Incident in Laboratory 612-B
Michael Yaworsky

Samantha Daniels and Eric Rodemeier sat facing each other thirty inches apart on opposite sides of Samantha's desk. Before we go further, let's explain that they're Doctor Samantha Daniels and Doctor Eric Rodemeier. At least to everyone outside the labs. After all, one has to defend one's hard-earned status; if science isn't about keeping things in their proper sphere, what is it for? But for all that, to each other and to everyone inside the labs, they were just Sam and Eric.
They sat now across from each other, alternately staring at the paper that lay between them, scrutinizing each other's faces, and casting glances around the room to no apparent purpose. As they'd been doing almost continually for an hour and a quarter. But now time, and the burden of their task, were beginning to take a toll. Sam's stomach was rumbling audibly, but she didn't notice. Eric couldn't remember how long since he'd eaten. Sam had tried music, caffeine, and fast-walking in the corridors to drive the obsession from her mind, but none of it had helped. Eric was similarly stuck. In the background We've Got a Groovy Kind of Love played through Eric's speakers:
...any time you want to, you can turn me onto
anything you want to, anytime at all...
The door to 612-B opened and Dr. Paul Szilagyi entered. He was younger than Sam and Eric, and their buddy and drinking companion after hours, at which times he consented to be called Paul. But during work time and on premises he insisted on being addressed as Dr. Szilagyi, even by his closest friends.
“Dr. Daniels; Dr. Rodemeier.”
“Dr. Szilagyi.”
“You're not... tell me you're not... oh god, are you guys still agonizing over that stupid nothingness stupid stupidity? Get serious, you two, there's work to be done around here. And the music? Still? Arrgghh!”
Don't get hung up on the music, that's just a background detail. Eric and Sam were not romantically involved, never had been, they were just good friends and companionable colleagues who had discovered a shared taste for dangerously saccharine guilty pleasure pop songs. Groovy Kind of Love. Surfer Girl. Dancing Queen. Sugar Sugar. Sk8ter Boi. Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. Anything Abba. Dr. Szilagyi assailed them daily and mercilessly for it, but did not succeed in curtailing it. They simply didn't care.
“Okay,” Dr. Szilagyi continued. “First you became obsessed with that line. Then you backed off, but only for a couple of days. And now you're back at it, worse than ever. First it was a math thing. Then some kind of cosmic, new age, mystic paranormal thing. Then some kind of artist savant thing. Who knows what cockamamie theory you'll have tomorrow? You have to freaking knock it off!”
Here's what had happened: Samantha had been keeping track of a repetitive operation with ticks on a sheet of paper – one vertical mark for each item, after the fourth you draw a horizontal line through them to indicate five. Like a prisoner keeping track of his time on his cell wall, a quick glance tells you how many days you've been inside. Well, about half-way down the page, at number 214 as it happened, Samantha had made a short, vertical stroke with her pencil, just as she'd done 213 times already – and immediately stopped short. With a sharp intake of breath she had stared intently at the stroke. She had then looked away, then back at it. She'd held the paper up to her nose, taken off her glasses, and examined it from different angles. She'd placed a straight-edge alongside it and examined it, aligning the paper sideways and then up-and-down, then sideways again. She'd held it up to a strong light and examined it through the back of the paper. She'd performed several iterations of these and similar examinations over a prolonged period of time. Then she'd called Eric over. This had all been four days ago.
...ooh, I start to shiver
can't control the quivering inside...
“Eric,” she'd said, “look at that line, would you?” He did. After the first few seconds of looking at it the way a normal person would, his face had undergone a dramatic transformation, following which he proceeded to put himself through all the same steps Samantha had just completed. Normally she would have lost patience at his repetition of her steps but she knew he had to go through the process himself. Then they'd looked at each other, eyes wide. Each had blown out a vigorous breath, then sat down. Samantha had thought, he gets it!, which had brought her enormous relief. For his part Eric had just thought, wow.
What had she done? What had caused all this hubbub and to-do? Nothing more, nor less, than that she had drawn a perfectly straight line. Now I know what you're thinking: what's the big deal? To which I respond: I challenge you to draw a perfectly straight line. With a pen, pencil, felt marker, paint brush, pointed stick, or what have you: draw a thousand lines, draw ten thousand lines, long, short, vertical, horizontal, diagonal, right to left, left to right, whatever— what you will get, at best, is a nearly straight line. You might even get a mostly straight line. But you won't get a perfectly straight line. This was a perfectly straight line. Perfectly straight, perfectly uniform in width (yes, a pencil mark on paper has width), perfect at both ends. Absolutely perfect.
Each of them had gone back and examined it again, and again and again and again. They'd used powerful magnifying lenses. They'd used intensely bright light. In the lab they had access to these kinds of things. And at the end of it they had both experienced the same kind of emotional agitation. Because they couldn't imagine this could have happened randomly.
Dr. Szilagyi had happened upon them a few hours later when he popped in to suggest a coffee break. He'd tried to reason with them, but it was like talking to concrete slabs. Uncommonly stubborn ones. He couldn't understand them. He couldn't seem to make them understand how a scientist must take care to separate science from sentimentality, superstition, and pop slop psychology, to preclude the tendency to force outcomes where outcomes do not exist.
Dr. Szilagyi decided he would just have to proceed with his work without their assistance until they came to their senses. At the time he hadn't thought it would be more than a couple of hours. Then, as the magnitude of their recalcitrance became clear, he'd had to resort to some rather inventive contingencies in dealing with his workload, especially when justifying it to others in the lab. He'd had to pretend to others, and sometimes to himself, that Eric and Samantha were both under the weather and no substitutes could be found to fulfill their duties. This is all I need, he'd thought ruefully, it's not like there isn't enough to do around here without me having to go it alone for the next, what, day or two? Or longer even? However long it takes these two idiots to get their act together. But eventually he'd seen that there was nothing for it: the two were nut cases, a lost cause, so what options did he have?
“At least turn that music off,” he now urged irritably. “It's driving me nuts. I can't believe you guys can work with that dreck. I can't believe you could even stand to listen to it when you're not working. What the hell are you two made of?” But Drs. Rodemeier and Daniels ignored him.
Through the open lab door now entered another colleague, Dr. Rachel Brock. Her name was easy: they could call her Rachel, Rae, Dr. Brock, Brocksie, whatever they felt like, on the clock or off. No one was more easygoing than Rachel.
...when the working day is done
girls, they want to have fun...
The three others, however, now wondered if that trait would continue to be exhibited after she learned of Eric and Sam's preoccupation.
“What's going on?” Rachel asked amiably, as it was obvious that something was. Had someone made a breakthrough in their research? Zinged one of the others with a great practical joke? Spilled acid on his or her shoes, dislodged a diamond from its setting, mistakenly ingested benzoylmethylecgonine? Had one of them just blurted out a piece of gossip that knocked the wind out of the others? Or had they just received bad news? Was one of them pregnant? Was one of them being let go? Was she being let go? The longer they delayed responding, the further her thoughts ventured down the path that led from mild curiosity past gnawing suspicion to full-blown dread.
Then the three others spoke all at once.
“Something interesting has happened,” said the always objective Samantha Daniels.
“How comfortable are you with occurrences that transcend the laws of probability and trespass on the realm of paraphysics?” asked the more imaginative and excitable Eric Rodemeier.
“These two have gone off their rockers,” declared the ever skeptical Dr. Paul Szilagyi.
“Wait—what?” begged the now flummoxed Rachel Brock.
They took turns filling her in on the story. It took all three narratives, each with its own unique perspective, to give her a good grounding in it.
“You drew a perfectly straight line,” Rachel clarified at the conclusion of it.
“Exactly.”
“You are obsessing over the possibility that you drew a perfectly straight line.”
“Not possibility, certainty.”
For the next ten minutes questions were asked, answers proffered, and theories propounded. The succeeding minute found the four sitting in silence, lips pursed, pondering the matter. Rachel said, “I need a drink.” The sentiment was unanimous. A minute later they were downing, respectively, a high potency energy drink, a bottled water, a cold Diet Coke, and two fingers of Jack Daniel's from a cabinet under the supplies table. I'll leave you to speculate who had what. (Hint: it doesn't matter.)
...and when you get the chance
you are the dancing queen, young and sweet, only seventeen
oh yeah...
“Tell me again,” Rachel probed, somewhat against her better judgment, “why do you think this is not normal?”
“Think about it,” Samantha urged. “The human body is not a perfectly automated machine. To draw a line free-hand you need precise coordination of your finger tips, knuckle joints, palm, thumb, wrist, arm, shoulder, eyes, and brain. You've got to have a sturdy and level surface, and the paper can't move or slip. You've got the pressure of your fingers against the pen and the reciprocating pressure of the pen against your fingers. Also the pressure of the chair seat against your butt; it's infinitesimal, but it's there, and it's acting on you just like everything else. Then there's extraneous noise, and people moving in your periphery, and fatigue, and... of all the possible directions in the universe when you set out to move an object – in this case a pencil tip – from point A to point B, of all the possible vectors, at every micro-moment there are forces acting to push you off course, to make you veer that pencil from left to right or right to left, or lift it up, even infinitesimally, or press harder, or angle it one way or the other. There's no way, no insufferable way, you can draw a perfectly straight line. No way. Just look at the evidence of the other millions of line strokes you've drawn in your life. There's never been one that was perfectly straight. Which shows you how the body works. It gets it nearly straight, but never perfectly straight. Never. No way.”
“But you've just proved the opposite,” argued Dr. Szilagyi. “Within the parameters of your act, moving the pencil from point A to point B, there are tens of millions of permutations of the direction and force you'll be exerting,” he said. “If you draw ten million lines, or a hundred million—”
“Try billions,” put in Rachel.
“Okay, billions. Or maybe tens of billions, or more, who cares,” conceded Dr. Szilagyi, “you'd have to cover all those permutations many times over. So, mathematically speaking, if you perform the operation often enough, there's no way you won't eventually hit those parameters. Heck, it could happen in the first hundred tries, or even the very first one. Certainly it could happen in the first two hundred and fourteen.” They all fell silent again. The music in the background refused to go away.
...my whole world could shatter, I don't care;
wouldn't you agree, baby you and me...
Rachel and Dr. Szilagyi, who were still skeptical, resolved to remain silent for the moment. They were savvy enough to know how not to screw up an argument they figured they'd won by throwing more words at it. But Eric and Samantha were adamant, and wouldn't give in. They pursed their lips and looked at each other, as if with enough concentration and by sheer will they could send thought-pulses to each other's brains to bring into being some logically infallible conclusion resting just below the surface only waiting to be coaxed into verbal expression, which they would then use to crush the pathetically faulty logic of their adversaries.
But none came.
“All I'm saying,” Eric said, “is that it's a remarkable thing, a truly remarkable thing, for a human to draw an absolutely perfect straight line, of any length, in any setting. Anyplace. Ever.”
“Granted,” “Maybe so,” “I'll give you that,” came the responses.
“But it isn't transcendent,” Rachel said.
“Or cosmic,” added Dr. Szilagyi.
“We're not saying it's magic,” Samantha countered.
“Well, you sound like you kinda are,” Rachel responded.
“Think about it. Just think about it! And look at it,” insisted Eric. “It's a thing of beauty, is it not?” He lifted the paper off the desk again and set it before Rachel. He was about to point out stroke # 214 when Rachel slowly waved him off. She was staring at it, right at it, as he backed away and resumed his seat.
...so I say from me to you
I will make your dreams come true...
She was still staring intently at the line a full five minutes later when another colleague, Dr. Ewan Trabold, poked his head through the doorway and inquired brightly, “Hey, guys; what's going on?”
The others looked at each other stupidly, their mental faculties undecided whether to answer him, ignore him, burst out laughing, or make a run for the exits.
...there's a fever, oh
that you'll never find nowhere else...
“What?” asked Trabold. He looked at the four and asked again, “What? What is it?” When they still didn't answer he said, “I'm not going anywhere 'til I find out what you guys are up to.” Still no one budged, or said anything.
Over Dr. Trabold's right shoulder appeared another face, that of Dr. Jane Chen. “What's going on?” she asked innocently.
The question was barely out of her mouth when she heard footsteps behind her, another co-worker, Jason something-or-other from the fabrication shop, approach and ask, “Hey guys, what's going on?”
Peering over Dr. Brock's head, Dr. Szilagyi could see Dr. Trabold's, Dr. Chen's, and Jason's heads lined up behind Rachel's, in a perfectly straight line.
...there was something in the air that night
the stars were bright, Fernando...
They sat now across from each other, alternately staring at the paper that lay between them, scrutinizing each other's faces, and casting glances around the room to no apparent purpose. As they'd been doing almost continually for an hour and a quarter. But now time, and the burden of their task, were beginning to take a toll. Sam's stomach was rumbling audibly, but she didn't notice. Eric couldn't remember how long since he'd eaten. Sam had tried music, caffeine, and fast-walking in the corridors to drive the obsession from her mind, but none of it had helped. Eric was similarly stuck. In the background We've Got a Groovy Kind of Love played through Eric's speakers:
...any time you want to, you can turn me onto
anything you want to, anytime at all...
The door to 612-B opened and Dr. Paul Szilagyi entered. He was younger than Sam and Eric, and their buddy and drinking companion after hours, at which times he consented to be called Paul. But during work time and on premises he insisted on being addressed as Dr. Szilagyi, even by his closest friends.
“Dr. Daniels; Dr. Rodemeier.”
“Dr. Szilagyi.”
“You're not... tell me you're not... oh god, are you guys still agonizing over that stupid nothingness stupid stupidity? Get serious, you two, there's work to be done around here. And the music? Still? Arrgghh!”
Don't get hung up on the music, that's just a background detail. Eric and Sam were not romantically involved, never had been, they were just good friends and companionable colleagues who had discovered a shared taste for dangerously saccharine guilty pleasure pop songs. Groovy Kind of Love. Surfer Girl. Dancing Queen. Sugar Sugar. Sk8ter Boi. Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. Anything Abba. Dr. Szilagyi assailed them daily and mercilessly for it, but did not succeed in curtailing it. They simply didn't care.
“Okay,” Dr. Szilagyi continued. “First you became obsessed with that line. Then you backed off, but only for a couple of days. And now you're back at it, worse than ever. First it was a math thing. Then some kind of cosmic, new age, mystic paranormal thing. Then some kind of artist savant thing. Who knows what cockamamie theory you'll have tomorrow? You have to freaking knock it off!”
Here's what had happened: Samantha had been keeping track of a repetitive operation with ticks on a sheet of paper – one vertical mark for each item, after the fourth you draw a horizontal line through them to indicate five. Like a prisoner keeping track of his time on his cell wall, a quick glance tells you how many days you've been inside. Well, about half-way down the page, at number 214 as it happened, Samantha had made a short, vertical stroke with her pencil, just as she'd done 213 times already – and immediately stopped short. With a sharp intake of breath she had stared intently at the stroke. She had then looked away, then back at it. She'd held the paper up to her nose, taken off her glasses, and examined it from different angles. She'd placed a straight-edge alongside it and examined it, aligning the paper sideways and then up-and-down, then sideways again. She'd held it up to a strong light and examined it through the back of the paper. She'd performed several iterations of these and similar examinations over a prolonged period of time. Then she'd called Eric over. This had all been four days ago.
...ooh, I start to shiver
can't control the quivering inside...
“Eric,” she'd said, “look at that line, would you?” He did. After the first few seconds of looking at it the way a normal person would, his face had undergone a dramatic transformation, following which he proceeded to put himself through all the same steps Samantha had just completed. Normally she would have lost patience at his repetition of her steps but she knew he had to go through the process himself. Then they'd looked at each other, eyes wide. Each had blown out a vigorous breath, then sat down. Samantha had thought, he gets it!, which had brought her enormous relief. For his part Eric had just thought, wow.
What had she done? What had caused all this hubbub and to-do? Nothing more, nor less, than that she had drawn a perfectly straight line. Now I know what you're thinking: what's the big deal? To which I respond: I challenge you to draw a perfectly straight line. With a pen, pencil, felt marker, paint brush, pointed stick, or what have you: draw a thousand lines, draw ten thousand lines, long, short, vertical, horizontal, diagonal, right to left, left to right, whatever— what you will get, at best, is a nearly straight line. You might even get a mostly straight line. But you won't get a perfectly straight line. This was a perfectly straight line. Perfectly straight, perfectly uniform in width (yes, a pencil mark on paper has width), perfect at both ends. Absolutely perfect.
Each of them had gone back and examined it again, and again and again and again. They'd used powerful magnifying lenses. They'd used intensely bright light. In the lab they had access to these kinds of things. And at the end of it they had both experienced the same kind of emotional agitation. Because they couldn't imagine this could have happened randomly.
Dr. Szilagyi had happened upon them a few hours later when he popped in to suggest a coffee break. He'd tried to reason with them, but it was like talking to concrete slabs. Uncommonly stubborn ones. He couldn't understand them. He couldn't seem to make them understand how a scientist must take care to separate science from sentimentality, superstition, and pop slop psychology, to preclude the tendency to force outcomes where outcomes do not exist.
Dr. Szilagyi decided he would just have to proceed with his work without their assistance until they came to their senses. At the time he hadn't thought it would be more than a couple of hours. Then, as the magnitude of their recalcitrance became clear, he'd had to resort to some rather inventive contingencies in dealing with his workload, especially when justifying it to others in the lab. He'd had to pretend to others, and sometimes to himself, that Eric and Samantha were both under the weather and no substitutes could be found to fulfill their duties. This is all I need, he'd thought ruefully, it's not like there isn't enough to do around here without me having to go it alone for the next, what, day or two? Or longer even? However long it takes these two idiots to get their act together. But eventually he'd seen that there was nothing for it: the two were nut cases, a lost cause, so what options did he have?
“At least turn that music off,” he now urged irritably. “It's driving me nuts. I can't believe you guys can work with that dreck. I can't believe you could even stand to listen to it when you're not working. What the hell are you two made of?” But Drs. Rodemeier and Daniels ignored him.
Through the open lab door now entered another colleague, Dr. Rachel Brock. Her name was easy: they could call her Rachel, Rae, Dr. Brock, Brocksie, whatever they felt like, on the clock or off. No one was more easygoing than Rachel.
...when the working day is done
girls, they want to have fun...
The three others, however, now wondered if that trait would continue to be exhibited after she learned of Eric and Sam's preoccupation.
“What's going on?” Rachel asked amiably, as it was obvious that something was. Had someone made a breakthrough in their research? Zinged one of the others with a great practical joke? Spilled acid on his or her shoes, dislodged a diamond from its setting, mistakenly ingested benzoylmethylecgonine? Had one of them just blurted out a piece of gossip that knocked the wind out of the others? Or had they just received bad news? Was one of them pregnant? Was one of them being let go? Was she being let go? The longer they delayed responding, the further her thoughts ventured down the path that led from mild curiosity past gnawing suspicion to full-blown dread.
Then the three others spoke all at once.
“Something interesting has happened,” said the always objective Samantha Daniels.
“How comfortable are you with occurrences that transcend the laws of probability and trespass on the realm of paraphysics?” asked the more imaginative and excitable Eric Rodemeier.
“These two have gone off their rockers,” declared the ever skeptical Dr. Paul Szilagyi.
“Wait—what?” begged the now flummoxed Rachel Brock.
They took turns filling her in on the story. It took all three narratives, each with its own unique perspective, to give her a good grounding in it.
“You drew a perfectly straight line,” Rachel clarified at the conclusion of it.
“Exactly.”
“You are obsessing over the possibility that you drew a perfectly straight line.”
“Not possibility, certainty.”
For the next ten minutes questions were asked, answers proffered, and theories propounded. The succeeding minute found the four sitting in silence, lips pursed, pondering the matter. Rachel said, “I need a drink.” The sentiment was unanimous. A minute later they were downing, respectively, a high potency energy drink, a bottled water, a cold Diet Coke, and two fingers of Jack Daniel's from a cabinet under the supplies table. I'll leave you to speculate who had what. (Hint: it doesn't matter.)
...and when you get the chance
you are the dancing queen, young and sweet, only seventeen
oh yeah...
“Tell me again,” Rachel probed, somewhat against her better judgment, “why do you think this is not normal?”
“Think about it,” Samantha urged. “The human body is not a perfectly automated machine. To draw a line free-hand you need precise coordination of your finger tips, knuckle joints, palm, thumb, wrist, arm, shoulder, eyes, and brain. You've got to have a sturdy and level surface, and the paper can't move or slip. You've got the pressure of your fingers against the pen and the reciprocating pressure of the pen against your fingers. Also the pressure of the chair seat against your butt; it's infinitesimal, but it's there, and it's acting on you just like everything else. Then there's extraneous noise, and people moving in your periphery, and fatigue, and... of all the possible directions in the universe when you set out to move an object – in this case a pencil tip – from point A to point B, of all the possible vectors, at every micro-moment there are forces acting to push you off course, to make you veer that pencil from left to right or right to left, or lift it up, even infinitesimally, or press harder, or angle it one way or the other. There's no way, no insufferable way, you can draw a perfectly straight line. No way. Just look at the evidence of the other millions of line strokes you've drawn in your life. There's never been one that was perfectly straight. Which shows you how the body works. It gets it nearly straight, but never perfectly straight. Never. No way.”
“But you've just proved the opposite,” argued Dr. Szilagyi. “Within the parameters of your act, moving the pencil from point A to point B, there are tens of millions of permutations of the direction and force you'll be exerting,” he said. “If you draw ten million lines, or a hundred million—”
“Try billions,” put in Rachel.
“Okay, billions. Or maybe tens of billions, or more, who cares,” conceded Dr. Szilagyi, “you'd have to cover all those permutations many times over. So, mathematically speaking, if you perform the operation often enough, there's no way you won't eventually hit those parameters. Heck, it could happen in the first hundred tries, or even the very first one. Certainly it could happen in the first two hundred and fourteen.” They all fell silent again. The music in the background refused to go away.
...my whole world could shatter, I don't care;
wouldn't you agree, baby you and me...
Rachel and Dr. Szilagyi, who were still skeptical, resolved to remain silent for the moment. They were savvy enough to know how not to screw up an argument they figured they'd won by throwing more words at it. But Eric and Samantha were adamant, and wouldn't give in. They pursed their lips and looked at each other, as if with enough concentration and by sheer will they could send thought-pulses to each other's brains to bring into being some logically infallible conclusion resting just below the surface only waiting to be coaxed into verbal expression, which they would then use to crush the pathetically faulty logic of their adversaries.
But none came.
“All I'm saying,” Eric said, “is that it's a remarkable thing, a truly remarkable thing, for a human to draw an absolutely perfect straight line, of any length, in any setting. Anyplace. Ever.”
“Granted,” “Maybe so,” “I'll give you that,” came the responses.
“But it isn't transcendent,” Rachel said.
“Or cosmic,” added Dr. Szilagyi.
“We're not saying it's magic,” Samantha countered.
“Well, you sound like you kinda are,” Rachel responded.
“Think about it. Just think about it! And look at it,” insisted Eric. “It's a thing of beauty, is it not?” He lifted the paper off the desk again and set it before Rachel. He was about to point out stroke # 214 when Rachel slowly waved him off. She was staring at it, right at it, as he backed away and resumed his seat.
...so I say from me to you
I will make your dreams come true...
She was still staring intently at the line a full five minutes later when another colleague, Dr. Ewan Trabold, poked his head through the doorway and inquired brightly, “Hey, guys; what's going on?”
The others looked at each other stupidly, their mental faculties undecided whether to answer him, ignore him, burst out laughing, or make a run for the exits.
...there's a fever, oh
that you'll never find nowhere else...
“What?” asked Trabold. He looked at the four and asked again, “What? What is it?” When they still didn't answer he said, “I'm not going anywhere 'til I find out what you guys are up to.” Still no one budged, or said anything.
Over Dr. Trabold's right shoulder appeared another face, that of Dr. Jane Chen. “What's going on?” she asked innocently.
The question was barely out of her mouth when she heard footsteps behind her, another co-worker, Jason something-or-other from the fabrication shop, approach and ask, “Hey guys, what's going on?”
Peering over Dr. Brock's head, Dr. Szilagyi could see Dr. Trabold's, Dr. Chen's, and Jason's heads lined up behind Rachel's, in a perfectly straight line.
...there was something in the air that night
the stars were bright, Fernando...