It was 7:30 p.m. and Jacob O’Connell hadn’t eaten in 14 hours.
He just realized this as he pushed back from his desk and stretched. Once he realized it was dark, some quick calculations told him the fatigue was food-based. The croissant before his run was a distant memory. So was sunlight, at least for that day.
Jacob looked around the lab. Aside from a pair of nose-to-the-grindstone graduate assistants, it was deserted and looked as though it had been for some time. Jacob hoped he hadn’t been too anti-social during the course of the day, but between the work and his Spotify account, he suspected he hadn’t spoken much more than he had eaten since this morning.
Try as he might, Jacob had always stood out. That happens when you’re 6-11. He’d thrown himself into chemistry because it didn’t have many expectations of him based on height or his Princeton education or anything else; it simply was, and what it was was pure, elemental, truth at its deep dark core.
Also, he liked playing with chemicals and seeing how they reacted with one another.
His mother had often worried about him. Barbora had known her son would be different—she had been a Division I athlete herself—but he had kept growing and growing and growing and then Princeton and then his turn with the CDC and the drug prototype and now he was a scientist who people were familiar with in the rockstar kind of way people were familiar with other doctors—Oppenheimer, Andrews, Seuss. He wasn’t comfortable in the spotlight, and so he kept to his lab and his work and his hope that eventually he would be left alone when he ventured outside during normal hours.