History of ersaTzLabs Pt2.

Cold rain fascinates against the glass. The sky apparently has forgotten how to rain properly and so the sheets of precipitation that hit the glass as she stares both at and through it, conjure in Mary’s mind the notion that the clouds have sort of given up and are just disinterestedly throwing buckets of water in the general direction of mankind.

There is a satisfaction that comes from watching inclement weather from somewhere you are protected from its effects. The safety of home as both a contrast and reassurance makes you almost grateful for the storm. Witnessing nature’s indifferent power displayed in all its terrifying splendour, but knowing you’re safe. There but for the grace of Dave go I.

It is a similar satisfaction which Mary feels, as she drinks what she thinks might be the finest hot beverage she’s yet had the pleasure of acquainting herself with. She’s vetted each ingredient and means of preparation that has been suggested by her team of researchers and so knows that everything is in there that absolutely needs to be in order that it deliver, chemically, the effects she has become accustomed to relying on, while also meeting her own personal expectations.

“I think this is it”

“How sure are you?”

“Eighty-five percent. Further testing required”

“And the fifteen percent?”

“probability of recreating it consistently, factoring in cognitive biases - had a generally good day, reasonable state of mind”

“Did you factor in the rain?”

“That’s why it’s only eighty-five. Look at that sky”

“Ok, and positives?”

“It tastes nothing at all like coffee”

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People have often remarked on how Organised Mary is. Wherever she finds herself, order is seldom far behind. She is praised for her diligence, and envied for her stamina and determination. Her greatest skill though, is neither of those. It is her ability to conceal from all the world, the amount of her energy which is leeched by the effort of maintaining this façade.

Order is all fine and well, and certainly something to be enjoyed, or at least used to one’s advantage. De-cluttering an environment goes a long way to removing some of the detritus of a brain which is thinking a little too fast for its owner to process. In this new environment, the mind is freer of physical and tangible distraction, and can focus more. There is no doubt in Mary’s mind that order is good, but it is not that which is her driver.

She does not fetishise, nor worship order. Quite the reverse, she sees it as a tool. An ingredient for a creation, no more or less vital than the others - good self-care, comfort, time to spare. Her motivation is to achieve balance in the unrelenting entropy of human existence. She does not love order, but abhors its absence. We do not love our kidneys, yet the absence of one would be uncomfortable and disquieting.

Until very recently, Mary had wondered if Professor Henry Wells were a fiction. The maniac with whom she had shared a lab these fifteen years, had spoken of him often, both good and ill. Richard would talk about him usually when he was trying to solve a problem. It might be that he’d make an assumption of what Henry would do, and then follow the polar opposite route, out of spite. Or he may recall a time he himself had overruled the professor, only to learn humility in the explosive results of his error. He invoked the man so often, without Mary ever seeing any empirical record of him, that she had as good as concluded that Professor Wells was a delusion, and was on to speculating the cause. Her most recent hypothesis had been that it was an imaginary friend from childhood who had simply never left, and had progressed through life alongside Dr Hume as a sort of separate conscience.

She had been surprised to find contact details for the man, and more surprised still when she found that they were real and correct, and not simply fabricated by her colleague to lend credence to his delusion. Professor Henry Wells did exist. Does exist. And he’s on his way here, now.

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It has been just shy of three months, during which none of us has had more than about four hours’ sleep at a time, and the tension in the little laboratory has led to no small amount of bickering, name-calling, and digging up of old feuds, but finally it is done. I have done my best to keep the two great minds focused on the task at hand, and to collate the progress they have made, into something resembling order. Or as close to order as one can, in a closed space, in which all things tend towards entropy.

There has been some interest in the breakthroughs we have made, both in the scientific and medical communities, but more importantly to us, we now have a client. Isaac Adams, thirty-five years old, cancer patient. He requested a brochure, which Richard naturally said would not be a problem. His reasoning was that to not be able to send one would make us look unprofessional. Looking at the hastily assembled document before me, I can't help but wonder if sending this will serve in any way to prevent that.

Nonetheless, it is done. The procedure works, or at least Richard and Professor Wells have lab results that appear to confirm it does. They were very cagey about the specifics - all they'd say was that they'd bypassed animal testing, and gone straight to proving that it will work in humans. The Animal Sentience Act prevents all animal testing, which has had a massive impact on the scientific and pharmaceutical communities, since there is no workable alternative as yet, so there is a collective scrabble to find a way to test substances without using animals, most of it clandestine, and operating by cleverly weaving around existing laws, or rather their absence.

All the lab results bear a logo proclaiming them to be from Protopolis Labs, though an exhaustive search on the infoweb has given me no further information on who or what they are. I trust Richard, but am rather unsure about Professor Wells, so I make it my personal mission to dig further - discreetly - to see what Richard has got himself involved in.