The Escapement Mechanism, Part 6

Notes and Introduction

We are officially in the second act of things. Now we need to pursue some goals. Encounter some roadblocks. I sure hope nothing bad happens to our protagonist. Already thinking of some editing choices for The Revisioning, but a story is in the telling, so let’e tell it!

“You’re in early,” said Wemly. Utsab was fixed glazedly on his computer, mouth slack, fingers moving in what seemed some autonomous, unconscious 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 hoped to have most of the day to herself coming in so early. 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 it was she been gifted from her grandma had been weighing on her. At least if Utsab was preoccupied with his analyses, he wouldn’t be actively watching the monitors in the mouse house. 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-moment 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 work he presented didn’t get to go to. This was the type of work she would ostensibly be conducting.

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 didn’t graduate, and everyone in the lab knew Warner had done all of the horrible things he had been accused of.

The hard evidence of the log book would never be requested for these study-of-the-day tangents, and everyone still at the lab had learned not to bring it up. Although technically there was 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. Initially, she shaved a patch of fur big enough to accommodate the device. It felt good to be hands-on at the bench again. The sleek black stone molded effortlessly into the nape of the mouse’s neck, and she felt the 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 not space remained between the device and the surrounding skin. If on a human it could have been mistaken for some kind of embedded jewelry.

The mouse squirmed slightly when the device was first applied, but seemed otherwise unaffected. Wemly pressed the stone directly over the pulsing light, 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, 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, blocking the delicate fade and bloom of light from her vision for a few seconds.

There was a faint beep, an electronic device activating. The mouse visibly shuddered, a tremor from an earthquake only it felt. At last, something had happened. 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.