Chapter 4: Chapter three

Present day

 

Doctor Elizabeth Clark, Liz to her friends, sipped her takeaway cappuccino and wrinkled her nose in distaste. There was a bitter, burnt flavour to the coffee.

Over-extracted. I knew that girl had no idea what she was doing.

As she walked the block and a half back to her lab, she daydreamed about how long it would take her to design and build a device that could be attached to existing coffee-makers and prevented barista error from ruining her evening cappuccino. She figured that if she worked hard at it, she could probably do it inside of six months.

Heh, maybe after I fix prosthetics.

She began to chide herself internally for the arrogance of that thought. After all, the field of prosthetics had a lot of intelligent people in it. She was contributing to it, not fixing it. Then she immediately chided herself for that thought. It didn’t help anyone to pretend she was less intelligent than she was or her work less significant. By twenty-four she had completed a Masters in Engineering and a PhD in biochemistry and now, three years on, she had her own lab with three people working under her, one of whom had an M.D. False modesty was nothing but a way to misperceive the facts of her life, and Liz wanted to see the world as it was. And in the world, as it was, she was a genius.

She sipped her bitter coffee and wondered whether her instinct to undervalue her own intelligence was due to some lingering social conditioning towards feminine submissiveness, or just regular garden-variety insecurity. As she considered this, the sun was setting and a chill wind blew. Liz wasn’t fond of the cold and she had considered not going to the coffee shop on account of the weather, but she was even less fond of spending long nights in the lab without any caffeine. Although, given the quality of the coffee, she was having second thoughts about that decision.

The pavement gave way to the grass of the university campus which contained her lab. Liz held the small knife she kept in her purse as she passed under the trees that were tastefully arranged along the path to her lab. Some might consider this, in the relatively safety of the university campus, to be paranoia, but Liz considered it simple practicality. She was just prepared for the most probable worst-case scenario. It pays to be cautious when one is alone. Especially after sunset. Especially when one is a woman. And especially when one is a preeminent scientist to whom religious fundamentalists often send death threats. Apparently, they objected to her ‘playing god’. She had taken note of their objections, and then decided that the 5.6 million paralyzed Americans might also object to remaining that way because of a bunch of close-minded zealots. Not that her work, even if it was as successful as she hoped, would be able to cure all paralysis.

But almost all.

Liz smiled to herself at that as she swiped her ID to get into her lab.

“Evening ma’am,” Aaron Garland—a large biochemist out of Texas who insisted on calling her ma’am regardless of how many times she said not to—greeted her as she entered.

“It’s Liz, Aaron,” she said again with a smile.

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“Yes ma’am.”

Liz rolled her eyes. “Sam, how are we going on the cerebellum implant?”

Doctor Samantha-Allison Martin, Liz’s consulting medical doctor and quite brilliant in her own right, let out a sound of extreme frustration. She was washing her hands in a large sink.

“In a word? Poorly.”

“Still not taking huh?”

Sam shook her head. “No, but I have given another sheep severe brain damage, so there’s that.”

Liz smirked at that. “Well keep trying. We have plenty more sheep.”

The cerebellum implant was Liz’s latest brainchild. The idea was to allow the brain to interact naturally with new prosthetics via a wireless signal rather than splicing their synthetic nerves to real ones. The patient wouldn’t be able to receive sensations from the prosthetic like they could if they used synthetic nerves, but it allowed them to switch out a worn-out prosthetic with a new one almost instantly and still have full control over it. It was essentially Bluetooth for the brain.

Or it would be if Sam could get it to take. Apparently, it was still too big and cumbersome to attach to the cerebellum without damaging it.

Liz went to chase up Lukas, her lazy but brilliant micro-engineer. She needed him to redesign the implant.

Probably napping again, Liz thought when he wasn’t in his adjoining workshop. He had a habit of turning up, asleep, in cupboards and under desks.

That day she would not find Lukas. He had the bad luck of being in the lab late the previous night when someone came looking around at Liz’s research. So he was not asleep in a cupboard. He was dead in a dumpster.

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