Gene wakes with his alarm at 6:03AM and slowly climbs the stairs from the basement to the kitchen, his heavy feet pounding like war drums against the hollow steps beneath him. 

He takes a small teabag from a container near the sink and drops it into a cup of hot water. He stirs it around with his finger, enjoying the pain of it as he leers at the hordes of action figures lining the walls. Hundreds stand crookedly on warped homemade shelves. None are whole. Not anymore. They are twisted, melted, frankensteinian monstrosities—Gene's earliest splices.

His morning drink turns dark, and he sips at it rapidly until the cup is drained empty. He eyes his analog clock: two hours and fourteen minutes before he needs to be at the lab. There's nothing for him to do until then, and so he sits in his kitchen, dead-eyed and still on the room's single chair, waiting in silence for the moment when it would make sense for him to enter his car and drive to work. He waits, and he waits, and eventually the moment arrives.

 

Lizardmen are often the top priority of a good mad scientist, closely followed by Cheetahbirds. (Source)

The other researchers at PacTech Labs take little notice of Gene as he enters the office. In fact, they tend to avoid everything to do with him besides the results of his work. Gene doesn't care. To him, they're all just glorified apes who will one day succumb to his genetically-modified army of lizardmen. Just like all the rest.

Gene asks Lynn, a research assistant, for the results of yesterday's lab work. She smiles and scurries away to find the paperwork for him. Gene doesn't much care about the results...or her smiles. This job is a means to an end, a place where he can be paid for his genius while he works furtively on his own special inquiries into the human genome.

Gene boots his computer and connects to PacTech's academic library. His team has been tasked with discovering how Alzheimer's disease relates to heredity. Other researchers have plotted connections between the disease and certain chromosomes, but no one's yet been able to discover the exact role they play in its contraction. He pulls up the latest publication of one such researcher, and continues the analysis he began yesterday of her results.

Lynn returns with the analysis of yesterday's experiment, and nervously interrupts Gene's reading to give him the folder. He Snape-faces her and accepts it as she giggles and returns to her workstation. He's not fond of the giggling.

As he flips through the results, Gene decides that people like Lynn will be the first assigned to the lithium mines. It will be hard work collecting the mineral currency of his New Tomorrow but—wait. Gene's expression scrunches as he flips back a page. He looks rapidly between the study on his monitor, and the conclusions in his hands. Is there...a connection?

 

This was much better than Gene's last epiphany, in which he discovered that staring at a blood sample for long enough without eating would cause cells to whisper dark secrets that only he could hear. (Source)

His body stiffens as he considers the implications. In as long as he's worked for PacTech, he's never expected to actually produce viable results. These things take time if they happen at all, but this...this is a viable result. A big viable result. Something to be recognized for. Something that will make them see—make them all see. Something that doesn't involve genetically engineering iguana humans. Gene has had an epiphany.

He quickly calls a meeting of the laboratory staff. While initially nervous, the PacTech scientists slowly ease as they learn of Gene's potentially radical discovery. Perhaps more surprising than the science, however, is Gene's demeanor. Could he be acting normally?

Gene, for his part, has never felt better. He dismisses the meeting and orders three separate internal experiments to corroborate the theory. He then assigns Lynn to contact other labs for presentation—he'll need independent teams to verify his results before publishing a serious paper of his own. There's a new energy in the lab, and it's infected everyone.

He works well past sunset, and his team stays with him through the end. Gene arrives home after 9:00 and, for the first time, finds himself disturbed by his own decor. Hurriedly, he begins to bag and trash his mutant action figures, but there proves to be far more of them than his current attention span will allow him to deal with tonight.

He packs a small bag and leaves again, this time for a local hotel. He needs a clean space to think, to consider the implications of not only the day's discovery, but also a future in which he's recognized not as a tyrannical demigod overlord, but as a hero.

"Hero," he says aloud as he drives through the night. It suits him better, he thinks.

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