Lactose
File sealed
The detectives are still writing this one up. The poster and the facts are below; the film and the interrogation room open soon.
Booking photographs
The suspect, from its real atomic coordinates. Drag to turn it. Height chart in nanometers, ruled every 0.05 nm. An ice cream cone is about a hundred million times taller.
Rap sheet
- Answers to
- Milk sugar. From lac, Latin for milk.
- Height
- 1.1 nm
- Weight
- 0.57 zeptograms
- Build
- Two sugars holding hands: galactose and glucose.
- Taste
- Same atoms as table sugar, a fraction of the sweetness. The ice cream brings its own.
- Associates
- Nearly every mammal’s milk. Not sea lions’. Not walruses’.
- Weakness
- Crystallizes in tired ice cream. The grit that won’t melt on your tongue is lactose.
- Last seen
- A 5 mL tube marked ICE CREAM in the freezer at HQ.
of them in a half-cup scoop of vanilla ice cream, give or take.
Recipes vary. You’ve never seen one.
The poster on the street
This is the photocopied wanted poster for Lactose, No. 67. They were made for noticeboards around Boston, Cambridge and the rest of the east coast.
Found one? Scan its QR code with your phone. If you're a signed-in player, the sighting goes on your record with +1 XP.
Not a player yet? Join the Epic Quest: the real role-playing game of Molecular Reality, a nanopore lab, with the CEO as gamemaster.