-Hi!- she tried to sound cheerful.
-Good afternoon, Ismene.- she would never get used to his voice, not even if she heard it one thousand times. Never. It always made her knees weak, and her heart jump.- How are you?
-Good, at work, and you?
-Taking profit of a slow hour at the shop to call you. Am I bothering you?- Ismene considered telling him she was busy to gain some more time, but she was the one who had chosen that life and she would need to keep on with it.
-No, not really, I can stop for a second.
-Good.
Ismene could almost imagine him, sitting on the chair outside his bookstore, his stare lost at the park across the street, holding the phone with his right hand, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up almost to his elbows. If she had been on the street at that moment, she would have sit down at the other side of the table and picked up one of his books, maybe he had some of his cookies out too, or maybe he had brewed some coffee. For a split second she would have swore she was able to smell coffee in the asceptic environment of the lab.
-Ismene?- when he called her name it was as if something inside her were hit with a hammer, making all of her resonate.- Are you sure it is a good time?
-Yes, don't worry.
-Did you enjoy your morning by the river? I hope I wasn't inopportune, but I really needed to talk to you, and I didn't feel it was adequate to call you to tell you that.- he was so polite, a bit too much, maybe. Ismene had gotten used to Leo's attitude of simply taking what he wanted, and Frode's struck her as too shy.
-It was alright.- Of course, she couldn't tell him that she hid in her house after meeting him for fear of meeting him again.
-I'm glad to hear.- something in his voice showed that there was something else he had wanted to say, Ismene let it slip.- I'm actually calling you to ask if you'd mind coming to a small party I'm organizing at the bookstore, on Saturday? There's going to be some of my best customers, home-made food, wine, and books, lots of books. I'll also make a tour of the hidden corners of the bookstore. I'm asking everyone to bring something to eat or drink, but if you feel you won't have time to cook anything tell me, and I'll take it into account.
-Oh! I'll love to! Of course I'll come!- one of her childhood dreams was to spend the night at a bookstore, and she would get to.- I still don't know if I'll be able to cook anything, but I'll try to. I make a killer musaka, and actually that's basically all I can cook. I'll call you later during the week to let you know if I have had time to cook, though.
-Brilliant. I'll look forward to Saturday.
-Me too. See you on Saturday.
Ismene was on cloud nine, she would have a bookstore all to herself, for sure there would be more people, but for all that mattered she would be basically alone. Maybe she would be able to sneak away and enjoy some privacy with the books. The though made her giggle. She was known to enter in a state of rapture every time she was at a bookstore or a library. It was like falling in love, actually it was more than falling in love. No one could understand it, until she started comparing it to meeting someone's favorite celebrity. It was a biased comparison, of course, everyone knew that books are better than people.
She forced herself back to work. The internal mechanisms of the Recombinator were all in plain sight. There was an ultrafast sequencer nested in it, which fed a computer that compared the two samples between them and against the BLAST database. A screen allowed the user to select the polymorphisms they were interested in, of course, unannoted polymorphisms were hard to work, as well as polygenic characteristics and phenotypes with unknown genes, or polymorphims out of coding regions. Fortunately there were less and less of those thanks to the advances in the fields of genomics. Ismene had read the lab notebooks of when the project had started around ten years earlier, and couldn't believe how far it had gone, and the conditions they worked on. The rest of the machine was where novelty resided, it also took most of the space. Technically speaking, what the recombinator did was create genetically modified organisms, there had been many ways to do so in history, sometimes the genes were forced into the organism through gold particles, other times taking profit of the organism biology through plasmids, in the case of higher organisms it was through transfection in cells and in embrionic cells. It usually involved generating a new organism, without the possibility of altering genes in an adult one, until the wake of gene therapy, but again, that only allowed to change a gene or subset of them, in a specific tissue. However, the Recombinator was able to exchange selected genes from one organism to the other, the one she was taking a look at was only able to do it in unicellular organisms, the other versions had moved up in the multicellularity scale, although at first they had had problems with getting it done in all the cells in the organism. It had been fixed, eventually, allowing a huge leap forward on the technology. They had already started working in invertebrates, and the next step was vertebrates. However, what Ismene was more interested in was the automatic selection of the genes, providing the computer with the information and the capacity to select the fittest characteristics once it was given the instructions of what would be the expected outcome. It would allow the researcher to skip the gene selection step. Ismene took out the sequencer, admiring that piece of technology, despite it being outdated, it was much better than the equipment some labs had, and yet, she knew that the one that was fitted on the latest model of the Recombinator was, at least, ten times faster.
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