The Escapement Mechanism, Part 6
“You’re in early,” said Wemly. Utsab was fixated on his computer, mouth slack, eyes glazed, fingers moving at some autonomous, instinctual level. He had the oily sheen of the ill and all-night upon him.
“Almost time for bed,” Utsab said. “I was going to leave a couple hours ago, but it stopped computing.” He trailed off, clicking a few times and then smacking the keyboard with more force than was necessary. “It was working,” he explained, “and then I updated one dependency to use a new feature for the Figures and it broke everything, and now even though I reverted the package, everything is still fucked.” He struck a key again. “Fuck. Dependency management my ass. I should have just used what I had.”
Utsab continued in this vein while Wemly unpacked her things for the day. She had come in early with the hopes of having most of the day to herself. Now she regretted getting out of bed. She was more tired than she had been in a long time; the subconscious stress of figuring out what exactly had been gifted from her grandma was weighing on her. At least if Utsab was preoccupied with his analyses, he wouldn’t be actively watching the monitors in the mouse house, and any grad student in the lab would keep to themselves. Maybe getting up early hadn’t been a total loss.
Wemly entered, “Warner project” and her name into the log book of the laboratory. Dr. Warner had a propensity to send students on idea-of-the-week work that was unrelated to their thesis project, but that he found momentarily interesting. Such work was usually conducted upon his return from a conference in some tropical locale that the grad student whose results he presented didn’t get to go to. By signing in to the log in this way, she was ostensibly conducting experiments for such a project.
It was a running joke that the log book was the only hard evidence of Dr. Warner’s capricious nature. At committee meetings, or the one tribunal that occurred after a formal complaint against him was filed, he was able to spin any criticism of him or his supervision into a failing of the student making the complaint. The one who instigated the tribunal never graduated, and everyone in the lab knew Warner had done all of the horrible things he had been accused of.
The log book documenting these these study-of-the-week tangents would never be requested, and everyone still at the lab had learned not to bring it up. Although technically there would be evidence of Wemly accessing experimental animals, the log book would only be used to placate the animal care committee and prove that the mice were indeed being treated as they ought to be.
Wemly selected one of the older mice not currently part of any experiment and got to work. It felt good to be hands-on at the bench again. Initially, she shaved a patch of fur big enough to accommodate the device. The sleek black stone molded effortlessly into the nape of the mouse’s neck, and she felt its surface temperature change as the mouse’s skin puckered up briefly at the sides to hold the device. It was like a paper muffin wrapper pulled taught, the crinkled edges smoothing until no space remained between the device and the surrounding skin. It reminded Wemly of some of the embedded jewelry she had seen students sporting around campus.
The mouse squirmed slightly when the device was first applied, but seemed otherwise unaffected. Wemly pressed lightly with her index finger directly over the pulsing light of the stone, which had adapted to the rhythms of the mouse’s breathing. There was no change due to her touch. She tried double tapping, but nothing happened. Figuring out how to make it do whatever it was supposed to was going to be a challenge.
In all her previous experiments for other projects, Wemly had at least known how to go about testing the variable she was interested in. It was something else entirely to determine what the variables were that she should be measuring.
She swiped across the stone, as if it were the smooth glass of her phone, knowing it was futile as she did it. Her grandma had retired long before the iPhone, so expecting the device to behave like one was silly. Finally, Wemly held her index finger over the red dot once again, blocking the delicate fade and bloom of light from her vision for a few seconds.
There was a faint beep—the unmistakable acknowledgement of an electronic device activating. The mouse visibly shuddered, a tremor from an earthquake only it felt.
At last, something had happened; however, what exactly was less clear. Was it pain? The readouts on the monitor for the cage did show a spike, but more in line with anxiety, as if the mouse had sensed the device activate and not been able to process the novelty of it.