Nano Bot Perfection

Tina scrolled through a mental list of all the mistakes that had led her to this moment. There were many, but most were minor and only mattered because they were so numerous. Some were pretty bad, she had been sloppy and had only seen the good of her work. But the biggest one, the one that mattered was not understanding how Ava saw the world and herself.

Ava had survived a fire when she was 12. She thought that survived was a good word for it. She was alive but would never be the same. The burns had disfigured her face and body, people didn't shrink back in horror when they looked at her, but they didn't see beyond the twisted flesh either. The scars on her body were nothing compared to the scars of her psyche, scars that only grew deeper with each person who treated her differently due to her disfigurement.

At 30 she had a PhD in neuroscience and had joined the staff of the university that she had studied at. She had been a sympathy hire, who needs DEI when you have third-degree burns across 40% of your body, she was a minority of one here. Officially her work centered on human perception and HOW it worked. Her personal goal was to find a way to CHANGE human perception, to get people to see what she wanted them to see, the lonely woman under her scars.

"Powering up the helmet Dr. Stern. Neural mapping has begun." the intern's stare was fixed on a monitor, his voice chipper but professional.

"Bring up the display," Dr. Ava Stern said moving her focus from her laptop screen to the big screen on the wall.

The screen had been dark, not off, just inactive. Suddenly it was alive with what looked like an X-ray of a human skull, bright flashes of light streaked and pulsed within the skull.

"Isolate red and run the second set," Ava instructed.

She looked back at her laptop, the screen was split into four boxes, each with different information. Her eyes focused on the video feed in the upper left corner. In it, a young man was sitting in what looked like an old time electric chair. On his head was a black helmet that looked like little more than a fish bowl that had been painted black. Inside it was an audio visual suite that fed in sounds and images. A collar went from the edge of the helmet to the wearer's neck, effectively cutting off all light and sound. A series of images and or sounds would be shown to each subject and their brain activity recorded.

He was also strapped tightly to the chair. Straps were around his body and his arms and legs were strapped to the chair firmly. In the past several subjects had moved or thrashed when they saw or heard certain things. This had resulted in a few minor bumps and bruises but in one incident the subject got out of the chair and fell over. This caused $1.2 million dollars in damage and almost crashed her project's already strained budget, now all subjects had to agree to be restrained.

Each subject filled out a twenty-page questionnaire and was interviewed two or three times before being scanned. Ava used this to add images and sounds that the subject should respond to in certain ways into the standard sets everyone was exposed to. Today's subject had indicated that he was in a promising new relationship and a picture of the pretty coed was included in the second set of sights and sounds.

"Damn," the intern muttered at the bright red streak that flashed across the big screen.

"Stay focused, interpretation can come afterward." Ava chided.

"But still... damn," he replied.

The whole scanning procedure took only ten minutes and the intern prepared to power down the device.

"Wait, run set BU," Ava said before he could flip the switch to cool down.

"Set BU?" he said, unfamiliar with it.

"It's in the new batch I uploaded last week."

"You're the boss, boss."

Ava smiled as she looked at her laptop again, she could see the subject's lips moving silently.

"I still can't figure out what happened there," her intern, Alan, said as he flipped through the chart of set 2. They were in her lab along with two other students who helped catalog each scan.

"Love is complicated," Jenn said not looking up from her readout of the scan.

"It's just more evidence that love, hate, passion, and anger are linked," Ava said confidently.

"Don't you agree Sarah?" She turned towards the third student. Sarah had gone through a rough break up which had led her to join the brain scan project.

"I don't know," was all the usually quiet and reserved undergrad said.

Inwardly Ava smiled, she found Sarah to be almost irresistibly attractive. Ava found herself attracted to most people in one way or another, a side effect of not ever having anyone look at her as an attractive or unattractive woman. Her scars either made people not allow themselves to want her or they fetishized the scars and were attracted to THEM, not her.

As she stared at the read out in her hands she imagined Sarah strapped into the chair she had constructed in her garage, helmet on, running a series of sets that only she knew about.

"Tina," Ava said a bit icily as Tina sat down.

"Ava," Tina Macek said cheerfully. She believed that she understood why Ava was always so cold and prickly and wanted to make her a happier person. And it just so happened that her project had potential implications for Ava.

"Dr. Thomas has approved animal testing, by this time next week I will either be very happy or very frustrated," Tina said as she sat down across from Ava. She ate lunch with her a few times a week, she hated seeing Ava always alone.

"I thought that you were always frustrated," Ava said without looking up from her plate.

"Nah, Dr. Thomas isn't so bad. If we have good results he will steal all the credit. But the university would never have allowed me to run a project this big and innovative. He only shows up in the lab two or three times a week and never stays long." Tina said this with a smile, she truly was alright with not getting credit and Dr. Thomas should have retired a decade ago so she understood why he was never around.

Ava surprised herself when she smiled. It wasn't that she felt happy for Tina or her progress, it was that Tina had totally missed what she had meant by "frustrated". Tina was all work and no play, a do gooder who had no time for herself.

Tina replied to Ava's smile with a big smile of her own and she went headlong into telling Ava what she could about the nanobots she was making. Ava looked at her intently, not hearing a word, she was mentally undressing Tina as she ate. Every time she did this, and it was often, Tina turned out to look a little different naked. Sometimes she had a killer body, firm breasts, and thighs. Other times she was flabby and without a bra, her boobs drooped down to her navel. Ava doubted that Tina had ever considered having sex with a woman and Ava wouldn't go out of her way to be Tina's first. But she had to find some way to survive her boring and often self-righteous monologues and this was the best way she had found.

Ava went from lunch to a post-scan interview with the young man that she ran the BU series with. She interviewed him just like she had the 12 test subjects before him. But at the end, very casually, she asked, "How are things going with you and... what was her name? Olivia?"

"Oh, we broke up... well I broke up with her."

"That's sad to hear, what went wrong?"

"I don't know... I just woke up one morning and couldn't get the thought out of my head." His face suddenly went blank and his voice was monotone, "Break up with Olivia, break up with Olivia, break up, Break Up, Break Up."