The Eye of Science

There was not anything in particular special about Dr. James Elmore. I’m sure that his friends and family could easily list off a series of good qualities, perhaps a minor flaw here in there, and portray him as a virtuous, devoted, and amicable man. But such things do not make a man unique. Regardless of how many percentiles on the IQ table you may be above your peers, there is absolutely nothing unique about it; almost every person has a ‘unique’ trait that makes them ‘interesting’. But in the larger picture, this is not so interesting at all.

But I say ‘was’ for a reason. Dr. Elmore is now interesting beyond belief, beyond reason, beyond what a normal person should be capable of. It is fascinating that often times, the circumstances of one’s death have the potential to be far more intriguing than the person ever was. But Dr. Elmore took such a concept to an entirely new level.

Dr. Elmore was working with the experimental new drug, Seraphin. Designed as a therapeutic treatment for lung cancer, Seraphin was not only expensive to produce but highly acidic and potentially lethal in large doses. Dr. Elmore had been at the laboratory for sixteen hours by now. It was his and my boss, Dr. Blaine, who had proposed the drug. Yet now that Dr. Elmore had successfully produced it, no one was satisfied with the data. Would it be Dr. Blaine or Dr. Elmore who would take responsibility for the subpar results? Dr. Elmore certainly didn’t want to. No, it was Dr. Blaine who had proposed the drug, the dummy and the waste of time, and it would be Dr. Elmore who extensively tested and reported in great and uncensored detail such a failure. Don’t shoot the messenger; such was the mentality that Dr. Elmore hoped the board of directors would take towards his efforts.

But though Dr. Elmore desperately desired career advancement; despite already being in his forties, hairline receding; he was only human, and a human cannot run sixteen hours on only the two hours of sleep they got the previous night after a twenty hour shift. And so he was careless; nothing ever happened in the lab anyway, regardless of whatever chemical was being used. Who says that a little carelessness here and there will kill anybody? Dr. Elmore certainly didn’t; he had seen many people simply rub their tritium covered gloves all over their desks and they didn’t develop skin cancer.

And so, after he had finished loading the Seraphin into the incubator, he dozed off for a quick nap in front of it while the automatic cycle completed itself in two hours.

But Dr. Elmore did not receive the luxury of two more hours of life. For he had been careless and left the incubator slightly ajar, allowing the Seraphin to vaporize under normal atmospheric pressure. As he dozed, his nose began to itch- A snort or two to get rid it. Then it became quite stuffy in the roam- a cough and a complaint to make himself feel better. But then he realized that he was not breathing at all. Desperately, he attempted to cough- to dislodge whatever was suffocating him. But it was too late. Tears streaming down his face, mucus flowing down his chin, he began a gradual and agonizing decent into the depths of despair, before he finally lost consciousness and doubled over on his chair and fell over his chair, crashing into a pile of molding cardboard that no one had bothered to throw away. The rest of it was history.