Part I can be found here.

I always love visiting the mall in a college town on a Saturday.  You see, I’ve found that while men usually want to get into and out of the store as fast as possible, women like to take their time and browse, walking back and forth from store to store.  This means that the women tend to stick around at least five times as long as the men.  And today, they were literally everywhere – gorgeous girls wherever I turned my head.

Of course, this fact was lost on most of my companions.  Spock was wearing the wide-eyed confused expression that appeared whenever he was thrust into unfamiliar social situations, and Mr. Chips was fairly indistinct in the background of our group.  Johnny must have been aware of the babes around him, but his attention was primarily focused on the machine we’d cobbled together.

I turned to Johnny.  “Okay, Mr. Genius, what now?”

Johnny was holding the modified voltmeter aloft, waving it around and watching the dial and display fluctuate.  “Now, this tracker ought to be able to trace the most compatible pheromones it can detect in relation to the sample loaded into it.  We just follow the signal to the most compatible female!”

I shuddered at this cold description of love.  “Who’s sample is loaded into it?”

“Mine, of course,” Johnny replied absently.  He began wandering off into the mall, and the rest of us hurried to follow.

Johnny took his time, meandering back and forth as the output from the device shifted, but we eventually ended up in front of Victoria’s Secret.  I stared up at the shop.  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said as we headed inside, looking incredibly conspicuous.

Once inside the store, the meter seemed to improve somewhat in accuracy, and I watched in disbelief as Johnny cut a path straight towards a dark-haired bombshell currently looking at the selection of lacy black thongs.  “There’s no way,” I muttered under my breath.  The girl in Johnny’s sights was at least an eight, and probably closer to a nine.  On his best days, with a few drinks in him, Johnny could maybe hit a five.  I winced in anticipation of the inevitable crash and burn.

A minute later, I opened my eyes again.  To my surprise, Johnny was holding his own!  The girl was responding to whatever he was saying, nodding and looking interested in him!  I had to pinch myself several times to make sure I wasn’t asleep.

After another couple minutes, Johnny strolled back, looking overly nonchalant and waving a small scrap of paper at us.  “Proof!” he exulted.  “We totally hit things off!  My machine works!”

I snatched the tracker out of his hands.  “Hold on,” I said.  “We need a real test.  How do you switch out the sample loaded into this?”

Taking the device back from me, Johnny flipped it over and pulled open a small compartment on the back.  “It reads off any biological material in here,” he explained.  “Hair works fairly well.”

“Great,” I replied.  I reached out and yanked a hair out of Spock’s head, ignoring his wordless complaint.  I shoved the hair into the chamber.  “If this thing can find Spock a mate, we know that we’ve got a real winner on our hands.”

I closed the chamber and flipped the device back right-side-up.  Sure enough, an arrow appeared, fluctuating back and forth as it searched out the detected complementary pheromone signal.  I grabbed Spock’s arm and set off following the arrow.

Strangely, the device didn’t lead us to any store, but instead to the doors heading out of the mall.  I glanced back at Johnny as we reached the doors, but he looked as blank as I did, so we headed outside.  We looped around the building, eventually ending up in the back near the dumpsters.

“This really doesn’t seem to be working,” Spock commented as we walked past the rows of garbage receptacles.

“Hush,” I commanded as we pressed on.  “With the amount that this thing is fluctuating, we ought to be pretty close – wait!”  I came to a sudden halt as I heard rustling behind one of the large garbage bins.  Was it a homeless man?  Was this Spock’s perfect soulmate?  Was Spock gay?  I somehow doubted it – a gay man would have enough fashion sense to not tuck his shirt into his white underwear.

A moment later, the source of the rustling emerged – a large tabby slunk out from between the bins and looked up at us.  At the sight of the cat, I had to laugh.  “Johnny, I think your machine needs more work,” I chuckled, handing the voltmeter back to him.  “Either that, or the best that Spock’s going to score is a street cat, and I don’t think he feels that way about animals.”

“It should have worked,” Johnny complained as we headed back around the building.  “I mean, it did so for me!”

“Maybe that’s just the confidence it gave you?” I suggested.  “Who knows.  Wait a minute, where did Spock get off to, anyway?”  I turned and looked around.  Johnny was walking beside me, and Mr. Chips was contentedly munching on a snack he had pulled from somewhere, but of our super-geek there was no sign.  If I had known where he was, I might have been more concerned about Johnny’s device.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, Spock was still in the back of the building.  He had squatted down on his knees and was beckoning to the cat.  “Here, puss puss,” he said, the words sounding strange in his mouth.  “Come here.”

The cat seemed reticent at first, but slowly crawled out of the crevice between the bins and moved into Spock’s arms, purring loudly as it realized that this strange human meant no harm and was offering scratches behind the ears.  Spock scooped up the purring cat, a smile breaking out on his face.  “Good kitty,” he murmured.  “Do you want to hear about Augmented Backus Naur metasyntaxes?”  The cat closed its eyes in contented agreement.

It all began when Johnny came into lab, hair mussed and glasses askew, claiming that he could quantify love. We should have left it at that, laughed it off.  We definitely shouldn’t have built the tracking device.

Now, before I say anything more, let me add here that I don’t know much about biology.  You want some circuits programmed, maybe a specialized chip board designed?  I’m your guy.  But about the only thing I understand from biology is the fermentation process, and that’s just because I like the end products.

But Johnny, now, he’s a biologist through and through.  Studied pheromones, probably because they were about his only shot of landing a decent date.  I’d dragged him to the bars in our little college town before, introduced him to some properly sloshed ladies, but he never quite managed to pull it off.

He said he was looking for “the real thing.”  I think he just can’t control the verbal vomit that he spews.  Honestly, some chick who’s five shots to the wind at the watering hole doesn’t want to hear about breakthroughs in delayed neurotransmitter release.  She wants to hear, “Hey, I’m a scientist, I discover new things for humanity, that’s pretty sexy, now let’s get back to my place before your buzz wears off.”

But I’m getting off topic.  It was a Monday, and most of us in lab were nursing hangovers from the previous weekend.  I had made out pretty well with some Latin chick who was up visiting a friend at our college for the weekend.  In between winces from the tequila hangover, I was telling stories about how I scored her to a few other patrons of our laboratory.  Sitting across the cheap card table listening to me were Spock and Mr. Chips.

I think I might need to back up again.  Spock’s our resident geek.  Even among the geeks, he stands out as especially geeky.  He works in programming, like me, but he does software only, not bothering with hardware like me.  I’m pretty sure that he’s a programming genius, but he only thinks in the same terms, so he tends to be overly logical.  Teaching him something not related to computers is an act of pure misery because he just doesn’t get it.  It’s like attempting to teach a puppy how to do your taxes.  The damn creature is so earnest and tries so hard, but will never succeed.  I long since gave up on trying to show him how to pick up girls.  If he can hold a conversation with a chick for ten seconds without offending her, he’s having a good day.

As for Mr. Chips, he’s an odd egg too.  Always seems to be snacking on a bag of potato chips, hence the nickname.  The kicker is that he insists on calling them “crisps”, not chips.  I don’t claim to understand the guy, but he’s a good listener and that makes him okay in my book.

So back to the story.  I’m sitting on the edge of the table, explaining how this girl and I had to go back to her friend’s dorm room and make sure that no one else was there before we could get down to business, and Johnny comes running in through the door, totally cutting me off.  “I’ve got it!” he yelled.  “I know how to quantify love!  I can find my soulmate!”

I stopped talking as we stared at this apparition that had appeared.  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

“Love!” he replied.  “It’s always been measured as a pheromone shift, but I know why the shift occurs!  It’s all complementary!  All it takes is a few molecules, and I can determine whether she’s your soulmate or not!” Johnny snapped his finger down to point at me.  “And I need your help!”

Now, I’ll admit that at first not even Spock was agreeing with him.  But it was a slow day, and any chance to delay work on my thesis is a chance I’ll gladly seize.  Johnny drew up some specs for a detector, and I worked out how to make the thing fit in the palm of one’s hand and started soldering together some parts I had lying around.  With uncharacteristic determination, Johnny bullied Spock into writing out the program code, and by the end of the day, we had a working love detector sitting in front of us.

“What now?” I asked, staring at the machine sitting on the table.  The thing looked like a voltmeter, mostly because I had used an old voltmeter casing to house the electronics.

Johnny scooped the detector up off the table.  “Now, we test it!” he cried dramatically, overly so in my opinion.  “We must find a high concentration of suitable females!  To the mall!”

To be continued….

When I stumbled into the back room of the shop, my head still aching from the night before, Gabe was already buried up to the waist inside an old engine pod.  He shot me his usual cheeky grin when he emerged.

“Looks like a few crossed wires,” he said.  “And some blighter’s stolen the fuel cell, of course.  Shouldn’t be too hard to replace, though.”  He paused to scrutinize me.  “You look like crap, man.”

I sat down heavily on the chair in front of my workbench and grabbed for the first item in my stack of checked in items – a laser pistol, rusted almost beyond recognition.  “It was a rough night,” I replied.  “I wish I had known that some Wharfmistresses carry implants that neutralize alcohol before we started the drinking contest.”

I worked my sonic drill into the hairline crevices of the pistol’s slide, and managed to slough most of the rust off of the blowback dissipator.  Gabe picked up a comm unit with a shattered screen, but tossed it aside in disgust after a minute’s examination.  “Someone tried to use this thing in an ammonium atmosphere,” he commented.  “Whole thing’s corroded.  Can’t even be recycled for mats.”

Before moving on to the next item in his pile, he shifted his attention back to me.  “Charlie, you gotta get over this breakup, man.  You’ve been throwing yourself at the wall for the last couple of weeks.  Sooner or later, you’re going to step out an airlock by accident.”

I shook my head fiercely, looking down at the firing chip of the pistol so he wouldn’t see me blinking furiously.  “It’s not that easy, Gabe.  She just up and left, after two years, barely even leaving a note.  ‘I need to see the rest of the galaxy’ is the oldest line in the book.”  I wrenched the chip out with a yank, snapping the bioplastic in my pliers.  Still avoiding my coworker’s gaze, I rummaged through my drawers for a replacement.

Gabe blew steam through the tubes of a klang-distiller that appeared to still be in working condition.  “Look, man, you weren’t going to spend the rest of your life with this girl, were you?”

After a moment, I was forced to shake my head in agreement.  “No, Carla wasn’t the one for me.  But still, you know how rare it is to run into another attractive human these days?  Especially one who isn’t either implanted to the gills, or fishing for someone who owns his own ship?”  I clicked the new firing chip into place and began polishing the trigger nodal connections.

For a moment, my companion in the back of the pawn shop was silent.  The only noise was the soft whine of my auto-buffer as it removed grime from the smooth nodes.  “It’s always hard,” he said at length.  “But that’s what life is.  And we’re a fairly busy port – lots of beings pass through, including humans.  You’ll meet another one.  In the meantime, maybe if you stop blowing all your credits at the cantina as soon as they’re in your account, you might someday be able to afford that ship of yours.”

I suppressed a sigh as I ratcheted in a new fuel cell.  Gabe was annoying with his frank critiques, but he was also correct.  His grin certainly didn’t help matters.  I spun in my chair, leveling the laser pistol at him.  The split second of wide-eyed shock was gratifying.  I squeezed the trigger twice.

The two shots flew true, leaving two smoking marks in the door over his shoulder.  I grinned back at him.  “You might be right,” I said, as he let out the breath he had been holding.  “And I’m glad you’re watching out for me.  But I’m gonna have to get better on my own, in my own way.”

I tossed the repaired pistol on the slowly growing pile of refurnished devices to be taken out to the pawn shop floor.  Fortunately, my headache was fading already.

Hey man, can you spare a dollar or two?  Look, I promise I won’t use it on test tubes.  I’m done with science – I’m clean now, I swear.

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking.  Beard, stained lab coat, my sign’s written on graph paper, I still look like one of those science addicts.  But not anymore.  I’ve quit the habit.

It all started off so innocently – a little dabbling in the Scientific Method after church.  Everyone was doing it, you know?  Formulate a couple of hypotheses, maybe draw an inference or two, get a nice little buzz flowing.  Just recreational, though.  No one was using any equipment, not yet, although Tommy kept on claiming that he had a pipette hidden in his sock drawer.

Of course, just theorizing isn’t enough after a while.  Gotta move on to experimenting.  Sociology, at first – they call it one of the gateway sciences.  Doesn’t need the accelerometers of physics or the petri dishes of biology.  We still thought we weren’t addicted, back then.  We kept telling ourselves that we could leave the field whenever we wanted.

Things just spiraled down from there.  Sociology led to psychology, and pretty soon I had a whole biology lab going in my basement.  One night I was building a compound microscope for 12 hours straight, babbling on about foci and apertures.  Anyone can find plans, these days, if they know where to look on the sleazy parts of the internet.

I wasn’t alone in this, of course.  Some of my fellow junkies would hit me up for collaborative projects every now and then.  Eventually, I even had some grad students in my lab, slaving away on my projects for days on end, basically indentured servants slaving away for the promise of second or third author.

In contrast, I was living the high life back then.  Data was rolling in, the lab was churning out plenty of results for me to throw around, and the authorities left me alone in exchange for a couple of forensic analyses a month.

Too soon, though, it all dried up.  I couldn’t keep up the rate of breakthroughs and another biology lab started putting out better, newer theories, muscling in on my turf.  My students left, the data streams stopped, and I had to resort to pimping out my equipment just to get mentioned in the journals.  That was rock bottom.

But that’s all behind me now.  I’ve sworn off science, man.  I’m not even reading the news stories.  Total cold turkey.  But it’s hard, and at night sometimes I still get the rush, the urge to mix up some strains, to feel that rush of science again.  But I know how dangerous knowledge is, now.  I’m resisting.  So come on, man, spare a buck.

Hey!  Where are you going?  Come back!