“Please Bri, don’t be saying these things.”

“Sorry, but you know Derek.” Brian gestured at one of the computer screens glowing on the bench across the way. “It’s all over.”

Leo squinted at a screen. “It wasn’t on Bioworld Today.”

“It will be tomorrow.”

The company website’s BREAKING NEWS box was blinking. Leo leaned over and jabbed it. Yep—lead story. HDL factory, potential for obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, heart disease…

“Oh my God,” Leo muttered as he read. “Oh my God.” His face was flushed. “Why does he do this?”

“He wants it to be true.”

“So what? We don’t know yet.”

With her sly grin Marta said, “He wants you to make it happen, Leo. He’s like the Road Runner and you’re Wile E. Coyote. He gets you to run off the edge of a cliff, and then you have to build the bridge back to the cliff before you fall.”

“But it never works! He always falls!”

Marta laughed at him. She liked him, but she was tough. “Come on,” she said. “This time we’ll do it.”

Leo nodded, tried to calm down. He appreciated Marta’s spirit, and liked to be at least as positive as the most positive person in any given situation. That was getting tough these days, but he smiled the best he could and said, “Yeah, right, you’re good,” and started to put on rubber gloves.

“Remember the time he announced that we had hemophilia A whipped?” Brian said.

“Please.”

“Remember the time he put out a press release saying he had decapitated mice at a thousand rpm to show how well our therapy worked?”

“The guillotine turntable experiment?”

“Please,” Leo begged. “No more.”

He picked up a pipette and tried to focus on the work. Withdraw, inject, withdraw, inject—alas, most of the work in this stage was automated, leaving people free to think, whether they wanted to or not. After a while Leo left them to it and went back to his office to check his e-mail, then helplessly to read what portion of Derek’s press release he could stomach. “Why does he do this, why why why?”