When Yeats Waltzes With Agnesi

Once you see her in one place, you see her in all places.

From a slightly grungy subway window on another morning commute, he chances upon a sight of her gliding sideways down a pavement, except that she is not on a snowboard or skates, but sitting on a curious two-wheeled contraption steered by hip-level handlebars at both ends and pedaled like a bike in a plane perpendicular to the wheels [1]. Strapped on her ankles and the vehicle are some electronic devices. Wisps of hair caress her soft cheeks in the wind. Her eyes shimmer in the early light, speaking of indescribable dreams in daytime. His may be the faster vehicle, but she seems to be moving at a greater speed, in an unimaginable dimension.

While waiting for a lift on the 15th floor of a commercial building, he spots her cruising along the corridor of the opposite building on a self-moving, sleek white seat with an ovoid base [2], high-fiving workers passing by. At one point, she turns her body a little and the transporter starts rotating slowly towards the window. He stiffens. The lift doors open just then with a chime.

On a sandwich break in a park, he hears a commotion among a bunch of kids who have been throwing Styrofoam toy planes around and follows their line of sight. There she is, jogging and pushing handlebars on the front legs of a giant tricycle which central frame hunches above her back [1]. Harnesses around her torso are tied to the frame. In a second, he finds her smiling brightly at him [1]. She calls out to him, "Hey!" Time stops for a while. A scowl then crosses his face. After the contraption gains enough speed, she adeptly places her feet onto pedals on its rear leg and sails like a seagull down a sloping, meandering path.

One weekend, he is leafing through The Death of Ivan Ilych and Confession by a lake when her voice drifts across the water, "Is that a happy or a sad book? Saturdays are for pick-me-ups." He looks up to see her lying on her stomach in a sheltered hammock perched between two outward-bending poles on a floating milk-white platform [3]. The twinkle in her eyes dazzles as ever.

"Seeing as you are asking this question, you do not know very much about Tolstoy. Not enough," he holds up the paperback cover with a deadpan expression, "to tell that this one publication bundles together two works—a fictional story of a judge and an autobiographical account."

"Ah, mansplaining!" she turns away and mutters to herself. 

His eyebrows raise slightly. "How is that mansplaining when you queried and I answered?"

"Well, you could have just said it may be half happy and half sad, for instance. Or perhaps the writings have been paired for some common theme, which would make my question perfectly sensible."

"That's a revelation. I would not have thought that the idea of coherent pairings could occur so readily to someone who uses insects as robots, skis on what is essentially a bike, scoots around on a glammed-up high stool, glides through the air on a mangled, oversized tricycle, and now, forcibly hangs a hammock on a raft."

She blinks at him, contemplates for a beat, then chuckles. "Tell you what, I'll pull off one more criminal act."

"What?"

"Invite my greatest dissenter to my most cherished underwater race!"

"In this weather?"

That is how he finds himself in a buzzing computer laboratory filled with T-shirt-wearing young people of various nationalities huddled over pairs of flat-panel monitors. In front of him and her team on one screen is a cream-colored blob they stare intently at as its location on a blue surface changes every few minutes. On the adjacent screen is a pulsing green pattern which resembles a cardiac rhythm on a black background. A video feed of huge, cylindrical metal instruments attended to by technicians in cleanroom garb is displayed high on a wall. That is a multi-tip scanning tunneling microscope, she chirps, located two floors below that the teams control from here to view their macromolecules and and induce currents which move them along an inverse S-shaped track a thousandth the width of a hair. Cameramen at the perimeters train their lens on each color-coded team. One of them zooms in on a bespectacled, white-bearded man waving a black and white checkered flag on a podium:

"Ladies and gentlemen, we have seen the black team's 2x3 carbon ring wheel sonic fox racer and the blue team's nano-hovercraft finish first simultaneously two hours ago, and now the third-place winner has emerged: the judges have just confirmed that the red team's whistling dog nanowagon has streaked across the finishing line!" 

"WOOHOOOO!!" she pumps her fist in the air. 

He gives her a half-admiring and half-befuddled look. 

The bearded man continues, "So the fourth position goes to the orange team, which windmill-shaped vehicle with four steering points was stuck on the surface 11 nanometers and one hour into the race. With the green team's paddling molecular caterpillar put out of the race by a software crash after traveling one nanometer and the purple team's curvy buggy sadly unresponsive to electrical pulses, there is no more moving racer on the track. The world's first nanocar race is over! We are very thankful to the many spectators from around the globe for witnessing this historic moment with us through this live webcast. Let's have a break before we move on to the awards ceremony. Grab a TV dinner, or breakfast bar if you're on the other side of the world, while we see if any team prefers a nano-trophy!" 

Postdocs and graduate students in raspberry red around her hug one another and wipe their spectacles. Reclining in the chair, she unties her hair, tousles them and sighs contentedly, "This is not part of my research projects, but it feels so good to help out the chemistry department! Do you know that the blue guys' hovercraft was originally designed for use in solar cells converting sunlight into electricity? How interesting that it ended up transforming electricity into movement in this race. One day, I want to try propelling other nano-sized molecular vehicles with photons, load medicinal drug molecules on them and drive them along blood vessels." [4] [5]

"Nice show of driving a car with a microscope," he broaches the topic slowly. "You clinched third place in a race with three functioning cars."

 "Right? We were in the half of the contestants who got to experience the entire course! I feel so sorry for the other three teams. But they were already great for trying! In what has been said to be the first motoring competition in human history back in 1887 Paris, only one car showed up [6]. Can you imagine that?"

"Your, well, imaginative approaches always need some getting used to. I've been thinking if I should imagine that your method of exacting revenge on your greatest eye-rolling dissenter is to make his eyes roll more."

"No," her eyes shine again. "My crime will be the heist of that beating organ in his chest."

He looks down as her index finger points straight at his left breast.

"The more I'm turned off by someone, the more I want to be a version of me who feels love for him."

Behind-the-Scenes Science:

An official international nanocar race was held for the first time in the world, with molecules of the aforementioned designs and competition outcomes but different timings and names, at Pico Lab in Toulouse, a city in the south of France in 2017 [4] [5]. It began at 11am on 28 April and ended at 5pm the next evening [5]. Scanning tunneling microscopes have probes so sharp that they have just one atom each at their very ends. Electrical signals are generated as electrons travel between these charged tips and the surfaces of samples being scanned. These signals would change with varying distances between tips and sample surfaces. In a typical scanning process, however, the height of the probe is adjusted as necessary as it moves across the sample to keep the signal and thus distance constant. This vertical movement of the probe is recorded and fed into computational processes that, in turn, map the contours of the sample surface. [7] In this race, the signals have the additional function of inducing structural changes, electron excitation, or repulsion/attraction in the molecules, thereby producing vehicular motion [5].

References:

1. Kiniry, L., 2012. 9 Unusual Human-Powered Contraptions, Popular Mechanics, viewed 27 December 2017, http://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/g893/9-unusual-human-powered-contraptions/

2. Corley, A., 2010. Riding Honda's U3-X unicycle of the future. IEEE Spectrum. URL: https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/041210-riding-honda-u3-x-unicycle-of-the-future (Model for the seat in the paragraph)

3. Wenz, J., 2017. 10 Weird Boats Weirding It Up Across the Sea, Popular Mechanics, viewed 28 December 2017, http://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/g2998/weird-boats/

4. Centre national de la recherche scientifique 2017, Nanocar race, 

Centre national de la recherche scientifique, viewed 4 January 2018, http://nanocar-race.cnrs.fr/indexEnglish.php (All race details in the chapter have been adapted from this actual race.)

5. Rapenne, G. and Joachim, C., 2017. The first nanocar race. Nature Reviews Materials, 2, p.17040. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/natrevmats.2017.40 (All race details in the chapter have been adapted from this actual race.)

6. Duchene, P., 2007, 'For Sale: ’84 Model. Runs Great.', The New York Times, 19 August, viewed 4 January 2018, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/automobiles/collectibles/19OLDEST.html

7. Nobel Media AB 2018, The Scanning Tunneling Microscope, Nobel Media AB, viewed 5 January 2018, 

https://www.nobelprize.org/educational/physics/microscopes/scanning/ (All information on how scanning tunneling microscopes work in imaging in this paragraph has been obtained from this source.)

8. Shelley, P.B., 'The Cloud' in Eliot, C.W., 1909. English Poetry II: From Collins to Fitzgerald. The Harvard Classics, 41, pp.1990-14. URL: http://www.bartleby.com/41/517.html (Origin of chapter title)

A busy city. Which city, you ask? His reply would be that, for all it matters to him, cities everywhere are the same. Their traffic junctures teem with the same denizens, surviving but not thriving on the same busyness. Rebellion lurks around the corners, except that even rebels play from an all-too-familiar, narrow range of repertoire. He shuffles impassively past the establishment and the renegades, finding home in neither camp. Like an exile in his own land.

But the prank of the gods is such that even an adrift soul has to be sustained by refueling stopovers for the belly. The life of the mind cannot do without the life of the flesh. Clad in a long black coat and grey turtleneck shirt on this wintry morning, he exits the subway station and makes his long trek through the sea of towering blocks, intersections and crosswalks to the workplace as usual. Formerly a novelist, insurance is now his trade. Today, a shivering teenage boy in a dark green sweater leans against the white granite-clad pillar of his office building. Head bent low, the boy fixes his eyes on his fidgeting feet.

"There is nothing you can do. Go back."

"My mom said the debt collectors would be repossessing our house," the boy continues to stare at his grungy brown shoes.

"Not if she negotiates for a payment plan."

"This is a six-digit figure bill. We have never even seen five-digit sums in our bankbooks." The boy's voice sounds hoarse.

"There is a first for everything. You'll learn that in time."

"All this trouble would be gone if you guys help out!" The boy finally looks up with angry tears.

"If you really need to hear it for the umpteenth time, the terms and conditions stated explicitly that self-inflicted injuries are excluded from coverage."

"She wasn't herself! The one who overdosed on sleeping pills was her inner demon. How can you blame her for being .... sick?" The accusing glare does not go away.

"Nobody is blaming her. We are just doing our jobs," he states matter-of-factly. "The firm is adhering to a contract written according to an ordinary person's understanding of the English language. The security guards who hauled you out earlier—Don't look at me with such surprised eyes. Was that so hard to infer?—were carrying out their duty to ensure the firm and other tenants can conduct business in peace. And going by her habit of fretting over the tiniest of details, your mother must have done her job as well."

The boy is definitely startled by now. "W-What do you mean?"

"She did consider the possibility that the clause on suicide applies also to suicidal attempts caused by medical conditions. She knew very well too that her impulsive bids to end her life were growing more frequent. It was just that she ultimately forced herself to take a blind leap by not asking and sign up for the policy."

His legs collapsing to the white pavement, the boy rests his head on the pillar and stares blankly ahead for some time. Finally, the boy mutters, "She had no choice. All the affordable insurance plans she could find came with that kind of condition. That must be the case. So what do you want us to do? Take on another debt and worsen her paranoia so that she inflicts yet more violence on herself?"

"What if—" The boy trembles. "She, she succeeds during her next ...." His voice breaks.

He looks down at the boy silently. Some passers-by slow down or pause to stare at them. As the hour wears on, though, the human traffic thins until only a few latecomers to work are scuttling around. At long last, he tilts his head upwards and sighs.

Just then, a monarch butterfly glides up the street and charges at them, with sunlight reflecting off its orange wings with black outlines and white dots. It swoops away from them at the last minute, circles up a street lamp and darts in and out of the backs of office blocks. Next, it soars into the sky and dances in a curious pattern.

"Gosh! Are those letters?" The boy widens his eyes.

He, for his part, furrows his brows and stares intently at the lines the insect is making.

"H. O. P .... E."

"Right! In cursive! W-What's going on?" The boy gasps.

"Radio control of a cyborg butterfly!" A melodious voice rings out from the road. They turn to see a woman with a small device in her hand pushing a bike toward them. Decked out in a fuchsia car coat, a tinsel choker and an electric blue dress, she wears her hair in a loose bun and appears to be in her late twenties, possibly the same age as him.

Waving the device before her sparkling eyes, she elaborates, "Pressing the buttons here sends radio wave signals to electrodes implanted on locations of the butterfly's nervous system that affect flight movements. There are also controls that enable you to fine-tune the movements by adjusting the voltage and frequency of the alternating current. Someday, GPS [1], miniature cameras [2], and heat [2] and chemical sensors may even be attached to the butterfly! In one organism, you then have the compactness and human-mediated navigation capabilities for searching the nooks and crannies of disaster zones [1], on one hand, and the ability to maintain stable flight without constant human monitoring [2] and refuel the system through readily available nectar, on the other. Don't let people enslave pets through that technology for pleasure purposes, though. That kind of perverseness crosses a line with me."

"You .... are not asking us to buy or sign up for anything, are you?" The boy looks at her with befuddlement.

She bursts into laughter, "I'm a biomechanical systems research fellow out on fieldwork, not a marketer!"

"And if you can do anything," she winks, "It's to turn the corners of your mouth up! A beaming face gives someone who sees you the turbo boost to fight on for another day."

They stare at her as she summons the butterfly back into a container from her bike's basket. As she climbs onto the bike, she turns back to smile at the man, "Same for you, mister!"

With that, she rides off in the morning light, leaving the young dropout and the tardy insurance agent behind on the windy street. The view of her back stays in his mind for a long time. Like an uninvited flower setting up home on a small patch of a desiccated and frigid heart. 

Behind-the-Scenes Science:

Butterflies have not entered the picture at the time of writing, but researchers have successfully controlled the locomotion of cockroaches [1], beetles [2] and moths [3] by sending radio wave signals to electronic packages attached to their backs. The receivers in these packages then delivered electrical stimuli to the insects through electrodes implanted in their nervous systems [1] [2] or flight muscles [2] [3]. Much work has been done to map the area of stimulation and, for each setup, the characteristics of the current applied to the movements generated. With stimulation of sensory pathways and channels like antenna, however, they found that the insects would learn to ignore the stimuli and respond instead to what other senses tell them [1]. Direct stimulation of nervous systems enables rescue workers to avoid this problem.

Further work to be done includes [1]: 

(i) shrinking the sizes of the packages further so that they do not tire out the insects too fast, 

(ii) using more flexible materials that fit the insects' curved bodies better, 

(iii) employing batteries with larger capacities, 

(iv) adopting stronger adhesives to minimize the detachment of the packages from the bodies as the insects move around, and 

(v) coming up with electrodes that remain sufficiently conducive even as tissue and bodily fluids cover them over time, as they are naturally wont to.

Scientists have also controlled fruit flies with laser light which excites neurons [4] and remotely manipulated the locomotion of rats [5], fish [6] and other larger animals [7] [8]. However, these options may be disadvantaged by the need for human visual contact, in the case of laser light, and bulkier sizes and graver ethical concerns, in the case of animals bigger than insects. 

References:

1. Sanchez, C.J., Chiu, C.W., Zhou, Y., González, J.M., Vinson, S.B. and Liang, H., 2015. Locomotion control of hybrid cockroach robots. Journal of The Royal Society Interface, 12(105), p.20141363. DOI: 

http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2014.1363

2. Singer, E., 2009. The Army's Remote-Controlled Beetle, MIT Technology Review, viewed 3 February 2017, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/411814/the-armys-remote-controlled-beetle/ 

3. Verderber, A., McKnight, M. and Bozkurt, A., 2014. Early metamorphic insertion technology for insect flight behavior monitoring. JoVE (Journal of Visualized Experiments), (89), pp.e50901-e50901. DOI: 

http://dx.doi.org/10.3791/50901

4. Davis, R.L., 2005. Remote control of fruit fly behavior. Cell, 121(1), pp.6-7. DOI:  http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2005.03.010  

5. Talwar, S.K., Xu, S., Hawley, E.S., Weiss, S.A., Moxon, K.A. and Chapin, J.K., 2002. Behavioural neuroscience: Rat navigation guided by remote control. Nature, 417(6884), pp.37-38. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/417037a

6. Kobayashi, N., Yoshida, M., Matsumoto, N. and Uematsu, K., 2009. Artificial control of swimming in goldfish by brain stimulation: confirmation of the midbrain nuclei as the swimming center. Neuroscience letters, 452(1), pp.42-46. DOI: 

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neulet.2009.01.035

7. Lee, S., Kim, C.H., Kim, D.G., Kim, H.G., Lee, P.S. and Myung, H., 2013. Remote guidance of untrained turtles by controlling voluntary instinct behavior. PloS one, 8(4), p.e61798. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0061798 

8. Li, H.P., Dai, Z.D., Tan, H., Guo, C. and Sun, J.R., 2008. A remote system for gecko animal-robot. Computer Technology and Development, 18(8), pp.16-19. URL: http://en.cnki.com.cn/Article_en/CJFDTOTAL-WJFZ200808006.htm

He steps grimly down the ninth metal round bar, the navy blue jacket on him flapping in the rough winds fourteen feet above the wasteland. 

Heaps of rusty steel scraps rustle in the darkness beneath. 

He arrives at the end of the bar and crosses over to the tenth just ahead. It is an upward climb this time. But one misstep, and an ascent swiftly takes you to the same destination as a descent.

The fulcrum nears and once his weight shifts to the other side, the bar tilts down, commencing another downward journey. More bars stretch to the moonlit horizon ahead.

He tucks his violin under his chin and plays Paul Buckmaster's "Dreamers Awake" as he travels on.

The Moon dims but never extinguishes its light.