Math came and went without incident. In fact, the rest of the day came and went without incident; before I knew it, it was already late into the evening. I'd gotten Chinese from a great little hole-in-the-wall near campus and settled into my dorm room for the night with headphones, music, and a thermos full of tea. This had become my routine for the semester: do any assignments that needed doing, eat, tea, music, sleep. I might also read something or putter around with simple games, but the main thing was to keep myself so engaged in what I was listening to that it kept the stress down. It was so much easier to keep my own emotions under control if I could get swept up in someone else's...

Pacing myself on the tea was a bit of a challenge, though. It was soothing up to a point, but too much and I'd get caffeine jitters. This was one of those nights, and frankly, my musical selection could've been better. Larks' Tongues in Aspic is an incredible album, but not one you want to listen to in a darkened room at night with chemically-jangled nerves rattling on top of your usual angst-driven stress. Particularly not if your roommate happens to barge in from the lighted hallway right at that abrupt shrieking brass sting leading into the final track.

Which, naturally, was exactly what happened. The door flung open, piercing the darkness with a flood of light and a tall, shadowy figure in the middle of it like the poster for The Thing, exactly at the critical moment. I just about jumped out of my skin, and it took a good minute to peel myself off the figurative ceiling. "Jeezus, Gil!" I snapped.

Gilad, for his part, was valiantly failing to keep from busting out laughing. "Oh man, you shoulda seen the look on your face! I swear I thought you were just gonna explode."

I hurled my empty takeout box at him, and he dodged it cleanly. He moved quick for someone with mostly sedentary hobbies; maybe because he was a gamer, but I'd seen plenty of people whose twitchy-thumb skills didn't carry over to real life. But some geeks are just blessed with a naturally wiry build; the amount of time he spent lugging around computers that were older than either of us and weighed a substantial fraction of what he did probably didn't hurt, either.

"Sorry, sorry," he said, picking up the paper carton and switching on the lights. "Didn't realize you were that on-edge. You okay, man?"

I shrugged. "About the usual. Too much caffeine, I guess." And a bunch of coursework, and my constant low-key existential angst...

He frowned. "'The usual' doesn't seem that great, to be honest. You need to relax a bit, Freeman. I mean, it's not like you're doing bad in your classes or anything, right?"

"No," I said. I hoped he'd let it drop; he was a decent guy, and surprisingly tactful and social for a programmer, but I wasn't eager to talk with anybody about my issues, let alone someone I'd known for barely more than a month.

He got the hint and shrugged. "Alright, but seriously - you're gonna give yourself a heart attack like that, sooner or later." He brightened. "Hey, y'know, we're gonna start having parties on Fridays. You should come sometime."

I frowned. "Sorry, but hanging out with a bunch of drunken meatheads isn't my idea of a good time."

LSC wasn't known for being a major party school, but there were a few fraternal organizations, and they seemed to be dedicated to living down to the "fratboy" reputation. I'd gone to one party back at the start of the semester to see if it was anywhere I could ever belong, stood in the corner most of the evening, nearly got groped by a guy who was so completely out of his skull that he mistook a 6'3" adult male for a woman, had to stop him from crawling all over an actual woman who wanted nothing to do with him, and got summarily kicked out of the building for being a buzzkill.

That hadn't endeared them to me any. Neither had another frat's habit of getting roaring drunk and tooling around campus (read: the dorm parking lots) at 3:00 A.M. on an antique and sorely-abused fire truck, whooping and hollering like lunatics.

"Not like a frat party, dumbass. In the lab. A LAN party."

Turning my attention back to Gil, I raised an eyebrow. "Those are still a thing?"

He grinned. "You get a couple dozen CS geeks with access to a lab full of computers, you get LAN parties - hell, before there were even LANs proper. Our kind have been doing this since Spacewar! was a thing, my friend."

I stared blankly. "The '60s," he clarified. "There was a whole article in Rolling Stone about it."

"Ah." I took his word for it; I didn't get the reference, and asking would just get him into lecture mode. I wasn't inclined to drag the conversation on any longer than necessary, even if Gil's lecture mode was as good-natured and enthusiastic as Emma's.

"Anyway, you should totally come," he said, settling in at his computer - his modern computer, as distinct from the half-dozen machines dating back as far as the mid-'70s (or so he'd told me) that took up almost all of his side of the room besides the bed. "I mean, some of us probably will be drunk, but, y'know, just pizza-'n-beer drunk, not fratboys-'n-Jäger-bombs drunk."

"I'll think about it," I said, knowing I wouldn't. It was nice of him to offer, really, but I wasn't going to fit in any better with a bunch of CS nerds than I did with the physics students. The problem was with me, not my surroundings.

"Well, think about something, whatever you do," he said, with what sounded like genuine concern in his voice; his fingers clacked nervously across the keyboard of one of the ancient machines, though it wasn't powered on. "Just holing up in here all the time can't be good for you."

I shrugged. I had as much reason to be here as I had to be anywhere else, I thought. Which was to say, not much at all.

The next few weeks rolled by in the same way; classes, assignments, eat, drink, and sleep pretty much on auto-pilot. Meanwhile, my evening routine and my time with Tammy and Emma and Gil kept me from getting an ulcer from the gnawing existential dread of having no idea why I was even doing any of it in the first place. There was a bunch of commotion around the Oesterlund Building as a spare classroom was refitted into a lab space, and a bunch more when a team of workmen wheeled in pieces of equipment that cost who-knew-how-much apiece, and a handful of expert technicians assembled them into a machine that definitely cost in the tens of millions.

And it didn't even take a week for Emma to lose her marbles.

It was Tuesday, and we were heading down to the cafeteria for lunch; Tammy had one of her med classes that day and was coming from another building. I was strolling casually down the hallway; Emma had started off that way, but her steps grew gradually stompier and stompier as she pulled ahead of me, and I could see her shoulders tensing up. I wondered what was bothering her, but I thought I could guess.

Abruptly, she whirled around and lunged up into my face; I leapt back, startled, and nearly tripped backwards. Fortunately, I caught myself against a nearby drinking fountain.

"I can't take it anymore!" she hissed, hands clawing at the air like a cartoon character. "Not only aren't they letting us at that bad boy, they're not even doing anything with it themselves!"

"Easy there!" I said, surprised at the sudden eruption. "And, really? You sure they're not just taking their time setting things up correctly?"

She shook her head, huffing angrily. "No - they finished break-in testing on Thursday. All clear, everything checks out, they just don't have any plans to even test it in practical application, like, at all. I badgered every faculty member I could corner, and nothing. It's all just some indefinite 'down the road' thing. Insane!"

That last interjection was nearly a shout; I looked around the hallway nervously. "Hey, look, people are starting to stare. C'mon, let's go get lunch and then you can bitch at Tammy and I about it in a nice quiet corner of the cafeteria."

Emma assented with an irritated grunt, and we continued on our way, but she was still stomping. It was something to see; she was usually the cheeriest, most well-adjusted of the three of us, but it seemed like having this thing she found so tantalizing perpetually in view but out of reach really got under her skin.

We arrived and ordered lunch, then found the most secluded back-corner table that was still wheelchair-accessible. I texted Tammy to let her know where we were - and warn her of impending drama - and then settled in for the rant-storm. It wasn't that bad, really; Emma just needed to vent, and all you need for that is an audience that can smile and nod along. I was experienced at that.

She railed about missed opportunities, blinkered faculty, insufficient dedication to the sciences, and how much she was paying in tuition for this, and I nodded and made noises of agreement and shrugged sympathetically at the appropriate moments. Hell, at least emotional support was a reason for me to be here.

Tammy wheeled up a couple minutes in and set her tray of sushi down. I took the opportunity to make a break in the conversation. "Man, do you ever eat anything else?"

She gave me the stink-eye and poked her chopsticks threateningly in my direction. "Screw you, I like it. Besides, unlike some of us, I actually have to pay close attention to my diet."

I bit my lip and nodded in apology; that was my bad. But she just shrugged and turned to Emma with a wry smirk. "So I hear we're planning a mass protest or something?"

Emma laughed bitterly. "Geez, I wish. If people cared half as much about the potential metamorphic science has for human advancement as they do about, say, sports, it'd be a better world."

I pondered for a moment. "Wait, is it still human advancement...?"

Tammy ignored my pointless musing. "Right, right. So tell me, in this fantasy universe where athletics doesn't matter and everybody goes to quiz bowls for fun, what would you even do with the thing, if you got it? Since we're still as far out from being able to induce a pre-calculated change as you claim?"

Emma bit her lip. "Wellll...I dunno? Maybe, like, get a rat...?"

"A rat," Tammy said dryly, as she picked up one of those little seaweed-wrapped rice-roll things and popped it in her mouth.

She grimaced sheepishly. "I mean, the point is that it's ridiculous just to do nothing with this. But, sure, why not? The biology crowd can spare a rat. Get one, pick a probability level, then energize that baby and see what happens. Whatever it ends up being, it's gotta be a better fate than being dissected."

I nodded thoughtfully. It was true, one of the odder points about transformations: they were never harmful, as such. Of course, two hundred-plus Navy crewmen might not want to be mermaids, and survival post-incident might present its own challenges, but subjects never ended up mutilated or only able to breathe sulfuric acid or scattered into a pile of dismembered meat chunks or anything. Proponents of the Strong Anthropomorphic Principle saw it as a key argument in their favor.

"It's probably a better fate than being a rat in any case," I said. "Even the ones that don't die in experiments just get cancer."

"No kidding," Tammy said. "I think my sister went through like five before she finally got tired of them dying on her. Cute little bastards, though."

There was a break in the conversation as Emma and I went to get our orders, sat down, and tucked in. We ate quietly, the hubbub of everyone else's conversations around us drowning out the silence at our table; it wasn't until she was staring down the last of her Philly cheesesteak that Emma started to get owly again.

"Y'know," she said, "this'd be so much simpler if we were a bunch of dumb fratboys. We'd just get blitzed out of our damned minds and go play pranks on each other with the thing." She brightened. "Hey, maybe we could use a frat instead of a rat." She paused, waiting for the laugh track to kick in, but she had to content herself with grinning at her own half-assed pun.

"Dunno if you wanna follow that line of reasoning, Em," Tammy said. "I mean, those idiots would probably give each other the Black Death if you made a drinking game out of it. Not my first choice for a life coach." She gestured dismissively with her chopsticks as she spoke, a piece of pickled ginger threatening to slip out of her grasp and probably land in my lap.

Emma chuckled. "Well, I didn't mean the part about getting drunk and acting like idiots. Just...man, why is it that it's the irresponsible morons in this world who just do whatever they want, and the rest of us who have to worry about coloring inside the lines and waiting our turn and not making waves? Riddle me that, Batman."

"'The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity?'" It was only after I said it that I realized I was fanning a flame that I probably shouldn't - but Emma's eyes lit up immediately.

"Exactly!" she cried, lunging forward to the point of leaning over the table, the cafeteria's fluorescent lights catching her glasses just so as to glint off the lenses and obscure her eyes. "If we could just barge in and do science whenever we wanted, just imagine what kind of progress we could make. Instead, we're stuck waiting around for God knows how long just to get a chance, while the faculty sit around watching their dumb...hockey...game..."

I could sense the wheels turning in her mind as she trailed off, but it was only later that I realized what kind of thoughts had been formulating behind those big full-moon glasses.

If only I'd kept my mouth shut.