Darwin paused, not knowing what she wanted to write to Lucy. She was a bit embarrassed to admit she was still in the lab, hunting for Rob's brain scan, like some kind of obsessive jerk.
Outside the window of her lab, in the darkness of the street, she heard two male voices yelling. Drunken students making a racket. She scowled and shook her head but the noise quickly died down.
But Lucy is not the type to ask where I am for no reason she thought to herself. She typed a quick message back to her. “Still at the lab, looking up old scans. You were right that Rob was displaying my old brain scan tonight. I should sue him haha.”
But Darwin wasn't interested in looking at her own brain scan. She'd come to find Rob's.
When Rob had come back from giving himself the brain scan that day two years ago, he did not bring Lucy's laptop with him. He shrugged and said to Adrian “like you said, Doc, it points straight up.”
Darwin let it slide. She didn’t really care what Rob’s brain looked like. And it seemed like everyone else in the room had enough distaste for him that they didn’t care, either.
After Adrian’s arrival, Rob stopped coming to the lab entirely. Darwin and Lucy became furiously busy preparing to publish their results in the Journal of Neuroscience, with collaboration from Adrian and Lester. Darwin was relieved to put Rob out of her mind and focus on her work.
The most time consuming part of preparing for publication was compiling a larger sample of test results. For three months, Darwin was busy scanning two or three new subjects a day in her BrainCleaver. Adrian performed another fifty scans, until together they had a sample of over two hundred test results, all confirming the existence of the anomaly.
Each scan result was essentially the same. It depicted brain tissue in white and grey, and bone in black. Normal forms of energy were orange, red and purple. And the anomaly appeared in a pale golden color. It always appeared as a faint pattern of unknown energy, which swirled in ghostly wisps upwards and outwards from the top of the human brain towards the sun
Once the scans were done, the journal article was simple enough to prepare. They merely had to explain the BrainCleaver parameters they had used when discovering the anomaly, include some of the scan outputs, and demonstrate with basic trigonometry that the anomaly in each case was, in fact, pointing directly at the sun.
By convention, Darwin’s article should include a discussion of possible explanations for the anomaly. But Darwin had no explanations. The most obvious explanation, that there was a misfiring component in the BrainCleaver, had been ruled out by Dr. Advani’s rebuild of the entire device, and by Adrian’s ability to replicate Darwin’s results with his own prototype from a location across the continent.
On those rare occasions when Darwin let her mind wander and imagine other possible causes, she experienced an intense anxiety that took her hours to recover from.
Therefore, Darwin offered no explanations in her journal article. She was confident, however, that further experimentation would provide data to guide her to a conclusion.
Finally, Darwin submitted the article to the journal. After the peer review period, which lasted three months and kept Darwin busy providing tours and demonstrations for skeptical neuroscientists from Oxford and Chicago, the article was finally published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
It was only a matter of days until the research team under Dr. Zhang at Peking University, the third and final team in the world to have a prototype BrainCleaver, announced it had completed an independent experiment that replicated the results compiled by Darwin and Adrian.
YOU ARE READING
The Science Prophet (Complete)
Ciencia FicciónDr. Darwin Goldstein's inability to cope with the spiritual implications of her revolutionary discovery of an inexplicable anomaly in the human brain drives her into self-imposed seclusion. But the world demands answers, and in Darwin's absence a s...
