The lull in Kael's study was absolute, broken only by the gentleness of his own breathing. On his large, slate desk, in front of him, lay the two choices. They were not charts or maps, but concepts brought to life in the tokens that represented them.
To his left, resting on a dark blue velvet bed, lay a data-slate. It emanated the blue, chilly glow of Lyra's latest report on Variant Zeta. Charts and graphs showed the mutated spike protein of the virus with clinical precision. The article was a dry, spine-tingling dissection of the failed inhibitor, followed by a proposed new direction of research—a clunky, multi-step synthesis that would take weeks, if not months. It was the Formula route. It was careful, painstaking, and based on the hard, harsh mathematics of molecular biology. It was s
