“Mom!”

She blocked out the voice. Concentrating.

Josie traced the air with fingers, connecting threads of 3-axis holograms. She was staring at memories. There was no way to know which memories. They could be anything. A birthday, a first love, a tea party…

She felt like she could solve all the problems in the world if she could just solve this…

“MOOOOOM!”

Josie turned from the screens.  Frowning at the young girl standing in the glow of her laboratory, “What?”

“How much longer?” Megan frowned. “I’m hungry.”

“Soon.”

“Soon?  But you said that, like hours ago.”

In reality it had only been twenty minutes.

“I’m starving.” Megan insisted.

For a human, Josie’s ten year old daughter took more maintenance than all the computers and lab equipment combined.  Or maybe it was Josie felt she had never properly adjusted, the young girl’s puberty added facets to parenting Josie had never even anticipated.  Even for a scientist.

When Josie and Valerie were children the pantry was plentiful with food.  Twins of a single working mother, their nutrition was always cared for.

But now times had changed.  Food was scarce…  Josie was 34 now, it was a strange time to be multitasking between motherhood, running a laboratory and a pregnancy…

Josie’s holo display was interrupted by a message. One of the lab rats had gone into a seizure.

“Mom-”

“I have to deal with this first.” Josie tried to smile at her daughter. “Wait for me in the lobby and we’ll have lunch soon, I promise.”

Megan slumped and turned around, heading back into into the office lobby.

Josie scanned the rat’s data - looking for what had gone wrong.

************************************************************

“It was the lattice.” Hiran said. Josie’s assistant raised the glass housing of the rat’s containment cell. “It grew off into the tissue. Causing seizures and heart failure.”

Josie examined the holo display over the rat’s corpse. She magnified the position where the lattice had grown off course.

The “lattice” was a wire growing inside the rat’s brain, a machine fed materials into the skull, programmed to layer itself harmlessly above the neural tissue. It was an offshoot of 3D printing and fabrication technology, the machine they had built had taken years to develop and a fortune to construct. It was, as far as Josie knew, the only one of its kind.

The lattice had countless points where light could be activated on specific neurons, turning those neurons “on” and “off”, allowing the scientists to essentially interact with the human brain at a pinpoint level. They could use the technology to target specific memories or allow machine-to-brain interfacing. A field Josie had chosen to specialize in ten years ago.

Josie had brought the field of research a long way in ten years. But her progress was far from where she wanted it to be. She wished she were smarter. Faster-

Josie felt a strong kick from inside her womb - 9 months into her pregnancy the baby was nearly ready for the world and already competing for attention.

Josie highlighted a group of node logic on the holo display. “Here, Hiran. RE.MAP couldn’t find a way through the tissue so the lattice just kept growing.”

RE.MAP, one of the pillars of their work was the deepmind A.I. which guided the lattice through a living brain.  The brain was the most complicated organ known to man, so it took an equally complex A.I. to navigate it.  RE.MAP was developed as a narrow A.I. and not multipurpose, but Josie had nearly perfected RE.MAP to do it’s single job especially well.

“Huh...” Hiran said, crossing his arms. “Want me to fix the pathfinding nodes?”

“No. I’ll do it.”

“I know what the problem is. Honestly Josie, I can take care of this-” Hiran started.

Josie brought up the lines of faulty program code on the display - yellow and red lines crisscrossed around the conflicting node logic.  The annotation revealed Hiran had written the faulty code in the first place. His brow furrowed at the evidence.

“You modified these lines without telling me.” Josie realized. “Why would you do that?”

“The nodes were stuck in a loop so I fixed it.  I sent you a notice a few days ago.  But you were in the hospital during a checkup-” Hiran brought up the notice he had sent, her dated three days ago.

Somehow she’d missed his notification. Non-pregnant Josie never missed a thing. Apparently pregnant Josie was another matter.

“I see.” Josie nodded. Not explaining her lapse, she continued “I still prefer to do it on my own. I’ll rewrite the segment after lunch. In the meantime halt lattice growth on all other subjects.”

“Yes ma’am.” Hiran nodded and began to shutdown the processes.

Hiran seemed intelligent enough - he’d passed all the necessary tests Josie put forth for all of her assistants. She designed those mental tests to be difficult, so that only the most detail-oriented and studied scientists could pass. He was smart, but like any human, not completely infallible.

Josie’s childhood with her paternal twin, Valerie had taught her this lesson early, if she truly wanted a job done right, she could only count on a single person.

Herself.

Josie looked at the rat’s body for a brief moment.

A rat’s death never gave her pause - they were innocent creatures, what scientist hadn’t become numb to this necessity? They were born in litters of nearly a dozen and their lives were reproduced cheaply and quickly. A rat seemed such a small exchange in relation to the alternative - a human life.

“You wanted me to notify you once the latest re-scan of her brain was complete.” Hiran nodded towards the other lab. “Want me to send you the latest?”

Josie stopped.  A tiny anxiety crept up from deep inside. The fear of an intellect’s guess. The fear of seeing that problem from the corner of your eye - afraid of what might be standing in the corner if you looked too close.

Josie absently swallowed. “Run an analysis on her previous scans. In particular see if there’s any degradation in quadrants CCCCC240 through CCBCB980.”

She wouldn’t have to repeat herself. Hiran might lapse in his programming skills, but the man had a perfect memory.

“Sure thing, after I have lunch is that ok?” Hiran asked.

“I need it done before. But I’ll bring you back something, if you like?”

Hiran shifted, annoyance quickly masked followed by a slight nod. “I’ll have the results for you soon ma’am, I’ll just eat after.”

“Thank you.”

Josie stopped by the scanning room, where another assistant was unhooking a nest of metal contacts from the subject’s body. The same woman whom Hiran would be comparing scans of.

The complex nest of of wires looped from the subject, along the floor, and back up into some of the most expensive equipment Josie had ever purchased on the company dollar.

The subject was completely unconscious, so the metal contacts were used to induce minimal shocks to receive meaningful neural activity. They had adapted technology similar to the lattice, without the need for cranial intrusion, which allowed them to map specific parts of her neurology. To the uninitiated the whole sight might seem like torture.

But the subject was completely unaware to all of this.

Josie could remember when the woman was young, vibrant and full of life. Now her body was pale, thin, and frighteningly fragile. A heartbreaking shadow of who she used to be.

After 10 years in a coma, this was how Josie had become used to seeing Valerie.