***
Sydney had never been so happy to be back in Topeka. Every piece of equipment in his lab seemed to glow upon his return. The sturdy walls, the locked door, and the cold air blowing through the vents all made him feel safe. He treasured the security of familiarity.
He opened his briefcase and pulled out his notes from the project he was working on before he was allocated to the field. Upon his search for his work, he stumbled across the data from the blood sampling in the town he visited.
The small personal thumb drive where he kept old pictures and projects contained the raw, untampered data. Sydney drew the blinds to the windows in the lab and locked the door. He stuck the drive into the side of his laptop and downloaded the information. He reached for his notebook while the loading bar inched from sixty to seventy percent.
Sydney flipped through the pages of the notebook, searching for the man’s name who had the high nutrition levels. It was on the tip of his tongue, but it eluded him. The computer beeped, signaling a finish to the download, when he finally found it. Todd Penn.
He traced his finger over the name, feeling the indentation from the ink on the paper. That name, and the man it represented, was a mystery to him. He needed to solve it.
The resources of the lab here in Topeka far exceeded any of the field labs that the Coalition used during blood tests. He had the finest equipment the country had to offer, which was a fabricated truth, because many of the scientific tools that could have helped him solve the puzzle had been destroyed in the violence that thundered after the first failed harvest.
Most of the equipment was actually quite old. And anything that broke down took a very long time to fix. The soil crisis didn’t just kill plant life, it also killed most of the brain power that was trained in repairing these delicate instruments.
However, Sydney’s resources were far greater than anything that Todd Penn could have had access to, and if he was in fact the missing link to the country’s problem, then he was confident he could decipher the hidden codes inside Mr. Penn’s blood.
A knock at the door made Sydney jump, and he spilled the water from the mug in his hand over the keyboard. He desperately patted the keys with his shirt, trying to wipe up the water before it seeped into the circuits. More pounding shook the lab’s door.
“Just a minute!” Sydney cried out.
He closed the programs on his computer and removed the thumb drive. He stuffed it into his pocket as he unlocked the door.
Jared wore a stony expression that contrasted with his three-piece suit and poked his thick forefinger at the wet splashes on Sydney’s lab coat. “What is that?”
“Water,” Sydney answered.
Jared stepped inside, his large frame almost taking up the entire doorframe. “Why was the door locked?”
Sydney twirled his fingers around one another, keeping his head down. He fidgeted from side to side, shifting his weight back and forth on his feet. “All of my work here is considered confidential. You know that.”
“I was told you were sent out into the field? Is that true?”
Sydney nodded, but Jared still had his back to him, so he didn’t see.
“Sydney!” Jared bellowed.
Sydney gave the same startled jump as before. The stern, commanding voice had always caused him stress. There was always a disappointed tone underlying Jared’s every word.
“Y-yes. I was,” Sydney answered.
“I put you here as a favor to your mother, not because of your expertise in the field. Now, the next time Gordon tells you to head out, I want you to tell him no, do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“For God’s sake, grow a backbone. Stand up straight!”
Jared grabbed his son by the shoulders and practically lifted him off the floor and dropped him from midair. Sydney’s heels smacked the floor hard, and a jolt of pain rushed up his spine. He rubbed his lower back as he attempted to reach the height he never seemed to be able to as a boy.
“Have you spoken to your mother recently?” Jared asked.
“No, sir.”
“I want you to call her this afternoon. I’m tired of her asking me about you.”
Jared looked around at all of the closed blinds and the water dripping from Sydney’s desk from the earlier spill. He shook his head.
“Do you have any idea how many other qualified candidates I had for this job? Hmm? And here you are, spilling your drink all over the equipment. Do you have any idea how hard it was to obtain all of this? And do you know how difficult it is to have it fixed? Sloppy,” he said, shaking his head. “You’ve always been sloppy!”
“It won’t happen again.”
“Hmph. Well, make sure it doesn’t. I have a meeting to attend. I’ve already vented my frustrations on Gordon, so he will most likely swing by later. Be sure this place is cleaned up. I don’t need any more embarrassment from you.”
Once his father was gone, Sydney grabbed a rag and began mopping up the water on the counter. His father’s words were a specific poison that he’d yet to find an antidote for. It had been that way ever since he was a child. Always too small and too weak for success at anything his father deemed as manly, such as sports, fighting, and hunting. The resentful eyes of his father always seemed to find him, no matter how successful he was in the lab.
Of course, his father was right: there were other qualified candidates to run the lab, and all of them would jump at the chance. But despite his father’s nepotistic appointment, Sydney had developed himself into a competent scientist. Before the crisis, he had just received a grant to work at Johns Hopkins Hospital as a researcher in their leukemia department.
When Sydney brought that news to his father, he was too distracted by a new prototype of weapon that his company was marketing to the Marines. He remembered how excited he was to finally have something to tell him that his father would be proud of, but it didn’t matter.
Upon hearing his son’s news, he looked over to Sydney, and this was the moment he thought he would finally receive approval, finally see a look of pride on his father’s face that was the direct result of his achievements. But his father only asked him one question.
“What did you do?”
“I don’t… W-what do you mean?”
“I mean what have you made and created for them to grant you such an opportunity?”
“Oh! My research. I recently wrote a paper on the theory of blood vessels and their capac—”
“Theory?” his father interjected. “What proof do you have that it’s true?”
“Well, I haven’t had the oppor—”
“So, let me make sure I’m understanding this correctly. You wrote a paper, that no one is even sure is correct, with no tangible product to show for your efforts?”
“Dad, my paper could be the first step to—”
“Ah!” his father said, holding his finger up, silencing Sydney. “‘Could,’ Sydney. Not ‘will,’ or ‘yes,’ but ‘could.’ You can’t eat ‘could.’ ‘Could’ can’t put a roof over your head. You can’t drink ‘could.’ So why would you waste my time with ‘could?’”
It was in that moment Sydney realized that no matter what he did, no matter what he accomplished, it would never be good enough for his father to recognize him as a man, as an individual. His world consisted too much of theories and what-ifs, whereas his father’s world was of metal and steel.
Sydney reached back into his pocket and pulled out his thumb drive. He closed his fist around it and gripped it tightly. If his father wanted something tangible, then that’s exactly what he was going to give him.