ANDERS MAGE PAGE 2.0

I was walking along the concrete alley behind the Institute carrying a huge pile of the white boxes when I heard the cry of a baby. At first I was unsure from where it came, I scanned the facade above me for open windows, but slowly the inescapable conclusion crept over me. I began to frantically search through the boxes, putting my ear against the smooth plastic and discarding the silent ones. Finally I found it, and rushed inside — the alley was no place for this.

Inside the Christmas party was well underway. The others were eating and drinking and making merry, and when I stormed into the room with the box and quickly explained the situation Dr. Davies even applauded, "A new-born child on Christmas!" and laughed loudly. I began to remove the plastic inserts, the salad, small cans of anchovies and pieces of bread from the box, while the others expectantly looked on and Christmas music played (too loud, where were the cries?). I finally reached the bottom of the box, but at first I didn't understand what I found. The laughter and smiles began to fade as they saw my face, and when I lifted up what I found many faces contorted in disgust.

Salt water dripped from my fingers as I examined the thing I had found. There was a definite fishy smell. The body was definitely humanoid, maybe five months developed, but attached where the head should be were two long, black, shiny things which hung limply from my hand, like aquatic shoe-strings. No wonder it had stopped crying. In a zip-lock bag inside the box I found the fragile fan-like tentacles, kept in a saline solution. I turned to the others, who all stood silent, accusing me of having disrupted their party. But I couldn't stop myself from explaining, despite their disapproval. "This is definitely something from the order Polychaeta. I think it must have got loose from one of the cans and begun to assemble itself..."

He awoke, not with a start but with a moan. A quick look at the clock told him it was too late to go back to sleep anyway, so he went up and began his breakfast ritual. It was at times like this he really wanted Professor Heiselberg and his team to succeed, despite their personal and professional differences. Why can't we move short-term memories from the hippocampus into long-term memory without involving conscious (or at least semi-conscious) experience? In theory it would be so simple, just a block on the ascending fibers from the subiculum... But he knew that was a long-term dream, and probably just as well. When he began to analyze the fragments of his dream, he noted the usual elements: fear of disapproval from his colleagues, a sense of futility in saving lives, a horror for both the natural and unnatural... Probably half the Institute had the same traits. But that didn't make him feel better.

At the foyer of the Institute he met Dr. Vassiliadis, always happy and cheerful, as usual. The lucky bastard probably had some biochemical screw-up in his endorphin system. He held open the elevator doors with a great deal more strength than was needed.

"Morning! Heard that you met with The Representative yesterday?"

"Don't talk about it. You already know how it went."

"Let me see... Was it 'Due to the current budgetary constraints we cannot approve any more funding to this kind of basic research' or 'Sorry, there is no market for that'?" Dr. Vassiliadis had the intonations down pat, and both laughed.

"A bit of both. I pointed out to him that the project would save a few million people if it worked, and he just responded 'If it works, yes'. Damned yuppie probably thought the people the project might save didn't have a high enough income bracket to be interesting."

"That is the general error with people like him. No connection with reality at all. Unlike us." He laughed and stepped out of the elevator.

The rest of the morning went on as usual, skimming through the mail and adding another score of post-it labels to his terminal. Dr. Vassiliadis of course called it the "autumn computer" — lots of yellow leaves that fall off in the breeze. His mood didn't get any better, but at least he could bury himself in paperwork instead of thinking of funding or things in white boxes. A paper from Peter caught his notice. "Perspectives of MPTP Induced Degeneration of the Nigrostriatal Pathway in the Presence of L-Deprenyl". The boy was doing fine, as usual. That paper was bound to become widely cited, if only for the raw data. Funny, he thought, that those Californian junkies had accidentally stumbled upon what could be the key to Parkinson's disease. Sometimes fate was ironic. We spent several decades poisoning our rats without succeeding in making them parkinsonian, and that chemistry student just messed up his heroin synthesis and created instant parkinsonism. Well, at least they did humanity some good.

He went down into the basement lab to check the experiments. There was almost no one there. All the research students were busy with something in the B wing. His steps echoed through the concrete corridors and clean labs. It was peaceful here, a cool place to calm down.

The shiverer mice spasmed as soon as he entered the room, one curling up into a tiny ball as he watched it. He gently picked it up and stroked the fur, feeling the tense shivering muscles beneath. "One day," he promised the misshapen little lifeform "we will be able to cure you. We will make your Schwann cells produce myelin, wrapping themselves around your axons..."

"It deserves death." someone said behind him. He quickly turned around, the mouse still in his palm. Behind him, in the doorway stood a ragged man. He gave a vague impression of vagabond mixed with street lunatic. Mirrorshades didn't combine well with a smelly jacket with Chinese coins sewn on. In his hand was a long knife.

"It is in pain, because you need it for your experiments. Hoping to better humanity. When you should let it die". Each statement hung in the air like a smoke cloud, slowly twisting and unfolding as he backed away from the intruder who slowly advanced on him, gesturing with his knife.

This had to be one of them. He had never met one before, but the intruder fit the description perfectly. This was no normal animal rights activist or biofundamentalist. This was a full-fledged reality deviant. Armed. Insane. Bent on killing him.

"Death is the natural consequence of life. Inevitable. Hindering it isn't even wrong — it is impossible!". The intruder spat out the last words as he moved forward.

The lifted blade reflected the room like a mirror. The light that had bounced from the animal cages filled with watching mice bounced from the arrayed atoms in the knife, refracted through his eyes and hit the retina. The retinal cells transduced it into electrochemical impulses that were processed by his bipolar and amacrine cells, rushed along the ganglion cells of his optic nerve, merged and divided in his optic chiasm and hit the lateral geniculate nuclei. Glutamate jumped across a synapse, and axons moved the signal into his visual cortex, into the secondary, tertiary and higher-order visual cortices; sending the room into his association cortex where it was refracted, associated, changed by patterns that were him.

He threw the mouse at the intruder. The little white ball moved through the air like a furry baseball. Innocent, fearful and powerless. The intruder smiled slightly and swung his arm in an arc faster than thought. The knife neatly divided the mouse into two dead pieces, red blood against white fur hanging in the air. The arm and knife continued their deadly arc past the chain of the emergency shower. The knife snagged, the chain tensed and water poured down over the intruder as the knife buried itself in the wall. The accident alarm started.

He didn't think, he just rushed to the doorway and hit the emergency seal. Thank goodness for safety regulations and paranoid virologists! The moment the blast door shut he saw the intruder running towards it, soaking wet, his glasses lost (he had Asiatic eyes) and the remains of a shiverer mouse still stuck on his disgusting jacket between two coins. Then metal, painted a flaking white, banged together and he was alone in the basement corridor. He sank to the concrete floor shivering as he listened to the sound of running steps and alarms.

"I promise you. I will make your vesicles link with synapsine and actin. Everything will be fine..."