An Excerpt of Triple X, work safe for once!

Today is a good day for an excerpt of Triple X. I’m feeling all medical-mystery ish. Or not. But I posted it at eXtasy for their Friday Foreplay so I thought I’d post it here, too.

Triple X is the story that asks “what would happen if bird flu came to America and altered our DNA?” It also asks “what would happen if three hotties fell in love?” but that is another thing

So, excerpt:

“You have got to see this data, it’s so bizarre.” Abby was staring at her computer screen, shocked. Her boss had given her full run of the lab to perform research, regarding the plummet in fertility rates across the nation. She spent weeks immersed in data from fertility clinics and obstetric offices. Pages and pages of numbers reflecting new patients, trends and demographics arrived via email in a constant stream. Jordan worked the computer end, organizing and calculating data. However, now that a large amount of information was in her hands, it made no sense.
“Come tell me what I’m looking at, because I can’t figure it out.”
Jordan sat down next to her and scanned the screen. “Well, from what I can see, pregnancy rates have dropped across all racial and socioeconomic lines.”
“Yes,” said Abby, “but check out this spike here.”
“Hm, that’s really weird. What do you suppose that means?”
“I really don’t know. There must be something we’re missing, because that just doesn’t make sense.”
Abby and Jordan looked at each other, stumped.
“Okay, so what I see here is that single women are getting pregnant more often than married or committed women.” Talking out loud often helped Abby reframe a problem.
“No, not just single women. Single women unsure of the father-look at that data.” Jordan tapped a few keys and brought up another chart. Sure enough, a huge boom in births showed up. “Single women with multiple partners seem to have the highest incidence of birth rates. Weird. I don’t see how this group is more likely to be having babies. What does having multiple partners have to do with getting pregnant?”
“Nothing,” said Abby, “the chances of getting pregnant are based on multiple factors of course, but I really don’t see how being with more than one man applies. After all, the data isn’t spitting out anything about frequency of intercourse-married women who have more or less sex aren’t getting pregnant in different numbers. The only factor that seems to stand out is multiple partners. But some women who are married are getting pregnant now, so this isn’t totally reliable anyway.”
“And how is this related to our complete inability to fertilize anything ourselves?” Jordan wondered aloud, but Abby could not answer.
“I’d love to run a few tests on the gametes we have in storage now, but with the new restrictions on the use of human cells for research I don’t think I can,” Abby lamented. Samantha specifically forbade her to attempt to achieve fertilization, despite thousands of desperate married couples on their waiting list alone. She’s more worried about our status with the government than with finding the real solution to these problems. Damn.
“I can see you are not happy,” Jordan interrupted her internal rant. “If we can’t find the answers in the lab, we’ll have to find them in the numbers. Let me make a few calls and we can start doing population surveys ourselves. Maybe we can get to the bottom of this thing.” Jordan, her math whiz, seemed to be truly excited at the prospect of more statistical analysis.
“Field work? Gee, haven’t been that lowly since college.”
“Aw, come on. A little trip around Virginia and Maryland can’t hurt us. Besides, we have got to get out of this fluorescent lighting. My tan is going to hell.”
Abby giggled. “All right, Fabio, let’s do it.”
“I can’t believe it’s not butter.”
On that note, Abby’s giggles grew to outright guffaws.

Dunno, I just liked that Fabio bit so I posted this scene, LOL.
You can get yourself a copy of Triple X, here.