The Escapement Mechanism, Part 13
With the mechanism reliably under her control, Wemly felt confident in cracking the mystery of what it actually did. Utsab would likely leave her alone if she was in the experimental lab, but she had no ongoing projects, and loathed helping the grad students.
“Madison needs help in the lab,” she said, and stood to leave. An ancillary benefit of her supposed drug use was Utsab giving her a pass on out of character behaviour. With a deadline looming, tearing her away from her desk would normally be impossible. She hoped Utsab wouldn’t investigate.
Madison was in fact running an experiment, a fortuitous sprout of truth she would nurture into a full grown lie if Utsab forced her into it. For now, she waved a quick hello to the blonde ponytail holding a clipboard, the stock image embodiment of “laboratory technician”.
Wemly selected a mouse from a cage on the youngest side of the habitat, not caring whether it affected Madison or the results of any other students. She would get her results or she wouldn’t go home, just like back in grad school.
She didn’t have to wait long. The young mouse with freshly shaved neck fur wore the escapement mechanism like a denotation of rodent nobility, yet froze in fear hearing the control tone for the first time, before any shock had been administered.
People fucked up all the time, grad students especially, but multiple habitats housing preconditioned mice was impossible. Though the results wouldn’t be publishable, she would determine how the mice knew of the pain that was yet to befall them. Currently, the camera feed and vital logs provided no evidence for any exposure that explained the conditioned fear response.
Yet the rodents cowered in expectant pain from a future shock. Perhaps the escapement mechanism somehow allowed the mice to have experiences outside Wemly’s frame of reference. If so, what exactly had her grandma been part of?
She considered different possibilities: the mechanism itself as a memory storage device, or as the facilitator for some sort of parallel universe crossover. If it were the first case, she was still left with the problem of where the memories came from, and though the theoretical physics students she sometimes ate lunch with would have no problem with the second explanation, she found it synonymous with “fantasy”.
Wemly resolved to stick with the facts. She could control the interface with her mind; extraordinary, but true. Mice wearing the device appeared to accrue memories from a time they had never experienced; also extraordinary, and trying to come up with a rigorous test for this wild conjecture brought her headache back into full bloom. Any reviewer at even a bottom-rung journal would dismiss the naïve mice showing a fear response as experimental error.
The prosaic explanations would simply overwhelm the required extraordinary evidence needed to convince skeptics. Even with a third party raising a mouse colony under constant surveillance and performing the experiments, doubt would remain. It was also a ridiculous ask, as funding bodies wouldn’t even green-light replication studies.
After doffing her lab wear and signing out of the lab, she sat back down under Utsab’s watchful eye. She had decided on a course of action. Like scientists immemorial, some later winning Nobel prizes and others dying because of their stupidity, she would experiment on herself. If the mice could accumulate unearned memories, then so could she.