The thing Jak hated about working in Olympia’s group was the specialization. Her parasite project required so many sequences that most days all he did was prepare primers, load them in the ABI, then prepare more primers while the first batch ran, the ABI generating reams of AGCTs that Chen and the others would then do their statistical analysis on. It got pretty boring. Like being the guy on the assembly line who put the nut on the bolt that someone ahead of him had greased and someone after him would tighten. Thousands of times a day.

The thing he liked about working in Olympia’s group, though, was the dead time he had waiting for reactions to finish, and the fact that The Center was large enough to be divided into labs, each headed up by a different PI, even though the department was small enough so that each lab shared as much equipment and facilities as they could. So while Shakar’s lab was working on infectious disease, and Brody-Johnson’s lab was working on agriculture, and Olympia’s lab was working on disease vectors, all of their insects were kept in a single Insectarium. There, among all the colonies of flies, mosquitoes, spiders, and other insects, it was easy for Jak to hide his bee-toys. Anyone who would come in there to get their weevils, or whatever, and saw his bees would just assume they were part of a project being worked on by another lab in the center.

The same with the equipment: sometimes he was alone with the $15,000 microinjection system that every lab needed but only had occasion to use. Or a $2,000 MammoZapper Cloning Gun just sitting there on a lab bench all lonesome-like. So he’d fallen into messing around with the equipment, first just to see how hard it was to work, then attaching protein ‘heads’ to DNA ‘tails’ till he was able to get a geranium to carry his DNA. iFlower, he called it, the video he put online getting, to his surprise, over 10,000 views a day, from all over the world. It even rose to the featured science spot on the BestVidies homepage until the Fun with Science Guys figured out a way to swallow copper chloride, and lit their resulting farts: brilliant green flames that came roaring out of their asses. Blue (methane) and Yellow (copper chloride) Make Green, was the title.

Then MyVidie attention shifted elsewhere, allowing his video to quickly fall to the 1,000th spot before fading to the one billionth, then the unranked mass. For the longest time he tried to think of a way to put the power of the lab he had access to behind a BestVidies production that no amateur could hope to produce. Under the nom-de-net Dr. Jakel & Mr. Hak, he ordered a pair of mice that had an myostatin gene altered to make them as muscular as bodybuilders. The gene also rewired their brain chemistry in a way that made them aggressive, and he thought he’d figure out a way to get them to wear little Lucha libre costumes and stage a wrestling match. But he had to give it up, lay low, after someone in Animal Oversight came across the mice he was trying to mutate. Olympia made a speech at one of their lab meetings about how she didn’t know if the order for the mice came out of her lab or one of the others in the building, but that she’d better not find any of her people “fucking around and getting Animal Oversight on our backs!”

Covering her ass: her and her lice-infested geese. Whatever. Since he’d started messing around again, he did it in a way that was more low-key—no special orders, no equipment or organisms that weren’t already in-house—his latest little hobby being an experiment to see if he could alter a bee to dance in a figure 8, like a figure skater, only an 8 with a horizontal axis: infinity.

It seemed doable. Bees naturally did dances that told others in the hive where to find a patch of flowers they’d discovered: for flowers near the hive, foragers simply did a ‘round’ dance to let the others in the colony know; if the food was further away, they danced in a ‘sickle’ pattern before the other bees—which was sort of like a deformed ‘8’ already. It seemed simple enough to alter whatever biological switches were shaping the dance and either get the bees to put two circles together to form the 8, or stretch out the sickle pattern into something that looked more like an infinity symbol.

In the time he had to kill between loading the ABIABI and outputting its data, he’d been able to locate cornerstone work on A. mellifera dance behavior by Boch, 1956, and von Frisch, 1993, then a more recent article that described how the transition from round to sickle dance was controlled by a single gene, following a dominant/recessive model. Old-school; Mendel stuff: complex behavior like dancing, or stinging, under simple genetic control. Anyone could do it, but just to make sure Olympia didn’t find out he was doing it at work, he hid his downloads on the lab computer Mohammed used. Within a week, he was artificially inseminating a couple of virgin queen A. mellifera with chromosomes that he hoped would cause a stutter in their step, make them dance double. A two-step. So sure was he that it would work that he’d spliced in the GFP gene that gave off the greenish glow of some tropical fish. If he could make it work, the patterns his bees flew in would leave a light trace behind, like dancers carrying glow sticks across a dark stage. Cool!