Strain subject 219
This is my first attempt at writing fiction. Constructive criticism is welcome.
The room was not really a furnished one, but wasn’t too messy for what it was. You could have very well mistaken it for one of those decent motels on the highway. It was late in the evening and the sun was about to set, (or had it?) The dim light inside the room and the pulled down curtains made it difficult to know what time it was. In the corner of the couch, lay Richard..reclining on the couch, on of his hands limply resting on the trackpad, the other carelessly slung around the sofa. The dim light of the his laptop in the power saving mode glistened on his glasses. He wasn’t too young, but I guess you could mistake him for a guy on the wrong side of 30. Maybe it was his unkempt hair, or his unshaven stubble…or the dull clothes that he wore. The room’s silence was interrupted only by the clicks of his trackpad, and they were too faint. Maybe he had been using the laptop for a long time now, and they had smoothened down from use. Just the way everything about him was. His shoes had faded away. His pair of jeans had seen better days..
Richard continued to click away on his laptop as the hours passed by. The scene hadn’t changed in the past few hours at all. The static atmosphere had become stifling for anybody who would have been in the house on that day. He keyed away into the late hours as if his life depended on it, with the regular faint clicks creating an eerie music in the house. You could’ve heard the clock strike midnight if he hadn’t replaced his grandfather’s clock one week ago with the new digital alarm clock that stood proudly upon his mantlepiece. The wifi lights blinked away in a corner of the next room as the only witness of the activity on his laptop. His internet connection surged away like the waves on a full moon night as he continued to use his laptop.
It was one of those sunny afternoons when he had come back early from work. He drove by the neighbourhood slowly, gazing at people waking by. There were very few people who ventured out on such hot days, he thought. He still had a few more blocks to go before he reached his house. The empty roads made him shift his focus away from the road to that morning’s meeting with Tien. He met him in the bosses’ cabin and was introduced to him as a person with several years of experience in a field that was still very young. Gene research was still in infancy, especially if you were in one of the developed countries. Over a casual lunch, Tien had discussed the new “Grizzly flourish” project, one of the entity’s top secret research activities in which he had been involved in. The project had been on for around 2 years now, and until recently they had not been successful in finding out how dystrophin (a protein) could easily allow for muscular damage and how it could help reconstruct muscles in the body. Tien had recommended that they isolate dystrophin under test conditions and his methods were more than successful in doing so.
He slowly parked inside the garage, got out and entered his abode. His house lay undisturbed as ever, only the loud ticks-tock of the grandfather’s clock in the house welcomed him.
To be contd….
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