The Mad Scientist

Dr. Qworm was dying.

He had gone too far this time. Victim of his own experimentations, there was no more hope for him. He knew it, and he called his assistant to dictate his last wishes.

"My life has been devoted to science, and so will my death be," Dr. Qworm spoke with difficulty. "You will take care for my organs to serve science..."

"Shall I give them to those who need them, for life-saving transplantations?" asked the assistant.

"I said they should serve science, not people!" croaked the idealist Dr. Qworm. Selflessly, he had wanted to devote himself to the well-being of humanity, and thus loathed the well-being of individual humans. Because of his high philosophical standards, he had worked at the Institute for Animal Experimentation and Vivisection all his life. "No, they'll serve for experiments," he went on. "My blood, for instance, can be used to study the effects of this new chemical weapon we were testing..."

As a matter of fact, the animal blood they had used until then had not been very cooperative, oddly - a lack of collaboration none of the scientists had really understood...

Dr. Qworm enumerated in this manner all the experiments to which each part of his body should be affected, until he arrived at the brain, for which he obviously hesitated.

"Do you remember this experiment we made on little rodents?" the assistant broke in to help him.

Dr. Qworm made an impatient move. "Don't speak in riddles, I've no more time for that! You know perfectly well that we made so many experiments on little rodents that no one on earth would be able to remember them all!"

"...Well, it was the time we tried to maintain their brains alive apart from their bodies," reminded the assistant. "But it didn't work too well..."

"Ah yes, now I remember. Our record time was of only 16.35 seconds... Do you think that with my brain, the record could be broken? - Of course it would!" Dr. Qworm immediately answered his own question. After all, his brains were better than anyone else's!

"I just don't happen to remember the purpose of this experiment..." remarked the assistant.

"Neither do I, but records are made to be broken," Dr. Qworm swept the utterly insignificant argument away. He even would have been excited if his physical condition had allowed it, and he couldn't wait to...

To die?

Of course! It was for science, and why should he struggle? To suffer two or three more days? It was less senseless than it seemed.

He still had a small apprehension though. "Hadn't we discovered that the rodents - their brains, I mean - were still able to think - on their level of course - during this experiment?"

"Yes, our scanners had detected a cortical activity..." agreed the assistant.

What could they have thought and felt? Dr. Qworm wondered. Alone, without any sensation, with no notion of anything anymore, in darkness - on the limit of non-existence? Did they have a feeling of ultimate freedom or of deepest despair? But he had to admit that experimenting such a thing on himself could be interesting indeed. He said aloud, "Records are made to be broken, but no need to break them by far. Let's fix the duration of the experiment to seventeen seconds - seventeen seconds, not a single more! This is my last wish."

It would have been too bad for Dr. Qworm to die before the experiment, so the assistant took a professional care of maintaining him alive until the day of the experiment, to the point that when the day came, Dr. Qworm was actually faring much better. He realized that perhaps he wouldn't have to die after all, but he had never canceled an experiment in his whole life and he certainly wasn't going to start doing so now, so he let his assistant make all the preparations for his death.

After having successfully performed a trepanning operation on Dr. Qworm's skull, the assistant connected a tangle of tubes and sensors to the scientist's brain. The next stage of the operation would be to brutally rip the brain out and put it into an amniotic liquid. Then, after seventeen seconds, he would destroy the brain accordingly with Dr. Qworm's last wish.

He did so, and he waited. Seventeen seconds. Not one more.

Dr. Qworm was alone in the dark. Not a good sensation, but not a particularly bad one, either; actually, it was no sensation at all. He felt nothing and hadn't the notion of anything anymore.

Just a little boring, perhaps: there was nothing to do. But it wouldn't last anyway: the seventeen seconds would soon be over.

They should have been, by then.

Or maybe not. After all, he had nothing to refer to. How could he tell that seventeen seconds had passed?

Still, he couldn't prevent asking himself if there wasn't something wrong. He would have begun to sweat if he could have, but he had no more body to do so, and it upset him the more. He couldn't do anything!

He tried to calm down, and to count: one, two, three, four, five, six seven eight nine teneleventwelvethirtnfournfnseventeen! Now it should be over! Or had he counted too fast? The fact was that he couldn't determine at all how quick he was thinking. He missed most one thing: the notion of time.

Dreitos Qworm was locked in nil for only seventeen seconds, but because of nil's very nature, these seventeen seconds stretched to infinity.

* * *

Now it seemed to him that he had been in this darkness for so long that a long white beard would have grown on his chin if he still had had one, and he didn't even remember his name. The thought had come to him that he might be dead after all. Maybe this was afterlife. And still there was nothing to do but think, think, think!

He knew he had a very poor imagination, but he had to try anyway. He thought, "At the beginning, there was light..."