“Okay. So we have a baseline. Excellent.” Katherine looked at the charts, but instead of rows and columns of numbers, she saw an intricate network of millions of neurons connecting nine brains, each arm of the octopus an entity unto itself connected to a greater whole. The neural network was unlike any other on earth and stretched the limits of Katherine’s imagination.
“They are so marvelous.” She scrolled through the numbers.
“What are?”
“The subjects.” She looked up. “Don’t you think they’re remarkable?”
“From a purely scientific standpoint, they’re an oddity. I don’t know that I’d call them remarkable.”
And that is why Segundo squirts you every time you walk into the tank room.
“Hmm.” Katherine wouldn’t let his demeanor dampen her admiration of the unusual and clever creatures. “From a systems standpoint, cephalopods are remarkable. We have a lot to learn from them.”
“I can concur with that.”
Her mind wandered from cephalopod research to the study again. Had Ansel been as callous with his students as he was with the four octopi he measured regularly?
Had he been callous with them at all? Or where they—like the spreadsheets Katherine was looking at—merely numbers on a page?
“Ansel?”
“Hmm?”
How to ask…?
In the space of a breath, the grey descended around her. She was in Ansel Shaver’s office and he was speaking.
“…you need human subjects for that?”
Oh yes.
What were they talking about? She was in the middle of a vision and there was something she was supposed to do. What had Monica advised her?
Pull back. Be an observer, not a participant. Try to draw the experience out. Notice everything. Use all your senses even if they’re muffled. Stretch.
Katherine felt like she was moving with a weighted blanket draped on her body, but she moved back, pulled away, and felt herself stretch as if her body was elastic that could snap back anytime. Her senses were still muddy, but the vision moved even more slowly than she did.
“Oh no. God no. You don’t have to actually interact … what grad students are for…”
“How many graduate students would I need…”
“Katherine?”
She blinked and her ears popped. “Pardon me?”
Ansel Shaver frowned, and Katherine couldn’t help but notice that while the vision had stretched, the time had too. Events hadn’t happened yet. She’d given herself time.
If she stretched the vision, perhaps she had a greater amount of time before it came to fruition.
“I think you were going to ask me something.”
“I was going to ask you…” She racked her brain. How to ask…? Of course! If she wanted to ask him about the study, she could ask for advice. If there was anything men in academia enjoyed, it was giving advice—solicited or unsolicited. Especially to female colleagues.
“I’m thinking about structuring a study, and since you’ve done far more human subject research, I had a couple of questions I was wondering if you’d be able to answer.”
Ansel looked up. “Human subject research in physics?”
“In biophysics.”
“On what?”
It was a fair question. Most of the research Katherine participated in was similar to what they were doing in the Fred lab and involved biosystems analysis and far more numbers than people.
How to completely confuse a psychologist?
Incomprehensible physics talk.
“I’ve been thinking about reexamining the thermodynamic negentropy, or rather the specific entropy deficits of dynamically ordered subsystems in relation to physical surroundings.” Any of her actual colleagues would be laughing at her.
Ansel frowned. “And you need human subjects for that?”
There it was; they were in the timeline of the vision.
“Do I need human subjects?” Not even a little bit. “Oh yes.”
He opened his mouth, closed it, then shrugged. “What do you want to know?”
Yep, he fell for it.
Katherine pursed her lips and put on her best “indifferent academic” voice. “I suppose I wondered how much interaction I’d be expected to have with the test subjects. If I’m writing the protocols, do I have to actually oversee each step of the research?”
How much did you know these students? How close were you? Did you know you were somehow screwing up their brains?
Ansel shook his head. “Very little. With my most recent study, after initial enrollment I never saw them. Not once.” He waved at the tablet. “They’re numbers on a screen to me.”
All study subjects would be given a number when they joined the study to protect their privacy. That way, anyone looking through the information would have no idea which student was which.
“Good to know,” Katherine said. “I’m still teaching general-ed classes, so I want to be careful to limit my interaction with students.” They were skipping around in the future. She’d changed something along the way, though she couldn’t figure out what it was, but their dialogue wasn’t tracking what the vision had been.
“Oh no. God no,” Ansel added. “You don’t have to actually interact with them. That’s what grad students are for.”
“How many graduate students would I need to dedicate to a project like that?”
“Depends on how it’s structured, but with my last one, we had roughly seventy subjects and ten grad students running the actual interviews and methodologies we were testing. Who will you be working with?”
On a completely fictional study that doesn’t need to be run and doesn’t need people to do it? “I’m still debating. I’d be lead of course, but anywhere from five to six. Was your study survey based? How many partners?”
“Five total. And we were testing…” He seemed to consider for a moment before pushing on. “We were testing what some would call an alternative anxiety treatment in conjunction with more standard medical treatments.”
“Not as a replacement for medicine but a complement?”
“Exactly.”
“Interesting.” She looked back at her tablet so as not to seem too interested. “I’d think there would be a lot of journal interest in that.”
The corner of his mouth turned up. “I don’t think it’ll sit on a shelf.”
She kept her eyes down on her tablet, making her words sound like an afterthought. “So you had two of your own students running things? And then everyone else contributed two
