Sketch: Late Night Lab Work

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

The punctuated drone of the lab was deafening in its own way, even as the highway noise had long since faded into the night. Ailing fluorescent bulbs crackled and buzzed in their unpolished housings, their harsh off-white radiation scouring the peeling drywall. A feeble window unit fought vainly to keep the humid ocean breeze at bay, periodically coughing stale air into the room. These were the worst possible conditions for a research lab, and Angela could only assume this betrayed the true value of her work.

She sighed, gripping her head in her hands. The monitor burning in front of her struggled to make itself known against the glare of the overhead fixtures, lines of miniscule type crumbling like cinders into her half-written report. Her syntax had fallen into amateurish repetition half an hour ago, and she'd made nine typos in the past five minutes. Still, she was certain even another Monster from the campus convenience store wouldn't help her contrive significance from the results of her most recent experiment.

Massaging her tightly-shut eyes only served to replace the sterile white with the dancing blue-green of phosphenes across her retinas. This experiment was the fourth permutation on the same flawed premise she'd been directed to investigate since all of this had begun - and Dr. Chakravorty was just one PI out of millions across the planet, all of whom had been frantically groping for a shred of understanding for the past eighteen months. By now the incontrovertible consensus held that Acute Scopogenic Psychosis was, indeed, principally caused by external stimuli, even if psychosomaticism introduced its own set of confounding symptoms. That this particular stimulus was the shifting gaze of a planetary-mass organism somewhere in the Earth's mantle was of little concern to him, aside from the practical frustrations this introduced to their methods.

What mattered to Dr. Chakravorty was the mechanism by which the effect was induced. No, the mere knowledge of being seen was not really enough to create such severe symptoms in a healthy, neurotypical individual. But reproducing the effect was impossible without detailed knowledge of the origin of the stimulus - what was so special about the eyes themselves? Exotic material properties? Quirks of their biology? Was there an active sensing component bathing the thing's earthly fixations in some uncharacterized form of radiation? None of these questions had particularly convincing answers, and Angela's research had contributed nothing of substance to any of them.

Non-organic material carried no trace of the effect, and neither did organic matter. Angela's last experiment had studied the central nervous system of dead cockroaches collected from the aftermath of a particularly large visual field that had struck Sacramento, finding nothing out of the ordinary - though their unusual positions in death were taken as evidence that they had suffered symptoms similar to those seen in people hit by the fovea. Finally, over the past few weeks she had studied live roaches which Dr. Chakravorty had managed to secure from Eugene after its storm the previous month. Chakravorty had gone to great lengths; even under the Federal IRB process waiver, securing live subjects from the path of a visual field was a tall order, but he had been adamant that those filthy insects would yield a breakthrough for their lab, the university, and, perhaps, the world. The jumble of meaningless jargon on Angela's computer permitted no such illusions.

Leaning back from her desk, Angela allowed her gaze to slide out the nearest window, sinking deep into the murky darkness beyond. The distant city lights shimmered like phantoms in the hazy nighttime sky. The underlying mechanism of ASP within the brain would be solved within the year, and neither she nor Dr. Chakravorty's names would adorn whatever journal published the discovery - this she knew.  Chakravorty was a good man, with good intentions, and more optimism than was especially practical lately. He was thinking about countermeasures, real preventative medicine, not the cheap antipsychotics that FEMA was passing around like Halloween candy. All he - and the rest of the world - needed to do was elucidate a neurotransmitter, a receptor, some kind of hormone, and the pharmaceutical companies would handle the rest. That "Chakravorty and Tsai, 202X" might be cited millions of times in the following years would merely be a nice accessory to their humanitarian triumph. 

It was all profoundly disinteresting to her.

Angela wanted to study the thing itself. Her specialization was still in molecular biology, no matter how much the department tried to shoehorn all of its undergraduates into neurobiology. Angela had lost all interest in human physiology the day she'd seen that first seismotomographic image - the one they plastered across headlines and television channels for days before it was finally censored in the interest of public health. She had immediately been gripped by the base urge to deconstruct it, to peel it away layer by layer and fit the slices under a microscope slide. She wanted tissue samples, though she knew that was the most unrealistic daydream of all. China's collection party had been the only one to survive, and now they held fast to the leverage wrought by their prize. The cosmic irony twisted the corners of her mouth: she was American-born; her parents had sought to grant her boundless opportunity, unwittingly robbing her of the greatest one the world would ever know.

The piercing tone of her phone alarm jarred her back to herself. 9:45 PM. Just enough time to make the last train. With great effort she gathered her body upright, reaching to unplug her laptop from the desk. Her thoughts were shattered now, sleep deprivation rushing in to fill the vacuum. Willing herself to wrap up her charging cable, all she could process now was

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.