Bleary-eyed, Juan watched as the female mouse fastidiously groomed herself. He glanced at the wall clock and sighed. Five a.m. Still two more hours before Jennifer would come in to relieve him.

A buzzer sounded, indicating someone out in the lab wanted his attention. Juan pressed the pickup button on his pressure suit. “Day nineteen, and all is well,” he said drily.

“Dr. Gutierrez, it’s John Hendrickson. I just came over to leave some reports for you, but I see that one of your workstations is beeping with a message saying ‘Match found.’ I figured you’d want to know.”

“Oh, hey, John. I’m stuck in here for another two hours before Jennifer relieves me. Can you hit a key and tell me what the screen says?”

“Uh, sure.” Hendrickson sounded uneasy. “If you’re sure I won’t mess anything up. I know you’ve been running these simulations for a week.”

Juan looked at the concrete wall separating the men and sighed. “It’s okay. You can’t mess it up. Just hit any key.”

“Okay…”

Juan counted his heartbeats as he waited for the tech to say something. One… two… three…

“Okay,” Hendrickson said. “I’m reading it to you word for word. ‘This annotation has four of nine introns confirmed by evidence of alignment. Ninety percent of the annotated sequence is confirmed by isoform expressed evidence. The total length of this annotation is 1,533 bases—’”

“Hold on, hold on,” Juan said. “I’m sorry, did you hit page down when you cleared the alert? Never mind, hit page up and go to the summary portion at the top.”

Another pause. “Okay, the summary says:

“‘Peak pattern matches achieved across 1,965 annotations.

“‘Matches began after 18,500 evolutionary cycles and progressed to the peak pattern match count at 201,023 evolutionary cycles.’”

Hendrickson asked, “Is that what you were looking for?’”

Juan did the math in his head. “Holy crap. Three million years?”

“Doc?”

Juan shook his head. “Never mind, John. Thanks for letting me know about the computer results. I’ll look at the reports as soon as I get out of here.”

“Okay, doc, I’m headed home. My shift was supposed to be over hours ago. Good night.”

The speaker went silent.

Juan immediately dialed Agent Carrington.

Nate’s gruff voice came through the speakers in Juan’s helmet. “Juan? Everything okay?”

“Nate, we just got a match on the stuff that was in that water dispenser. That means it’s confirmed: they used my algorithm. And it gets worse. They created genetic fragments that we probably won’t see in humans for another three million years.”

“Whoa, are you telling me—”

“Yeah. Whatever I’ve fed this mouse, it’s for a genetic experiment that’s beyond anything I could imagine. There are almost two thousand different genes involved in this change. I can’t even begin to express how dangerous this can be.”

“Yet they were feeding it to cancer patients.”