[Kaimee]: 5.Short stories.Creating God

This is the very first section of an actual honest to god.. something. Something that isn't a short story! I don't know what it actually is yet, but hell, it's something.

Inspired by the 5 words contest (complete, egg, species, parallel and voltage.) I'm not going to tell you where I'm going with this. There's one more paragraph written (but not perfected, and therefore not uploaded) that you need the gist of to work out where this is going.
In it, she mistakenly uses the scrambled permit to open a door that should only have scanned open with her ID, yet miraculously opens with the wrong card.

Apart from that, think of the title Creating God, the play on the term Playing God and the mysterious research they're doing with particles. Mwahaha!

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Tara pushed the chair back on it’s rollers and swung out of the editing station, rubbing the back of her neck and trying to stretch some of the kinks out of her spine. Across the room Leffy lifted his head from the slides and looked at her with surprise. “You leaving?” 
”Yah, I think I’m going cross eyed trying to keep track of the splits. If I put them on video review the machine can pick out the focal changed for us later. They’re going crazy Leff, I don’t know what we did with that last change but it’s like every single particle suddenly got a map and instructions and we’re trying to work out blind what they were.”
His head burrowed back into the slide viewer and his voice came muffled around the apparatus. “Go have a nap then Tar baby, but bring me back a cheeseburger and some coffee!” She was already packing up and she swung her dilapidated old leather handbag over her shoulder, looking around her cluttered desk and patting her pockets. “You seen my parking permit anywhere? I swear I had it here earlier.” Plonking stacks of paper and books into even more haphazard piles around her desk she tried to think back to when she’d last seen it. “I must have had it, I drove here this morning right? You didn’t find me comatose at my desk this morning or anything yeah?” Leffy didn’t lift his head out of the microscope but waved vaguely in her general direction and mumbled something.
She raised an eyebrow and looked at his skinny, young, hunched over form, waiting for him to glance up and grin back at her arch look. But his head just bobbed a little lower towards the scope and she heard him mutter some numbers to himself, deeply immersed in his work again.
That was the way of things in a research lab like theirs, work was important and people sometimes went days barely glancing up from the tiny particles they were manipulating. Coffee was drunk cold three hours after it was made and the team generally padded around their station wearing worn out fuzzy slippers and vaguely chanting number sequences from their latest projects. Jingling her keys in one hand she gazed out the high windows at the cold grey of the afternoon sky and the steady drizzle pattering on the glass. Catching a train meant the walk to the station with water dripping down her neck and seeping in at the bottom of her shoes, but lab parking was extortionate if you didn’t have a permit. If she couldn’t find it tonight she’d have to pay the exit fee and tomorrow’s entrance fee. She sighed and absently picked up someone’s cold coffee and took a sip. It was probably Cameron’s; you could pretty much feast on the amount of day old food left around the lab by their absent third partner. With only Leffy and her here today it’d been really quiet; with that indoors, cosy wet-weather feel that school had always had on days like this. If she were here today Tara could probably have bummed a lift from her, but she was at some terrible religious summit, to defend the work they were doing against the latest religious sanction against it.
A religious world government was a bigger sacrilege to Tara than any manipulation three middle range scientists could ever achieve, in her opinion. Who knew if they’d ever be able to complete a single research branch, this was the third their team had put together only to have the religious fanatics attack it and try to bring in new legislation ruling against it.
Leffy looked up from his work and frowned at her, standing there jingling her keys. “Your permit is stuck to the egg refrigeration unit with the Garfield magnet, dunno if it’ll still work. Now bugger off and let me concentrate.”
Glaring wouldn’t effect him any more than the raised eyebrow, so she didn’t bother. Plucking her permit card from the lid of the unit she smoothed it’s dented edges and looked at the spreading brown mark across the barcode with dismay. The magnet had been right over the scan area, it was probably totally scrambled. “Who the freck decided to put a magnet on this, Leff? It’ll never work now. What am I supposed to do?”
”Cameron probably, remember she was saying she wanted revenge for you tipping her coffee-mould pet down the sink last week? You were monitoring early change stages when she left this morning, didn’t you even notice her taking it?”
Blaming things on the absent was an obvious trick and she stared him right in his glowingly innocent little boy eyes. He was definitely lying. “It was disgusting and you both knew it, and you’re lying. So why’d you attack my permit with a magnet?” He answered with a grin, a shrug, and a wriggle of the eyebrows. “Right. I don’t know how you ever passed adult-status, you horrible child, you should still be studying the pap they feed pre-adolescents with your morals.” But she couldn’t help but grin, and forgiven, he spun around on his chair and stretched, cracking his shoulder blades and yawning like a lion. With one last crack he relaxed back into the chair and ran his hands through his messy hair. “Alright, lets be honest here, I destroyed your card so you’d have to come home with me tonight. Up for it?” he ducked behind his desk again and peeked out, grinning again with all the excitement of a child expecting something thrown at him. He wasn’t disappointed as first one fuzzy slipper and then another were launched at him, and laughing she grabbed up her card and bag and skipped out into the corridor, demands of a rematch following her into the passageway.
Smiling she looked around and met the eyes of a passing researcher, immediately damping down her enjoyment in the face of his disapproval. Their team wasn’t the most popular here, with a highly theoretical (and heretical) interest in a genes manipulation technique that the top dogs of the station had proven “impossible” years ago, their successes came as a slap in the face to every other group working there. That they chose to forgo the spotless white company lab coats and were often seen slinking in half asleep at half past 2 in the afternoon carrying a large supply of fast food was another affront to the sticklers of the place. One or two assistants upon occasion tried to defend them to their contemporaries, enjoying the fun and relaxed attitude the team brought to the place, but anyone with their career in mind kept well away.
Cameron was a pushy and beautiful blonde, and as much as these men and women hated them, at least half of them would still be willing to jump into her bed if she so much as spoke kindly to them. Leffy never noticed the hostile stares and with his focussed young mind was always shocked that Tara could possibly care what these people thought. But she did, and it was with all this in mind that she self-consciously tried to pull her cardigan straight and tucked her hair neatly behind her ears. There was nothing she could do about the coffee stain on her skirt or the old scuffed handbag, and so she simply hurried to the stairs leading to the underground parking lot.

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