Kit rubbed his eyes against the bright white of the clouds below and turned to the screen in front of him. The laptop had fallen asleep just after he had, no more than fifteen minutes ago. It woke with a brush of his finger, revealing a single white page.
"Switching addictive behavior in mice by genetic manipulation of the Stand Alone Complex."
Kelvin I. Thomson
The Waystead Institute for Synaptic Engineering
Running title: Tweeker squeekers.
It was a review he'd been commissioned to write for Nature Mindfuck. Not a journal he had much time for, but one with sufficiently high visibility to keep his benefactor happy and generous.
- You must be a scientist. The passenger sitting next to him was gesturing sheepishly towards the laptop screen.
- So I've been told, Kit replied.
Indeed it was something his father had told him on many occasions, usually after a lengthy discourse on the grand tradition of scientific endeavor in the family. The tradition stretched back to William Thomson, Baron of Kelvin, who had given to the world an absolute scale of temperature founded on that most unattainable of certainties, Absolute Zero. Successive generations of Thomsons followed his footsteps, some excelling, most faltering, but all with a determination to put everything in its rightful place in the universe. For the Thomsons there was no room for uncertainty in the physical world; Kit's great grandfather's claim to fame was once having landed a right hook on the jaw of Werner Heissenberg, exclaiming "Observe the position and velocity of this, you scoundrel!" Kit's decision to study the ambiguity of the human brain rather than certainties of the atoms and the forces that held them together broke family ranks and his father's heart. Some in the family saw it as a blessing that his father was in the early stages of Alzheimer's (which was in fact one of Kit's motivations for entering neuroscience) and indeed after some time his father became quite oblivious to Kit's heresy, not long before he became oblivious to Kit himself.
Kit turned to the window while he thought of something friendly to say to his neighbor, who he'd noticed had been reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, one of Kit's favorite novels. He'd ask him how he was enjoying it. As Kit looked out the window he saw that they had passed over the mountains and that the shiny white clouds had given way to a carpet of grey. Not the rich slate grey of rain clouds, but a dirty, mottled grey that seemed to be sucking in all the light reaching it. He was getting close to home.
Eighteen thousand feet below Johnny opened his eyes and looked up into a vermillion sky. Another weird dream, must be something to do with being alone in the desert. He was still in the desert when suddenly he got the feeling he was surrounded by horses, horses, horses, horses, coming in from all directions, white shining silver studs with their nose in flames. Pretty scary. No horses here though. Cougars, coyotes and collected critters circled him, but no horses. He was sure of that. Sort of. Actually, he encouraged the desert's creatures, leaving out candy and jerky for them. And there was still plenty of water for them. When the fairways turned to fireways and the rich angelitos fled for their gated havens they left the water - took the booze, but left the water. In plastic bottles. And Johnny. They left Johnny. Things sometimes worked out for the best. That was almost six weeks ago. Forty days in a giant sand trap. If only he could do something about getting some wine from those plastic bottles.
Still, horses. Pretty scary. Not as scary as the fires, but still. Pretty scary. He just couldn't shake the feeling that the horses were a sign. That something bigger was on its way. Something very big.
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