Page 8 of Conspiracies and Chemistry

“I saw an opportunity, and I took it. Tessa is passionate about our research, and she has a background in entrepreneurship.”

“Oh, does she?” I was being a dick. But a switch had flipped inside me when I’d passed Simon’s old office next to Dr. Perrell’s and seen the new sign withhername on it.

“She founded Red Rover. Do you know the company?”

“She did?” Everyone knew Red Rover. Their signature red insulated bags showed up in our breakroom at least once a week with pizzas or Chinese food. Once, when our regular shipment was delayed and we’d run out of stubs for our electron microscope, Red Rover had brought us a box just in time to continue our assay. And during the pandemic, they’d been the only place in town you could get the good toilet paper—at ten times the regular price. Someone must have sold their soul to get a steady supply and made a mint on it. Was it our new COO? Simon was brilliant at business, but he’d never have done anything predatory. Simon would?—

“Tessa has exactly the experience and energy we’re looking for,” Dr. Perrell said. “We’re lucky to get her. And we need her, especially now.”

“Why especially now?”

“Oliver.” She pulled off her black-rimmed glasses and set them on her desk. Pinching the bridge of her nose, she closed her eyes.

I straightened my glasses. Whenever Dr. Perrell did that, she was about to hit me with a truth bomb.

Her dark eyes flew open. “You are running late. We were supposed to have started the clinical trials for our ovarian cancer biomarker test by now.”

“It’s not ready,” I snapped. Like I didn’t know I was late. The board reminded me every quarterly meeting, and Dr. Perrell responded to each of my monthly status reports with another reminder. She didn’t have to add to my burden of guilt by bringing up her daughters’ upcoming weddings. “You know the risks of going to trial too soon. Of rushing a test to market.”

“There’s also a risk of never releasing a product,” she said.

“I’m not saying we’ll never release it,” I argued. “We’re doing everything we can to meet your timeline. We pulled everyone off their other projects to work on this.”

“Which only means that everything is riding on your success. Look at this.” She swiveled her monitor so it faced me.

She’d pulled up a press release, dated today.Greenwich Biomedical Announces Ovarian Cancer Treatment.

I scanned the article, then leaned back in the chair. “Good that they have a treatment.” Maybe it’d work better than what they gave Grandma Vee.

“The market is hungry for tests like ours. It’s only a matter of time before someone else makes it to market with one. And if they beat us, we become irrelevant.”

“If we release a faulty test, we’re worse than irrelevant,” I growled. “We can’t risk launching before we’ve thoroughly tested and achieved the certainty we’re looking for.”

“We’re looking for strong results, of course, but certainty? That’s unreasonable. And expensive. Plus, we don’t have that kind of time. We have to launch by the end of next year, or you won’t like the consequences.”

That gave us a little over a year to work. It’d be tight, but if we worked very hard, we could hit our quality targets. “We’ll get the work done,” I promised.

“I feel more confident about it now that Tessa is here,” she said.

I wished I agreed with her.

4

Big Pharma Profits from Cancer

From Barry Wright’s manifesto:

Big pharmaceutical companies developed the cure for cancer years ago but never released it. Why? So they can profit from selling us poor saps their expensive “treatments.”

TESSA

The naproxen finally kicked in, and I sank deeper into my cloud-soft sofa. Rain pattered against the window, blurring my view of the camellias, and my eyelids drifted shut. For once, my pain had conveniently waited for an obligation-free weekend when I didn’t have to fight it at work. Thank the universal power it had been only a dull ache Friday at the lab. Though my anxiety over what it might become had led me to rashly promise Maya Perrell that I’d mentor Oliver.

What had I been thinking? When we’d met yesterday in the lab, I’d been relieved to find that they had already identified and validated some key biomarkers and developed an assay. (I’d crammed the night before to learn the terms so I’d be able to talk intelligently with him.) Then he’d walked me through his convoluted preclinical testing process. Despite all my arguing, I couldn’t convince him to skip even one step. And we’d have to skip a lot of steps if we were going to meet our timeline.

Something punched my stomach. “Oof,” I muttered, cracking open an eye.

A pair of yellow eyes stared back as my red tabby cat kneaded the heating pad over my torso.

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