NIH: Brain Organoid Maturation Is Driven by a Lifelike Development Clock. Lab-grown brain mass spontaneously generates neurons! Article does not estimate how long until an evil brain in a jar becomes the planetary overlord.
Chapter 11: Silence Roams from Room to Room
In the old apartment they had shared Snoz lay on the love seat reading, his knees over its arm. Emily came through the door from work in a fluster and she did not offer her familiar “Hi-eye” greeting. She dropped her purse on the antique end table and she pulled off her shoes with the thick door-stopper heels and tossed them to the corner of the room where they struck the hardwood floor with two heavy clanks. Emily was petite with wavy brown hair that brushed her shoulders timidly when she walked. She flopped onto the recliner with a grunt.
“Tough day at work?” Snoz asked.
“Three people. Three! Asked me for money on the walk home,” Emily said.
“Such is life when you live and work in the Quarter.”
“One followed me for a block until I turned around by all these people waiting for a cab in front of a hotel and yelled at him to fuck off.”
“You’d never know you were a deb,” Snoz said, eyes in his book.
“Following me after I said no? I hate dealing with this every single day.”
“They’re not dangerous, they’re just drunks. And we knew what it was like when we moved down here.”
Emily was aghast and she got up. “No, we didn’t!”
Snoz heard her banging drawers and silverware in the kitchen.
“Are you cooking?” he called.
“I’m just making a sandwich!”
“Could you make me,” Snoz started and quickly caught himself. “Okay, sounds good!”
Things were quiet, and Snoz’s focus returned to his reading. He was filling himself by studying literary biographies: Faulkner’s Nobel acceptance speech, Joyce fleeing to Switzerland to escape the war, Twain’s scheme to bring in some money by giving lectures out West and the success it brought him. After a while Emily came back in the living room, her arms full of purple candlesticks.
“Will you trade me rooms?” she asked.
“What are you doing?”
“Just,” she sighed, “something for me. I need to be alone for this.”
“Is it a Wiccan holiday?”
“Trade me rooms.”
Snoz put a bookmark on the page. “Okay.”
“Don’t come in til I come out,” she said and pulled closed the double sliding doors that separated the two rooms.
On the bed Snoz was laying on his stomach still reading when Emily slid open the doors to return the candles to her bureau top.
“All through?” he asked.
She gave a half-smile and continued through the shotgun-style apartment to the bathroom. “I’m going to get ready to lay down,” she said.
Snoz rolled onto his side, his finger lingering over the spot his eyes left the page. “Okay. Everything all right?”
“Mm-hm.”
With Emily in the bathroom the apartment settled back into the same silence it had relaxed in for the few hours prior. She came out undressed and slid herself under the covers. Emily would fall asleep with the lights on, she had no trouble and did not resent it. But watching her lay still, eyes closed and not twitching, Snoz pulled the cord on the ceiling fan and went in the bathroom to smoke a bowl and there in the dark draped one arm over her belly and fell into sleep.
Chapter 12: Secret Likes
It had been hours of unusual excitement and stress, and Lucy’s back had absorbed much of it. It complained like a distant foghorn, bassy and insistent. She swallowed the rest of the day’s medication in a single sighing gulp. Each day she was in pain, but by now she didn’t notice it unless it jabbed her from the inside. In those times the steel rods along her spine were like hawk talons. By habit she put the manila folder with the work she wanted to bring home into her satchel and as she went to sling it over her seatback she caught herself. Already there was much to do this evening. She’d have to tell Jerry she was going out again. He wouldn’t mind, and he wouldn’t question her nor bring it up after, and this she turned into guilt in her own head. Without considering it she replaced the folder on her neat desk, got the rest of her things together, and left.
She drove languidly and on impulse took the long way home toward the elementary school. The day was nice, full and blue and dabbed with clouds so wispy they seemed out of focus. Lucy knew the after-school groups would be waiting outside to join their parents in the commute. She pulled into the teacher’s lot at the face of the school, avoiding the circle drive-up.
“Don’t want to get their little hopes up that I’m mom or dad,” she said.
Lucy watched a little boy pull the pigtails of the girl he denied he liked, and she remembered a day like this at recess when Elliott, Elliott Something, did the same to her, and she thought it must go way back to the Pilgrim times and that it’s gone on ever since, and that it would keep going on to the Jetson’s times, which was as far into the future as she was able to think. The girl squealed and Lucy called a whispered squeal after her, and both reacted with half-moon smiles. The chase was on, up concrete steps and over the trim front lawn, a group of girls screamed when the boy ran between them, and it was put to a stop when a teacher called, “No running by the younger children!”
None of the children was still, they played slap-hand games and telephone operator and house and two for flinching, even the ones sitting playing video games squirmed with impatience. The moms arrived. The ranks thinned. Each sound of another engine drew hungry eyes until two children remained. One a pretty girl, one a boy who had been reading on the steps, they had not acknowledged each other when the other kids were around but they drew together now, and Lucy saw this was a familiar routine for them. The girl sat beside the boy and they fell fast into conversation, and the teacher stood at the top of the steps smoking a cigarette, weary and as impatient. An SUV pulled fast around the circle, windows down and radio audible, and the girl got up and ran to it. Once Jerry was fed and propped up on the Ottoman, Lucy would head downtown. She stayed until the boy was picked up and then she too went home.