The chemistry lab didn't seem to have any paper or pens, so Marissa approached the big flat screen mounted near her work area. She couldn't see any power button, but as she reached to feel along its edges, it came to life. After a quick shimmer of black it showed a bright green outline of a spread hand in the bottom right corner. She pressed her palm into the indicated print and the screen went white except for the picture of her she had attached to her job application and a set of tool boxes down the right side. Clicking on the artists pallet gave her a selection of pens, brushes and colours. Black pen.

She drew a quick grid of eight by eight on the touch-screen with rough, wobbly lines. A moment after she had finished, it turned into a neat table. Nice. In the far left column she wrote the names of molecules she was considering as possible toxins. After completing each cell she was delighted to see it flick to spell-corrected text, subtitled with the molecular properties. This was progressing much faster than she'd hoped. Across the top she listed the acids she was going to use to try and break some molecular bonds with. Again she was pleased as it corrected her and added extra information. After completing the heading column and row she began in the first interior cell to try and work out what the result would be. She found she could drag the molecules notation from the column into the cell. Then after she wrote a plus sign next to it her drawing converted into the symbol with a drop down next to it offering many other symbols of relationship. Dragging down the notation for the acid from above worked the same, but it was surrounded in brackets with a little grey n hanging beside them. Ha, one of the acids may not be enough. Maybe she should make the acid component times two. Tapping the n revealed a list of numbers, three, five, seven, eleven. Clever. Two wasn't an option. She selected three. To her relief and delight, the clever board completed the formula and drew a picture of the resulting molecules.

This was going to be much quicker. She tapped on the next cell and was surprised to see it duplicate itself into nine possible versions of itself in a floating column of options. She selected the version that added the header column molecule to the header row acid. Again she got a list of option cells. This time with a different number of acids in each cell. She selected the lowest number. Instantly the rest of the table completed itself.

Now another tool box on the right was slowly pulsing. She selected it and realised that it contained mark-up tools. A red highlighter will do. To the side of her table she wrote the word 'toxic' in bright red. It was replaced by the word toxic in black text with a red highlight swiped across it. She then looked at the resulting molecule in the first cell. No idea. Instead, she scanned around for anything she recognised. A few were clearly poisonous and she marked them red. Once she had marked her fourth cell more than half of the cells were also highlighted in a transparent red, and a number more in a greyed pink. This made it much easier for her to mark off the possibly toxic ones. The grey pink ones were tricky, they seemed to be molecules that would build up in the system because they don't break down easily. She left them grey pink.

It seemed that phosphoric acid and lactic acid were both reasonably safe. Ascorbic acid was also a good contender. She tried something. With two fingers in adjacent top cells she pulled the columns apart and was satisfied by blank columns appearing in the gap. She then moved one finger higher than the other. This sheered the two sides of the columns apart and separated tables. She dragged them back together and then pulled a gap for six columns. Into the header row of these columns she dragged the notation for pairs of safe acids. Clicking on an empty cell below gave her a table of options. Did she want to join two acids together, then one molecule, then the next? Was she going to try and join two molecules with one acid and then add another acid? Thankfully the results continued to highlight with reds in grey-pinks. Feeling overwhelmed with options, her tiredness hit her.

It rolled in like a thick fog, extinguishing the bright sparks of ideas that had been firing around her mind, flattening the landscape of possibilities before her and annihilating the memories of thoughts that had just passed. She blinked and stared again, stared again at the grid of combinations, and again. Each blink seemed to wash away some clarity until the symbols swam meaningless before her. Aware that her soft bed in a dark room would have her sleeping until tomorrow, she instead lay down on the floor for a quick nap. Just enough time to recover some of her senses and keep working on an antidote. Even the fear of the agent she had consumed was not enough to slow down the onslaught of sleep.

She brushed at the tickle of an insect on her lip, and came away with the back of her hand streaked with drool. The antidote. Her eyes flicked open and took a moment to focus on the stick moving quickly away from her. A pipet. In the hand of Dr Precarious. He had been taking a sample of her saliva while she slept.

"So you are conscious. Good." He glanced at the little drip of saliva captured in the tip of his glass tube. "I was just about to run some tests on this to find out what had done you in."

"Oh, I'm sorry. I know it must look like I collapsed on the floor here, but I was just having a quick nap, siesta. I didn't mean to alarm you."

"No, no. Not alarmed at all. Just curious."

"Not alarmed at all?" Marissa had propped herself up on an elbow and was now moving to stand.

"Of course not. You've only just begun your training. Once you've started to become useful I'll be much more concerned." Instead of reaching out a hand to assist her onto her feet, he stepped back and gave her some room. "So how have you progressed? I don't see any experimenting going on."

Marissa looked at the flat screen which was now off. "I made a little progress, then got a bit swamped with options." She waved her hand at the screen and it flicked black and offered the hand print. After pressing it, the table of options showed again.

Upon seeing her use the screen Dr Precarious let out a grunt that sounded somewhat like 'damn'.

"You didn't want me to use this? It already had an account set up for me with my picture."

"No, no. I'm glad you discovered it. I just would have preferred to watch you, have you verbalise your thought processes and give me feedback as you started to explore it. I designed and coded the whole system myself."

"Hmmm." Marissa did her best to sound disinterested and dismissive.

"Hmmmmm?" Dr Precarious did an affronted imitation of her noise. "Do you know anything of interface design or programming? This is really rather impressive."

Marissa turned to face him. "I've some experience with design and computers, and I know this would be quite an incredible achievement for any person to accomplish on their own. It's just that not only do I have no idea what to expect from you, I'm aware that if I sound too impressed I might end up being told to program a plug-in that emulates biology by tomorrow. Just for reacting too surprised by what you might consider a trivial achievement." She gave him a quick smile that could be read as apologetic or obsequious, "And I'm certain that you've no need for praise. If you needed a cheer squad you would have one already." She turned back to her screen before his face had time to react.

With an arm waving vaguely over the options for chemical combinations she said, "What I don't know how to do is predict which molecules will react together first if I were to just stir them all together in a bowl."

"May I?" Dr Precarious leaned forward as Marissa moved out of his way. He dragged a finger over the whole collection of options and then went to a toolbox with the symbol of a bubbling beaker. In here he tapped on an hour glass, then it's drop down choosing to sort by fastest to slowest, top to bottom. This shuffled the options in the table. Then he tapped the hour glass again and selected the option which showed two hour-glasses overlapping. This created transparent boxes of colour extending up and down from each option showing what Marissa guessed were the overlaps of reaction times. Another tap on the charts toolbox and with the selection of a topographical 3D bar-chart he had created a map of all of the options. "This is a histogram showing the quantities of each type of molecule over time moving to the right, based on source molecule volumes towards the back."

Marissa moved forward and was pleased that Dr Precarious moved back in response. She put her finger on her red-highlighted 'toxin' text and dragged it onto histogram. Nothing happened.

"You expected it to mark each molecule with its toxicity?"

"Yes. Well a bit. More just hoped it would."

"It is a good idea. Tomorrow it will. But today you will just have to drag the set into a simple table and then drag your mark-up flag onto it." He reached forward to show her, but Marissa was closer and beat him to it.

"I do wish I had been here to watch you discover it."

"Oh, I've only just started." Marissa's voice was absent minded while her attention was studying the chart. "It seems to me that if I drink a lot of ascorbic acid, wait about..." She glanced over her shoulder, "Is this time-scale on the histogram in minutes?"

"Minutes? No, no. That is seconds. It will be labelled tomorrow as well."

"Then if I wait about one-eighty to three-sixty seconds before drinking a mixture of lactic acid and phosphoric acid, I should be fine."

"Good, good." He stepped back a bit further from her as if making ready to leave. "So what volumes are we talking here. I will get you pure acids, you can buffer or dilute them as you please."

Marissa dragged the relative atomic mass data from the table for molecules and acids and dropped a division symbol in between them. She then multiplied the result by thirty. "I doubt that there was any more than thirty mill of the agent in my breakfast. I don't know why I don't feel angry at you. So seventy, twelve and nineteen respectively should do as a minimum. I'll just have to Google how much I can drink safely to get a maximum."

"You're learning chemistry, not researching biology. I'll bring you the safe maximum of ascorbic acid and plenty of phosphoric and lactic because their safe maximum is far more than your required minimum. Would you like some ice with that?"

"Oh, damn. I haven't even considered exothermic and endothermic aspects. I've never understood them."

"No, no. You don't need to. It won't make any difference, I just thought you might enjoy some ice with it. It won't have much of a nose to it, so there is no point getting out the brandy balloons, without layering it would be a waste of Martini glasses. Perhaps a champagne flute?"

"Yes please, and a couple of olives?"

"Olives you say. Why olives?"

"I just feel like olives is just what it would need to set it off. Seems perfect somehow."

"Not today, but we'll come back to it. You'll see olive oil will have some quite impressive effects, and there are remnant alkalis left over from the detoxification steps that take the bitterness out of olives that I'm certain you will enjoy exploring. Yes, olives are quite the intuitive suggestion."

When Dr Precarious returned, he was holding an ornate stainless platter that held three small jugs of clear liquid, three tiny vials with cyan, magenta, or yellow caps, and a champagne flute. In his other hand he carried an ice bucket that matched the tray. He smiled at Marissa as he set them before her. "The little vials are organic food dyes, perfectly safe, even after being effected by the acids, which won't change their colours too significantly. Anything else?"

"Do we have any pure water in here?"

"This way." Dr Precarious led her over to a sink with seven taps over it, all labelled with their chemical properties. He indicated the tap labelled H2O, "It is not actually pure water. Very close though. Certainly good enough for drinking."

"What do you do if you want truly pure water then?"

Dr Precarious indicated another set of pipes protruding from further along the wall. "I make it myself from the hydrogen and oxygen." Then turning back to the H2O outlet, "But this will do for you." He passed her a pair of clean beakers with etched measurements up the side. "You'll find my benches are quite level. Now I'll get you some scales."

Marissa accepted the beakers, "Thank you." Then she filled one with water before taking them back to the platter. On her flat screen she wrote the names of the three acids, smiled as they converted to text with their notation subtitling it. She then used highlighters to mark each one a colour of cyan, magenta or yellow. Then she drew a table with three rows and four columns, dragging the acids as row headers and writing in the columns, 'total', 'jug', 'acid', 'dye', 'col-acid'.

Each jug of acid sat on a small note naming it and stating its volume so it only took her a moment to fill out most of the chart, the flat screen doing the mathematics for her. After weighing them on the scales that Dr Precarious had returned with, she then added drops of colour to each. Now to dilute the acid. She had no idea how acidic they would taste and assumed that if they were okay for her mouth, then the rest of her body would handle them fine.

Starting with the ascorbic acid, she used a pipet to add a single drop to her beaker of water, stirred it around a moment and was unable to detect any colour change at that dilution. She dipped in her ring finger for an instant and pulled it out again.

Dr Precarious had been watching intently, almost a smile threatening to shape his lips. "Why your ring finger?"

"It's the one that I am least worried about loosing."

"So I take it you're not interested in marriage then?"

"Marriage? I hadn't considered it. No, it is the second weakest finger, the least dexterous and in the most useless location." She considered joking that she only kept it for sentimental reasons, then remembered who she was talking to. The acid had no effect on her finger, her cuticles and nail bed felt fine, so she dipped it in again and rubbed a little of the acid on the outside of her lips. Still no effect.

Then she poured a few millilitres into the bottom of the champagne flute and brought it up to her nose, sniffed. Nothing. Sipping it tasted like water and she drank it down. She then half filled the champagne flute with the diluted acid and added a droplet of pure ascorbic acid to it. After going through the same testing routine again she sipped it and licked around her lips. Five drops. Twenty drops. She was now getting confident with how strong the acid was. She weighed what remained in the beaker and then added thirty millilitres to the flute. It was now a strong blue colour.

One sip for caution and then she drank it down. It made her wince like it had been pure lemon juice concentrate, but she was okay. She looked around the room for a clock, then noticed a toolbox on her flat screen that looked promising. She created a timer labelled 'ascorbic acid thirty ml start' and set it counting up.

Dr Precarious spoke up, "It's a very accurate clock, synced to the atomic clock."

Something about this irked Marissa, maybe because he thought she might be impressed with his clock while she was trying to save herself from some agent he had snuck into her. "I'm sure it is. What is the refresh rate on this flat screen?"

There was silence for a while as Marissa mixed up another serve of ascorbic acid. Then after she had swallowed it, he responded. "I believe it is ninety hertz, so the second change over on the display will average about two hundredths of a second late. On a per second basis, that would make it less accurate than a two dollar watch from the eighties. But over a century, it is still far superior."

Marissa was stirring her third and final ascorbic acid cocktail, this one tinkled with ice. "I'll keep that in mind."

He stared at her with a steady, inscrutable gaze, "I'm not sure if I like you or not."

"Well then, it's just as well that you don't need to." She sipped her icy blue drink, then updated her timers. "I've only got seventy two seconds left before I need to start drinking the next two combined acids." She took a big sip and set the glass down. After filling the other large beaker with water and picking up two small beakers on her way back, she tested the other two acids much more boldly. Partly because she had gained some confidence, but mostly because Dr Precarious indicated that these acids had an upper limit that was much higher than she would need to consume.

When the countdown on the screen flashed at zero, she had finished her ice blue cocktail and tested her new orange one. It had been so mild that she mixed all of the provided lactic and phosphoric into the beaker. After another bolder sip, she drank the whole lot down straight from the beaker.

Only then, after drinking it down, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand and gently placing the beaker on the bench did she look around the lab again. "You know, if I'd done this in the school chemistry lab, drunk acids out of a beaker, I would have been expelled."

Dr Precarious' voice was measured. "That would be because it is a very dangerous thing to do. Apart from the risk that acids pose to your insides, which is nothing to be ignored, there is also the possibility in a shabbily run lab that the containers, even the raw ingredients, could be contaminated with any number of highly toxic substances." Marissa stared back at him while focusing attention on how her insides were feeling. "Not that this lab could ever be accused of being shabby, but acids are acids."

Marissa nodded at him and with heavy eyelids scraping over dry eyes and realised that her nap had only taken the edge off. She refused to let her yawn escape. "I had better tidy up then." She turned and picked up a couple of the empty beakers.

"No, no. Leave them please. I have professionals for that who I'm much more confident will return my equipment back to a pure state. No point you fussing with it first."

"Oh thank you."

"My pleasure really."

Marissa indicated her working on the flat screen. "What should I do with this?"

"Nothing is deleted. I don't even let myself delete anything. Mistakes teach us far more than correct work ever does, and sometimes you don't know you have a mistake to review and learn from until you are much further down the track." He pointed at the tool box. "It is all there, as a calendar, and searchable by any number of filters. I'm certain you will find it very handy."

She knew this was all very good and useful, but right now she didn't feel like going on a software tour. "Good. That's all good then. Thanks. Is it okay if I go for a bit of a lie down now?"

"Certainly. If that is what you think you need to do, go ahead and do it. You may find me tinkering around in here still later, if you get up."

Marissa nodded her understanding and found the walk out of the lab and back to her room more unstable than she had expected after wearing spherical toed shoes so long in a lab surrounded by benches all within grabbing distance. By the time she flopped into her bed she barely had the energy to remove her shoes.

Drinking acid from a beaker in a chemistry lab? Was Marissa brave or stupid? Do you believe her motivations?