The Science Prophet (Complete)

Chapter 4: Celebration

Darwin sighed with relief as the computer began working to reassemble the file. It would take several minutes, but she would get it and whatever truth it revealed.

She picked up her phone and began keying a text back to Lucy.

Her mind turned back to that day more than two years ago. After Adrian had stormed into her office, Darwin had quickly noticed that he was a mess. His clothes were disheveled and he hadn’t shaved in days, and he smelled like he hadn’t been showering either. He had been so agitated that it had taken fifteen minutes for her and Lester to coax him into sitting down and explaining what had occurred over the last two days.

Adrian sat bathed in the sunlight that streamed through the window as he recounted that he had received her email on Tuesday morning but was, as he put it, “quite busy” and didn’t open it immediately.

Darwin frowned. “Quite busy” was obviously a euphemism for “couldn’t care less about answering your emails”, but didn’t interrupt.

Finally, Adrian had opened her email on Tuesday evening as he was clearing out his inbox. His curiosity was piqued by her request, so he had entered the calibrations into his BrainCleaver prototype and scanned himself. He’d been stunned by the results he saw, cancelled his dinner appointment, and spent the next four hours trying to analyze them.

Stymied, he decided to see if he could replicate the same results on another subject. But by this late hour the lab was empty of his colleagues. He looked around frantically until he found an elderly janitor. “Come with me!” he’d blurted excitedly.

“What, you spill some coffee or something?” asked the janitor resignedly.

“No, no I need you to get in my machine!”

“What the hell are you talking about?” the janitor had said, edging away suspiciously.

“No, it’s ok.” Adrian reached into his wallet and pulled out all of his cash. “Look, I’ll pay you. It’s here down the hall. Just lie in there for 5 minutes. I need to run one test.”

The test on the janitor had been positive for the same anomaly that Adrian had seen in his own scan.

Adrian had been so excited he slammed his laptop shut and ran for his car without remembering to take his phone or even help the janitor out of the BrainCleaver.

He drove straight to the airport and ran to a ticket counter, asking for the next flight to Boston, which left at 5:15AM. However, his trip went awry when he was diverted into a full security check. “I guess as a wide-eyed lone male demanding a one-way ticket across the continent, I checked a few boxes on some Homeland Security profiling list,” Adrian admitted to Darwin and Lester.

Unfortunately, he handled the imposition of the security check badly, berating the bored-looking TSA officer for impeding the progress of science. The officer put an arm on his shoulder to calm him down, and Adrian responded by angrily pushing the hand away and repeating how important his trip was to humanity.

“They must have thought I was a nut. They put me in the detention cell along with all the drug mules and other riff raff. I was there in that damned cell for 24 hours. I guess I was only released because my story about being a professor at CIT checked out.”

During this entire ordeal, Adrian had not been able to contact anyone because he had even forgotten to bring his phone and his computer had been confiscated.

Finally, on Thursday morning he had been allowed to board a flight to Boston.

“I’m glad you finally made it,” said Darwin, giving a warm smile to show him he was welcome.