Lab 4B, after hours.

Tina finally has the number: nine milliseconds, clean enough that a host brain should stop noticing it is being driven. She shows Dr. Francis the graphs, drops herself into a rat for sixty ugly seconds, and comes back with the only conclusion that matters. They need a human subject. Ethics will not allow one.

So in her infinite wisdom, she injects herself, tells him to put the helmet on, and spends the next minute inside her own body without recognizing that the hands on her chest are not making her decisions. She walks out denying all of it. He follows. The argument gets petty, then quiet, then worse. He doses himself, holds out the helmet, and gives her five minutes. She puts it on.

The last thing Part 1 leaves you with is Tina opening someone else’s eyes, laughing in a voice that is not hers, and realizing the machine works in both directions. What the fuck did she invent?

Dr. Francis comes back into his own body and tries to explain the missing minutes as nerves. Tina does not let him. For a few seconds they both have to sit with the same fact: the handshake worked in both directions, the host mind will invent any story except the true one, and they have just built the most dangerous machine on campus. They lock it up. They go home. Tina does not stay home.

By morning the vial is on her desk, Markus’s drink is already dosed, and she is standing in the wet grass in someone else’s shoes, cataloguing dew through a voice that is not hers. What starts as “data only, nothing weird” does not stay that way once she looks down in the shower.

Will Tina really go all the way her own friend for the sake of... "data"?

Saturday morning in the house, after the orgasm. Tina is in a haze of glory as "Markus" finishes the shower that felt too vivid. They walk out in sweatpants to find Sarah on the hallway floor. Her father has seen the piercing she paid for herself. Tuition is now the leash. He sits down across from her meaning to be stoic and instead says the exact thing she needed, in a voice that does not sound like his. He thinks the words were his. Someone else knows they were not. Maybe a girls perspective isn't an awful idea right now... even if its in the weirdest possible way.

She wanted a timestamp more than she wanted to be a good person. A Sunday slot. A room that had to listen. Twenty minutes of a number nobody in the thread believed. The applause was real. So was the empty chair when she came back.