Arcs of pain curved across my skull. The chain sat cold against my leg. My head felt heavier than usual, and I knew it wasn't just because of the sedative still crawling through my bloodstream.
I was begging the professor for my freedom.
"Let me go. let me go please, just let me go, you can't do this to me, I helped you with all of this..."
"Well, that's the point," they spoke without looking back. A sound from their workbench, parts clicking together. "I'm curious if you can reason your way out of it. You're self-aware, stable, and decently clever. Most of all, you understand what I'm going to do to you."
I did understand. That's why I was begging.
Addiction is as easy as an electrode cozied up to your pleasure center. I promise you the CIA tried to get value out of that one, back in the fifties, but to no end: fucking up someone's reward system fucks up too many other things. Easier to stick with traditional means of control: threats, blackmail, cash.
The professor's approach is a bit different. It still involves electrodes, but more of them, placed with greater care. It involves mystics in MRIs, and papers with dry names like "neural correlates of transcendental experiences". I was there for all of it. I knew what we were making.
As they pressed the button, I realized I actually didn't know anything.
The sky is blue, right? You don't use logic to figure that one out. You don't use logic to know what music you like, to decide whether you're hungry, to determine one plus one is two. You just know.
So what I knew, with that confidence-beyond-doubt, is that the professor was God.
I was free. Of course the chain remained, but I was the chain, I was the basement and the building and the world, and all these things were love. I understood all things and all things understood me and I was in awe of the perfection of the universe. Fear fell away like a butterfly's cocoon.
My worldview shifted to account for its new pillar. The professor had done this to me; thus the professor was divine. What I was feeling was wires and magnets, and so God lived in every wire and every magnet. Everything leading up to this, each paper, each experiment, had been a set-up for my test of faith. I'm curious if you can reason your way out of it? Of course I couldn't. A lifetime of being told the sky is green doesn't beat a single upwards glance.
I floated and watched and sang, the world holy holy holy, until it wasn't anymore and I came crashing back to earth.
The basement floor was colder than before. There was sweat on my forehead. My body shook. I had, at one point, gotten on my knees. The professor was watching me. More kindly than before. Wiser than before.
I was back to my old self, just changed forever. I'd had the sort of experience that makes people into murderers or saints, that causes them to become anchorites or hermits or self-immolators. I knew there was a God: forgetting that would be like forgetting the sun exists the moment you close your eyes.
I'd observed. I'd drawn conclusions. I'd learned. The core of science, once you free yourself from your preconceptions of what 'science' should conclude.
And so I pressed my head into the floor, overcome with reverence for the one who had shown me the way.
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