Love on the Brain by Ali Hazelwood

            Guy notices. “Want a sneak peek at the helmet prototype?” he asks.

            My eyes widen. “Is that what’s in there?”

            He nods and smiles. “Just the shell for now, but I can show you.”

            “That would be amazing,” I gasp. Embarrassing, how breathless I sound when I get excited. I need to follow through with my Couch-to-5K plans.

            The lab is much larger than I expected—dozens of benches, machines I’ve never seen before pressed against the wall, and several researchers at various stations. I feel a frisson of resentment—how come Levi’s lab, unlike mine, is fully stocked?—but it quiets down the instant I see it.

            It.

            BLINK is a complex, delicate, high-stakes project, but its mission is straightforward enough: to use what is known about magnetic stimulation of the brain (my jam) to engineer special helmets (Levi’s expertise) that will reduce the “attentional blinks” of astronauts—those little lapses in awareness that are unavoidable when many things happen at once. It’s the culmination of decades of gathering knowledge, of engineers perfecting wireless stimulation technology on one side and neuroscientists mapping the brain on the other. Now, here we are.

            Neuroscience and engineering, sitting in a very expensive tree called BLINK, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.

            It’s hard to communicate how groundbreaking this is—two separate slices of abstract research bridging the gap between academia and the real world. For any scientist, the prospect would be exhilarating. For me, after the mild shitshow my career has put up in the past couple of years, it’s a dream come true.

            All the more now that I’m standing in front of tangible proof of said dream’s existence.

            “That’s the . . . ?”

            “Yep.”

            Rocío murmurs, “Wow,” and for once doesn’t even sound like a sullen Lovecraftian teenager. I’d tease her about it, but I can’t focus on anything but the helmet prototype. Guy is saying something about design and stage of development, but I tune him out and step closer. I knew that it’d be made from a combination of Kevlar and carbon fiber cloth, that the visor would carry thermal and eye-tracking capabilities, that the structure would be streamlined to host new functionalities. What I did not know was how stunning it would look. A breathtaking piece of hardware, designed to house the software I’ve been hired to create.

            It’s beautiful. It’s sleek. It’s . . .

            Wrong.

            It’s all wrong.

            I frown, peering closer at the pattern of holes in the inner shell. “Are these for the neurostimulation output?”

            The engineer working at the helmet station gives me a confused look. “This is Dr. Königswasser, Lamar,” Guy explains. “The neuroscientist from NIH.”

            “The one who fainted?”

            I knew this would haunt me, because it always does. My nickname in high school was Smelling Salts Bee. Damn my useless autonomic nervous system. “The one and only.” I smile. “Is this the final placement for the output holes?”

            “Should be. Why?”

            I lean closer. “It won’t work.” A brief silence follows, and I study the rest of the grid.

            “Why do you say that?” Guy asks.

            “They’re too close—the holes, I mean. It looks like you used the International 10–20 system, which is great to record brain data, but for neurostimulation . . .” I bite into my lip. “Here, for instance. This area will stimulate the angular gyrus, right?”

            “Maybe? Let me just check. . . .” Lamar scrambles to look at a chart, but I don’t need confirmation. The brain is the one place where I never get lost. “Upper part—stimulation at the right frequency will get you increased awareness. Which is exactly what we want, right? But stimulation of the lower part can cause hallucinations. People experiencing a shadow following them, feeling as though they’re in two places at the same time, stuff like that. Think of the consequences if someone was in space while that happened.” I tap the inner shell with my fingernail. “The outputs will need to be farther apart.”