I hadn’t heard from Carl in years. He was my best friend in university, and all the best stories from that time involved him. Like the time he mixed drinks at a pre-finals party and everyone turned lemon-yellow and got a pass on the vector calculus. Or the time he gave Cindy, the self-proclaimed “Biology Bimbo”, some sort of confidence booster before her big presentation that she aced. She took great pride making sure Carl couldn’t walk for the week after. Or the collection of beaker-shaped coffee mugs, and the misunderstandings those caused. So when I got the email inviting me to his parent’s mountain retreat, I couldn’t book time off work fast enough.

The Canadian Rockies are amazing -- tall, jagged spires of rock clawing triumphantly at the blue, Albertan summer sky. When he wasn’t at the research institute on the Pacific Coast -- something to do with whales, I think -- he spent his time at his parent’s old cabin. I grinned remembering the ragers we threw here. Carl and I made a great team back then -- he was the brains, and I was the charm.

Carl welcomed me with his trademarked shy smile as I pulled up the lane to the cabin. It looked completely different than the last time I was here. Originally, it could have charitably been called a shack, ramshackle and fresh out of a horror movie. Now, it was an almost palatial lodge; multistory and open with tall, glass windows.

“You came, Tom! I’m so happy, please, come in, come in!” I hugged my old friend -- I was one of the few he afforded this luxury. “Carl, my man, it’s been too long, you look great! What did you do to my cabin, you’ve ruined it!”

“I’m sorry, Tom. As you can see, I have some good news, and some bad news.” We shared a laugh over our inside joke almost older than our friendship. “I… uh… I needed some extra space. I loved the view. So, I made a few changes, nothing major… Uh… come in, I’ll show you around. I… I’ve made a breakthrough.”

My feet kept following Carl to his chalet while my mind stopped. He said, “breakthrough”. Carl’s failures were far more successful than anything I’d consider a life victory. But he always called them “failures”. He’d never used the b-word before: refused to, in fact. It courted disaster, he claimed.

After a quick trip to the kitchen -- I was dying for a coffee before even getting here, and he still had the novelty mugs -- we ended up in his laboratory. Of course, Carl has a laboratory in his remote, mountain retreat. It wasn’t the first time I accused Carl of being a mad scientist in jest. But the b-word kept my mouth shut. Absently, I put my mug down on the laboratory countertop and waited.

“Uh, so Tom, you may not know it, but uh I’ve been working with orcas. Lovely creatures, not the killers everyone thinks. I’ve been working on a formula to increase their intelligence. Most of them, even one drop of the solution, caused immediate death of the whales. But this one, this beaker holds the breakthrough.” The brown-black liquid sloshed in the beaker in his hand as he triumphantly waved it.

Swept up in the moment, I grabbed my coffee mug; it was fuller than I thought. I raised it to toast his victory. “Congratulations, Carl! That’s amazing!” I took a deep swig, the pleasantly sweet, lemon-lime liquid coursed down my throat. The caffeine roared through my mind, awaking me.

The look on Carl’s face froze me. His eyes were wide with fear; his mouth falling, falling open; the rest of the colour draining from his pale, gaunt face. A healthy face, though, with not even a trace of the facial scleroderma that killed his father.

“What? How did you turn my coffee into lemonade?” I checked my mug, the brown-black liquid swished around the graduated flask. Oh. Carl’s novelty mugs didn’t have precision measurements of a real Erlenmeyer flask. The refractive index of the borosilicate glass should have given it away as well, or the heft, or even that this glass was room temperature instead of piping hot.

“Tom, a drop of that beaker was enough to kill a whale!”

I already knew that. In my mind, I could see the chemical reactions in the orca’s biochemistry as its brain tissue surged and expanded, as the creature’s encephalon grew, as the Vitamin A became toxic to their enhanced minds and killed them. I could feel the terror as their last thoughts knew how and why they were dying and how powerless they were to stop it. I could tell by the swish of the liquid in the beaker that Carl -- poor, slow, dumb Carl -- was still years away from his breakthrough.

“Carl, I have some good news, and I have some bad news”.