The Escapement Mechanism, Part 5
Notes and Introduction
No notes.
It was late and she was tired, but the thrill of the unknown had Wemly wired. If she went to the lab now, maybe she could have an answer by morning for how the device worked—or at least what it was for. She left the apartment in a hurry, forgetting her mitts and a scarf. She had imagined the winter spent with her laptop warming her legs, or under a blanket, or sitting next to a machine radiating heat in the lab, rather than thawing the lumpy fake leather of her car with her thinly covered body.
The streets were mostly clear at this time of night, and she thought again how the commute to the lab would be a pleasant one if always undertaken after midnight. Haloed stop lights and braking cars were like some painting that she was being brushed through, and she took it all in, the opposite of the tunnel vision that normally guided her to the lab. At the last light before she made the turn into the University complex, she saw a man pushing a hot dog cart.
Wemly had probably come at some lull between night activities that she wasn’t aware of. Night activities. How long had it been since she had gone out to someplace other than the lab? She hadn’t felt particularly hungry at home, but the idea of a warm hot dog and toasted bun instead of the icy steering wheel between her hands was enough for her to turn off into the empty parking lot of the all-night convenience store.
Wemly didn’t even need to get out of the car. A dreadlocked man, mostly hidden under a toque, leaned down to her open window.
“Watcha have?”
“Loaded.”
“Toasted?”
“Of course!”
The dog was in her hand, and then her mouth. She squeezed the bun, and the warm toppings oozed through the bread and between her fingers, with all time and her cause forgotten. And then it was over.
Wemly sat satisfied and stuffed, licking remnant grease and sauce off her hands. She tossed the napkins onto the pile of discarded wrappers that littered the passenger side floor, and backed her car out of the stall.
At the lab, Wemly grabbed some monitors and recorders, normally used for mice, and set up a crude experimental area where her actions and vitals were recorded. She was a little nervous with her shirt off in the lab, as Utsab had a habit of staying or coming in late, and she didn’t have a good explanation cooked up for why she was in her underwear with probes on her chest and temple. The wires were also barely long enough to plug into the equipment and allow her to use the computer; she made a bad mouse.
Wemly ran all sorts of diagnostics, but as far as she could tell, she was a normal human, albeit with a slightly elevated heart rate. She tapped the device on her neck, but couldn’t get it to do anything that registered a change in her vitals, or any EMR or background fields. Eventually she held her fingers on the device, over what she assumed was the slowly blinking light.
She might have been imagining it, but she felt the intake and exhale of every breath as a slight variation in temperature under her finger—warmer on the exhale, and then a beep which she had heard before and tried to place, but a wave of nausea washed over her …
… and she caught her reflection in the mirror. She was tired. Maybe she would experiment on some of the mice in the lab tomorrow. Although if she went in to the lab now, when no one else was around, she could experiment on herself without drawing the confused interest of Utsab, or the angry dismissal of Warner. But she was too tired to go anywhere after the exhausting day.
Surreptitious experiments with the mice in the morning would have to suffice.