (Mers) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars), cause severe diseases. (See: What We Know So Far About SARS-CoV-2.) 

It is not clear why some coronaviruses are relatively harmless and others dangerous. An up-to-date and accessible summary of what is known about the SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19 is hosted by Our World In Data here: Coronavirus Disease (Covid-19) – Statistics and Research which, in turn, uses data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control here: Covid-19. At present, gigantic amounts of research and data are being generated all over the world, from appropriate policies to prevent the spread of the virus, to potential drug treatments and of course, the potential of a vaccine. (Novel Coronavirus Information Center). The World Health Organisation (WHO) has also put together an excellent video of the disease: The Coronavirus Explained & What You Should Do, and its public health implications.

In the absence of proven drug treatments or a vaccine, the following related issues are important: how and how quickly does it spread; and how sick do people get (and what is the mortality rate) across different classification criteria? It is these that drive policy or, as we see, dramatic interventions of nationwide lockdowns.

We know that SARS-CoV-2 is highly infectious and more so because carriers are asymptomatic (they don’t show symptoms) for about 5-6 days before they get sick [Report of the WHO-China Joint Mission on Coronavirus Disease 2019 (Covid-19)], but this can be as long as 14 days or perhaps longer. To be safe on this metric, the South African government has given itself 21 days. It is possible that some carriers don’t get sick at all. Key measures used here are related measures, namely the “doubling rate” and the basic reproduction rate (represented as R0).

The doubling rate or exponential growth is introduced to children by the (mythical) story of the man who once got the emperor of India to pay him in rice with the formula that he would start with one grain of rice and double the number for each block on a chess board. An online maths game for kids demonstrates the point: The Rice And Chessboard Story — Learning How Doubling Makes Numbers Grow (useful for parents trying to get their children to learn something during the lockdown). 

Without intervention, the virus’s reproduction rate (ie, how many people are infected by one carrier) is very high. An R0 below one means that an infected person infects less than one other and the disease, therefore, dies out. Anything above one means that the infection rate grows. Using data from China, the Imperial College paper used a base assumption of 2.4 (range 2-2.6).

Regarding how sick people get, an assumption based on the Chinese experience and especially the city of Wuhan, 81% of those diagnosed with Covid-19 have mild cases that can be managed at home. About 14% have serious cases needing hospital treatment and 5% were critical cases of patients who suffered from respiratory failure, septic shock, and/or multiple organ dysfunction or failure. Almost half of the critical cases (2.3%) died.

It is the 19% of serious and critical cases combined with the high reproductive rate that looks to overwhelm public health systems.

Unfortunately, the above numbers are not very useful. There are wide discrepancies within China (Estimating Risk for Death from 2019 Novel Coronavirus Disease, China, January–February 2020), between China and the epicentre of the current outbreak, northern Italy, and between these and the data from the Covid-19 afflicted cruise ship, the Diamond Princess (Cruise ship outbreak helps pin down how deadly the new coronavirus is). More information here.

There are significant differences between age groups, and gender, but especially where there is any other underlying disease. The recent data from Italy is especially interesting. The fatality rate was very strongly weighted towards those with underlying health conditions. (Characteristics of Covid-19 patients dying in Italy Report based on available data on March 20th, 2020)

In Italy, the median age of those who succumbed was 80. About 41% of all those who died were aged between 80-89, with the 70-79 age group accounting for a further 35%.  The other significant detail from Italy was the presence of pre-existing conditions. Approximately 75% of the dead had two or more pre-existing conditions, 50% had three or more pre-existing conditions, in particular heart disease, diabetes and cancer. Of the five who died who were between 31 and 39 years old, each of them had serious pre-existing health conditions. But whether it is age or the underlying conditions which in Italy are associated with older people that have driven these outcomes is not yet clear.

For Ramaphosa then, the decision to implement the lockdown must have been extremely difficult. We rightly expect our governments to make evidence-based policy, but in this case, there is not sufficient evidence. The highly respected Stanford University Professor John Ioannidis (In the coronavirus pandemic, we’re making decisions without reliable data) in a 17 March piece entitled A fiasco in the making? argues that as the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data.

However, the absence of evidence is certainly not the same as the evidence of absence. The government would have taken note that the fatality rate of Covid-19 is strongly correlated to people with existing diseases of the type that are particularly prevalent in South Africa, including tuberculosis (TB), diabetes and those with weakened immune systems from the very high HIV infection rate. (Graphs that tell the story of HIV in South Africa’s provinces)

While some countries are focused on flattening the curve (How to flatten the curve of coronavirus, a mathematician explains) to give health systems breathing space, South Africa already operates beyond the curve. There is no scope for additional patients needing life-saving ventilators.

In 2015, 460,236 South Africans died. More than half (55.5%) of deaths were attributed to the group of non-communicable diseases, and communicable diseases accounted for 33.4% of deaths, while injuries were responsible for 11.1% of deaths. Other research shows that a total of 63,000 people died of tuberculosis in 2018 and two-thirds of those were HIV-positive. However, as many as 400,000 fell ill with TB in that year. TB, being a respiratory disease, could very well make sufferers particularly susceptible to Covid-19.

Even with just a 1% fatality rate and a R0 of 2.5, Covid-19 would rip through South Africa and reach the 60% infection rate predicted by Health Minister Mhkize within a year. Based on a population of around 57 million, this could amount to as many as 342,000 dead South Africans. This is just a fraction of the numbers that would need hospitalisation. Here is an epidemic calculator allowing for anyone to input their own data. None of this is even a prospect worth contemplating and this is the best case. A 4% fatality rate increases the number of dead to around 1.4 million.

In a well-argued piece, Harry Crane of Rutgers University’s Department of Statistics and Biostatistics  makes the point that Professor Ioannidis sought to treat the Covid-19 pandemic as an academic exercise and not a global crisis. Crane argues that for dynamic and complex problems like the pandemic, we cannot avoid uncertainty and we can’t delay action waiting for more evidence. Once the evidence arrives, it will be far too late to do anything about it.

This is exactly the approach taken by Professor Yaneer Bar-Yam of the New England Complexity Institute who has led a global initiative, End Coronavirus, that seeks to minimise the impact of Covid-19 by providing useful data and guidelines for action. They make the point that if everyone got tested for Covid-19, we could temporarily separate the infected from the uninfected and then help reduce the spread of the virus and return society to a semblance of normality as soon as possible.

As far as evidence is concerned, we know that lockdowns do work. (See Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance – Tomas Pueyo) In Wuhan, R0 moved from 3.9 before the lockdown there to around 0.32 immediately afterwards. (See: Evolving Epidemiology and Impact of Non-pharmaceutical Interventions on the Outbreak of Coronavirus Disease 2019 in Wuhan, China.) As of 19 March, there have been no new cases of coronavirus in the entire region of the province of Hubei where Wuhan is situated. Italy too, after its belated lockdown, is seeing the beginnings of a fall-off in new cases and deaths. (See Italy Coronavirus: 69,176 Cases and 6,820 Deaths)

There is, of course, the risk that after the lockdown we simply continue as before, which would see another exponential increase in new cases. Obviously, we cannot even think about another lockdown. We must insist that the lockdown is followed up with the identification of all possible infections and widespread but focused testing of all likely infections. Because there will be a relatively small number (compared to Europe and the US), this should not be that difficult to do. The lockdown gives the country some breathing space, including to develop testing protocols and to see whether any prospective drug treatments are effective.

What we can say is that each one of us is an important data point in the largest and most expensive experiment of all time. Closing the country down for 21 days to locate a few thousand people among 57 million of us might seem like overkill but we all have a direct stake, even just as data points, in making sure that the experiment runs smoothly and renders useful information. Think about this before you ask whether whatever you want to do in the 21 days might make the data less certain.

If we make the effort a success, whatever your own views of it are, there is an additional free bonus for us all. South Africa re-establishes itself at the top table of countries that can make the right decisions, a country where things can get done. We haven’t had that spirit since 1994.

As a final point, the lesson we need to learn from this pandemic is that the next one is already evolving. It might emerge tomorrow, a hundred years hence or any point in-between. Next time, we need to be much better prepared. (See: Bill Gates: The next outbreak? We’re not ready) DM  

https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2020-03-25-the-drivers-of-president-ramaphosas-big-lockdown-decision/

[yesthatssadirichardslove]

Testing blunders crippled U.S. response as coronavirus spread  WASHINGTON

A series of missteps at the nation's top public health agency caused a critical shortage of reliable laboratory tests for the coronavirus, hobbling the federal response as the pandemic spread across the country like wildfire, an Associated Press review found.

President Donald Trump assured Americans early this month that the COVID-19 test developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is “perfect” and that “anyone who wants a test can get a test.” But more than two months after the first U.S. case of the new disease was confirmed, many people still cannot get tested.

In the critical month of February, as the virus began taking root in the U.S. population, CDC data shows government labs processed 352 COVID-19 tests — an average of only a dozen per day.

“You cannot fight a fire blindfolded,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organization, said at a recent briefing. “We cannot stop this pandemic if we don’t know who is infected.”

The Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the CDC, has begun an internal review to assess its own mistakes. But outside observers and federal health officials have pointed to four primary issues that together hampered the national response — the early decision not to use the test adopted by the World Health Organization, flaws with the more complex test developed by the CDC, government guidelines restricting who could be tested and delays in engaging the private sector to ramp up testing capacity.

Combined with messaging from the White House minimizing the disease, that fueled a lackluster response that missed chances to slow the spread of the virus, they said.

“There were many, many opportunities not to end up where we are,” Dr. Ashish K. Jha, the director of the Global Health Institute at Harvard, told the AP. “Basically, they took this as business as usual. ... And that’s because the messaging from the White House was ‘this is not a big deal, this is no worse than the flu.’ So that message basically created no sense of urgency within the FDA or the CDC to fix it.”

Even as private labs have been cleared by government regulators to process tens of thousands of additional tests in the last two weeks, experts warn that the nation is still falling well short of enough testing capacity to keep ahead of the highly contagious virus. And it can often take a week just to get results back.

Trump last week rated his administration’s response to the crisis as a perfect 10. However, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the CDC's system wasn't designed to test for and track a widespread outbreak, which he characterized as “a failing.”

In interviews with the AP, two federal health officials with direct knowledge of the situation said CDC experts don't know why many of the agency’s test kits failed to reliably detect the virus. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about what went wrong.

J. Stephen Morrison, a health policy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, called the testing issues a “debacle,” contributing to what he described as a confused and delayed federal response to the crisis.

As a result, he said, the CDC has now been marginalized within the White House — a worrisome development.

“CDC has generally been regarded as the best in the game,” Morrison said. “I don’t think they anticipated the technical difficulty, or the speed with which the virus has been moving. The virus was racing out ahead of them.”

FATEFUL DECISIONS

On New Year’s Eve, Chinese scientists informed the World Health Organization about a cluster of 27 pneumonia cases of unknown cause in the industrial megalopolis of Wuhan that they linked to the city’s wholesale fish market. Less than two weeks later, the Chinese had sequenced the virus’ genetic makeup and shared it with the world.

Within days, German scientists had developed a test that could identify a unique part of the virus' DNA. The WHO quickly adopted the German test, publishing technical guidelines on Jan. 17 and working with private companies to produce testing kits.

As they have done with some past outbreaks, officials at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta decided to develop their own test, focusing on three gene targets distinct from what the WHO used. Over the decades, the headquarters lab had built a track record of being among the first to develop tests for new diseases and quickly making them available for disease tracking.

The CDC published the technical details for its COVID-19 test on Jan. 28, 10 days after the WHO. By then, the virus had already been in the U.S. for at least two weeks.

The 35-year-old man who would become the first American to test positive had arrived in Seattle on Jan. 15, following a trip to Wuhan. After swabs from his nose and throat were flown to the CDC lab, federal officials announced the results Jan. 21.

In an interview on CNBC the following day, the president was asked about the risk to the nation.

“We have it totally under control,” he said. “It’s one person coming in from China. ... It’s going to be just fine.”

With limited capacity at the CDC lab in Atlanta, the agency placed strict criteria on who could be tested: people with fevers, coughing or difficulty breathing who had also visited Wuhan within the preceding two weeks or who had close contact with someone already confirmed or under investigation for having the virus.

On Jan. 30, the day WHO declared the outbreak a public health emergency, Trump again assured the American people that the virus was “very well under control.”

Then he departed for a weekend at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, where he tweeted a photo of himself playing golf at his club in West Palm Beach.

“Getting a little exercise this morning!” the president wrote.

The following day, the U.S. declared its own emergency. Still, U.S. citizens returning from China who did not have a fever weren’t tested for the virus but were encouraged to self-quarantine at home for 14 days.

At that point, the CDC had confirmed just eight cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. The agency amended its testing criteria to include people with fevers who had traveled to China, rather than specifically just Wuhan.

FLAWED TEST KITS

Four days after the U.S. declared a state of emergency, only 178 patients had been tested and 82 others were listed as “pending,” meaning they were awaiting final results, according to CDC data released at the time.

To help increase the number of people being screened, the Food and Drug Administration issued emergency authorization for CDC-certified labs run by state health departments to begin processing swabs, and they were provided with kits that could test 250 patients.

As the first tests were processed at the state labs, technicians reported getting inconclusive results, which the CDC has said could be due to the test looking for signs of generic coronaviruses, of which there are many, rather than the specific virus that causes COVID-19.

Whatever the reason, by mid-February, only about a half-dozen state and local public health labs had reliable tests. But still, CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield continued to insist his agency had developed “a very accurate test.”

“We found that, in some of the states, it didn’t work,” Redfield said earlier this month. “We figured out why. I don’t consider that a fault. I consider that doing quality control. I consider that success.”

The testing problems emerged just as the CDC broadened its criteria to include patients who were “severely ill” with COVID-19 symptoms “even if a known source of exposure has not been identified.”

As more sick people sought to be tested, many states were forced to limit access because of the flawed CDC test. Accounts began to emerge through social media of people with all the symptoms of COVID-19 who either couldn’t get tested or had test results delayed by days or even a week.

“I know of doctor friends of mine who have critically ill patients in the ICU, and we don’t know if they have COVID or not because we can’t get a test,” Jha said last week.

COMMUNITY TRANSMISSION

On Feb. 24, exasperated officials at the Association of Public Health Laboratories sent a letter to the FDA, basically asking permission for state labs to develop their own tests. Within days, the FDA reversed its previous position and said both public and private labs could conduct testing.

Trump, for his part, continued to insist the virus would die out on its own. “One day, it’s like a miracle. It will disappear,” he predicted Feb. 27.

By then, experts say, the opportunity to halt the relentless spread of the virus within the U.S. population had been lost.

On Feb. 29, only 472 patients had been tested nationwide, with just 22 cases confirmed, according to CDC data. Of those, nine cases were not related to travel but had spread person-to-person within the U.S.

By comparison, South Korea had its first confirmed case of COVID-19 on Jan. 20, the same day as the U.S. Officials there used a test that focused on the same gene targets as the WHO test, according to the website of a test manufacturer. They then quickly permitted private-sector labs to run the samples. As a result, a nation with less than one-sixth the population of the U.S. mobilized to test more than 20,000 people a day.

South Korea also instituted drive-thru centers, allowing quicker identification of those who were infected but might not be displaying symptoms, thus slowing the emergence of new cases to a more manageable level.

Meanwhile, the rate of U.S. infections soared.

"The system is not really geared to what we need right now, what you are asking for,” Fauci conceded during a congressional hearing earlier this month. “That is a failing. Let's admit it.”

SHIFTING BLAME

As public outrage over the lack of available U.S. tests grew, the FDA announced it would allow private diagnostic lab companies to produce new tests without preauthorization from regulators.

Trump and HHS Secretary Alex Azar visited the CDC lab in Atlanta on March 6, praising the agency’s performance and promising 4 million test kits would be available by the end of the following week.

That lofty number didn't match the ability of U.S. labs to process tests, however. Private providers were just then ramping up, while CDC and state health labs processed about 25,200 COVID-19 tests in the following seven days, according to CDC data.

At the same news conference, Trump said he wanted infected passengers to remain on a cruise ship off the West Coast to keep the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the U.S. low.

“I like the numbers being where they are,” Trump said, shortly before departing Atlanta for another weekend of golf in Florida. “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.”

Trump has also attempted to mislay blame for the testing troubles on the Obama administration. In 2018, Trump disbanded the White House directorate charged with preparing for and responding to global pandemics.

“I don't take responsibility at all,” Trump replied when asked about the testing shortfall in a March 13 briefing at the White House.

Morrison said Trump appears to see the virus as a political issue rather than a public health threat.

“You can imagine a White House that said, ‘Do whatever it takes to test everybody for the virus,’” he said. “That wasn’t the mentality. It was the opposite mentality, and ultimately the responsibility to protect the American people lies with the White House.”

Trump and other officials have falsely said they declined to use the WHO test because it isn't reliable.

“Quality testing for our American people is paramount to us,” Deborah Birx, who is coordinating the U.S. coronavirus response, said last week. “It doesn’t help to put out a test where 50% or 47% are false positives."

“It was a bad test,” Trump chimed in.

Tarik Jašarević, a WHO spokesperson, told the AP last week that his agency had so far shipped 1.5 million testing kits manufactured in Germany to 120 countries around the globe, with no such problems emerging.

“The test has been validated in three external laboratories, adapted by WHO and manufactured in line with international quality standards,” he said. “It has shown consistently good performance in laboratory and clinical use, and neither a significant number of false-positive nor false-negative results have been reported.”

Over the past two weeks, U.S. testing capacity has surged, with private companies joining in. LabCorp began providing tests March 5, and Quest Diagnostics followed four days later. Tests also are being conducted at individual hospitals and other centers.

With the increased testing has come a skyrocketing number of confirmed cases, zooming from 43 at the beginning of March to 33,404 by Monday.

Only in the last few days has the United States finally begun testing more people each day than far smaller South Korea, according to data complied by Johns Hopkins University.

Jha estimates the U.S. should be testing 100,000 to 150,000 people per day — figures he said should be obtainable given the number of high-quality diagnostic labs in the country.

“We certainly have the capacity. It’s just we’re not doing it,” Jha said Thursday. “We are up to about 40,000 tests per day now — and so we are moving in the right direction. Still far from where we need to be, but moving."

[weekendwarriorblog]

WHAT TO WATCH THIS WEEKEND April 12, 2019  - HELLBOY, LITTLE, MISSING LINK, AFTER

We’re almost midway through April (already?) but that also means that we’re one week closer to Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame, which is probably the only movie everyone is really waiting for anyway, going by advance ticket sales.

For those who can’t wait for more super-heroics, Mike Mignola’s HELLBOY (Lionsgate) gets another go in theaters, this time played by David Harbour (Stranger Things) and directed by Neil Marshall (Game of Thrones). I wish I could say I was looking forward to seeing this, but frankly, I loved Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy: The Golden Army, and I have secretly wished for the last ten years that he would be able to continue that story with Ron Perlman, Doug Jones and the rest. This one has some interesting casting including Ian McShane, Milla Jovovich as the main baddie, Sasha Lane and Daniel Dae Kim. I guess with that cast, maybe it won’t be so bad? I expect the movie will be more geared towards the fanboys and girls rather than the mainstream audiences that have been flocking to other comic movies. (My review is now over at The Beat… and I hated it!)

Universal and Will Packer Productions are offering some interesting counter-programming to Hellboy in the comedy remake (of sorts) LITTLE, written and directed by Tina Gordon and starring Regina Hall, Issa Rae and Marsai Martin (from ABC’s Black-ish). This is the type of body-swapping comedy that’s delivered some great laughs in movies like both Freaky Friday, Tom Hanks’ Bigand others like Jennifer Garner’s 13 Going on 30. I mean, there’s still so much that can be done with this sort of thing as seen by Shazam!, and this sort of high-concept premise is also fairly easy to sell audiences. I missed the press screening of this, but if I have a few moments in April (it might happen!) I’d go check it out.

The other movie I saw that’s opening this weekend is LAIKA’s new stop-motion animated film MISSING LINK (Annapurna/UA Releasing), featuring the voices of Hugh Jackman, Zoe Saldana and Zach Galifianakis. I’m not going to review the movie even though I generally liked it, mainly since it’s been a minute since I watched it, but if you like some of LAIKA’s other films (particularly director Chris Butler’s earlier film ParaNorman) then you should enjoy this one, and like with all of LAIKA’s movies, I

Lastly, there’s Aviron’s AFTER, another teen romance drama, this one based on Anna Todd’s fan fiction that pairs Hero Fiennes Tiffin (Ralph’s nephew) and Josephine Langford in the type of Y.A. romantic drama that has had mixed results in recent years. Sure, the recent Five Feet Apartdid fine but others, like last year’s Midnight Sun, released by the defunct Global Road, barely made $10 million. Since I haven’t seen the movie – honestly, I haven’t even watched a trailer -- I’m not really sure what the appeal of this is going to be except that some younger women may not have much interest on other options this weekend.

LIMITED RELEASES

Well, I totally screwed up last week… including one movie that was delayed until this week and neglecting a movie which I thought opened this week. (This is why you need to keep me apprised on date changes, publicists!)

Actor Max Minghella makes his directorial debut with TEEN SPIRIT (Bleecker Street), starring Elle Fanning as Violet, a young woman from the Isle of Wight who hopes to get out of her smalltown blues by performing on a popular talent television show called “Teen Spirit.” Helping her out is the scraggly Vlad (Croatian actor Zlatko Burik, who starred in Nicolas Refn’s Pusher trilogy) who was an opera singer in Croatia and offers to manage Violet and help her get to the finals of the show.  While Elle is no Aretha Franklin, I was truly impressed with her singing voice as well as Minghella’s screenplay and direction of the film which has a distinctive look and tone but is also a movie with quite a lot of mainstream appeal. If you like television shows like The Voice and American Idol, you might be interested in seeing one contestant’s (fictional) journey to get onto one of those shows.

You can read my interview with writer/director Max Minghella over at the Beat.

The movie I left out of last week’s column is HIGH LIFE (A24), the new movie and first in English from French auteur Claire Denis, which stars Robert Pattinson, André Benjamin, Juliette Binoche and Mia Goth. I saw the movie at the New York Film Festival last year, but I guess I never got around to writing about it, but I wish I did. Not that I particularly liked the movie, but if I wrote about it, at least I could remember what it was about. I know it takes place on a spaceship with a bunch of astronauts including Pattinson and his young daughter, all of them trying to survive.

But my absolutely favorite new movie of the weekend is Alex Ross Perry’s HER SMELL (Gunpowder and Sky), starring Elisabeth Moss as Becky Something, the lead singer of an all-girl punk band who have hit the big time but are about to implode due to Becky’s addictions and eccentricities. Becky also has a baby daughter who she is constantly neglecting and her bandmates (Agyness Deyn, Gayle Rankin) and everyone is worried about her. I’ve liked some of Perry’s past work, but something about this one really connected, maybe because I spent a couple decades working in the music business, so I can relate to the frustrated engineer in the recording studio section of the film.  Moss, obviously, is amazing as Becky, a role that puts her through all the highs and lows of success and fame, but I also liked the cast around her, actors like Cara Delevigne and Amber Heard who I barely could recognize in their respective wigs. I actually saw this at the New York Film Festival, and I liked it even more when I watched it again recently.  It opens in New York on Friday and in L.A. and other cities next Friday, and I hope to have an interview with Perry, probably over at NextBigPicture by next week some time.

A movie that I hoped would play the Toronto Film Festival in 2017, but instead got up in the Harvey Weinstein scandal was Garth Davis’ MARY MAGDALENE  (IFC Films), the follow-up to his Oscar-nominated film Lion.  It stars Rooney Mara as the title character and her real-life boyfriend Joaquin Phoenix as Jesus… and just hat last part gets me worried just because I remember Rodrigo Garcia’s Last Days in the Desert a few years back, starring Ewan McGregor as Jesus. This is being released this weekend into about 50 theaters in select cities after playing in just about every other country in the world last year as it sought out a new U.S. distributor.

Italian filmmaker Matteo Garrone of Gamorrah fame returns with DOGMAN (Magnolia), a crime thriller set in a small seaside village where a dog groomer named Marcello (Marcello Fonte) is being coerced into committing petty crimes by an ex-boxer bully named Simoncino. Apparently, this is based on true events, and I generally liked it, particularly the performance of Fonte. It opens at the Film Forum and at the Film Society of Lincoln Center Friday, as well as the Landmark Nuart in L.A. It will expand to more California theaters on April 19.

Martial arts fans will want to check out master fight choreographer Yuen Woo-Ping’s latest The Ip Man Legacy: Master Z (Well GO USA), starring Max Zhang as Cheung Tin Chi, who is trying to make a life in Hong Kong with his young son after being defeated by Master Ip.  The movie also stars the legendary Michelle Yeoh (in a great sequence with Zhang), Tony Jaa (ditto) and Dave Bautista… yeah, well I guess two out of three isn’t bad, but Bautista is pretty terrible, and the movie is disjointed in its storytelling. But the action is cool, so there’s that! It opens in select theaters this weekend.

Eva Husson’s Girls of the Sun (Cohen Media Group) stars Golshifteh Farahan (Pasterson) as Bahar, commander of the “Girls of the Sun” battalion, who are set to free their hometown from extremists, while also freeing her son. Emmanuelle Bercot (My King) plays a French journalist who is embedded with the warriors during the mission. Husson’s film opens at the Quad,Landmark 57and the FIAF Florence Gould Hall (now showing first-run films) on Friday, as well as the Laemmle Monica Film Center in L.A.

A movie I sadly had to miss at this year’s Oxford Film Festival is V. Scott Balcerek’s doc Satan & Adam (Cargo), a movie that took twenty years to make, as Balcerek pulls together two decades of documentary footage of the blues duo that were a fixture in Harlem in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. “Satan” is Sterling Magee, who played with so many greats but felt exploited so he walked away from the music scene, before being joined by Adam Gussow, an Ivy league scholar…but then Magee vanished, and the film follows what happened after that.

I had heard great things about Kaili Blues director BiGan’s Long Day’s Journey into Night  (Kino Lorber), when it played a number of film festivals last year. It follows a man, played by Huang Jue, who is haunted by a woman from his post who he goes looking for her. And it includes a substantial single shot in 3D… for no particular reason that I could ascertain. To call the movie a “slog” would be an insult to actual slogs, and I barely could stay awake while watching it. It’s playing at the Metrograph and Film Society of Lincoln Center starting Friday.

Also now playing at Film Forum is Camille Vidal-Naquet’s debut feature drama Sauvage/Wild (Strand Releasing) following a gay sex worker, played by Felix Maritaud from BPM (Beats Per Minute).

Tim Disney’s William, opening at New York’s Cinema Village and L.A.’s Laemmle Monica Film Center, is a love story between two scientists who fall in love while trying to clone a Neanderthal from ancient DNA creating William, the first Neanderthal to walk the earth in 35,000 years. The film stars Will Brittain, Waleed Zuaiter, Maria Dizzia and Beth Grant.

Gilles de Maistre’s Mia and the White Lion (Ledafilms Entertainment Group) is an ambitious film about a ten-year-old named Mia whose family moves to Africa to manage a lion farm, bonding with a white lion she names Charlie. The film was shot over three years, so that the film’s young starsDaniah De Villiers and Ryan Mac Lennan could bond with their lion co-stars. The film also stars Melanie Laurent and Langley Kirkood, and it opens in select cities.

LOCAL FESTIVALS

I’m finally shifting my gaze over to Chicago where the 21stAnnual EBERTFEST kicked off yesterday with Alan Elliot’s Aretha Franklin concert film Amazing Grace, as well as a special showing of the Wachowski’s Bound with special guests Jennifer Tilly and Gena Gershon. It continues through the weekend with showings of recent and older movies, including Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married and more.

REPERTORY

METROGRAPH (NYC):

Late Nites at Metrographwill screen Werner Herzog’s Bad Liuetenant: Port of Call New Orleans, starring the inimitable Nicolas Cage, while the Playtime: Family Matineesthis weekend is Danny Kaye as Hans Christian Anderson. Although I forgot to include it last week, Michael Blackwood’s 1968 docs Monk and Monk in Europe(as in Thelonious Monk) will continue for the next week, as does King Hu’s The Fate of Lee Khan from 1973. This Saturday night, the Metrograph is presenting a cast and crew reunion for Sidney Lumet’s 1988 movie Running on Emptywith Christine Lahti, screenwriter Naomi Foner and producers Amy Robinson and Griffin Dunne

THE NEW BEVERLY (L.A.):

L.A.’s hottest newish rep theater will show Michael Ritchie’s 1975 film Smile as well as his 1992 film Diggstownon Weds and Thursday (and apparently, Bruce Dern appeared in person on Weds!), Friday and Saturday are Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry  (1971) and Escape from Alcatraz  (1978), while Sunday and Monday screens David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai  (1957). This weekend’s KIDDEE MATINEE is Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, while the midnight offerings are The Hateful Eight on Friday and The Blues Brothers (1980) on Saturday. On Monday afternoon, there’s a screening Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.

FILM FORUM (NYC):

On Saturday, Film Forum will screen Jaime Chávarri’s 1976 documentary El Desecanto, introduced by author Aaron Shulman, who wrote a book about the Spanish literary family, the Paneros, on which the movie is based. (FYI, Chávarri’s film was never released in the States, and there is only one screening on Saturday.) Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) will screen Saturday and Sunday as part of Film Forum Jr, and Francesco Rossi’s 1973 film Lucky Lucianowill screen a 4k restoration for a single screening on Sunday afternoon.

AERO  (LA):

The late Luke Perry gets a tribute with Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) shown on Thursday, and then the Aero is doing its own Claire Denis tribute (cause everyone else is doing i!) with Salt, Sweat and Sunshine: The Cinema of Claire Denis with a double feature of her debut Chocolat  (1988) and White Material  (2009) on Friday, a screening of Beau Travail (1999) on Saturday, Nenette and Boni (1996) and 35 Shots of Rum (2008) on Saturday, and then Trouble Every Day  (2001)and Let the Sunshine In (2017) on Sunday. Most of those will be showing on 35mm and Denis will be there, at least for the first two nights.

MOMA (NYC):

Modern Matinees: B is for Bacall continues with 1948’s Key Largo on Thursday and Jonathan Glazer’s Birth (2004) on Friday. The What Price Hollywood series will screen George Cukor’s Sylvia Scarlett (1935) and John Waters’ Female Trouble (1974) on Thursday, Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place  (1950) and Bill Gunn’s Ganja & Hess  (1973) on Friday, Mitchell Leisen’s Midnight  (1939), Clarence Brown’s 1931 film A Free Soul and George Cukor’s What Price Hollywood  (1932) on Saturday and Fritz Lang’s Clash By Night  (1952) and Joseph Lewis’ Gun Crazy  (1950) on Sunday.

QUAD CINEMA (NYC):

The Quad begins its new series Wild Things: The Ferocious Films of Nelly Kaplan, a tribute retrospective to a pivotal filmmaker in the French New Wave, which I know next to nothing about, so I won’t even try. Just click on the title to see the movies playing.

BAM CINEMATEK (NYC):

This week’s series is The Anarchic Cinema of Věra Chytilová, a celebration of the filmmaker who emerged during the Czech New Wave, which I know even less about than the French New Wave. Just click on the link if you know who she is.

LANDMARK THEATRES NUART  (LA):

This Friday’s midnight screening is the ‘70s classic Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (1974), starring Peter Fonda and Susan George. I’m not sure when was the last time I had a chance to see this movie but if I were in L.A., this is where I would be on Friday night.

STREAMING AND CABLE

Streaming on Netflix starting Wednesday is THE SILENCE, the new apocalyptic thriller from director John R. Leonetti  (Annabelle), starring Stanley Tucci, Kiernan Shipka and Miranda Otto. In this twist on Netflix’s hit Bird Box (and rip-off of A Quiet Place?), this one involves a world being terrorized by primeval beings with acute hearing and a family trying to survive. Also streaming Friday is the high concept teen rom-com The Perfect Date, starring Noah Centineo as a guy who is payed to take a friend’s cousin to the prom.

Next week, another horror movie in New Line’s The Curse of La Llorona, plus the faith-based drama Breakthrough from Fox and DisneyNature’s Penguins.

[vsplusonline]

Coronavirus: Testing blunders crippled US response

New Post has been published on https://apzweb.com/coronavirus-testing-blunders-crippled-us-response/

Coronavirus: Testing blunders crippled US response

A series of missteps at the nation’s top public health agency caused a critical shortage of reliable laboratory tests for the coronavirus, hobbling the federal response as the pandemic spread across the country like wildfire, an Associated Press review found.

President Donald Trump assured Americans early this month that the COVID-19 test developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is “perfect” and that “anyone who wants a test can get a test.” But more than two months after the first U.S. case of the new disease was confirmed, many people still cannot get tested.

In the critical month of February, as the virus began taking root in the U.S. population, CDC data shows government labs processed 352 COVID-19 tests — an average of only a dozen per day.

“You cannot fight a fire blindfolded,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organization, said at a recent briefing. “We cannot stop this pandemic if we don’t know who is infected.”

The Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the CDC, has begun an internal review to assess its own mistakes. But outside observers and federal health officials have pointed to four primary issues that together hampered the national response — the early decision not to use the test adopted by the World Health Organization, flaws with the more complex test developed by the CDC, government guidelines restricting who could be tested and delays in engaging the private sector to ramp up testing capacity.

Combined with messaging from the White House minimizing the disease, that fueled a lackluster response that missed chances to slow the spread of the virus, they said.

“There were many, many opportunities not to end up where we are,” Dr. Ashish K. Jha, the director of the Global Health Institute at Harvard, told the AP. “Basically, they took this as business as usual. … And that’s because the messaging from the White House was ‘this is not a big deal, this is no worse than the flu.’ So that message basically created no sense of urgency within the FDA or the CDC to fix it.”

Even as private labs have been cleared by government regulators to process tens of thousands of additional tests in the last two weeks, experts warn that the nation is still falling well short of enough testing capacity to keep ahead of the highly contagious virus. And it can often take a week just to get results back.

Trump last week rated his administration’s response to the crisis as a perfect 10. However, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the CDC’s system wasn’t designed to test for and track a widespread outbreak, which he characterized as “a failing.”

In interviews with the AP, two federal health officials with direct knowledge of the situation said CDC experts don’t know why many of the agency’s test kits failed to reliably detect the virus. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about what went wrong.

J. Stephen Morrison, a health policy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, called the testing issues a debacle, contributing to what he described as a confused and delayed federal response to the crisis.

As a result, he said, the CDC has now been marginalized within the White House — a worrisome development.

“CDC has generally been regarded as the best in the game,” Morrison said. “I don’t think they anticipated the technical difficulty or the speed with which the virus has been moving. The virus was racing out ahead of them.”

FATEFUL DECISIONS

On New Year’s Eve, Chinese scientists informed the World Health Organization about a cluster of 27 pneumonia cases of unknown cause in the industrial megalopolis of Wuhan that they linked to the city’s wholesale fish market. Less than two weeks later, the Chinese had sequenced the virus’ genetic makeup and shared it with the world.

Within days, German scientists had developed a test that could identify a unique part of the virus’ DNA. The WHO quickly adopted the German test, publishing technical guidelines on Jan. 17 and working with private companies to produce testing kits.

As they have done with some past outbreaks, officials at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta decided to develop their own test, focusing on three gene targets distinct from what the WHO used. Over the decades, the headquarters lab had built a track record of being among the first to develop tests for new diseases and quickly making them available for disease tracking.

The CDC published the technical details for its COVID-19 test on Jan. 28, 10 days after the WHO. By then, the virus had already been in the U.S. for at least two weeks.

The 35-year-old man who would become the first American to test positive had arrived in Seattle on Jan. 15, following a trip to Wuhan. After swabs from his nose and throat were flown to the CDC lab, federal officials announced the results Jan. 21.

In an interview on CNBC the following day, the Republican president was asked about the risk to the nation.

“We have it totally under control,” he said. “It’s one person coming in from China. … It’s going to be just fine.”

With limited capacity at the CDC lab in Atlanta, the agency placed strict criteria on who could be tested: people with fevers, coughing or difficulty breathing who had also visited Wuhan within the preceding two weeks or who had close contact with someone already confirmed or under investigation for having the virus.

On Jan. 30, the day the WHO declared the outbreak a public health emergency, Trump again assured the American people that the virus was very well under control.

Then he departed for a weekend at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, where he tweeted a photo of himself playing golf at his club in West Palm Beach.

“Getting a little exercise this morning!” the president wrote.

The following day, the U.S. declared its own emergency. Still, U.S. citizens returning from China who did not have a fever weren’t tested for the virus but were encouraged to self-quarantine at home for 14 days.

At that point, the CDC had confirmed just eight cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. The agency amended its testing criteria to include people with fevers who had traveled to China, rather than just Wuhan.

FLAWED TEST KITS

Four days after the U.S. declared a state of emergency, only 178 patients had been tested and 82 others were listed as “pending,” meaning they were awaiting final results, according to CDC data released at the time.

To help increase the number of people being screened, the Food and Drug Administration issued emergency authorization for CDC-certified labs run by state health departments to begin processing swabs, and they were provided with kits that could test 250 patients.

As the first tests were processed at the state labs, technicians reported getting inconclusive results, which the CDC has said could be due to the test looking for signs of generic coronaviruses, of which there are many, rather than the specific virus that causes COVID-19.

Whatever the reason, by mid-February, only about a half-dozen state and local public health labs had reliable tests. But still, CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield continued to insist his agency had developed “a very accurate test.”

“We found that, in some of the states, it didn’t work,” Redfield said earlier this month. “We figured out why. I don’t consider that a fault. I consider that doing quality control. I consider that success.”

The testing problems emerged just as the CDC broadened its criteria to include patients who were “severely ill” with COVID-19 symptoms “even if a known source of exposure has not been identified.”

As more sick people sought to be tested, many states were forced to limit access because of the flawed CDC test. Accounts began to emerge through social media of people with all the symptoms of COVID-19 who either couldn’t get tested or had test results delayed by days or even a week.

“I know of doctor friends of mine who have critically ill patients in the ICU, and we don’t know if they have COVID or not because we can’t get a test,” Jha said last week.

COMMUNITY TRANSMISSION

On Feb. 24, exasperated officials at the Association of Public Health Laboratories sent a letter to the FDA, basically asking permission for state labs to develop their own tests. Within days, the FDA reversed its previous position and said both public and private labs could conduct testing.

Trump continued to insist the virus would die out on its own. “One day, it’s like a miracle. It will disappear,” he predicted Feb. 27.

By then, experts say, the opportunity to halt the relentless spread of the virus within the U.S. population had been lost.

On Feb. 29, only 472 patients had been tested nationwide, with just 22 cases confirmed, according to CDC data. Of those, nine cases were not related to travel but had spread person-to-person within the U.S.

By comparison, South Korea had its first confirmed case of COVID-19 on Jan. 20, the same day as the U.S. Officials there used a test that focused on the same gene targets as the WHO test, according to the website of a test manufacturer. They then quickly permitted private-sector labs to run the samples. As a result, a nation with less than one-sixth the population of the U.S. mobilized to test more than 20,000 people a day.

South Korea also instituted drive-thru centers, allowing quicker identification of those who were infected but might not be displaying symptoms, thus slowing the emergence of new cases to a more manageable level.

Meanwhile, the rate of U.S. infections soared.

“The system is not really geared to what we need right now, what you are asking for,” Fauci conceded during a congressional hearing earlier this month. “That is a failing. Let’s admit it.”

SHIFTING BLAME

As public outrage over the lack of available U.S. tests grew, the FDA announced it would allow private diagnostic lab companies to produce new tests without preauthorization from regulators.

Trump and HHS Secretary Alex Azar visited the CDC lab in Atlanta on March 6, praising the agency’s performance and promising 4 million test kits would be available by the end of the following week.

That lofty number didn’t match the ability of U.S. labs to process tests, however. Private providers were just then ramping up, while CDC and state health labs processed about 25,200 COVID-19 tests in the following seven days, according to CDC data.

At the same news conference, Trump said he wanted infected passengers to remain on a cruise ship off the West Coast to keep the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the U.S. low.

“I like the numbers being where they are,” Trump said, shortly before departing Atlanta for another weekend of golf in Florida. “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.”

Trump has also attempted to mislay blame for the testing troubles on the Obama administration. In 2018, Trump disbanded the White House directorate charged with preparing for and responding to global pandemics.

“I don’t take responsibility at all,” Trump replied when asked about the testing shortfall in a March 13 briefing at the White House.

Morrison said Trump appears to see the virus as a political issue rather than a public health threat.

“You can imagine a White House that said, ‘Do whatever it takes to test everybody for the virus,’” he said. “That wasn’t the mentality. It was the opposite mentality, and ultimately the responsibility to protect the American people lies with the White House.”

Trump and other officials have falsely said they declined to use the WHO test because it isn’t reliable.

“Quality testing for our American people is paramount to us,” Deborah Birx, who is coordinating the U.S. coronavirus response, said last week. “It doesn’t help to put out a test where 50% or 47% are false positives.”

“It was a bad test,” Trump chimed in.

Tarik Jaarevi, a WHO spokesman, told the AP last week that his agency had shipped 1.5 million testing kits manufactured in Germany to 120 countries around the globe, with no such problems emerging.

“The test has been validated in three external laboratories, adapted by WHO and manufactured in line with international quality standards,” he said. “It has shown consistently good performance in laboratory and clinical use, and neither a significant number of false-positive nor false-negative results have been reported.”

Over the past two weeks, U.S. testing capacity has surged, with private companies joining in. LabCorp began providing tests March 5, and Quest Diagnostics followed four days later. Tests also are being conducted at hospitals and other centers.

With the increased testing has come a skyrocketing number of confirmed cases, zooming from 43 at the beginning of March to 33,404 by Monday.

Only in the last few days has the United States finally begun testing more people each day than far smaller South Korea, according to data complied by Johns Hopkins University.

Jha estimates the U.S. should be testing 100,000 to 150,000 people per day — figures he said should be obtainable given the number of high-quality diagnostic labs in the country.

“We certainly have the capacity. It’s just we’re not doing it,” Jha said Thursday. “We are up to about 40,000 tests per day now — and so we are moving in the right direction. Still far from where we need to be, but moving.”

IndiaToday.in has plenty of useful resources that can help you better understand the coronavirus pandemic and protect yourself. Read our comprehensive guide (with information on how the virus spreads, precautions and symptoms), watch an expert debunk myths, learn about the first human trial of a vaccine and access our dedicated coronavirus outbreak page. Get the latest updates on our live blog.

Watch India Today TV live here. Catch the latest TV debates and video reports here.

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[ecotone99]

[HF] The secret identity of the Zodiac

On the 50th anniversary of the sensational Zodiac killing spree, a cold case detective from the San Francisco PD pulled out the dusty boxes of official records. They hadn’t been touched in years; and the killer himself was presumed dead or incapacitated by advanced age. There were as many suspects as there were theories but the last time anyone had worked the case was in the early 1990’s. Since then, DNA genotyping has exploded and forensic science had advanced in leaps and bounds. Amazingly, the original envelopes and morbid correspondence sent from the killer to various media outlets were still there, turning yellow in the evidence boxes.

With millions of people participating in ancestry tracing programs, there is a huge DNA database of family links. Of course those are conducted through ‘private’ organizations but hundreds of cold cases are solved each year with their cooperation and discreet assistance. Detective Tim Rand got into law enforcement with the goal of helping people. He also enjoyed challenges and solving mysteries. The Zodiac case was one of the most infamous, unsolved crimes in the world. He figured he would take a crack at it himself. With modern science, he hoped to see if it could be used to do what thousands of hours of old-fashioned detective work, could not.

Of course countless people had been in contact with the evidence over the years. From postal sorters, mail carriers, mailroom staff at the newspapers, the secretaries for the editors, and more than a dozen lab techs and detectives, the chances of having uncontaminated DNA was unlikely. Honestly, it was pretty slim but it was worth a try. If it failed, he’d just chunk the papers back in their boxes and put them on the shelf for the next eager sleuth to crack the case.

The lab attendant rolled his eyes in frustrated annoyance when the detective explained what tests he wanted performed. The technician knew all-too-well how many random sets of unrelated DNA would be found on that pile of evidence. Tim had a clever solution to the issue.

“Cross reference all samples found on all the letters. The Zodiac send his cyphers and correspondence to several different media outlets and individuals. He enjoyed taunting the editors of different newspapers and the detectives assigned to the case when it was an active investigation. The only DNA thread they should all have in common, is him.”

As incredible as it might’ve seemed, there was only one set of common DNA for all samples! It was just like he had predicted. Detective Rand had stumbled onto the first major break in the case in nearly 30 years. The forensic team were honestly impressed with the heightened potential for linking the evidence to the unknown killer. They recorded the DNA sequence and approached their contacts within the ancestry database for an official ‘rush job’.

Even with amazing lucky breaks, they were still highly guarded with their enthusiasm for a match to be made. It therefore came as a great shock when a direct match was made in only a couple days. Greater still was the impact of learning the identity of the DNA match for all 14 known pieces of authenticated Zodiac evidence. No one was ready for the truth and the push back by the authorities was considerable.

The profile was a 99% match to the chief of police of San Francisco at the time of the crimes! At first the laboratory dismissed the shocking revelation as accidental evidence contamination. That explanation would’ve made sense but it was eventually disproven. The chief had stated formally in his memoirs that he always left the investigative work to his detective team. He even went so far as to declare that he never meddled in any of their open cases. If so, there wouldn’t be any logical reason for his DNA to be on every single piece of Zodiac evidence.

Internal affairs stepped in when they caught wind of the mounting evidence. The ‘boys in blue’ were known to protect their own, especially the higher up officials who retired, or had passed away. There was an unspoken protocol that their law enforcement legacies were cemented in stone and beyond reproach. Damning evidence like the former chief’s DNA being directly linked to the Zodiac was hard to ignore and even harder to suppress.

Detective Rand just wanted the truth to come out but a revelation like that would surely cause backlash and heads to roll. The chief himself had died a dozen years earlier but many of his contemporaries were still around. A few younger officers who worked under him were still on the force. They were going to chafe at the accusations against their former boss.

By all accounts, he was a well liked and respected senior officer. It was going to be a tough sell to convince the public, even though it was the truth. Tim had to find corroborating evidence to tie him to the disturbing series of crimes. Without that, he’d be dismissed as a reckless rookie with penchant for throwing veteran officers under the bus. That’s what they would say. That he did it just to make a ‘name’ for himself.

The biggest question of all was ‘why’? Why would an officer that swore to ‘protect and serve’, lead a secret life as a serial killer? It made no sense. The man spent almost 40 years in law enforcement. At times Tim wanted to chalk it up to a crazy coincidence but some of the evidence they tested hadn’t even been available to the San Francisco PD during the active investigation phase. A few of the letters from the Zodiac were sent to neighboring police departments and had only been released to him the previous week for the testing. His highly unusual suspect had never legally been in contact with them, yet his DNA was on all.

As is often the case with big city government organizations, they had yet to completely digitize their old records. Detective Rand filtered through mountains of dusty records for the chief’s sign-in sheets for the time periods in question. While they couldn’t prove or disprove his guilt, it would shed light on whether he was officially ‘on duty’ during the known crimes. Secretly, Tim hoped the Chief was signed in during some of them to disprove the allegations but in every single instance, he was officially out-of-the-office. He hoped he was wrong but It looked very bad.

The fact that the Chief fit the general appearance of eyewitness accounts of the Zodiac was another troubling element that couldn’t be dismissed. Research into the Chief’s past also revealed he was a Korean War veteran. As a Navy signal man, he would have been well acquainted with code symbols and cryptology similar to the cyphers the Zodiac sent.

All of those things added up to compelling circumstantial evidence but it wouldn’t be an open and shut case without the DNA association. That made things difficult to deny. Tim spoke to a number of old timers from the department about their memories of the investigation but he was careful to avoid implicating their former Chief. Most just offered a general commentary about the shocking crimes but one of them mentioned the Chief personally. It proved to be a very revealing interview.

Interesting, the retired lieutenant thought the Chief’s reaction to one of the gruesome crimes was ‘odd’. He said he had an odd grin on his face when informed about the taxi driver’s murder the night before. The lieutenant assumed the Chief was simply amused by an earlier event, but felt it was strange that he continued to smile, long after informed about the murder. At no point did the pleasant gentleman suspect the former police chief of any wrongdoing. He just shared the strange anecdote from 50 years earlier because it stuck him as a strange reaction.

Only detective Rand would’ve been able to use that offhand testimony, in an official capacity. Tim thanked him for his time and made plans to interview the most important person yet in his undercover investigation. The Chief’s widow resided in the suburbs and was reportedly still ‘sharp’. Tim put a great deal of thought and planning into his ‘game plan’. He wanted to ask important questions without clueing her in to the delicate and very personal subject of his investigation. It was going to be a balancing act.

He called in advance to make an appointment to speak with her. He explained he’d inherited several cold cases and merely wanted to ask her recollections on them. It was all presented as a casual chat. She invited him to come by at noon. Tim felt she was probably very eager to have company in her advanced age. He arrived a couple minutes early and rang the doorbell. She opened the door and invited him in. Seated on the sofa across from her, she surprised him when her demeanor immediately changed.

“Young man, why don’t you come clean for your reason to visit me? I’ve been the wife of a lawman too long to fall for ‘the casual chat’ ruse. My husband practically invented that interrogation technique.”

Tim started to feign ignorance or protest but stopped himself. She saw through the facade. It was clear to both of them that he had some uncomfortable, indiscreet questions to ask, and she wanted him to just cut to the chase. Her ‘no nonsense’ attitude was both admirable and intimidating. He had spent so much time working on a strategy that he was unprepared to dive right in.

“You came to ask me something about my husband. Something so disturbing that you are avoiding the subject entirely. I can see it in your eyes. Are you sure you want to know the answer? Once you discover the backbone to ask, I’m going to tell you. The question is, what will the truth do? Will it bring you fame? Will it solve a series of nearly forgotten crimes where even the victim’s families are probably long dead? Will it besmirch and tarnish my dead husband’s memory and celebrated police career? Yes. The answers to all those things, is yes.”

Detective Rand was at a loss for words. The Chief’s widow had all but confirmed what he already knew. Up until that moment he had hoped for an unlikely but plausible explanation for the damning evidence against the man. Instead, she sewed up the case in a tight little package for him. The information came so freely that he was unprepared to handle it.

“Down in the cellar there is a large cardboard box marked ‘decorations’. It contains a black hood, a pistol, several pieces of stained material, a number of library books on code writing and cryptology, and a personal diary. If the handwriting and substance of that journal were analyzed by experts, they would find that it is consistent with the letters you have in your possession from the Zodiac killer. They would also agree that it perfectly matches the handwriting of my late husband.”

Tim sat there speechless. He stared into her eyes while trying to absorb the incredible revelation she had just disclosed to him. For the briefest of moments he worried she had unveiled the dark truth because she didn’t intend to let him leave, alive.

“I didn’t always know. I suspected. I really did, but like most people I was in a deep form of denial about it. He went through strange mood swings. He was obsessed with the case in a way that surpassed any officer’s level of professional commitment. His behavior was highly bizarre and erratic at times, but then again he was obviously affected by the war. It changed him. I couldn’t bring myself to consciously suspect he was ‘The Zodiac’, but deep down I suppose I always knew.

When I found his secret box down there, I was devastated because I could no longer deny it anymore. I couldn’t begin to answer why he did any of it but his journal probably spells it out pretty well. I couldn’t bear to read beyond the first couple pages. I just put it back in the box and pretended it wasn’t there. It was his dark little secret and I wanted no part of it. We never spoke about it. I was secretly terrified of the man I slept beside until the day he died.”

Detective Rand stood up. He had a lot to process. She looked up at him with a steely glint.

“Young man, what do you plan to do with this information? I’m a feeble old woman with terminal cancer. I can’t take a media circus or the public shaming of the news media. At best, the doctor’s say I only have a few months left. I am grateful to unburden myself about this to you. I guess you are my official confessor. Will you sit on this ugly secret about my husband until I pass? What’s a couple more months? Revealing the truth now won’t bring back any of those poor souls. I’d just like to go to my grave without being dragged through the mud.”

Tim nodded. The confirmed identity of the Zodiac killer was now his burden the bear. He could keep the lab technicians and internal affairs quiet until it was the right time to reveal the truth. In the meantime he had plenty of other cases to work.

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[theseventhhex]

Kadavar Interview

Kadavar

Kadavar is a trio that forms music with unique symbioses, challenging each other to fill the sonic space between them when the curtain goes up – and to grow even closer after it's gone down. In the beginning of 2017 the band prepared to start a new album cycle by literally rolling up their sleeves and building a brand new recording studio from scratch. Over 100 square metres inside an industrial complex in the area of Neukölln in Berlin is now their creative haven and workplace alike, and this is where the follow-up to ‘Berlin’ started to take form. ‘Rough Times’, the band’s latest release, sees the trio question everything they’ve already established in order to move forward as a band... We talk to Tiger about pulling from the chaos in the world, fatherhood and an incident with the police in Denver…

TSH: There is a wider spectrum of different sounds on your latest record ‘Rough Times’. Were you very much looking to switch things up?

Tiger: With our previous albums I think we were looking for one special sound that went pretty much all the way through the entire record. This time around we were just up for trying different things. Also, I personally feel there is a lot of negativity on this record and it kind of ties in well with the first few albums too. There are a few sad and melancholic moments, and even the sound of organs used too. It’s safe to say we wanted more variety.

TSH: The madness in the world also informed your songwriting...

Tiger: Absolutely. As a band we were drawing from the madness, chaos and absurdity in the world today. Today’s political and digital world means we kind of feel lost sometimes and we’re usually angry about what’s going on around us. It’s really concerning how quick the world has become so dangerous and scary. When we wrote ‘Berlin’ in 2015 this wasn’t the case so much, but the madness in the world has spiralled out of control very quickly.

TSH: For you, does playing music together as band still allow you to enter a rare state of mind where everything is just fine for a few moments?

Tiger: Definitely. For me, playing rock n’ roll is therapeutic and it makes me happier than most things in life. Being so into music helps me to escape and it helps me to heal. I find it so enjoyable to be in harmony with my bandmates, as well as with our fans when we play live.

TSH: Moreover, with this album each member got even more involved to offer more of a collaborative outcome?

Tiger: That’s true. I guess we’ve always kind of crafted songs together, but with ‘Rough Times’ the process was even more of a band effort. Me and Lupus always exchange ideas initially, but in the end we always make it work together as a band, which is very important.

TSH: What was the process like in bringing together ‘Skeleton Blues’?

Tiger: It’s the kind of song which wrote itself pretty fast. When you have a verse like that, as well as knowing what you want to say, things just fall into place naturally. The feelings that were expressed in the song made it easier to say the words. I guess the song is about self-hatred and a state of depression that I was in when I wrote it. Regardless, it felt good to express myself.

TSH: Whereas ‘Vampires’ is a track which touches on a specific generation?

Tiger: Like most of the other songs looking at the record cover was a big inspiration for this song. ‘Vampires’ tells us that we are leaning towards the success of our parents’ generation. Our parents have done so much for us in the decades before us and it seems like so many people do not think about this. This song is basically about not throwing away and disregarding what those before us have done and sacrificed for us.

TSH: By the end of the record, there is very much a hopeful feeling after expressing self-deprecation and depression...

Tiger: Yes, I certainly feel the way that we sequenced the record means that with the last three tracks there is some hope developing. ‘The Lost Child’ is about navigating in a wrong direction, but still changing for the better. Whereas ‘You Found The Best In Me‘ is a song that Lupus wrote for his girlfriend - it’s about being together but not at the same time, which is the hopeful message at the end.

TSH: Travelling is also key for you when it comes to broadening one’s horizons?

Tiger: Yes. I think if everyone in the world was to travel more and get to know other cultures and understand them more, then the world would be a better place. So many people are just frightened about what they don’t know regarding other cultures and traditions. Just looking at the hate towards foreigners in so many countries is a lot to do with misinformation, and also a lot to do with not understanding the workings of other cultures. Sometimes trying to understand others even if you don’t speak the same language is a skill that is beneficial, and it makes you more humble.

TSH: You recently became a father too. What’s it been like to be responsible for the little one?

Tiger: It’s so amazing! It is a completely new situation for me to be in, but when my daughter was born, my whole life changed and I realised that there is no discussion about what is most important to me. Everything is secondary to my immediate family and it feels good to have this new purpose and responsibility. I can see that even just three months in that my daughter has this specific love for me. All I do nowadays is spend time with my wife and kid at home. It’s incredible to see my newborn grow each passing week, however, it’s also heartbreaking when I have to leave for touring. My wife sends me pictures and videos and I’m so happy to see how fast she’s growing! Oh, as well as the new noises she is making, haha!

TSH: You’re also a big fan of Nick Cave?

Tiger: He is such a legend. I just love that there is no bullshit with him at all. He’s done it for so many years and he’s earned a level of respect that that is so high, which is richly deserved. The guy has a great reputation for such amazing contributions to music. Also, ‘Skeleton Tree’ was so intense and so well thought out - I really loved this record too.

TSH: Is Kadavar’s maturity among the traits that’s pleased you most?

Tiger: For sure. After 7 years we’ve matured and we know how the business works, which is important too. Having more of an understanding of the music industry and really nice fans means that we really feel freer than we did at the very beginning. We don’t have to kiss ass - we can simply just do what we want with our music, which is a good feeling to have.

TSH: Tell us more about an incident in Denver where you guys got stopped because the police thought you were driving too fast. However, you were sure it was because of how you looked as individuals...

Tiger: Ha! Well, that was quite the incident. We were driving at the right speed in the region of 55mph. Basically if you’re a good cop, this means there’s no reason to stop nobody. Anyhow, this was in the middle of nowhere and I think the cops were just bored or they don’t like people that play rock n’ roll. I’m not saying all cops out there are like this, but it seemed like these cops were. Anyhow, in Denver weed is legal and we had a smoked out weed pipe in our car but no weed inside because we’re not that stupid. And so they just gave us a hard time for 5 hours! We even had to put our hands in the air and they had machine guns and all - it was ridiculous. We weren’t even allowed to pee and this was outside of a train track in the middle of nowhere. We were thoroughly searched and they even brought in the dogs. I guess they must have felt fucking powerful that night. Nonetheless, there was no need for it. I was just glad it was over when it was.

TSH: What aspects are you looking to delve into with future Kadavar music?

Tiger: I have a vision for his band to continue with a true sense of integrity. I really hope that the DNA of this band will always be defined by the three of us playing music with passion. It’s all about maintaining the character of how we work together as a band. Perhaps we will always sounds similar, but we also want to develop with every record and change for the better. I have no idea which direction the next record will go in, but I know we can still surprise and exceed ourselves as long as we have a good social climate in the band.

Kadavar - “Tribulation Nation”

Rough Times

[engdashboard]

Turning data into numbers

 Jeff Leek  2017/01/31

Editor’s note: This is the third chapter of a book I’m working on called Demystifying Artificial Intelligence. The goal of the book is to demystify what modern AI is and does for a general audience. So something to smooth the transition between AI fiction and highly mathematical descriptions of deep learning. I’m developing the book over time - so if you buy the book on Leanpub know that there are only three chapters in there so far, but I’ll be adding more over the next few weeks and you get free updates. The cover of the book was inspired by this amazing tweet by Twitter user @notajf. Feedback is welcome and encouraged!

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.” Arthur Conan Doyle

Data, data everywhere

I already have some data about you. You are reading this book. Does that seem like data? It’s just something you did, that’s not data is it? But if I collect that piece of information about you, it actually tells me a surprising amount. It tells me you have access to an internet connection, since the only place to get the book is online. That in turn tells me something about your socioeconomic status and what part of the world you live in. It also tells me that you like to read, which suggests a certain level of education.

Whether you know it or not, everything you do produces data - from the websites you read to the rate at which your heart beats. Until pretty recently, most of the data you produced wasn’t collected, it floated off unmeasured. Data were painstakingly gathered by scientists one number at a time in small experiments with a few people. This laborious process meant that data were expensive and time-consuming to collect. Yet many of the most amazing scientific discoveries over the last two centuries were squeezed from just a few data points. But over the last two decades, the unit price of data has dramatically dropped. New technologies touching every aspect of our lives from our money, to our health, to our social interactions have made data collection cheap and easy.

To give you an idea of how steep the drop in the price of data has been, in 1967 Stanley Milgram did an experiment to determine the number of degrees of separation between two people in the U.S. (Travers and Milgram 1969). In his experiment he sent 296 letters to people in Omaha, Nebraska and Wichita, Kansas. The goal was to get the letters to a specific person in Boston, Massachusetts. The trick was people had to send the letters to someone they knew, and they then sent it to someone they knew and so on. At the end of the experiment, only 64 letters made it to the individual in Boston. On average, the letters had gone through 6 people to get there.

This is an idea that is so powerful it even became part of the popular consciousness. For example it is the foundation of the internet meme “the 6-degrees of Kevin Bacon” (Wikipedia contributors 2016a) - the idea that if you take any actor and look at the people they have been in movies with, then the people those people have been in movies with, it will take you at most six steps to end up at the actor Kevin Bacon. This idea, despite its popularity was originally studied by Milgram using only 64 data points. A 2007 study updated that number to “7 degrees of Kevin Bacon”. The study was based on 30 billion instant messaging conversations collected over the course of a month or two with the same amount of effort (Leskovec and Horvitz 2008).

Once data started getting cheaper to collect, it got cheaper fast. Take another example, the human genome. The genome is the unique DNA code in every one of your cells. It consists of a set of 3 billion letters that is unique to you. By many measures, the race to be the first group to collect all 3 billion letters from a single person kicked off the data revolution in biology. The project was completed in 2000 after a decade of work and 3billiontocollectthe3billionlettersinthefirsthumangenome(Venteretal.2001).Thisprojectwasactuallyastunningsuccess,mostpeoplethoughtitwouldbemuchmoreexpensive.Butjustoveradecadelater,newtechnologymeansthatwecannowcollectall3billionlettersfromaperson′sgenomeforabout" id="MathJax-Element-1-Frame" role="presentation" style="border: 0px; direction: ltr; display: inline-block; float: none; font-size: 18.72px; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; max-height: none; max-width: none; min-height: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 1px 0px; position: relative; white-space: nowrap; word-spacing: normal; word-wrap: normal;" tabindex="0">3billiontocollectthe3billionlettersinthefirsthumangenome(Venteretal.2001).Thisprojectwasactuallyastunningsuccess,mostpeoplethoughtitwouldbemuchmoreexpensive.Butjustoveradecadelater,newtechnologymeansthatwecannowcollectall3billionlettersfromaperson′sgenomeforabout3billiontocollectthe3billionlettersinthefirsthumangenome(Venteretal.2001).Thisprojectwasactuallyastunningsuccess,mostpeoplethoughtitwouldbemuchmoreexpensive.Butjustoveradecadelater,newtechnologymeansthatwecannowcollectall3billionlettersfromaperson′sgenomeforabout1,000 in about a week (“The Cost of Sequencing a Human Genome,” n.d.), soon it may be less than $100 (Buhr 2017).

You may have heard that this is the era of “big data” from The Economist or The New York Times. It is really the era of cheap data collection and storage. Measurements we never bothered to collect before are now so easy to obtain that there is no reason not to collect them. Advances in computer technology also make it easier to store huge amounts of data digitally. This may not seem like a big deal, but it is much easier to calculate the average of a bunch of numbers stored electronically than it is to calculate that same average by hand on a piece of paper. Couple these advances with the free and open distribution of data over the internet and it is no surprise that we are awash in data. But tons of data on their own are meaningless. It is understanding and interpreting the data where the real advances start to happen.

This explosive growth in data collection is one of the key driving influences behind interest in artificial intelligence. When teaching computers to do something that only humans could do previously, it helps to have lots of examples. You can then use statistical and machine learning models to summarize that set of examples and help a computer make decisions what to do. The more examples you have, the more flexible your computer model can be in making decisions, and the more “intelligent” the resulting application.

What is data?

Tidy data

“What is data”? Seems like a relatively simple question. In some ways this question is easy to answer. According to Wikipedia:

Data (/ˈdeɪtə/ day-tə, /ˈdætə/ da-tə, or /ˈdɑːtə/ dah-tə)[1] is a set of values of qualitative or quantitative variables. An example of qualitative data would be an anthropologist’s handwritten notes about her interviews with people of an Indigenous tribe. Pieces of data are individual pieces of information. While the concept of data is commonly associated with scientific research, data is collected by a huge range of organizations and institutions, ranging from businesses (e.g., sales data, revenue, profits, stock price), governments (e.g., crime rates, unemployment rates, literacy rates) and non-governmental organizations (e.g., censuses of the number of homeless people by non-profit organizations).

When you think about data, you probably think of orderly sets of numbers arranged in something like an Excel spreadsheet. In the world of data science and machine learning this type of data has a name - “tidy data” (Wickham and others 2014). Tidy data has the properties that all measured quantities are represented by numbers or character strings (think words). The data are organized such that.

Each variable you measured is in one column

Each different measurement of that variable is in a different row

There is one data table for each “type” of variable.

If there are multiple tables then they are linked by a common ID.

This idea is borrowed from data management schemas that have long been used for storing data in databases. Here is an example of a tidy data set of swimming world records.

yeartimesex190565.8M190865.6M191062.8M191261.6M191861.4M192060.4M192258.6M192457.4M193456.8M193556.6M

This type of data, neat, organized and nicely numeric is not the kind of data people are talking about when they say the “era of big data”. Data almost never start their lives in such a neat and organized format.

Raw data

The explosion of interest in AI has been powered by a variety of types of data that you might not even think of when you think of “data”. The data might be pictures you take and upload to social media, the text of the posts on that same platform, or the sound captured from your voice when you speak to your phone.

Social media and cell phones aren’t the only area where data is being collected more frequently. Speed cameras on roads collect data on the movement of cars, electronic medical records store information about people’s health, wearable devices like Fitbit collect information on the activity of people. GPS information stores the location of people, cars, boats, airplanes, and an increasingly wide array of other objects.

Images, voice recordings, text files, and GPS coordinates are what experts call “raw data”. To create an artificial intelligence application you need to begin with a lot of raw data. But as we discussed in the simple AI example from the previous chapter - a computer doesn’t understand raw data in its natural form. It is not always immediately obvious how the raw data can be turned into numbers that a computer can understand. For example, when an artificial intelligence works with a picture the computer doesn’t “see” the picture file itself. It sees a set of numbers that represent that picture and operates on those numbers. The first step in almost every artificial intelligence application is to “pre-process” the data - to take the image files or the movie files or the text of a document and turn it into numbers that a computer can understand. Then those numbers can be fed into algorithms that can make predictions and ultimately be used to make an interface look intelligent.

Turning raw data into numbers

So how do we convert raw data into a form we can work with? It depends on what type of measurement or data you have collected. Here I will use two examples to explain how you can convert images and the text of a document into numbers that an algorithm can be applied to.

Images

Suppose that we were developing an AI to identify pictures of the author of this book. We would need to collect a picture of the author - maybe an embarrassing one.

This picture is made of pixels. You can see that if you zoom in very close on the image and look more closely. You can see that the image consists of many hundreds of little squares, each square just one color. Those squares are called pixels and they are one step closer to turning the image into numbers.

You can think of each pixel like a dot of color. Let’s zoom in a little bit more and instead of showing each pixel as a square show each one as a colored dot.

Imagine we are going to build an AI application on the basis of lots of images. Then we would like to turn a set of images into “tidy data”. As described above a tidy data set is defined as the following.

Each variable you measured is in one column

Each different measurement of that variable is in a different row

There is one data table for each “type” of variable.

If there are multiple tables then they are linked by a common ID.

A translation of tidy data for a collection of images would be the following.

Variables: Are the pixels measured in the images. So the top left pixel is a variable, the bottom left pixel is a variable, and so on. So each pixel should be in a separate column.

Measurements: The measurements are the values for each pixel in each image. So each row corresponds to the values of the pixels for each row.

Tables: There would be two tables - one with the data from the pixels and one with the labels of each image (if we know them).

To start to turn the image into a row of the data set we need to stretch the dots into a single row. One way to do this is to snake along the image going from top left corner to bottom right corner and creating a single line of dots.

This still isn’t quite data a computer can understand - a computer doesn’t know about dots. But we could take each dot and label it with a color name.

We could take each color name and give it a number, something like rosybrown = 1, mistyrose = 2, and so on. This approach runs into some trouble because we don’t have names for every possible color and because it is pretty inefficient to have a different number for every hue we could imagine.

But that would be both inefficient and not very understandable by a computer. An alternative strategy that is often used is to encode the intensity of the red, green, and blue colors for each pixel. This is sometimes called the rgb color model (Wikipedia contributors 2016b). So for example we can take these dots and show how much red, green, and blue they have in them.

Looking at it this way we now have three measurements for each pixel. So we need to update our tidy data definition to be:

Variables: Are the three colors for each pixel measured in the images. So the top left pixel red value is a variable, the top left pixel green value is a variable and so on. So each pixel/color combination should be in a separate column.

Measurements: The measurements are the values for each pixel in each image. So each row corresponds to the values of the pixels for each row.

Tables: There would be two tables - one with the data from the pixels and one with the labels of each image (if we know them).

So a tidy data set might look something like this for just the image of Jeff.

idlabelp1redp1greenp1bluep2red…1“jeff”238180180205…

Each additional image would then be another row in the data set. As we will see in the chapters that follow we can then feed this data into an algorithm for performing an artificial intelligence task.

Notes

Parts of this chapter from appeared in the Simply Statistics blog post “The vast majority of statistical analysis is not performed by statisticians” written by the author of this book.

References

Buhr, Sarah. 2017. “Illumina Wants to Sequence Your Whole Genome for $100.” https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/10/illumina-wants-to-sequence-your-whole-genome-for-100/.

Leskovec, Jure, and Eric Horvitz. 2008. “Planetary-Scale Views on an Instant-Messaging Network,” 6~mar.

“The Cost of Sequencing a Human Genome.” n.d. https://www.genome.gov/sequencingcosts/.

Travers, Jeffrey, and Stanley Milgram. 1969. “An Experimental Study of the Small World Problem.” Sociometry32 (4). [American Sociological Association, Sage Publications, Inc.]: 425–43.

Venter, J Craig, Mark D Adams, Eugene W Myers, Peter W Li, Richard J Mural, Granger G Sutton, Hamilton O Smith, et al. 2001. “The Sequence of the Human Genome.” Science 291 (5507). American Association for the Advancement of Science: 1304–51.

Wickham, Hadley, and others. 2014. “Tidy Data.” Under Review.

Wikipedia contributors. 2016a. “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon&oldid=748831516.

———. 2016b. “RGB Color Model.” https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=RGB_color_model&oldid=756764504.

Resource: https://simplystatistics.org/2017/01/31/data-into-numbers/

[mysteryshelf]

BLOG TOUR - Waking Lazarus

  Welcome to

THE PULP AND MYSTERY SHELF!

DISCLAIMER: This content has been provided to THE PULP AND MYSTERY SHELF by Hargrave PR and Events. No compensation was received. This information required by the Federal Trade Commission.

About the Book

A fast-paced thriller packed with page-turning twists, Waking Lazarus proves beyond a doubt that D.J. Williams is an exciting, fresh voice in international mystery and suspense. Homeland meets Bourne in this inventive and complex story of epic global adventure.

  Jake Harris’ life hasn’t turned out the way he planned. Battling his addictions, and the shattered pieces of his family, he is hired to ghostwrite a memoir. From the 1920’s story of a controversial evangelist, to the present-day mystery of a former District Attorney, everything changes when his search for the truth leads to an atrocity hidden from history.

  With a past he can’t remember, he begins to discover that he is not the person he believed himself to be. Rather, he is a threat to a secret society that has remained in the shadows for nearly a century. Jake is drawn deep inside a world he never knew existed that brings him closer to his own extraordinary destiny.

  This Summer you can access the first 10 chapters of Waking Lazarus – the # 1 read for summer 2017 – for free. Head to www.djwilliamsbooks.com for more information. Waking Lazarus will be exclusively priced at just $10 from 12th June-31st August 2017, with both Waking Lazarus and The Disillusioned available together in print for just $16 (and e-books priced at $2.99 each) via www.djwilliamsbooks.com. The Waking Lazarus soundtrack is also now available for just $4.99 from June-August 2017. Don’t leave for your vacation without them!

  Interview with the Author

  What initially got you interested in writing?

  At eight years old, I read Treasure Island cover to cover lost in my bedroom living out an adventure in another world. From the first page I was captured by the story and characters. When I closed the book I was left dreaming of becoming a storyteller. I never imagined how that would become reality. Fast forward through the years to a season in life where I found myself transitioning out of the music industry into the second act of my career as an Executive Producer and Director in the TV business. Only then did that spark of inspiration return to pursue my dream to write mystery, suspense, and international thrillers. Even after all those years I was hooked by a spark of inspiration, and the chase was on.

  What genres do you write in?

  Mystery, suspense, International thrillers

  What drew you to writing these specific genres?

  I stood on the shores of the Zambezi River as that spark of a story pierced my soul. I’d traveled across Zambia for three weeks, producing a live music recording and filming a documentary. I witnessed the reality of those forgotten by the world and I knew that one day I’d write about this place. Little did I know that it would be a few years before I found the courage to write my first novel, The Disillusioned. After a year of writing late at night, I sent my novel to a friend in the TV industry with the disclaimer, “If it’s not any good, the only two people who’ll know are you and me.”

  Within a few days my friend, Judith McCreary (Executive Producer of Law & Order: SVU, Criminal Minds, & CSI) called me back and encouraged me to push forward so I found an agent and searched for ways to get the story published. I was humbled when she was the first to endorse the novel, “The Disillusioned is a fast-paced mystery…you won’t put it down until you’ve unlocked the secrets and lies to find the truth.”

  How did you break into the field?

  After I finished writing The Disillusioned, I went through the step of sending query emails to potential agents, and then I waited. Weeks and months passed with the occasional rejection. Just as the birds stopped singing, and I thought I’d failed to get to the next stage, I ended up signing on with a literary agent who helped me put a proposal together. Then more months passed as the proposal was sent out to a long list of publishers. I’d heard from other authors how they were rejected ten, twenty, or nearly thirty times before their novel landed with a publisher who was willing to take the risk. I hoped that I’d be one of the lucky ones. I’ve yet to reach the summit. I’m just another climber on the mountain pulling myself up one word at a time.

  What do you want readers to take away from reading your works?

  What I discovered throughout the writing process was that using my experiences traveling to the poorest places in the world fueled my drive to create the Guardian Novels, a series filled with mystery, suspense, and adventure. All of those were aspects of the story, but from the first novel the reality of the fight against human trafficking was an underlying thread throughout. It’s one reason why I’ve defined this series as cause-driven novels. My hope is that readers will be entertained, but will also be inspired to make a difference in the world when they flip that last page.

  Writing the second novel, Waking Lazarus, was challenging to continue in the cause-driven storytelling style. To capture this story in a unique way, the novel spans nearly a century as readers are taken back to the 1920’s and then return to present day on a global adventure. It also pushes readers further into the worlds of child slavery, poverty, and the darkness of secrets. I’m humbled that the Guardian Novels, and the cause-driven storytelling style, have garnered the attention of Hollywood’s elite, including Peter Anderson, and Oscar winning cinematographer, who described it as “a captivating visual story with a colorful narrative” and  “hard to put down.”

    What do you find most rewarding about writing?

  Chasing the story is what keeps me writing. Once that spark of a story hits you’re on the hunt for answers. Often, I’ve found that the outline I create in the beginning looks vastly different at the end of the first draft. I believe it’s because as I’m writing, chasing down the story and characters, there are twists and turns that reveal themselves in surprising ways. For me, not knowing exactly what’s going to happen next keeps me on the edge of my seat. I’ve always thought that if I’m on the journey guessing what’s going to happen next, then hopefully, the same will be true for readers who enter into the world I’ve created.

  What do you find most challenging about writing?

  When I first began writing the Guardian Novels, there was only one story with one set of characters. But as I continued writing the second book, Waking Lazarus, the world expanded with new characters, twists and turns, and underlying secrets that needed to be revealed at just the right moment. Keeping track of all my characters, and their story arcs in the world, has been a challenge at times. And I’m not only chasing the next story, I’m also chasing after my favorite authors who inspire me to push my characters farther than I ever thought possible. In the end, I’d love for those I admire to be surprised by the stories I write. It’s easy to start a story, but the real challenge is to finish with a bang!

  What advice would you give to people wanting to enter the field?

  Writing is a journey that leads us into the valleys as we strive to climb the mountain. I would say for any writer the challenge is to live out the 3 P’s: Passion. Purpose. Productivity. Passion is what gives you the endurance to keep going. If you love to write, then you write whether you become a bestselling author or not. It’s part of your DNA. It’s something you’ll do no matter who might end up reading your creation. But passion without purpose leaves you without clear goals or direction. Know where you want to end up in six months, a year, or five years from now. Know what drives your passion for writing. Know the genre where you want to build an audience. Passion and defining your purpose allows your writing to become more productive. Set a writing schedule to start and finish your novel, and then do it! Finishing a novel is the hardest part of the journey. But with each story you finish, you’ll discover what makes your writing and storytelling unique.

  What type of books do you enjoy reading?

  John Grisham, Michael Connelly, Brad Meltzer, James Patterson, David Baldacci, Gillian Flynn, Robert Galbraith AKA J.K. Rowling, and Lee Child. It’s impossible to pick only one, so I’m on a quest to read them all.

    Is there anything else besides writing you think people would find interesting about you?

                                                                                             When I began writing Waking Lazarus I searched for musical inspiration as the story spanned nearly a century. I scrolled through my iTunes playlists and picked out a sequence of soundtracks to help set the tone and mood to help capture each scene as it played out on the page like a film. Working in the entertainment industry as an Executive Producer and Director, I understand how important a piece of music can be to enhance the story you’re trying to tell.

  As the months passed, Waking Lazarus came alive on the page and I had a thought…what if we created a soundtrack to go with the book. It was something I hadn’t seen done before. A soundtrack customized for the story, and done in a way that readers of all kinds could use it without being lost.

  I reached out to a young composer, Jené Nicole Johnson, and shared with her the vision I had for a soundtrack to enhance the reading experience for Waking Lazarus. Under a tight deadline, she accepted the challenge and broke the code on how best to put the soundtrack together. She created layers of music that not only captured the 1920’s era through present day, but also the mystery and suspense as the story travels from the Southland to the Orient. All of the music tied together with specific chapters so it was easy for readers to follow. I found myself writing to the soundtrack as I worked on the final draft. It was an energizing, creative, experience, one I believe I’ll do again in the next Guardian Novel.

    What are the best ways to connect with you, or find out more about your work?

  The best way to connect with me is on my website, www.djwilliamsbooks.com. In addition to the novels, you’ll find some really cool stuff. We’ll be launching the Writers Circle in June, a place to share what I’m learning with other aspiring writers. And you’ll also find the Guardian Alliance, our ongoing effort to support causes around the world through proceeds from each book sold. You can also find me on Twitter: @djwilliams316, Facebook: www.facebook.com/djwilliams316 and Instagram: @djwilliamsbooks

    BLOG TOUR – Waking Lazarus was originally published on the Wordpress version of The Pulp and Mystery Shelf