Keegan awoke at a little after midnight. Any sickness he had earlier had subsided, and due to the time he went to bed he was unable to go back to sleep. Thus he decided to play some games and browse the internet for a while. It was almost 4 and he was about to return to his bed when the phone rang. For a moment he hesitated to answer. Who would be calling at this time in the morning? He wondered. He decided that the chances of it being someone with something important to say was worth risking the possibility that it was just a late night prank caller or something. It was Rick.
“Why are you calling now? It’s 4 in the morning!”
“Dude, I just had a really crazy thought! What if instead of just seeing the accident, you were the accident?”
“Wha…”
“Your bike was in the middle of it, right? and you can’t remember coming home after work that day, right? I think you were right in the middle of the crash! There’s no way your bike would’ve gotten in the middle of the street like that without you on it.”
“But… how would I get home then? You saw those people in hazmat suits still cleaning up yesterday, wouldn’t they keep me inside the quarantine for decontamination and such?”
“Maybe they…” Rick began.
“And didn’t you see how bad that accident was? If I was on my bike when it happened there’s no way I would’ve survived without a scratch.”
“Well… well… maybe you got a top secret thing on you and it helped you survive and escape…”
“You think that because people were wearing hazmat suits it means there would be some useful top secret thing right there for me to use? Usually it just means there’s stuff that kills you.”
“Dude, we need to test you for weird sciencey stuff right now.”
“‘Sciencey’? Really? Just go back to bed, you aren’t making sense…”
“No way. I’m coming over, and I’m bringing my microscope.”
“You mean your dad’s old microscope? You don’t even know how to use it, much less…”
Keegan was about to make several comments about the hopelessness of Rick trying to do anything science related, but there would’ve been no one to hear it. Rick had hung up and without a doubt was en route with his dad’s microscope stowed under his arm.
The process of binding neural listener experiments involves at least partial immersion in a primer substance comprised of [REDACTED] for 1-4 minutes. In most experiments the neural listening compound itself is then injected at locations near the neurons that fire the signals is listens to. Other experiments forego this process by combining the neural listener and any other components into a single compound, and immediately following immersion in the primer with immersion in this compound. Tests on merging the primer substance with the experiment compounds themselves have seen varying degrees of success. Both methods are often very painful. Injection is less so but it takes longer the more locations there are to bind. Immersion compounds are difficult to create and cause much more pain, but they are necessary when the experiment covers a larger area than can be covered by about 14 injections.
As with Part 7 last week I did this one last minute. As such there are probably errors that I’ll edit out later, but hey, at least I’m sticking to the schedule. I really need to get ahead on my writing again…
‘Till later.
-chip
chipgw.com 