The Escapement Mechanism, Part 7

Notes and Introduction

Mice. Computers are otherwise. No motorcycles or grandfather clocks. Only electricity, which the giant weights pulling on chains need none of. A house in the country devoid of power, yet glowing internally. The belly of an incandescent bellows. What spills out into the wilderness? Read on to find out!

Wemly set up a standard mouse test for cognitive performance. As expected, the mouse did a fast maze route after it knew where the treat was. The device made no appreciable difference. Wemly tried all sorts of diagnostics and readouts, but nothing had changed in the mouse after the beep. If it was doing anything, Wemly wasn’t able to measure it. She never did really like fear conditioning, but set up the experiment nonetheless.

She applied a mild shock from the electric plate in the bottom of the cage, which played a single 2.7 khz tone at the same time. Each time the mouse would stop moving, fearful. Tense. Hear rate increased, but motionless, attempting to hide from the unseen tormentor. Wemly pushed the button again. The tone played. The mouse froze.

A few repetitions was all it took to cause the mouse to freeze in fear at the sound of the tone alone, completely absent the electric shock.

Wemly sighed and decided to remove the device, working her finger nails under the stone and prying it off the mouse’s neck. It peeled away easily, the skin of the mouse folding back like the skin of an onion.

Wemly had tried swiping the stone like it was her phone, but had no success. She decided to run additional experiments, to see if the device, even though she couldn’t seem to get it to work, would have any effect on the standard cognition, learning, and memory tests. The Y-branch test ran successfully, but when she was recording the control response for the fear conditioning experiment, the mouse froze, scared still at the sound of the first tone. Wemly checked the logs. She must have accidentally used a mouse that had been preconditioned. She would need to reprimand the graduate students. Again.

But no. This mouse was fresh despite its age, and had not been used for anything. Wemly played the tone again. Maybe it had just been a coincidence. Maybe something else in the lab had startled it. There was no way it could already associate the tone with the painful stimulus, because she had yet to activate the plate in the cage. Except the result was the same. Classic conditional fear response. The mouse was still. Fearful that some unseen wrathful and capricious presence would once again administer it pain. Wemly shook her head.

If the grad students were fucking up even the simple logging of experimental mice, they would never graduate, because none of their experiments would work. Most were so focused on getting the required large amounts of work completed, that they had neglected to ensure that it was being done correctly.

Wemly returned the mouse and marked it correctly in the log. The whole mouse house probably needed to be validated, but she thanked the God she knew didn’t exist that it was not her fucking problem. She would think of a good reason to borrow a mouse from a different lab. In the meantime she would see what she could learn from the device itself.

The problem with figuring out how the device worked, was that there were no visible ports. It was as if the stone had been forged in a single piece, the blinking light somehow included, along with a power source that Wemly had yet to deduce, but that seemed impossible. And had it not been for the light she had seen with her own eyes, she would have said that it was. What could still have power after who knew how long in the locket? Something nuclear? Trudy had worked for the military, but something that small? And not detected in all the imaging and medical tests her grandma had been through?

Solar was not possible, hidden away in a locket, and working in closed hands and hidden under hair. Could it be body heat that powered it? Neither solar nor hear transfer could generate enough energy from such a small surface area to do anything effective. Even powering the light was prohibitive from the approximate calculations Wemly ran through in her head. Utsab was still focused on his computer, so Wemly set the stone on a silicone mat in front of her computer.

Bluetooth or wireless were too recent of advancements to be in tech that was at minimum twenty years old, but Wemly scanned for connections anyway. She didn’t find any. The interface was with skin. That had been the only time the stone had responded. She palmed the stone and cast a nonchalant glance at Utsab. Then she made like she was stretching and scratching her neck.

She felt the device meld into place immediately, the feeling now familiar. And intimate, live the embrace of a loved one. Like Trudy herself wrapping her arms around Wemly’s neck and squeezing her in a gigantic hug. Wemly did another wireless scan, just in case the connection with a body had opened up a line of communication. It had not. Wemly decided she needed to attach monitors to herself and analyze the outputs on her computer. There would be no hiding this from Utsab, and she didn’t have a plausible cover story drafted.

She attached the monitors anyway. Petroleum jelly-based adhesive disks that she slipped under her shirt and attached to her temples. Utsab couldn’t pass it up.

“What in the fuck are you doing?” he asked. “Have you finally snapped? Do you think you are a mouse or something now? Should I call the student crisis centre?” He looked genuinely concerned, despite the teasing jabs.

Wemly just shrugged and held her limbs like a rodent in front of her chest. She bared her front teeth and responded, “Squeak! Squeak!”

“I’m serious,” said Utsab. “What the fuck?”

“Just getting some non-rodent comparators,” Wemly said, as if that explained everything, or anything at all.

Utsab stared at her for an uncomfortably long time before shaking his head and returning his focus to the computer. Wemly let out a long breath, visibly deflating. Subterfuge was not her strong point.