Poster time in the garden of good and evil

"Candy-ass eukaryotes can't even organize their shiz without putting a membrane around it. Prokaryotes are the way to go, my friend."

Allie's left foot edged itself another ten centimeters away from Jim's wobbly toupee and Bermuda shorts. If she stayed in his presence any longer, her limbs would soon take her screaming out of the tropical conference hall.

Allie daydreamed about the value of things, and decided that an opportunity to schmooze with an award donor wasn't worth the odor wafting from this living fossil. It was even worse to consider that he was the guy who had derailed her aunt Rosealia's career forty years earlier. Still, Allie had busted her butt getting her presentation together, and she'd be damned if she didn't collect on the prize at the end of the conference.

It took her ears fifteen seconds to register that the droning had paused. It took her eyes five more seconds to conclude that the bluish tinge of her ex-conversation-mate's forehead was not a good thing--and about three milliseconds to realize that she had planted her foot on his oxygen hose during his monologue.

It seemed like as good an opportunity as any to make her exit.

Buffer? I hardly even know 'er!

Britt chose to break the news to Lev behind the dumpsters, just after the gates clanked shut. Lev was struggling with the spigot, and didn't see her grin.

Aghast, he turned to her. "Are you sure--sure--that she was nicking my buffers?"

Nod. Britt's electric-purple hair bobbled in the cascading fog as she screamed the news. "Last Tuesday! I took a nap after the Margarita Mixer, and I guess she didn't notice me on the gel room floor...."

"Well, that's the last time she...wait, I think it's done." Lev screwed the valve closed on the liquid nitrogen, and silence crashed down, disturbed only by the burble of the full dewar and the squeak of their now-frozen sneaker soles on the concrete floor.

"Where was I? Right! Revenge...or at least introducing a bit of responsibility here. Perhaps it's time to put some tequila in her buffer ingredients..."

And thus began the buffer wars of 2012.

Sex-lethal

"...so you can imagine our delight that this seemingly innocuous mutation has in fact induced a dramatic shift in the helix..."

Jim held back a grin as Rosealia droned through her poster. She had shown him the missing data to confirm his new theory, just 48 hours before his keynote talk. And so Jim flirted, fawned, and slept his way into her good graces. Nothing was going to stop him from getting those results, decency be damned.

For weeks afterwards, Jim was still getting congratulations by email. Perhaps his actions were indiscreet--and Rosealia's furious glare from the front row suggested that she agreed--but he had just guaranteed his future career. And he had never placed much value on friendship.

Full term

"George...You should know that I'm carrying your baby!" Katrin's voice rang out over the din of bacterial incubators and overzealous air vents.

George's face blazed scarlet. "P-pardon me?" Papers flew out of the way as he scrambled to put his computer in sleep mode--and get to a room where six leering labmates wouldn't live-tweet the impossible accusation.

Katrin rounded the corner, cradling his newly printed thesis in her arms. His baby.

A thousand barbs leapt to George's mind. He forced a smile and silently swore vengeance...vengeance for a night he still regretted, when one-too-many vodka shots out of Falcon tubes had led to a confession. A confession and a kiss.

He would leave this lab soon, where drama was the rule, and where the tables in the cold room were perpetually getting messy (seemingly overnight). Leave the regret of a weak moment with a senior postdoc.

Vengeance. Bloodless, slow-moving, tenured scientific vengeance.

Syzygy at the work bench

Their eyes first met above the buffer rack. Margot's steel-blue irises rose to meet Joan's, and Joan couldn't find air to breathe. A short left-right flicker. An invitation? Joan ignored the ambiguity and hazarded a quick nod.

Two weeks, one day, three smiles and a fingertip on a shoulder later, and they were sharing a pitcher of Hefeweizen at Jupiter's, laughing into the warm spring night. The stars had aligned; yin had finally met yang (and mustered the courage to ask her out after the weekly seminar).

Many years later, Margot drunkenly confessed that she had just been scanning her bottle labels for some misplaced azide stock.

hearts burned hot in the cold cold room

"Meet me in the cold room," purred Ramon, "...as soon as you're done with those minipreps."

Julie spun her Eppendorfs for only five minutes instead of the usual ten. Proper procedure could wait for another day.

(Or, she added, for another ten minutes. She hadn't done any tests in this new arena yet.)

The gust of cold air as the door swished open couldn't quench the Bunsen burner of her passion...