Micah hated collaboration. That old saying - if you want to go fast, go alone - if you want to go far, go together - did not apply to him. In his opinion, he went faster and farther by himself. Without the burden of having to communicate his complex, ever-changing stream of consciousness, to wonder whether the other scientist was keeping up and understood the terms and concepts he droned about. Very few scientists understood Micah, and there were a couple that he could tolerate for the sole fact that they stayed well out of his research.
The only man that had kept up with him thus far was Jonah, and damn did Micah hate it.
So, when his boss stated that he had to collaborate with someone for his next project, he ensured that it was not Jonah, or another senior scientist that had too much to say and too little to show for it. Rather, he requested someone from the Department of Agriculture to study the effects of the DraC-2 on crop life, and if there was a chance for the virus to mutate into a plant pathogen.
The Department sent a scientist named Linden Arcangeli to work with him. Micah was bad with names (or rather, he never bothered to remember them), but the surname Arcangeli was hard to ignore. From what Micah had heard, they were famous soil and agriculture scientists who owned Terrane, the older generation of which had worked with Micah's parents.
Micah never got himself involved with the politics of it, and just because the man had that last name did nothing to dissuade Micah from how he wanted this meeting to go. When the young man arrived in the conference room they were scheduled to meet at, Micah hardly raised his eyes from his current manuscript. A very lengthy project, years in the making, about DraC-2's interaction with other viruses, namely the common cold.
"Arcangeli?" he asked, his long fingers typing at his terminal, with no other indication that he noticed the man's arrival.