The temporary plastic tarp door flapped against itself in the corner of the temporary lab. Dr Woolcott replaced a batch of tubes in the Distributor and set the process to be, at maximum, a 4-hour procedure. Her assistant, Liz, was printing out results from earlier batches. Each report was 190 pages. They heard someone enter the building by the side door and Dr Woolcott removed her latex gloves and rubbed sanitizing fluid over her hands before stepping outside the plastic tarp to greet their visitor. A second later, she parted the tarp again, and was standing in the doorway, and Liz looked up. Dr Woolcott appeared to be very ill. "I'm being scared," she said, and then she was covered in blood, and so was much of the lab. A devil's pitchfork had been hurled into her back. As Dr Woolcott fell forward onto a benchtop and the tarp dropped down in place, Liz saw the teenaged boy, blurred by plastic, in the next room. She stared at him and said, "Do you bargain?"

"I don't want money," he said. "OK," she said. "This is a biochemistry lab. I can give you a liquid that will make your brain come up with the most amazing ideas that it could ever hope to think up." He flicked the tarp aside and stared at Liz. "How," he said. "And how do I know that it won't just kill me."

"You can see the vial I get it from, and I will inject myself first, with the exact same amount," she said. "And it works like a plant fertilizer. It's safe, I've tried it. It encourages the communication between the different parts of your brain." "I'll watch you do it," he said. "If you're not dead in 5 minutes and you seem to be smarter, I'll take it."

"OK," she said. The teenager had hauled his pitchfork out of Dr Woolcott's body, and he held it with the prongs sticking into the lino floor, leaning on it. Liz broke out two new needles from a pack, and wheeled a portatray of syringes over to her bench area.