The Dangers of Tattoos

Two minutes into Intro, just as I announced that a quiz would follow the lecture, Angelica Merndevel screamed. Everyone laughed, thinking she was making a joke. But Angelica kept screaming, a high pitched, banshee wail. She grabbed her forearm and began to slide out of her chair, twisting and turning, trying to escape the pain in her arm. I was stunned; they don’t prepare you for this in grad school. It wasn’t until she hit the floor that I started to move.

Someone beat me to her. Kathy Greer was kneeling next to Angelica as I got there. She had come all the way from the back of the room to the front row before I could move the five feet that separated me form Angelica. She must have started moving the moment Angelica screamed. Kathy wrenched the girl onto her back and swore. Under Angelica’s finger, I could see the mobile-tat flashing and pulsating. With each twist and pulse of light, it shook itself out of its natural shape and spread through her skin. Kathy looked up at me an ordered, “Hold her.”

I dropped down and pinned Angelica’s legs. The boy sitting next to her — a Legacy whose name I can never remember, Bob or Biff or Wellington — shook himself, slid out of his chair and reached for Angelica. “Arms,” Kathy instructed, and he pinned Angelica’s arms to her sides. Kathy looked down at Angelica for a moment and then pulled a knife out of her back pocket.

She paused, then slashed. Angelica screamed even louder, but Kathy slashed again, peeling the infected skin off in sure, quick slices. BobBiffWellington turned grey and Angelica nearly kicked my ribs out, but we held on until Kathy had completed her surgery.

And then it was done. Twenty minutes later, the departmental first aid kit had been fetched, Angelica’s would had been cleaned and bandaged, paramedics had wheeled her out and the three of us, Kathy, BobBiffWellington, and me were leaning on my desk, watching the police put the finishing touches on our statements. BobBiffWellington broke the moment. “That was amazing, dude.”

Kathy smiled. It looked out of place on her gaunt, angular face. “Yeah, when I was on patrol in Caracas once, the guy next to me got grazed by a sniper. It busted his mobile-tat and he reacted like he’d been gut shot. The corpsman did just what I did. He told us later that if the chems and stuff hadn’t been cleared out, they could’ve burned his skin away.” She shook her head. “Shame, too, it was a real nice tat. Stars and Stripes rippling across his bicep like it was blowing in a Georgia breeze.”

“I thought that those things were safe,” I said.

“Well, if ya go to a legit place. The cheaper guys just use whatever junk they get their hands on. It’s okay as long as it stay in the tubing, but if it gets out your in trouble.” She pushed up her sleeve to reveal a rather impressive Marine Corps tattoo done in red and black ink. “That’s why I stick with ink.”

BobBiffWellington had apparently just caught the Caracas reference. “Caracas, huh? Wow, you are old.” The moment he said it, his eyes widened and he turned beat red. “I .. I .. I mean you look good for your age.”

She shook her head. “Aww, you say the nicest things.”

BobBiffWellington turned even redder and I took pity on him. “Why don’t you go and ask the department secretary to get someone in here for me to clean up that blood?” He nodded and practically ran off.

“Thanks, Prof. Why did you tell the cops the knife was yours, though?”

“School policy forbids weapons on the campus. I can get away with since I can claim I need it for my lab work.”

She grinned. “I didn’t realize bi-ops and nano factories were so violent.” She stood up, patted her pockets theatrically and announced “I am off to find a smoke.”

“On campus?” I snorted. “Good luck.”

“That’s why I intend to go looking in a bar.”

So those are today’s lessons: cigarettes can be found in bars and stick with plain old ink for your tattoos. Now you can never say that you never learned anything useful in school.

The March of the Political Officer

The Political Officer visited my Advanced Genetic Engineering class today, for the third time in six weeks.

That is not his official job title, of course, but an honorarium this particular assistant dean has earned. When he visits your class to “observe”, you and the students had better hope that you stick to the approved topics. This is a bit of a problem for the tele-students.

Tele-students are the pride and joy of the University. Once the telcos were forced to reinstate network neutrality as the price of government laid fiber, some clever bugger in the IT department figured out that we could make money off all the new bandwidth by offering internet based video classes. Doing it through the internet would allow the students to interact in practically real time. Not wanting to be accused of poaching local stundents by other universities, the administration decided to offer this to just overseas students. It has been a huge hit. My AGE class has a row of two-way television screens off to one side, so that the students can see me and the rest of the class. The interaction really is excellent – it is like the students are sitting here in real time and the time difference doesn’t seem to bother anyone.

And I can mute the tele-students. Would that I could do that to all the students.

The program has been a big success in India in particular. All my tele-students are Indian, and I think the number is something like 95% university wide. India is rich, growing, and English speaking. It is also much more democratic than the US, which brings me back to the problem of the political officer. The Indian students can sometimes prove distressingly unwilling to let go of topics that American students know to downplay or soft pedal.

I could never express that sentiment

I can see you smiling; I can feel the amusement radiating through the fiber and washing through the room. “Political Officer. Silly lefty academic with his silly paranoia.” I wish it was paranoia, but it is not. My state has an Academic Bill of Rights. That means anyone can complain that my teaching offends them and is political indoctrination. Topics such as evolution and its affects on our field and the contributions of stem cells to the science have to be dealt with very, very carefully if I want to avoid hassles. The Political Officer is more than willing to hand over a recording of my class to disgruntled students or off campus “student rights” organizations. I have tenure, so I cannot lose my job, but it still an irritant.

More importantly, though, is that I work in a lab and a field that has the potential to do a great deal of harm. The government is well aware of that. The security restrictions on us are, while not overpowering, certainly present, like are a slight smell that you get used to and ignore, until something brings it back to your attention. And Joseph Padilla died in a US Navy prison, having never been tried, and Enrique Martinez is still in one, along with who knows how many other people. The power is there, even if it is not used very much. The government would prefer that only patriots of its definition work with this material. The Political Officer is more than happy to point out where a professor’s definition of patriotism and the government’s differ but even so much as an unguarded comment or slight frown of disapproval.

It is important to investigate such things, the Political Officers swear, because we cannot have terrorist infiltrators gaining access to such dangerous information and materials. Loyalty must be assured.

He didn’t say anything, but he never does. He came in the middle of the class, silently oozing into a chair at the back where he could take careful notes on each participant. I think I handled it well enough. This has become something of a routine. I take a larger role in the discussion, guide it more. Come, follow me, students, away from the discussion of the benefits of fetal stem cells in our engineer, away from the questions of morality and ethics that you will have to grapple with every damn day of your professional career. Ignore the spider in the back; I will lead you out of the web. Maybe next session we can go back to being teacher and students.

Maybe.