AN: I'm sorry about this chapter being delayed. I've been mired in issues involving the State and license I didn't know I needed. Apparently no one told me I needed to be licensed to work in a clinical lab. I've been trying to get this license without the help of my college or the Graduate School I went to. I've been jumping through preverbal hoops for the better part of the month and it's making me crazy. Coupled with the fact my computer hasn't been behaving as nicely as I'd like it to, I've been a very unhappy camper. I'm still working on the license thing but now I have my laptop hooked up wirelessly so, if this computer isn't behaving, I can always move over to that one. Anyway, thanks for sticking around anyone out there still reading this mess of a story. I promise some action--- and Hawk's trial ---sooner rather than later. To anyone who's taken time out to read this story, thanks very much! I really appreciate you taking time out to read this misadventure. To anyone who's made my story a favorite, put me on alert, or left me a review, you rock like a box of socks. Remember, I'm always open to reviews…good, bad, or indifferent. Just let me know how I'm doing!
Disclaimer: I own nothing except the characters I made up and their Real World alter egos. I don't own The Matrix, The Animatrix, or any of that cool stuff. I'm broke and I just finished graduate school for my Master's Degree. All I own are my Pointe shoes.
"Weird
science
Things I've never seen before
Behind bolted
doors
Talent and imagination
Weird science…" (From "Weird Science" by Oingo Boingo)
Pixie figured Neo had assumed the worst when he'd stepped into her house and seen the lab she'd created for herself. There were plenty of stories, she knew, of homemade labs in the Matrix exploding because of experiments gone horribly wrong. From what she remembered, though, those labs were usually up to no good or the people running them only knew the basics of chemistry, if they knew that much.
Her lab was pretty safe, as far as Pixie was concerned. She'd gotten all her equipment from the Science Council. It wasn't new by any standards--- They kept the newer equipment for themselves. Though "newer" was a relative term in Zion. ---but it was still functional. The glassware she was using wasn't cracked or mended with duct tape. Broken glassware was actually melted down to make new glassware. Technically speaking, there was "new" glassware in Zion. It just wasn't what was used on the ships or by the younger members of the Science Council.
With Neo trailing behind her, looking at her oddly as she ran through the orange curtain that separated her bedroom from the rest of her house instead of parting it like a normal adult would, Pixie announced, "Welcome to my laboratory!"
"Isn't this your kitchen?" Neo asked, giving Pixie a confused glance and looking around the medium sized space.
She seemed almost at ease standing in the middle of the room, with her experiments working behind her. The room, itself, was as neat as Pixie's bedroom except for the bits of lab equipment sitting on stone and metal counters. Two he recognized as distillation devices--- and only because he'd seen Dozer's on the Nebuchadnezzar ---but the third device, Neo had no idea what that was.
"I only have three rooms since I'm not a high ranking officer. This space is my kitchen, living room, laboratory, and just about everything else. The only thing I don't do is sleep in here but that's because the couch hurts my back," Pixie commented with a painful looking shrug.
As she talked, she started to walk, a bit slower than before thanks to her back starting to bother her, among the experiments she had going. There were connections to be checked, lines to be adjusted, and, in the case of her vacuum flask, more liquid to be added. Since she was trying to "take it easy," Pixie only had three major experiments running in her kitchen.
If Wheeler, who'd taken over cooking duties when he discovered that Pixie didn't actually know how to cook, saw what she'd done to the kitchen area, Pixie figured he'd be less than pleased. He did have a point--- it wasn't smart to mix her experiments with the spaces used to prepare food ---but Pixie needed someplace to work when he wasn't around. She figured that her little experiments weren't a big deal since she was, in essence, creating "natural" compounds. The only reason they were called "artificial" was because they weren't made from "natural" sources. Since the natural sources didn't exist anymore--- though there were people on the Science Council who were trying to re-grow some of the plants from the Matrix in their underground home with varying degrees of success ---"artificial" was the best anyone could do at the moment. Maybe when they weren't so focused on winning the war, science could turn its collective head and mind to other things.
Not that there weren't people already focused on doing other things. Someone had to be responsible for the fact everyone in Zion wasn't eating the goop those who worked on the ships did. There were several someones, as a matter of fact, working on that. One had been a professor of Pixie's during her Academy days. She'd wanted Pixie to go into research work since she insisted it was more suited to Pixie's personality. It was quiet, safe work, perfect for someone like Pixie who was more of an academic than a fighter.
Pixie had always known she wasn't very strong nor was she insanely brave. Though the bravery claim was being disputed now by her friends after the fight she'd had with Hawk. Either way, she knew that applying for a job on a ship wasn't what her professors wanted her to do. Smart people, it was argued, should stay behind and help Zion by working in one of the labs. The young woman had other things in mind, though, and when it came down to choosing what job she'd like to have, she went with the job her professors had warned her against.
Still, Pixie couldn't deny the fact that she actually enjoyed everything and anything related to science. She'd taken every science course, both at the Academy---where she took classes with the Zion Borns because they were more "fun" ---and on the Nebuchadnezzar to supplement anything she might have missed learning in the Academy, she could get her hands and head around. Like many medics, in what little spare time they had, she did small things for the Science Council. They supplied the equiptment and whatever stock solutions the individual wanted and they were assigned experiments to work on.
Pixie had been given organic chemistry experiments--- very basic ones, at that. Basic as in Organic Chemistry Semester One experiments. ---to work on this time. Though they were taught in Organic Chemistry classes, there was nothing truly organic about what she was making. Not in the proper definition of the word "organic" anyway. They just mimicked organic compounds using inorganic solutions.
Most of the time her little experiments worked well enough that she'd been able to repeat them on the Nebuchadnezzar. That was how she'd learned to make the homemade pain killers that had gotten her into the fight with Hawk in the first place. It was an experiment that she'd been able to repeat many times over with good results.
The only time they didn't really work was when she was working with alcohols. For some reason working with alcohols never yielded the proper results. Her first experiment--- done in her first semester Organic Chemistry class ---using alcohols was just to make simple mash alcohol. Pixie remembered working at the same lab bench with Aisling, who'd been taking the class with her, and following every direction to the letter. When it came to boil off, then cool down, the alcohol to produce a product, Pixie found herself staring and a distillation apparatus that was doing nothing. She had no product to speak of.
Eventually the whole mess was chalked up to human error---the catchall term for what happened if an experiment didn't work in an Academy's lab class ---which worked for Pixie. It annoyed her that her experiment didn't work but sometimes things like that happened. When it her experiment failed the next time she worked with alcohols and the time after that, Pixie decided it had to be her. It wasn't human error ruining the experiments; it was just rotten luck on her part.
Now, though, Pixie figured she'd better get cracking on the whole making alcohol thing. That had been Dozer's job and she figured she'd inherited that along with his position as resident medic on the Nebuchadnezzar. Not that she'd wanted to earn the job the way she had but it was how things worked out.
Pixie was only vaguely aware of Neo watching her as she went about her work. Wheeler always joked that she stayed in her own head when she worked on her science projects. He'd told her once that he tried calling her for ten minutes while she was working and she hadn't heard him. It had taken him coming up behind her and tapping her on the shoulder--- making her jump in the process ---to get her attention. Changing the Erlenmeyer Flasks that were filling up at the ends of the two distillation devices, Pixie wandered over to the table with the capped, flat bottomed flasks in hand.
"Want to smell?" Pixie offered, setting the two closed flasks on the table before her.
"What do you have in there?" Neo wanted to know, looking at the two innocuous flasks as if they were about to explode and disgorge their liquid contents all over his lap. "Is it something dangerous?"
The fuller flask contained something that was orange in color but wasn't the bright orange of orange juice or what the Matrix said was orange juice anyway. It was more the dark orange color of dirty carrots. It didn't seem to have the same consistency as orange juice either. It looked slightly oily, bending the light like a car's oil slick. Neo was almost sure that, if he were to drink whatever was in the orange flask, he'd probably get sick.
The other flask was filled with something that looked like water. Like the orange filled flask, however, it was bending the light in an odd way. There was a faint rainbow across one of the sides of the flask as it bent the light in the room.
Neither flask seemed to contain anything particularly dangerous but Neo decided to be cautious. He remembered not only the homemade alcohol Cypher had given him but the things he'd been tricked into drinking and eating during his college days. Pixie might have looked like a young girl and seemed to be relatively harmless, but he still didn't trust what she was making in her little in-house lab.
"They're not dangerous," Pixie answered with something like a giggle but not quite. "They don't let us take the dangerous experiments home. Only fully vested members of the Science Council can work on the more dangerous experiments. They have their labs down in one of the lower levels with the other councils, I think."
"Then what's in the flasks?" Neo asked again.
"The orange one is called Limonene. It's the basis for any and every citrus scent that's known in the Matrix," Pixie explained. "That's why it sort of looks like dirty orange peels. It's actually the essence of orange."
Looking at the clear flask for a long moment, she added, "This one is a little harder to explain. See, I could tell you that it's peppermint but it's not really and I could tell you that it's spearmint but it's not really that either."
"What is it, then?" Neo broached.
An odd look crossing her face, Pixie sighed and explained, "It's pretty much a racemic compound because it contains almost the same amounts of the molecules that make up peppermint and spearmint. The two of them--- peppermint and spearmint ---are enantiomers so they're really hard to separate because they're basically the same molecule except one bends light to the right and ones bends it to the left. It's just easier to leave them together in a mixture. It doesn't smell so bad, even though it's a mix of two different things."
"You mean to tell me you're making perfume in here," Neo commented, trying his best to ignore the fact Pixie had just sounded very much like a chemistry textbook and the fact she was doing something very girly instead of dangerous like he'd initially thought.
"Not a chance," Pixie exclaimed, sounding almost insulted by Neo's claim. "The Science Council has bigger things going than making perfumes for the women here. It's not something that's helpful to the war effort. At least, that's how Commander Lock would put it. Where he's concerned, everything everyone does has to be helpful to the war effort."
Shrugging, and hiding a giggle behind her sleeve, Pixie added, "I guess you could use them as perfumes, really, but I wouldn't recommend it. You'd have to water it down until there was some small amount of parts per million in order to make wearing it tolerable. Using its pure form would be…disgusting…to say the least. Smell it and you'll understand what I mean."
Pixie pushed the dark orange flask towards Neo, trying to hide her frown as he unstoppered the flask and prepared to smell it. To her, and it might have been just because of where she'd been raised, the orange liquid smelled like orange or yellow Fruit Loops cereal. Well, what the Matrix said orange or yellow Fruit Loops smelled like. Either way, it wasn't a smell she enjoyed in its purest form.
She used the watered down version in her soap and shampoo so she didn't have to smell like hard water and engines all the time. It was girly and silly but it was the one concession she allowed herself. That and her hair, which was currently loose and not bound up in a braid. If she was home, there was a good chance her hair was loose. There was also the small problem of her braided hair hitting her bruised-but-healing shoulders. Wearing her hair down--- despite the ambient heat in Zion ---was the best option, Pixie figured. It was light enough not to hurt her shoulders whenever she moved, not like the tied end of her braid might.
One sniff of the viscous orange substance was all it took for Neo to start gagging. His face turned a startling shade of pale and Pixie was, for a long moment, afraid he was going to be sick. She could smell the strong, cloying odor coming off the orange flask from her seat across the table from Neo. Pixie fought the strong urge to push back in her seat just to get further away from the smell since it was that strong.
Pushing the flask back towards Pixie, wearing a disgusted look on his face and coughing in a painful sounding way, Neo asked, "What do you use that for?"
"It smells so strongly now because there's so much of it in the flask. It kind of hits you in the back of the throat when you smell it like that," Pixie explained. "Its practical applications, if you could call them that I suppose, would be to take, maybe, less than half an eyedropper full of either substance and mix in cough syrup for the younger kids in Zion. It makes their medication a little more palatable for them."
With a crafty sort of smile--- the type of smile that made Pixie look like her elven namesake ---she added, "My friends and I, well mostly my female friends, usually take one of the oils and mix it in with our shampoo and soap. That way it doesn't smell so…industrial, I guess."
Neo laughed, trying to imagine Trinity doing the same. For some reason, he had trouble imagining Trinity doing something like that. It did seem like something that a teenager--- something Pixie actually was, job or not ---would do though.
"It was my friend Aisling's idea," Pixie blurted, feeling the need to justify what she was doing to Neo. "Her mom works and makes soaps and stuff and she got the idea to start mixing the oils in with the stuff her mom makes. It sort of took off from there. A lot of girls do it so the feel more girly, I suppose. I mean, my friend Aisling says it's hard to be girly on a ship surrounded by guys."
From the one time he'd trained with Pixie--- Playing around in a program that was more role playing game than anything else ---Neo had learned three things about the young woman sitting in front of him. The first was that she really liked puzzles in every form except when they included numbers. Second was that Pixie was a lot smarter than she let on. The young woman knew more about most topics than he did, though that wasn't saying a lot. It was better to say that she knew almost as much about things as any other older member of the Resistance despite the young age.
The third thing, the one that was coming into play now, was that Pixie tended to babble when she was nervous. She'd managed to tell him the entire history--- or as much of it as was known ---of the humans who came out of the Matrix just because she accidently called him a "freak."
"Is that all you make?" Neo asked, vaguely gesturing to the nosiest machine Pixie still had running. "Any other experiments you have going in here?"
Pixie opened her mouth to explain when a very loud knock and a shout outside her red door got her attention. It wasn't so much the knocking that interrupted her train of thought but the shout. It was a voice she'd recognize anywhere and one she wasn't expecting at the moment. Since everything was making her jump at the moment, unpleasant side effect of her panic attacks, Pixie excused herself and went to see who was making such a racket at her front door.
