Tale #22: Thinking Caps On

Tale #22: Thinking Caps On (A sequel to the 'Thinking Cap' series) (Content Tags: Brain drain via helmet, science fiction, messy and wet diapers) "The project that you're asking about was shelved, a couple of years ago, for good reason. We sold off a prototype of it to a private buyer, that uh, what was it...? Oh, yeah, a warden of a private prison. I think they used it as some type of penal measure. I think we sold another set to a farm of some kind, though I can't remember exactly why... ...Doesn't really matter. Wasn't nearly enough to recoup the cost of the project, but it was just enough to at least not get anyone fired." "We shouldn't let a few *unfortunate* accidents be the end of it. It passed the animal testing phase just fine, so the proof of concept is there, it just needs to be retooled! Reconfigured! *Something!*" Two men sat at the company cantina, steam twirling up from each of their coffee mugs. One manic, one stoic, and a sordid discussion that linked the pair. Something that should have stayed buried. "Professor Kanada retired shortly after the project was sold off, so we wouldn't even have the skillset needed to work on it. Don't know if it was the guilt, or the dishonor of failure; you know how important honor is in their culture. That's not even getting into the multiple lawsuits we had to--" The manic man banged his hand on the table to interrupt, the coffee in his cup sloshing back and forth. "--They signed fucking waivers! Everything was in the documentation! We didn't lose any of those cases, and most of them settled out of court for a pittance anyways!" "*Yes*, but the company's stocks took a massive hit. Turning over a dozen people into pants-shitting vegetables isn't a good look. We even got some tabloid peices about how we might be responsible for that Jorenberg kid, remember him? His dad croaked and he inherited Vigor at like, twenty? Then he messed up his head somehow and next thing we know, there's conspiracies on the 'National Inquirer' about corporate sabotage. Even if you *could* find someone who could work on the helmet, there's almost no way that the current CEO, or really the board of investors, would go for it. Any ressurection of it is a non starter, completely dead on arrival." The more rational of the two took another sip from his cup and tapped his fingers across the ceramic surface of the half-empty drink. His eyes were veiled by the reflection painted across the lens of his glasses, but the nonplussed curl of his lips were all the expression he needed. This was hardly the meeting that he'd thought it'd be. "...Look. At least hear me out on this. I can *find* someone who can take over where Kanada left off, maybe a graduate from Rosewater or something. I *know* that the company doesn't want to touch this thing unless there's a guarantee it won't have the same result as before..." The manic man's voice suddenly got lower: "...But the company doesn't need to really get involved until the product is completely finished. We have some extra money in our budget, and those expenses can always be put down as something above board. CIA does that shit all the time: blacksites, skunkworks, psy-ops...Hell, you ever read about project Zarathustra? Or that Sevchenko kid they used?" The other man pushed up his glasses, took a final gulp from his mug, and stood up from his chair. "Thanks for the coffee, Dean." "Wait, wait, wait...! Look, just give me access to the old project, and I'll leave you out of everything else. If things go well, you get credit and a huge payout; if they don't, then well, you'll never hear about it again. Come on, Oswald, picture your spot in the executive suite..." Oswald hesitated, his demeanor inscrutable. Finally he reached into his breast pocket and took a pen to hastily write something on a napkin that was on the table, he then slid it toward Dean and began to walk away. "That's the passcode for the decryption. You better know what you're doing." Months would pass, and all of Dean's free time had gone to what he considered his big career moment. His quest to revive the 'Thinking Cap' was a tapestry detailed in esoterica and dark deeds. He'd called St. Vito prison, and attempted to make contact with the farm that'd bought the other set, but only the warden of the prison had been receptive to speaking with him. The warden praised the helmets in their original design, and lamented the fact that his program had been shut down after the govenor had gotten involved in his little legal loophole. The warden gave Dean whatever sloppy data that he could, and showed off the freakish menagerie of inmates that'd gotten their 'mental execution' at his hands. The two discussed the whole thing at length, and while the warden kept reiterating his support, he couldn't legally offer his prisoners as test subjects for the new model that was being worked on. Dean mentioned that the governor's race was coming up, and that if a more conservative man took office, that the prison's program might see a revival too. Ultimately, Dean came up short on his first leg of the race, but he considered that he might be putting the cart before the horse. What he really needed to focus on was finding an effective team of scientists and engineers to learn from Kanada's mistakes and fix the mistakes. Supplying the test subjects would have to wait until after that. The team that'd worked on the Zarathustra project were either dead, missing or senile, Kanada never answered any phonecalls and had gone off the grid entirely, so he had to start really digging. Some boy in California had made the news for inventing something impressive, but once he'd gone to try to make contact, he'd realized pretty quickly that whatever 'Carlos' was now, it definitely wasn't a genius. The same was true for a boy from Rhode Island named 'Theodore', and according to his teachers, he'd actually developed his own type of 'thinking cap' too! Dean had been over the moon, until he'd been shown Theodore now, and the types of 'inventions' he was working on. The device he'd used had apparently gone missing, and all that was left of the research notes was a partially damaged trifold poster board from the science fair. His two biggest leads had been flops, so he decided to go a more professional route. He contacted Rosewater academy, which was the institute for gifted boys. It was literally a genius-making factory, so it'd be perfect to assemble a team from. He met with the headmaster of the academy and let her know the types of experts that he was looking for; she mentioned that she'd had some incidents with some of the students lately, but that there were still plenty of options for him. She introduced him to a little boy named Dylan Wainwright, who had specialties in neuroscience and engineering, and while the boy hadn't exactly been forthright with whether or not he'd applied his theories on a practical level, Dean found himself suspicious that Dylan's roommate had met a mushbrained fate just a year before. He also met a teen by the name of Wolfgang Hauzer, who specialized mostly in virology, but had a deep understanding of neurological principles. Dean put him on board as well, especially when the teen mentioned that he'd possibly be able to scrounge up some test subjects. These two would become lead developers on the new project, with the academy offering them adjustments to their GPA for taking theoretical into the physical. The academy also offered a laboratory for the team to use, which was good, since there was no way Dean could use the facilities at his own company for this clandestine operation. The 'Thinking Cap' project had been reborn! To really springboard things, they would need a sacrificial lamb though. They had a functioning version of the prototype, courtesy of the warden from St. Vito's prison, and they had all the data from the original trials, but they needed a current 'baseline' for the effects of the device. They needed to see how the helmet currently affected the brain in real time. They had to 'tardify' some poor sap on purpose, essentially. Wolfgang was all too gleeful to find them a 'lab monkey', some genius kid by the name of Julian. Dean didn't want to know anything about it; he figured that with Rosewater being in some legally murky sovereignty and with minors helming the project, it'd be best to divest himself as much as he could until there were positive results to profit from. "...Alright. Test number one; purpose, to get a baseline readout on the unaltered device. Julian, are you ready?" A boy shuffled into the lab area, looking uncomfortable, likely due to the bulky medical diaper he'd been told to put on. "Uh, yeah...So do I really have to wear this for it? Its just going to scan my brain, right?" Wolfgang smiled and nodded, "...Yes, but the scan can agitate the nervous system. Better safe than sorry, right? Go ahead and take a seat." The boy sat on a stool with a crinkle and fidgeted anxiously, "And you guys are gonna test my project next? Right?" Dylan looked up from his clipboard, "Uh, right...You're working on that special rash cream or something, right? Yeah, we'll trade a test for a test. " Wolfgang set the helmet on the boy's head and made some adjustments to it. A screen nearby suddenly jolted to life with readouts of Julian's brain in action. "You'll feel some discomfort, but it'll be over quickly." The two young scientists exchanged looks, and Wolfgang activated the helmet via a remote. The thinking cap whirred to life, blinking and glowing rapidly; the readouts on the monitor began to go wild, and a real-time image of the boy's mind could be seen taking serious damage. Julian fortunately didn't have time to conceive regret at his decision to volunteer. His cognition was immediately disrupted and sent down a devolutionary path of total destruction. His eyes glazed over, his jaw slackened and a river of drool and snot began to flow downwards. The front of the diaper began to rapidly swell and stain a dull yellow. The bulb atop the helmet suddenly burst and the machine came to a stop, smoke rising from the failed trial. Julian looked as if he'd lost 90% of his brain in the process, sent back to an intellectual level more on par with an infant, or a particularly clever rock. "...You alright there, Julian?" Dylan gently asked, looking up from the clipboard, as if he didn't already know the answer. "Puuhhh....puhhhh..." The former genius moaned, pursing his lips in some attempt at speech. He lurched forward, his shaky legs unable to keep him up; he toppled to the floor, crawling upon it like an animal. He suddenly stopped, and the helmet seemed to roar back to life for just a moment, giving a few more seconds of blinking, before the rest of the bulbs also popped, and with it came a simultaneous tuba note from the back of Julian's diaper. Steaming hot mush blasted into the medical garment with the force and volume of a firehose; almost instantaneously, the white material began to stain a sickly brown and the diaper began to rumble and expand. The two scientists couldn't hide their amusement from the sight of it, beginning to snicker as they watched their peer soiling himself in such an extreme fashion. "..Subject one seems to have been reduced to about a tenth of his intellect, maybe less...Heavy urination, flatulence, and defecation..." Dylan wrote, while watching Julian continue to fart and poop without any cessation or worry. "Yeah, I think a tenth might be too generous. Looks pretty much like the people we saw on the videos from the old tests of it. I guess at least this thing has failed in a consistent way." Wolfgang added, entertaining himself by pressing down at the back of Julian's growing seat with his shoe, feeling the giant pile of stool squish beneath. "Puhhhhh...puuhhhhh...**PoOoOoOoPiE!!!**" The drooly boy shouted, finishing his pantload with a nasty sounding crescendo of sloppy plopping, a giant snot bubble forming and popping in his nostril. "...Well, I guess on the plus side, he'll become his own test subject for that stupid rash cream. I see diaper rash as a problem for him in the very near future.." Wolfgang took the helmet off of him and set it off to the side. "Alright, we have something to work with now. Get him changed and out of the lab, he's stinking the place up." "M-me? You're the older one! I don't want to change him!" Wolfgang clicked his tongue, "I know what you did to your roommate, Wainwright. Sammy? The little prodigy? So, unless you want to have to go answer for *that*, I think you'll be handling the *dirty* work here, got it?" Dylan huffed, getting flustered, but he went to grab a fresh diaper for poor Julian. He reminded himself to ask Dean about getting another lab assistant for dealing with the inevitable mountain of dirty diapers that would come across during testing. The Thinking Cap project was back in full swing, and no omelets could be made without cartons upon cartons of broken eggs.