katzenfabrik

This is a science-fantasy short story I wrote last year for the Pod
Writers' Guild. I unearthed it today and was amazed that although I
wrote it months before even hearing about TechCo, let alone applying
for a job there, the story accurately describes my day-to-day work in
the lab.

As the children came down the stairs, socks slipping on the polished
boards, they saw through the open kitchen door that the table had been
set for breakfast. It had been set, in fact, for any conceivable
combination of breakfast that could be desired, and for many helpings
of that. The time-worn oak surface was hardly visible beneath the
plates of bread rolls, pastries, sliced cold meats, cheese and fruit. A
ewer of milk and a tall glass jug of orange juice stood towards the
back of the spread, next to the china teapot and a copper coffee pot.
Jars of preserves and pickles had taken over a whole corner of the
table. Still fussing over an arrangement of cereals on the other side
stood the family's weekend guest, the tall Professor.

“Ah! Children!” he cried, straightening up – a process that took him
longer than most people the children had seen, since he had further to
go. “You rise earlier than I had imagined. I meant this as a little
surprise.”

The three children had stopped at the doorway, Michael and George
hiding a little behind Belinda, the oldest. At this direct address, she
became aware of her duties as de facto hostess and stepped forward.

“That's quite all right, um, Professor. Mum and dad aren't usually up
for about another hour on Saturdays. Can we, er, help you with
anything?”

He stood back and looked at his work. “Well ... I think this banquet is
nearly completed! I just have a few more preparations to make, and
those are of rather a technical nature ... Let me see. Are you allowed
to use the taps, young fellow?” He craned at George, who shrank back
briefly and then replied with a stout, “Yes!”

“Excellent! Then would you and your brother be so good as to fill this
vase with water and make these flowers at home in it?” The Professor
brandished a bunch of fading flags that looked, Belinda thought,
suspiciously like those in the neighbours' garden, and the boys set to
work. “Now, you look like a scientifically-minded young lady,” he
addressed her. “I think I could use your help setting up the last of my
equipment. Follow me.”

The pantry was connected to the kitchen by a polished oak door, much
like the rest of the doors in the house but slightly smaller. At least,
it had been. The door had been taken off its hinges and laid down over
a couple of trestles, providing an impromptu bench that supported a
bewildering range of objects. Several white boxes sat in a row, their
plastic casings altered in places to admit new metal pipes or strange
attachments. Belinda's mother's food processor sat at one end, a wide
rubber band wrapped around its rotor and disappearing somewhere. There
were other things on the bench, more or less obscured by a tangled
growth of wires and cables that trailed off eventually to an overloaded
extension cord.

Having led Belinda to this mess, the Professor now seemed to forget she
was there, bending over a set of dials at one end. “Ah!” he cried out
suddenly, as a blue spark jumped between his fingers and the machinery.
He shook his hand, dispelling smoke. “Nearly got it. Now, my dear!
Would you please observe the screen down there to your right? Yes,
that's right. Just push those wires behind it, don't worry, they're
only for the printer, but don't! Don't get them in that liquid
nitrogen! Good heavens, then we would be in trouble. Mind your fingers,
too. Hmm.”

Belinda poked the wires back as far as she dared with a wooden spoon
she had found lying on a pile of greasy, discarded-looking gears. The
screen was grey, with a green dot dancing erratically across it. As she
watched obediently, the dot began to trace out more regular patterns.

“Just shout out when it's a straight line!” The Professor was
concentrating on the dials again, stooped so far forward that a lock of
grey-streaked dark hair tapped them as he nodded to himself. “Now?
Good. Fastest calibration yet. You clearly have a gift, dear girl.”

The two boys had again crowded behind Belinda, fascinated by the
chaotic equipment but not daring get too close to it. “Please sir,”
Michael piped, “what's all this for? And do we have to wait for Mummy
and Daddy to have our breakfast?”

“Oh, I dare say you can begin soon,” the Professor said genially,
standing back and admiring his work. “Your father was saying at dinner
last night how interested he is in my work, so I thought I would take
the opportunity of demonstrating it to him, not to mention collecting
some data while I was at it.” He spun suddenly around, snatching at a
heap of cloth on the dresser that became a long white coat when he
shook it out and dug in its pockets. “You see this egg!” It was a brown
egg. He handed it to Michael and threw George the coat.

“Science, and perhaps your home economics teachers, tell us that this
egg is made up of water, proteins, fatty acids and vitamins. When
poached, it makes a tasty morsel; under, ah, other circumstances it
might have produced a baby chick. But, unbeknownst to even the most
informed home economist, there is more that we can discover about this
egg.

“... Now, none of us think well on an empty stomach.” The Professor led
the children back to the breakfast table, where the food shone
invitingly in the golden morning sunshine, and handed them each a
plate, a bowl and one of their parents' best dinner-party napkins. As
they collected food – toast and jam for Michael, chocolate cereal and
ham for George, croissants and strawberries for Belinda – he poured
them each a tall glass of juice, and added more coffee his own already
stained mug. The two boys found spaces just big enough to set down
their plates and tucked in immediately, curiosity and strangeness not
really being a match for hunger. Belinda, though, nibbled flakes from a
croissant and kept her eyes on the jumble of equipment across the room.
She could just about trace the connections between the devices (that
one was a microscope, she thought; that looked more like a metal funnel
covered in digital watches) but she couldn't even guess at their
purposes.

“I knew you had the look of the scientist about you, dear girl,” the
Professor's booming voice interrupted her. “Afraid this is all a bit
beyond bottle volcanoes and red cabbage indicators, though.”

“Do you bring all this everywhere you go?” she asked.

“Oh, most of it. Some parts required improvisation, but a professor who
can't set up an experiment without help from a lesser-spotted graduate
student ought not, in my view, to be a scientist at all.”

“When Mum said you were coming, she said you were the new kind of
professor,” Belinda said shyly. “The kind who wasn't, um...”

“My dear,” the Professor chided her, taking a final slurp from his
coffee mug. “The only sane professor is a mad one who knows you're
still watching him. Now, shall we begin? Dear boy! Please pass me that
wheaten farmhouse loaf!”

He leapt towards his bench, a new animation taking hold of his
spider-like limbs. With a cry of, “This is perfectly safe,” he slid the
loaf onto a metal plate beneath the strange funnel and tapped buttons
in a wild rhythm. The food processor began to whirr intermittently, red
LEDs blinked across the table and an odd blue nimbus showed faintly
around the bread. As the Professor ran up and down, checking displays
and tweaking dials, Belinda saw that the pattern on the screen had
settled into a brilliant green wobbly line.

“Look!” she cried.

“Ah, perfect. This line, children, represents what might be called the
moral character of the food. The hills and valleys make up a different
map for every type of food, and it is always the same for each – an
excellent guide to the constitution of what we propose to ingest.”

Michael and George were not really listening, though the Professor
hadn't noticed. Instead they were tussling under the table for
possession of something small. As older sister, Belinda hissed at them
briefly before turning back to the “map” on the screen.

“In the frequency map for this wheaten loaf, we see a peak here and
here, corresponding to the values of honesty and hard work. This gentle
incline, cycling up which would present a pleasant challenge, shows an
uncomplicated warmth of attitude; the situation of this valley
indicates a lack of unnecessary aggression. All in all, a most
wholesome foodstuff.”

George looked up from his tug-of-war with Michael for long enough to
say, “Sir, it's smoking.” Underneath the funnel, the blue haze around
the loaf had developed yellow licking flames at the edges and a fine
smoke was rising from it.

“Good heavens! We can't have that!” The Professor grabbed the bread and
beat it against his trousers until burnt pieces of crust were scattered
around his feet, then relaxed. “This procedure children, is eminently
repeatable and almost entirely non-disruptive to the food. Young
fellows, would you care to propose a food for another demonstration?”

Both George and Michael's heads sprang up. Each was suddenly eager to
fiddle with the machine, if it set things on fire, and both loosened
their grip on their treasure at the same time. When the matchbox had
fallen to the floor, half-open, Belinda saw a dazed-looking bee crawl
out of the slot and slowly take to the air.

“Sir! Let's do a banana! I bet that would make a great fire,” George
said.

“No, let's do honey. It'll go all like toffee,” Michael said.

To head off another fight, Belinda reached over the tops of their heads
and took a honey jar from the table. “Here you go, Professor,” she
said. She heard the bee's wings settle into a steady buzz and hoped it
would stay out of her brothers' clutches this time.

“Thank you.” He attempted to fit the entire jar in the test space but
it was too tall. Instead he scooped half of the honey onto the plate
with a large screwdriver, which he handed to Belinda to lick. “Here we
go! Observe carefully, children, the precise sequence of adjustments I
must make!” With an enormous grin, the Professor dashed to the other
side of the bench, his fingers darting between the stacked appliances
too quickly to keep track of. He flicked switches, adjusted the speed
of the food processor and, after a brief mental calculation, pushed
buttons that changed the constellation of LEDs completely.

“How're we doing?” the Professor asked, finally. “There's just one
dashed button ...” It was on the top of a metal box that should have
been accessible, but a spinning handle kept whooshing past it and so
far he hadn't found the correct timing to push the button. Meanwhile
the green dot on the screen wavered lazily in no pattern and the honey
had developed a faint glow.

The bee was still buzzing, flying a looping course over the equipment,
until it finally dropped onto the same metal box the Professor was
leaning over. It wandered myopically across the surface on some bee
mission. Both the handle and the man were too high up to worry it. When
it got too near to the row of controls, he stopped stabbing his finger
futilely towards them and it simply crawled up onto the crucial button,
which slowly dropped into position.

“It's made the map again!” Belinda reported.

“Great Scott, did you see that?” the Professor muttered as he returned
to the screen. “Let's have a look at this chap. I've not tried honey
before.”

A neat profile of narrow peaks and corrugated lowlands was traced on
the screen. He bent close and whispered to himself, following them with
a gnarled finger, until the pattern disappeared suddenly back into the
uncommitted doodling of the dot. The bee had flown off and the button
popped up again. “Hmm! That really is it.” With a startling lurch and
perfect timing, he pressed it furiously down. Then he – and Belinda,
though she didn't really understand why – simply gaped at the screen.

The profile was different.

It had inverted itself, in fact. Where each hilltop had been was now a
sharp valley, and each valley had become a wobbling raised plain.

“Sir, what's happened?” Belinda asked quietly.

“It certainly shouldn't behave like this,” he said. “Let me see ...
here we have decadence; a peak for theft; this valley means cruelty,
and this wiggle is for ingratitude. This is when I pressed that switch.
But inverted, we would have ... community. Devoted service, here; we
believe this peak might mean something akin to love. Cooperation.
Hmm ...”

Footsteps from upstairs signalled that the children's parents had
awoken. The Professor turned off the motor and unplugged several things
from the extension cord. He had begun to move very slowly, his head
nodding in front of him with faraway eyes. “My dear. I must just stand
very still for a while and think on this,” he said. “You may divide
this rather singed honey between you, if you wish. Please apologise to
your parents for me; I shall not be long.”

Belinda did not fancy it much now but the boys fell on it gleefully.

“What on earth is all this?” Her father stood at the door, staring at
the cluttered kitchen. “Is that the pantry door? Has Professor Grey put
you up to all this?”

“It's, um, an experiment, Dad,” she tried to explain. “The Professor
was just showing us with the honey. It's a frequency map machine.”

“Frequency map? And what exactly is the frequency of honey, then?” he
asked roughly.

“It appears to depend,” the Professor said quietly, “on whether you're
a bee or a human being.”