((Feel free to comment!))
Dr. Ambrose Martel worked on his two mechanicals, feeling Fargazer’s eyes on him from her perch on the surgical table. When she’d asked him, a few days ago, to explain what he’d done to her, he knew the time had come to terminate this phase of his studies. He had a new, promising human subject in his clinic; he had a cat ready, as well. All he needed to do was remove Fargazer’s brain, and spend the next several days studying it and the human brain to see what had happened to them.
He snapped closed the the compartment of the mechanical. Ambrose hadn’t wanted to spend too much money on his mechanical assistants…and he’d wanted to be sure he retained control over them. The two he’d bought had come with programming cylinders for a few functions. They could only work in one function at a time, but that was all he needed. When Fargazer had become conscious, he’d made one mechanical into her nurse, keeping her fed and helping her while she learned to move in her new body. The other had functioned as a guard, making sure she didn’t try to escape.
Now, though, he needed to change their programming to fill the role of surgical aides. That was a simple matter of changing out the programming cylinders to the correct ones, and now they were standing by, ready for his instructions. Everything was ready.
He turned around to find Fargazer now on her feet, standing by the surgical table, hands clasped to her chest. Was she about to ask that final question?
“Ambrose,” she said in a shaky voice. “Can you…can you put me back?”
She’d asked it.
“Put you back in your cat body?” he asked, rather rhetorically. Had she asked this a few days ago, he would have prevaricated. But no…well, she had only a few more minutes of life left. What harm was there in answering?
“No,” he said, turning around to take up a hypodermic needle and fill it with a solution to put her swiftly to sleep. “Even if I had kept it, if what I suspect is true, I wouldn’t be able to separate your brain from the part of the human brain left in there. Although…” he paused in filling the needle, musing aloud, “it is an intriguing notion. Separate the cat brain after such an experience as yours, put it back in the cat body…how much would it remember? What skills would it retain? I may have to try that…though it will take a great deal more experimentation and study before I could even think about attempting that.”
Ambrose finished preparing the needle, and bent over, placing the empty ampule down. “Now then,” he said, beginning to straighten and turn. “If you’ll just sit back up on the table–“
((To be continued))
Be First to Comment