Max hunched over his keyboard with bated breath, checking each part of his genomic analysis code line by line for what felt like the hundredth time. The pipeline ran just fine, but just because it was syntactically correct didn’t mean that it was free of errors. A shared variable namespace he’d overlooked, a flag that he’d carelessly hard-coded and forgotten about – any number of possible bugs might have produced the results staring back at him through sheer coincidence. Given that he was the one who’d written it, the cheetah figured that the chances there was something wrong with the code were pretty good.

But he found nothing. Every single piece of the pipeline was doing exactly what it was supposed to do on the test data he’d fed into it. What he was seeing with the actual samples had to be real. It was incontrovertible evidence that the hypothesis he’d been fervently pursuing for months was correct… and if it was correct, he may have just discovered the first fruitful avenue for finding a cure for Albrecht syndrome.

Max forced himself to take a couple of deep breaths to steady his racing heart, then glanced across the lab to a petite coyote carefully pipetting a solution into an agarose gel.

“Hey Jess, can you come over here? I need to show you something.”

“Just a sec!” With a deftness only acquired through years of experience, she quickly filled each of the other wells, then circled around the rows of black-topped workbenches to meet Max at his station. “What’s up?”

“These are the latest BLAST results I got for the Albrecht subjects – let me know what you think.” The cheetah rolled away from his computer to let her get a closer look.

After peering at the screen for a few moments, the coyote turned to Max with an eyebrow raised. “I don’t understand. The ASCP gene has the exact same disease-causing point mutation in all of these samples. This has been published on a million times.” She let out a sigh. “I thought Professor Hardman told you to let this go already.”

“No, no, not that!” Max could hardly keep himself from bouncing in his seat, completely disregarding her last statement. “Outside of the coding sequence – look at introns 2 and 3. There’s perfect alignment between all subjects for these weird insertions, which aren’t in the reference sequence or in any of the healthy controls we looked at.”

She turned back to the monitor. “Huh… that is strange.”

“I ran some follow-up analyses on them, too.” Reaching for his mouse, the cheetah pulled up one of the countless research papers he’d pored over. “They’re long repeats, right? According to this group, it’s a known integrase binding site. That suggests that this is foreign DNA.”

“You mean… inserted by some kind of virus?” Jess grabbed the mouse from him and scrolled through the article. “That’s not possible, Max – these Albrecht syndrome cases were completely isolated, and no one has ever reported any kind of pathogen. A virus makes no sense.”

The cheetah’s ears lowered. She wasn’t wrong. That as much as anything else was why he’d spent the better part of a day reading the same few hundred lines of code – it was way more likely that this was a data processing artifact. Except that it wasn’t.

“It’s probably a bug in your pipeline. Or some kind of contamination. You’ve been having trouble for months, right? I bet that’s it.” The coyote walked over to the freezer and shuffled through some boxes, then pulled out a string of tiny microcentrifuge tubes.

“Aha!” She practically waltzed back to Max with a triumphant grin on her face. “These were the only samples in your box. Take a look at how cloudy these are. You must have been a little sloppy with your prep again.” Her expression turned apologetic. “I know it’s frustrating, but you’ll get it eventually. It took me a while, too.”

The cheetah took the tubes from her and examined them carefully. Sure enough, there was definitely something in there that shouldn’t have been.

“Those aren’t the samples I ran,” he said flatly.

“What?”

“They’re right there.” Max pointed to an identical-looking set on the lab bench next to him, each filled with much clearer fluid. “I kept them in a different box. The ones in mine were just filled with buffer solution.”

Jess took a step back, mouth agape. “I-I don’t understand…”

Truthfully, he didn’t either. He’d chalked up the possibility of tampering to paranoid delusion, and yet he hadn’t been able to get it out of his head for weeks. There was just no way that he could have messed up a routine DNA extraction this many times, no matter how clumsy he was.

Still, he could hardly guess at a motivation. Everyone here all had the same goals, right? Maybe it was professional jealousy, or a hazing ritual. He was the lab’s youngest member, after all.

The cheetah shook his head – he’d worry about the sabotage later. “It doesn’t matter, Jess. This is huge. No one thought to look at the intronic DNA. We’ll get a massive publication out of this, and maybe we’ll finally be able to find a way to treat this horrible disease.”

“Yeah, it’s amazing news.” She gave him a small smile. “I have to finish setting up my gel. Why don’t you print those results out and then we’ll show Hardman together?”

Nodding, Max turned back to his computer and began to organize everything. “It’s funny…” he mumbled. “The sequences are almost too aligned, you know? The insertions all have exactly the same number of repeats between subjects. Viruses aren’t that precise… it’s almost like this was engin—”

His eyes suddenly went wide as he felt the prick of a hypodermic needle plunging into the side of his neck. Lightheadedness took hold as the anesthetic used for their mouse experiments entered his bloodstream, and then Max’s world quickly faded to black.