The Start of a Novella (Mild Cursing)

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Edit: Thank you for the feature :0

Okay, so I decided to start a dystopian novella that is the start to several other dystopian novellas!

This one is called TFT.

A summary will be written at a later date, but here is the prologue! (Use of this in any way will be found and will be punished)

TAGGTCGATTCA…

The letters which represented the nucleotides of the deoxyribose nucleic acid of my latest project danced across the screen I had been staring at for hours. After many failures, this was the first time I felt close to getting it right.

…AGGCTTAAACTG…

‘Good, good,’ I thought, tapping the pencil I was holding on my cluttered desk, glancing at the thermal cycler that was on a cart beside me. Hopefully these readings meant that I had finally got it to amplify the DNA correctly. I looked back at the screen as it continued to produce letters.

…GCTAGCNNNNNNTGNNNN…

“Damn it!” I shouted as I sat back in my chair, rubbing my eyes while I groaned in frustration.

“Got the Ns, again?” a voice with a thick Irish accent asked from across the quiet lab I was in.

An exasperated sigh escaped my mouth as I replied, “Yes.”

“Hmm,” the voice hummed in thought, “did you try the protease?”

“Try it?” I replied with a bitter laugh, “I put a shit ton in it!” I shook my head, “I’ve tried practically everything.”

The voice sighed and I heard the sound of something being put down as footsteps approached my desk. A tall man with blazing ginger hair appeared by my side, his soft green eyes flicking over my computer’s screen in thought.

He then glanced down at the papers around me and gestured toward one stack while asking, “May I?”

I nodded and motioned for him to pick it up. He did so, examining my writing with furrowed brows.

It took him a long moment before he said, “You should try reworking the primer you used. Perhaps the version here is what’s causing trouble.”

He then placed the papers back on my bench-top, and I slid them towards me to examine what he had pointed out, nodding as I echoed, “Perhaps…”

“Not to put the pressure on, but…,” he paused until I looked up at his freckled face, “when is this project due?”

“In four months they expect me to have it finished,” I replied, my Italian accent coming through as my frustration at this deadline grew. Two years! How on Earth was I supposed to get this done in two years? ‘Idiotic politicians,’ I thought bitterly, ‘don’t they know that something like this can’t be achieved that quickly?’

The man beside me smiled slightly and placed a light hand on my shoulder, saying, “I’m sure you’ll get it figured out, Albati. You are a smart man.”

I gave him a shocked look, the small praise he had given me immediately going to heart, and I responded to it with, “You really think so, Dr. O’ Sullivan?”

“Please, call me Nick,” he laughed boisterously as he glanced over at the clock on the wall, his smile wilting as he continued, “I should be going now. I suggest that you leave for tonight as well, a good night’s sleep is half the battle after all.”

I nodded as he left the room, the door closing softly behind him.

A deep breath that I hadn’t noticed I was holding escaped my mouth. My eyes drifted over the documents scattered over my desk, finally resting on the computer screen in front of me. I shifted my mouth to the side out of habit, reaching over to turn the system off…

But then an abnormality in the sequence caught my eye.

Something was there beyond the Ns…

Behind the lines of The Fedichi Test:

Polymerase chain reaction (PCR for short) is the method used in the field of biotechnology (and in this story) that amplifies DNA that has been isolated from a biological sample. The thermal cycler that makes this happen goes through 40+ cycles to do this, starting with the denaturing (unraveling of the DNA helix) of the DNA, then the binding of the primer to the DNA strand, then the DNA polymerase finds the primer and creates a complimentary strand from the original, then the strands bind to each other with hydrogen bonds. This is repeated over and over. This results in hundreds of the same DNA sections being produced.

Normally the DNA is sequenced (or read) separately from this process, but in the future, dystopian world of The Fedichi Test, sequencing can be done during the amplification process.

Here is a simple diagram of PCR: