story time! story time!!! (face plant into carpet)

 

Gather round young ones for I will tell you a tale.

It has nothing to do with band camp no no… this is a story of old yet it so seems
to apply to modernity. Way back in oh 1999 (where many of you may have still
been in the upper levels of elementary school) times were simpler cigarettes
still killed you but cost a lot less and jeans were so big you could almost
literally fit a small village under each leg. Yes my young ones these were the
days and then the world went to hell… and sparkly vampires were found to be
actual reality. the end!

But that’s not the end now is it, otherwise this would be a horrible story. no no
this is the story of my highly interesting former roommate hanna and her summer
of mad science, I say mad because she was a little less than sane in all
reality. Hanna was fascinated with everything she didn’t know about and her
latest interest had fallen on this new think called biotech.

I am still unaware of what happened in those 8 hours I was slaving away out on
the flight line that day but when I came home she was raging about conspiracy of
the government to keep us all from knowing the simplest scientific knowledge. “They
are hording all the discoveries, giving them only to the rich I tell you. I bet
we would have a cure for everything if we just gave it to bill gates. One week!
That’s all it would take!” 

I’m sure you could imagine my concern for my personal safety at this point. 

This went on for about an hour before I informed her that I was going to lay down
and walked (ran) to my room locking the door behind me. When I woke hours later
hoping that it was a dream I discovered that it wasn’t that while I was
blissfully slumbering she had been busy researching and then shopping. Our living
room had been transformed into a makeshift laboratory, looking around with my
mouth hanging open I managed to stutter out that this is not ok… mostly because
I wanted to play video games for a while.

“Not ok!!! This is more than ok we are going to discover… crack codes! What if we
find the answer to the questions that scientist have been struggling to answer
for decades?” As she rambled on I did a hasty calculation of how long it would
take me to pack and move out of the apartment without her noticing; only
problem was that she did work down the hall from me. “what about the possibility
of the government busting in one of these days in the middle of one of your experiments
frau Frankenstein and taking our asses to prison? I don’t know about you but I really
don’t feel like going to jail because you believe you can save mankind with a
can of spam, a toothpick and well basically you’re not MacGyver.” 

She looked at me with some form of disbelief, like I had just put the cats paws in jello cups. After a moment of silence I sighed and said alright whats the plan. She laid out what she wanted to do, order DNA from a lab do the fun investigative stuff and I got to be the trusty side kick. Basically she called me robin. I couldn’t resist asking where she put my tights.

The days became weeks, weeks, months, into years deployments came and went and
before we knew it, it was June 2001. I was less optimistic than she who kept
saying science takes time; Rome wasn’t built in a day and all the other cliché things
that could fill the space. I was coming up on another deployment and excused
myself from her mad science for a few days and left a week later. In September before
I returned home I got an email from her saying she had done it but wouldn’t go
into detail and would tell me when I got home. Back in country on the 10th
waking on the 11th the next call I got from her was more panic than
anything else partially due to the events the rest with what she was going to
do “we have to get rid of this stuff”. 

She found a way in the next 24 hours and by the time I got home the living room
resembled a living space again; she had collected her notes and put them
somewhere safe. Less than a week later we were both gone, when I got back I told
her I was moving out and a couple weeks later we parted ways. About a year ago I
heard from her, she had moved south where people didn’t seem to care what you
did they minded their own business there but she was still very active in her
work and had gone to school for it. She had made quite a few advances too. We had
a good talk, before saying our goodbyes an hour or so later. And I haven’t
heard from her since.