Dangerous by Default

35. The lab

In the pitch darkness of the empty lab, Mina tapped a command into her wrist panel.

Lights: bounce.

One after the next, rows of LEDs flooded the cavernous space in a vivid crystal-whiteness before shuddering back to black. Her body flexed upwards on dancer's legs, strong yet fluid, the bare cement cold on her arching feet.

Breath breath breath.

Another tap on her wrist panel.

Warmupjamz ; PLAY

The sound was like an aircraft carrier exploding. Music flooded the 4,000 square foot robotics test lab from 16 powerful speakers hanging from the rafters like gargoyles. The thick bass and tight percussion pushed against her stomach.

Her body swept through the space in wide, open arcs, acrobatic points and elongated plies. Mina was alone in her lab. It was her lab. Nobody else's. And it was going to stay that way. I can catch someone falling through the sky. I have a plan. I am unstoppable.

The synth bass cracked and rose, climbing to a drop. At the zenith of the music's peak, she tapped her wrist, freezing it in space and time. Her body tightly held in the middle of an improvised sequence, she remained still, a sentence left unfinished. An outsider would have easily mistaken her for a statue. In a moment that felt just as sudden, Her shoulders relaxed and Mina stood upright.

Walk walk walk. Work work work.

She sprung forward into a fast-paced step. Hold her dance's energy in her body, she let it propel her into her day. She ascended the metal staircase at the back of the test lab to the part of the building where the research labs were.

They were close. Just finish the work, release the technology, and have a baby. She didn't need an investor. She just needed time. She glanced at her wrist. 12 hours until... She didn't want to think about what would happen if. Now was the time to make things happen.

The lights flickered on in each room as she hurried through their empty spaces. Finally she came to the soft white marble floors of an open kitchen. A cup of Lion's Mane tea steeped in an electric water pot on the bambu cooking table. A hallway snaked behind the kitchen to a row of utility closets. It was a small rectangle that seemed to hover in the wall above the floor that called her. It could have been anything: a vent, an electrical room, a place to store garbage bags. But it wasn't. A thin backlit cutout, a nondescript architectural feature, ran beside it. Mina dragged her keycard along the slit and the light flickered. She pushed the wall panel further back to uncover A narrow hallway drenched in dark blue light.

The hallway was lined in a dark plywood, the back wall a sheet of solid stainless steel. After the attack on Ami's lab at the University of Kyoto, religious fundamentalist terrorism was a constant concern. The door, 900 pounds and blast resistant, was one of many precautions that kept Mina and her team safe. That and its special lock. Mina's hand slid across a pattern of ridges and bumps on the wall beside the steel door, searching for a specific pattern. The clump that nestled under her thumb, and the small constellation of dots that told her where to put her ring finger. A pattern that could only be learned through touch. Being impossible to describe in words or even photograph, there was no chance of it being hacked or even duplicated. Mina found the shape with ease, and held her fingers in place patiently. Exactly 1.57 seconds later, the steel door slid away effortlessly as if it were a silk sheet.

Whereas the front house lab was austere and plain, here was a space bathed in the pinks and blues of a maternity ward. Because that's what it was - or will be. Ami first. Then Mina. Then the world.

Mina walked down an open multistory row of cells. Row after row of surgical operating rooms were stacked one on top of the other, each hermetically sealed behind clear plexiglass and suspended over perforated floors that vacuumed away ninety-nine percent of dust particles. These were almost the cleanest rooms in the world.

Mina was whisked up to the second floor by a tiny elevator stand attached to the side of the wall. In the middle of a concrete slab stood a tiny shack, a shell of corrugated steel and glass. It looked like a beach bungalow. It was anything but.

It was here that Mina spent the majority of her mornings. To one side of the room was the desk that Mina and Ami shared. In the center, an operating table. This was the place where she came to listen, to understand, and to try to speak back. She spoke not with words but in the primordial language of her brain, the raw signal of Science. If she listened well enough, when she spoke the natural world would listen with her. She would ask it questions. In an arcane and elusive voice, sometimes nature would reveal its answers.

She entered the tiny lab and flicked a command into her wrist display.

Warmupjamz

The crackly synth bass, held in suspense since she paused her warmup ritual, was finally allowed to drop. Mina smiled, arching her back to the climactic electronic music. Just a few short hours ago she had been spinning freely in the open air. What could be closer to the voice of science than gravity? She was still carrying the thrill of the skydive in her blood vessels. She knew the secret to creating the world's first artificial womb was just a single breakthrough away. Mina felt a deep well of emotion fill up from the base of her spine, like she had been connected to a hose. It finally hit her. Her dreams, the ones she could imagine so vividly that she could taste them.They could be so much more. It was their reality, the reality they gave the better part of the last three years striving towards. They had come this far. She looked down at the tiny blue object on her desk. As far as you.

She was not yet willing to accept that it would only ever be a dream. Ami would get to experience childbirth, become a mom, to share her love with a small child, teach it how to become brilliant and resilient and strong. And so would she. She couldn't wait to see Caine's grey eyes in a pink-faced little monster. She put the small blue object back down on her desk and opened a drawer. It was a timed Faraday box, able to block any cellular transmissions in or out. She placed her phone inside. If she had only one last day here, she didn't want to be disturbed.

Mina tapped another command on her wrist. A glistening multi-tentacled robot hummed sedately from the back corner, docking itself beside the stirrups of the operating table. In its arms it carried a heavy shape wrapped in a thin gel. It laid the object to rest on the table. After strapping its legs into the stirrups, she peeled away the translucent gel wrapping. Mina gazed on the face and smiled.