"Hoo shit, Jesus Carl, be more careful about what you-"

"AM I GOING TO DIE?"

"Christ Carl, no; you're fine, you're not a whale, are you? One drop will kill a whale, it would take like a gallon to kill a human. You should really be more careful about what you drink though."

"Why the FUCK did you put this in a goddamn coffee cup?"

"Well, it was a handy container, and I was already late for the meeting."

Carl slammed his hand down on the table "Ok, more to the point, why did you put it in *my* coffee cup?! This is MY coffee cup!"

"Why did you bring a goddamn coffee cup shaped like a beaker into the lab, Carl?"

"It has FLOWERS printed on it?!"

"Still, drinks in the lab?!"

A third voice cleared their throat from the other end of the long table, "It's very good to know that The Consortium won't need to find another testing director, but you've both demonstrated to our satisfaction that your lab protocols have become very lax, which we'll talk about at a subsequent meeting... And I think we're all very anxious for you to get on with the presentation."

".... Right."

Carl and Francine both remembered then, that they were in the middle of a meeting presenting their work from the past month to the directors of the Consortium, whose motives were often as terrifying as they were mysterious. The other end of the table was always shrouded in darkness at these meetings, so it was also never clear exactly how many people were watching them. After 15 years working for them though, Carl and Francine had learned two things very thoroughly: A certain familiarity with their workplace that occasionally allowed them to forget where they were, and to *never* question their employers, who paid quite handsomely and left them largely to their own devices.

"Yes, anyway... This poison, which is mostly safe for human consumption, is what I've been working on for the last month, and if, for some reason, you needed to kill a whale, it would only take one drop, but here's the real kicker: It would only take one drop *dropped into their aquarium*. For a whale living in an enclosure with the recommended water volume for an adult blue whale, one drop in that enclosure will be enough to kill the whale within an hour. Which... I don't mean to brag too much, but if you weren't aware, the 'recommended water volume' for a blue whale enclosure is very large, so this poison is... Incredibly potent. If you could deliver the poison directly into the whale's body, it would take about 0.000001 grams of it ."

The voice at the end of the table spoke up again, gravelly and raspy, but high pitched; "That is splendid, this will work perfectly for our purposes."

Francine became more visibly agitated as she considered her next words "My only word of caution about this substance is that it uh... Perhaps might be inadvisable to produce it in large quantities. Aside from simply being somewhat expensive to produce in bulk, a spill to the tune of even one gallon would do incalculable damage to whale populations the world over. A sufficiently large spill or leak could easily render the entire planet free of whales within a generation."

"Yes."

Francine's face turned white as she packed up her papers, and, with a shaking hand, accepted an envelope slid down the table.

The darkness spoke again, "Now, Carl, do you have anything to report on your new nanostructure idea?"

"I do, but I have good news and bad news about how it's made. The good news is it's actually much cheaper to produce than I could have ever hoped; I have those figures here," he waved a piece of paper, "but the bad news is... Look, how do you feel about reptiles? I don't usually ask questions like this, but... Do you have any moral issue with breeding them systematically while keeping them in constant excruciating pain?"

Carl heard silence, then faint hissing from the other side of the table, and his face turned white too...

'I thought my day was unlucky when the vending machine ate my dollar, but Fuuuuck.'

The gravelly, high pitched voice returned, "Francine, we feel that your presence is not necessarily required for the next portion of this meeting. If you'd like to return to your work, you may do so while we continue discussing Carl's progress."