Within Tolerance

I wrote this as a prequel to Non-Compliant, there might be a third in store if I can figure out the timescale of things.

Jan came into the lab this calm Thursday morning as she did every other day, not with a bounce in her step, but with a slight drag in her heel. At least it was nearly the end of the week, she thought to herself as she set down her coffee and started clicking through reports of analyses that ran overnight.

Most of which were the same as the last - negative reports for contaminants and abnormal bacteria. She really had one of the dullest jobs around - modern dairy farming had eliminated much of the scientific side of her job - milk was consistent and that was probably a good thing.

This morning though, in one of the analyses there was an anomaly. Well, a slight anomaly, in one test the freezing point was off. It was something small, but at least it gave Jan something to do.

She hit print, grabbed the hot paper from the machine and headed into the wet lab. Looking through the rack she found sample #0037264. In about 30 minutes she had set up a series of tests across three machines and let those get to work confirming the initial findings.

Meanwhile she could set up some exploratory tests. She grabbed a stack of agar plates from the fridge and got to work setting up 12 plates and assigning them various conditions of humidity, acidity and temperature. That would give her a good idea if any bacteria out of the ordinary were present.

She headed back to the office to note down what she had done and nearly walked straight into Peter as he was coming in.

“Oh” she said.

“Morena”, Peter replied before she could say anything else.

“Hey Peter”, Jan said, “Sorry, I nearly bowled you over”.

He waved it off, “All good, have you found something interesting to look at?”

“Maybe”, she said, “I’m not sure yet, one of last night’s samples came back odd. It had a lower freezing point than normal”.

“Ah, cool”, Peter replied, “So probably a machine error or a calibration bug? We haven’t replaced those temperature probes in a few years. We really should at least get them tested”.

“Yeah, not sure. I am rerunning it. Added a few extras too. Will let you know if anything interesting pops up”, Jan said.

“Yeah, let me know what you find”, Peter said, giving a small nod and going about his work.

Throughout the day Jan ran more tests, there were a handful of normal reasons why the freezing point was off. Most commonly it was farmers watering down their milk to try to make a little more profit - but this wasn’t that, the freezing point was lower than normal, not higher.

None of this indicated that it was harmful in any way, just that it was something unusual, perhaps a foreign contaminant or bacteria present. They had seen a few odd occurrences in the past like this, one such memory that stuck in her mind was a herd of cows that had broken into a neighbouring paddock with bee hives and a few had managed to scarf down a lot of honey before being relocated. This messed up a bunch of readings, but the milk was perfectly safe. Hopefully the cultures would have more answers for her when she comes in tomorrow morning.

The next morning was different and it wasn’t just because it was Friday. She was eager to see what the cultures had produced and was hoping for another day of getting to do real science.

But as she pulled out her agar plates, one after the other, putting each of them under the microscope, each was untouched. This wasn’t unusual, in fact it was normal to not see any growth in the first 24 hours. Until she got the last plate, which was already blooming into life with a high rate of growth, which was doubly odd, as these conditions were unsuitable for many cultures due to the high acidity.

She snapped some pictures through the microscope, replaced the plates and ran back to her computer to find out more.

But alas, the internet was not as much help as Jan thought, there were very few known bacteria that survived those levels of pH. In fact almost all of the studies she found were related to gut biome type stuff. She was slightly concerned that someone had vomited in the milk and decided not to tell anyone. It wasn’t long until she exhausted bovine related studies (all four of them) and figured it might be worth asking Peter before moving on to human originating bacteria.

Funnily enough, he did also think that someone might have puked in the milk. He also gave a good suggestion, to run more tests on the cultured sample. Perhaps it would give them more information.

Before anything else, she loaded up 6 more agar plates, so that if she did any destructive tests, they would have more to work from after the weekend. She gave the culture a quick run through the spectrometer, but with inconclusive results. Her next thought was toxicity, if the bacteria were only now producing toxins in this environment - then it could be problematic for human consumption. As unlikely as it was, it was important to rule it out, this was also a good time to flag the risk with the plant. Processing wouldn’t be finished yet and they could hold the batch going out at least until her immunoassays were finished - it was better to be safe than sorry. They were unhappy to hear the news at first, but brightened up when they found out it would only be a couple of hours before the results came in.

Two hours later an automated report landed in her inbox with a big green NEGATIVE label at the top. She forwarded this on to the rest of the lab and the plant, the sample and its culture were confirmed to contain no known toxins. After that whirlwind of a couple of days, she decided to finish up and start her weekend early. The box of beer in her fridge and pizza that she hadn’t yet ordered were calling out to her.

That night as she sat up in bed with indigestion that could only be caused by eating too much pizza, she couldn’t help but think about the samples back at the lab. She had this niggling feeling that something wasn’t right. As she sat there burping occasionally she came to the conclusion that she was already missing out on sleep as it was, so she got dressed and headed into the lab. It felt a bit eerie driving into work at five in the morning on a Saturday, the fog was thick and the last sentence from the report hung in her mind: “no known toxins”.

The growth was fast enough that the cultures she had prepped the day before already had signs of life. She could still run a cell-based toxicity assay, although it wasn’t something that they did under normal circumstances at the lab, it was closer to research type work than what she did. Hopefully she could find some cells to use for testing.

After checking the inventory, she decided she would have to use cultured cells she found that were borderline expired. They would work for what she needed and no one would miss them either way.

Under a laminar flow hood she set to work extracting some of the culture onto a slide and under the microscope she added a small amount of the cells.

At first Jan was relieved, the cells and the cultured sample did not react at all, but after a few moments Jan began to notice that some of the cells began rounding a bit. Maybe it was sleep in her eyes, or maybe it was the tiredness. She took a step back and rubbed her face.

Contamination, she thought, the cells were old after all. Then she leaned back into the microscope, bringing the control cells into focus, they seemed fine. But looking back to the other plate the cells were definitely beginning to spread out, at first it had been just one or two at a time, but now all of them seemed like whatever invisible force was holding them together had let go and they were all collapsing in on themselves. But it hadn’t done this in milk. Only here.

“Oh shit!”, she said under her breath.

She scrambled, knocking the slide on the ground, she slipped a little on the lab linoleum as she ran for the door. Grabbing her phone she called the plant, there still might be time to stop it leaving the plant. The phone rang, first once, then again and again and again. No one was answering. Thoughts in her mind raced, competing with one another to find the answer first. Another thought beat out the useful ones, this could kill people.

On her computer she traced the company directory, she had to tell someone. “Why does no one put their fucking cell phone numbers in here!”, she yelled in frustration, looking at pages of the same office phone numbers with different extensions. She opened her emails and started paging through, looking at phone numbers in people’s email signatures. There. Mark.

She dialled his cell and waited. It rang, once, twice and then someone answered.

“Hello”, a groggy voice answered.

“Hi, is this Mark?”, Jan asked, exhaling loudly.

“Yes, it’s a bit early though, what’s up?”, he asked in return.

“It’s Jan here from the lab, I just observed a cytotoxic collapse in one of the samples we have been looking at and haven’t been able to get through to the plant this morning. We have to stop this batch going out”, Jan put all her effort into not stumbling over her words.

“Wow, okay, thanks for that - great work”, I’ll get the message out.

She let out a sigh of relief, then said goodbye and hung up the phone.

Somewhere, far off, a tanker engine turned over.