“Does the offer still stand?” she asks, leaning against the wall next to my door in the dimly lit corridor. Everyone else has already left, and I am, as usual, the last person to leave. I have been so lost in thought that I didn’t even notice her being there.
I exhale in relief.
“How long have you been waiting here?” I ask without answering her question as I lock the door.
“A while,” she says without further elaboration.
I stare at her, gaining information.
She looks sharper, less agitated.
“Come with me,” I say and walk all the way through the corridor, down the stairs, through endless doors until we reach my lab.
I unlock the door with my card. Maybe the most reckless thing I have ever done, but here we are.
“This is my lab,” I say as I turn on the lights, walk to a workstation, enter the password, and scan my iris so everything springs to life.
She walks through the lab with a curious gaze, taking in the screens and other equipment.
I watch her as she walks through the rows. She walks past the laboratory section and stops at the location where the TMS and tDCS devices are stored. Her eyes wander to the visualization screens, where my recent fMRI brain scans are displayed.
She stands in front of them, her head slightly tilted. “What’s the subject’s background?” she asks.
“Twenty-seven-year-old male, imprisoned for life for stabbing three women. The scan was taken after an imagined rejection by a female subject who denied closeness,” I say from where I stand several yards away from her.
“That’s hell of a lit up amygdala,” she says. “Quite enlarged, is it not?”
“It is,” I say, and I know it was the right decision to bring her here. Even though I might land in prison for showing her classified research without clearance.
“What changed between the scans?” she asks as she stares at the second one. “It’s less reactive.”
“Three months of following an entirely new approach designed to stop the hijacking.”
“It’s what you research,” she says and turns to me. “You don’t just want to predict it, you want to cure it. You want to cure evil.”
“Curing is a harsh and perfectionist approach, just as evil is not the right word,” I say. “I would rather refer to it as a reduction of potential triggers.”
“What is the approach?”
“It is a form of re-training neural pathways and rationalized reactions through techniques like meditation, breathwork, andself-awareness to increase frontal lobe development and reduce the activation of the amygdala.”
Her eyes unfocus for a moment, and I walk over to a workstation next to her.
“But wouldn’t that require a subject’s desire to actually change to be successful?”
“It would,” I say, and delight tugs on the corner of my mouth as I pull up a flowchart, but she doesn’t look at it.
“Why would they want to?” she asks and looks me straight in the face.
I chuckle.
“Can’t you imagine a single situation worth changing? Not for, but because the status quo is painful enough, so it requires a subject to change?”
She scoffs and takes a step back, because she, of course, has sniffed the underlying message.
“I am not evil,” she says.
“I didn’t say you are.”
