Dangerous Science

Chapter 1
Ignorance is Bliss

For as long as I can remember I’ve always been a nerd. These days TV shows like Big Bang Theory have been trying to make being a nerd kind of cool. Well, it isn’t. It never had been for me anyway. I was always advanced for my age, never understood or got along with my peers, never had any real friends. The kids my own age treated me like a freak, the older kids who were intellectually my peers didn’t want to be seen hanging out with a little kid, with a baby. I was an outcast, I was ‘different’ and there was no room for that in elementary school. I was always that smart alec, the brainiac, the weirdo. Nobody likes to hang around with someone who is always right after all.

It started even before elementary school in fact. I know because I remember it all perfectly. That’s another ability I have been cursed with, a perfect visual memory going back to my earliest years. Some people call that a gift, it isn’t. I can recall every insult, every jeer, every awkward moment from childhood. But I digress.

It all started when I was just two years old. I was fully toilet trained before any of the other kids in my playgroup. The carers there were insistent children under two and a half wear diapers and kids under three wear pull-ups but I simply didn’t need them. At first they refused to even allow me to use the toilet and I can still recall the humiliation of being forced to wet my diaper for them. I can recall the disgusting feeling of it turning warm and clammy around my loins while the carer stood there watching me do my business. My parents threatened them somehow, maybe with a lawsuit, maybe just with badmouthing them to all their friends. In any case they gave in and I was allowed to wear big girl panties.

At the time I thought it was a victory. I so desperately wanted to be a big girl of course, as all toddlers do. But as soon as I showed up in my beauty and the beast panties I created a division between myself and my peers. We were regularly stripped down to play with finger-paints or water, leaving us to toddle around for half the day in nothing but our undies. As soon as the other kids saw my big girl pants they grew curious. At first the attention was nice. They wanted to feel them, they stared at them with awe, they envied me. But then their envy turned to jealousy and they reacted the only way little kids knew to, they rejected me. I was pushed and pinched and bit by kids who didn’t yet have the verbal skills to simply mock me. That was how it started.

By age four I could read whole books meant for first graders. At kindergarten the other kids were working on writing their own names and learning what their last and middle names were. I was simply ignored, allowed to waste the day playing with dolls because the teacher didn’t have time to set up an individual lesson plan for such a gifted child. My parents got sick of that pretty quickly and I was moved ahead, leaving my peers behind.

Intellectually it was the right thing for me of course. By jumping ahead to second grade I was finally challenged by the work. But socially I was nowhere near prepared for elementary school. I was physically much smaller than the kids now, which made their pushes and punches more bruising, more damaging. But the mocking was so much more damaging to me than any physical abuse they could dole out. They teased me mercilessly. I ended many a day in the nurse’s office, faking illness to escape the torture.

As I got older things changed. There was less mocking in my teen years. Instead I was simply ostracised. No one wanted to be seen with me, lest they be seen as a freaky nerd as well. By the time I finished high school, at age fifteen, I had learned to shut myself off from the rest of world. I had built a wall around myself, to keep out the pain. I was a depressed but brilliant young woman and adults had begun to take real notice of me. They saw the promise in me, the genius mind capable of making new scientific breakthroughs. They could see beyond the gawky, pimply, friendless teen girl. They could see the real Sara Sheppard, the woman with the potential to be the next Einstein.

Ten years have passed since I arrived on my first college campus. During that time I have achieved many great things, written academic papers read around the world, made important breakthroughs in multiple scientific fields. But in all those years one thing I have not been able to do is make a real friend. The deck was stacked against me right from the start. Due to my age I couldn’t be housed in a dorm building. I had to live with an aunt in the suburbs while I did my undergraduate work at Harvard. When I moved to England at age eighteen to attend Oxford I was on my own for the first time. But still I isolated myself. I had learned too well that making contact with other people only led to pain.

At twenty I had my doctorate in biology and moved back to the US. I tutored at Johns Hopkins while doing another doctorate there. My students thought I was boring and cold. They were right. I finished my second doctorate at twenty-three and became the youngest assistant professor Georgetown University had ever had. I was a terrible lecturer of course, but that didn’t matter. It was the research I was doing that made them fight for me. I was given my own lab, with a sizable grant and a number of assistants. My research into the human mind was thought to have great potential.

It was then that I began to become a bit more confident socially. I was no longer a pimple-faced, brace-wearing teen girl. I had blossomed into a beautiful young woman. Many times my doctoral supervisor at Johns Hopkins had said to me, “Sara, why do you stay in working every Friday night? I know you have ambition and that is good. But you must have balance in your life. You need to have something beyond your work. Go out with the lab techs, have some fun.”

But I always brushed aside his suggestions, insisted I had too much work to do. Eventually he’d given up. Now that I was out of college though, feeling like a real grown woman, things were different. For the first time in my life I gave some thought to having a social life. One Friday evening I got all dressed up, put on the make-up I usually only bothered with for important interviews, and headed out to Adams Morgan to go clubbing.

It was not a pleasant experience. Every guy I met seemed initially interested, drawn by my flowing black hair, good skin tone and thin but shapely young body. But within a couple of minutes I had ruined it each time just by opening my mouth. I couldn’t do small talk, I’d never learned the skill. I still came off as a brainy freak, even at twenty-three. The previous twenty years might as well not have happened, my social skills had not improved a bit.

I didn’t give up that easily. If there was one thing I had learned over those difficult years growing up, it was determination. So I went back week after week, I joined social clubs, joined a church, attended meetings. None of it worked. I managed to alienate everyone I came into contact with. I simply couldn’t help it.

When all my attempts to create a single viable friendship failed I began to assess where the problem lied. After much introspection I came to the conclusion that it was my intelligence that was getting in the way. My 180 IQ was ruining my life. This led me to some real soul searching. Was it worth being socially isolated to have career success? If I could change my IQ, should I? How much lower should it be? Would that really cure my social awkwardness?

In the end I reached the conclusion that it would be advantageous to lower my intelligence somewhat. I didn’t need my vastly superior intellect to do well in my field, only to be extraordinary and that was overrated. If my IQ was more like 130 I would still be borderline genius, but not a total freak. My new goal became creating a way to reduce my intellect through scientific means.

More than a year had passed since the night I made that decision. Over that time I had worked long hours on a device of my own design, the purpose of which was simply to lower intellect. It had been a long and laborious process to be sure. I couldn’t use test subjects of course, not human ones anyway. That meant testing only on mice, teaching them to run a maze then using the device on them and making them run it again. After a year of work, the device seemed to work, the mice consistently forgot how to run the maze. The second test came in re-teaching them how to run it. I compared the time it took them to learn the first time with the time it took to learn the second time after use of the device. Sure enough it took them longer after use of the device and the increased time to learn went up with length of exposure to the device. It successfully lowered the little intellect they had.

I couldn’t help but explode with glee at this success. Aside from solving my own problem this was potentially a major scientific breakthrough. This was the kind of thing I was likely to get a big research grant or maybe even an award for. With the theory proven I went about creating a human-sized version of my device. It ended up taking the appearance of a type of head-gear. A semi-circular metal piece slipped around the back of a user’s head so that the two electrodes touched each temple. Another metal piece extended up the back of the head with an electrode pressing right on the crown of the skull, the point where older men developed their bald spots.

It was a simple, flimsy looking device, powered by a battery in the handle extending down and back from it. It worked by blasting a certain sequence of energy waves through the brain. Duration and power of the exposure determined how much intelligence was lost. It would of course be very important to determine the original IQ of a user before it was applied to them.

Of course I couldn’t very well ask for volunteers to test it, which meant I had to try it on myself first. Since my IQ was so incredibly high I really was the safest person to try it anyway. Taking away forty IQ points from someone with a normal IQ of 100 would leave them an imbecile, but for me it would just make me slightly less genius. I decided the initial test would be on minimal power and for very short duration. I took an IQ test beforehand and prepared an identical test to be taken immediately afterwards.

As this obviously wasn’t a sanctioned activity, not even a legal activity in fact, I had to wait until it was after hours to proceed. I chose to try it out at ten in the evening on a Friday night. There was no one else even in the lab building that night. The security guards didn’t start their rounds until midnight, so I’d have a couple safe hours at least. I headed up to my lab on the seventh floor, feeling my way down the darkened corridor to my room. Machinery working on other experiments hummed in the background. Other than that the only sound was the whine of the fluorescent lighting. I was completely alone.

I removed the device from its hiding place, locked in a safe under my desk. I carefully left the safe door open, in case I forgot the combination. My hands were actually starting to shake a bit from the anticipation. This was more than a normal experiment. I had used myself as a human guinea pig several times before but never for something of this sort. I was about to use a device on myself that would actually alter my brain structure. I was changing the very fabric of my identity, altering who I was. Naturally this gave me an adrenaline rush, left me shaking, jittery.

Taking a seat in the middle of the lab I prepared to record tonight’s experiment. With a remote I turned on a video camera sitting on a tripod in the middle of floor. I waited till I saw the little red light indicating it was recording then I cleared my throat and began, hoping my voice wouldn’t break or quaver due to my anxiety.

“This is Wednesday night, the thirteenth of May and I am Doctor Sara Sheppard, assistant professor of neurobiology and researcher for Georgetown University. Tonight I am going to conduct an experiment with a newly created device I call the Neural Degeneration Halo. The device is designed to lower intelligence without causing any other associated brain damage. I am about to use it on myself. I am setting it on the lowest power level with the goal of lowering my IQ by 20-30 points.”

With that statement done I flipped the switch in the handle, turning it on. But instantly I saw there was a problem. The battery was drained or dead for some reason. This wasn’t just a couple of AA batteries to be easily replaced either. The only solution was to plug it in to the nearest power socket and run it that way. It wasn’t what I wanted, but this was only the first experiment. There were bound to be some issues.

With the device plugged in the green light on the side lit up, telling me it was ready for use. I twisted a dial to set the power at its lowest and another dial to set the time of exposure to just ten seconds. There was an electrical hum as the device powered up fully. My heart was really starting to pound as I slipped the halo onto my head. It was cool against my skin, the electrodes poking into my temples. I could hear my blood rushing in my ears I was so nervous now. I hoped the camera couldn’t tell I was shaking all over.

“The device is now in place,” I told the camera. “A wire running from the back attaches to this hand-piece,” I explained, holding up the black remote with a red button on the middle. “When I push the button my brain will be bombarded with stimuli for ten seconds,” I finished.

I could barely bring my fingers to close around the object in my hand. I knew all too well how reckless and dangerous this was, but a part of me, a tortured part of my soul, just didn’t care. I needed this to work, I needed to end my depression, my isolation. I pushed the button.

The two metal points touching my temples grew warm. They weren’t painfully hot or anything, but they were no longer cold metal. I could hear an odd hum, like white noise, even though I knew the device made no sound at all. Then the world seemed to go fuzzy. It was like I was being forcefully made to daydream. It was like when I’ve been sitting in a boring lecture and can’t help but let my mind wander to other things. It was the same feeling only there really was no way to keep my mind focussed. I didn’t start to daydream either, just drifted into that glassy-eyed, unfocussed state where normally a daydream takes place. I was still awake, but I could feel that I wasn’t all there.

A few seconds passed and a part of me recalled that this should be over soon. I still had the presence of mind to know that. I could only hold onto that fleeting thought for a second, then I drifted back to a blank-minded state of drifting in the pleasant hum of white noise, seeing the camera before me but not thinking about it at all. Not thinking about anything really.

It was at that moment that I heard a most disconcerting sound. It was a crack, like an electric circuit was overloaded. For the briefest of instants it jolted me out of the forced stupor I was in. Then the opposite happened. The white noise seemed to grow much louder and my head felt funny. I tried to reach up for the halo but found my arms weren’t responding to my brain signals. This really scared me! I could nothing but sit there passively, my body slumping down in the chair, as the device apparently kicked into overdrive.

Now there was this sensation of tingling in my head. It was kind of like getting a headache, but different too. It was similar to the feeling of a foot or hand going to sleep, getting all tingly and numb, except it was inside my head that I had this feeling. My brain was going to sleep. I giggled, that was a silly idea of course. Brains couldn’t go to sleep, ‘cept when you went to sleep of course. But I wasn’t sleepy, just not awake exactly. My vision got blurry and I couldn’t remember what I was thinkin’ ‘bout a second ago. What’s this thing on my head again?

I can feel it, but I can’t touch it or nothin’ cuz my arms are asleep. Oh yeah, that’s right, my brain’s going to sleep too! Now I remember! It’s all tingly and fuzzy and... I wonder where the fuzzy noise is coming from? I don’t know where I am and that makes me nervous. This place is familiar looking and my vision is getting better now. I think I know this place, but I can’t remember where. I can’t focus at all. Not my eyes, not my mind.

The tingles are gettin’ stronger now. Don’t feel like numb tingles no more. Feels like exciting tingles, really nice, really pleasant. I like them. I guess the thing on my head is makin’ them. Maybe not, maybe it’s tryin’ to stop ‘em. I dunno what they are. I wonder where I is. The room is scary lookin’ with lots a big stuff. I try to ‘member where I is and why.

I feel soooo good! And I feelin’ gooder and gooder by the second! The tingles are all over my head. It’s like the total opposite of a headache, it’s a un-headache! That’s so silly of me. I made that word up. I like makin’ words up. I wanna tell mommy ‘bout the word a maked up. I wonder where mommy is. How come I’m all alone and I don’ know dis place? Now I scared.

Tryin’ to ‘member what’s happenin’ to me. Can’t ‘member nothin’ though. When I tries to think it just tingle more an’ I forget. Like the tingles, like the pwetty sound. Me feel all warm and nice. Wonder what that thing with the light is. Try to ‘member what colour the light is... what’s a colour? Me not sure now. Feels so silly, so dumb, so... little. Wasn’t I big? A big girl? Tryin’ to think...

Words are going now, going bye-bye. Dunno where dey goin’ to, but they not here no more. They leavin’ me forever. When Sara think, it in pictures now. Sara feels so nice, so warm and tingly. Sara feel giggly cuz of tingles. Me think ‘bout my favourite stuff, like my bottle. Still know that word, “bottle.” Then it gone. Now the word I ‘member is “ba-ba.” Know there was a big person word for it, but don’t know it no more.

Big crack noise scares me. The tingles an’ fuzzy noise gone. Sara can move ‘gain! Me got arms and legs and me can move them! Stand up and try to walk. It tough, room all wobbly an’ Sara not like. Me get on hands and knees, feels much, much better. Feel warm and wet down below, dunno why. Tummy hurts an’ I push. Feels all squishy in my bum. Sit down. Squish! Smells funny too. Stick hand down pants to feel squishy, like it ‘tween my fingers, smell ‘em. Yucky! Wipe sticky squishy off on shirt. Got icky things on my footsies too, wan’ em off. They pinchy on my piggy-toes. Kick and kick and grab at ‘em till the gone. Throwin’ ‘em is fun though! Crawl after pinchy things and throw ‘em and do it ‘gain and ‘gain. Sara likes this! Wonder what things taste like? Funny taste, don’t like it, but chewin’ ‘em is still fun. Feels nice to chew. Lie down on back and chew and move bum-bum on nice squishy. Sara feels gooder now. Sara feels silly.

Tummy grumble ‘gain and Sara wanna push, make more nice squishies! Push, push, push and hear popping noises and feel more oozy stuff on bum. Me like makin’ squishies! Giggle and make happy noises, not words, they’re for big people. Sara make noises now. Feel warm stuff goin’ down chin, like that. Sara wonder where ma-ma is. Sara want show ma-ma the nice squishies and have a nice ba-ba. Maybe ma-ma got boobie for Sara! Me such a silly girl!