The scientific community laughed at him when he first presented his proposal. He was convinced that dead tissue and dead blood cells could be regenerated back into living organisms. He proposed that the dead brain cells of Alzheimer’s patients could be brought back to life. He even dared to say that loved ones lost in terrible accidents could be brought back to life.
Knowing of his recent loss, his peers thought his intentions were “misplaced”. Others had simply labeled his ideas as Frankenstein-ish, and although none would admit it, many feared that if he did succeed, the end result would not be that much different than the monster in Mary Shelley's famed novel.
Rage filled Heslin's already exhausted mind as the sound of mocking from his peers crept back into his memory. He grabbed a beaker of formula 25-41 and fired it across the room, smashing it against the wall, just inches above the opened window. The loud crash of shattering glass snapped him out of his rage. Heslin laughed in spite of himself.
"Well now, Paddy me boy, that was rather dumb now, wasn't it? Now you have a mess to clean up.”
“Father, is everything all right?” Robin asked.
“Not now, Robin,” Heslin answered abruptly, looking at his watch.
6:10 a.m.
Quietly, Heslin picked up a small garbage pail and began to pick up the broken shards of glass as the thick, translucent green liquid succumbed to gravity and slowly oozed down the wall. His mind lost on his recent failure, Heslin grabbed a piece of broken glass the wrong way, and as he clenched his fingers a sharp pain jolted him back to the task at hand. Blood poured from the deep cut. Instinctively, he put the cut to his mouth. He knew it didn't really help the pain, He knew that it was just a psychological link to when his mother had the power to heal hurt with a loving kiss, but he sucked the cut anyway.
Overcome with disappointment, yet clinging on to a fragile hope, he peered inside the microscope’s eyepiece once more. Nothing moved. He adjusted the magnification as a small trail of blood trickled down his badly cut hand. A solitary drop of blood hung suspended from his hand, daring to fall. In less than a heartbeat the tiny drop of blood began its descent. It splashed in the culture dish, hardly noticeable to the naked eye, but under the magnification of his powerful microscope, the tiny splash was huge. It looked like a giant wave of red reaching up to grab him. It startled Heslin as if someone had jumped out of a dark corner. He quickly collected his thoughts and looked at his hand. Blood was streaking down his forearm.
“I have to stitch this,” Heslin said to himself as he headed out of the laboratory.
Robin spoke up. “Father…”
“Not now, Robin.”
“Father…” she repeated.
“Go to sleep now, Robin,” Heslin commanded, cutting her off.
The computer monitors instantly went black.
The command, “Go to sleep now, Robin” was a built-in fail-safe known only to Heslin and the programmers of the Robin 1 Mainframe. Robin prevented everyone, Heslin included, from accessing her AI brain, so no one could tamper with her programming. The command was created so Robin could be shut down to allow for routine maintenance of the system. At the end of a one hour period, a second fail-safe timer automatically rebooted the main system, turning Robin back on.
Heslin hissed in pain as he fumbled about trying to stitch the deep gash on his finger. The folks down the mountain may have called him “Doc”, but his feeble attempt to stitch his wound proved he knew very little about practical procedures. He was a scientist after all, not a medical doctor.
Heslin thought about the good folks in the Valley, hard working people who welcomed the scientist with open arms and, as he requested, left him alone so as not to disturb his research. Once a month they ran supplies up to him, mostly by 4-wheel drive, but during the harsh winter months, a snowmobile was the only thing that could make the trip up the secluded mountain road.
Perched on the mountainside, he sometimes felt like his idol, the great inventor, Alexander Graham Bell. Bell had settled in the nearby village of Baddeck, not more than an hour away. Heslin proudly hung a picture of Bell above his mantle. Below it, a plaque displayed Bell's immortal words:
“I have traveled the globe. I have seen the Canadian and American Rockies, the Andes and the Alps and the highlands of Scotland, but for simple beauty, Cape Breton outrivals them all.”
Sitting on the mantle above a giant fireplace was an old fiddle that had belonged to Heslin's father. Occasionally, when he needed to clear his thoughts, Heslin would play the old fiddle, but that was a rare occasion as he was usually too busy working in his lab, trying to perfect his formula. The rest of the pictures in the massive lounge area were all of Robin. There was one old wedding photograph with a much younger Heslin and his pretty bride but the other pictures were of his sweet, little Robin.
Heslin hoped to acquire some of Bell's inspiration by building his lab on his own Beinn Breagh, which was Gaelic for Beautiful Mountain. Gaelic was a dying language on the island, save for a few small communities buried deep in the highlands. Heslin understood some of the Scot Gaelic words and he marveled at the fact that Scottish musicians often traveled here to learn the Cape Breton style of fiddling, which remained practically unchanged by time. Cape Breton fiddling was said to be closer to original Scottish fiddle music than in Scotland itself.
On a quite summer night, Heslin could sometimes hear the faint sounds of a fiddle, carried by the warm summer breeze. Other times, he heard the majestic drone of highland pipes. Both were music to his ears and a welcomed distraction.
Heslin’s lab, controlled by Robin and filled with modern equipment, was a stark contradiction to Bell’s modest laboratory, forever captured in time at the Bell Museum located in the village of Baddeck, a place Heslin occasionally visited for inspiration. Unlike Bell’s modest lab, Heslin's was a sterile, clinical white, lit by huge florescent lights and flickering computer monitors. He had everything a modern laboratory needed. Well, almost everything.
At first, just like all his junior lab assistants when they first arrived on the mountain, he too had been taken aback by the sheer size and beauty of the old log cabin, standing proud on the mountain with a million dollar view. The spruce and pine trees seemed to hug the giant log building as if the lodge was meant to be there. It was beautiful and breathtaking. And, just like his assistants, he quickly grew to hate the fact that this kind of beauty and seclusion had a very steep price: modern conveniences, or lack thereof.
No cable, no phone, and no running water except for a small electric pump that drew water from an outdoor well, and worst of all, no proper toilet. An outhouse stood ten yards from the back door and proved to have two major flaws: In the summertime it smelled really, really bad. And it was freezing cold in the winter.
When the construction of the lab was completed on the main lodge, Heslin had planned on installing proper facilities, but with the lab ready, every day a new idea or a new experiment took hold, it pushed further renovations aside.
Now, three years later, Heslin still used an old diesel generator as backup power for the lodge. The main power was supplied by massive solar panels. A temporary hot water shower was installed in one of the upstairs rooms by running rows of copper pipe across the roof. In the summer time, the sun baking the pipes on the black shingles provided them with all the hot water anyone could ever need. In the wintertime the pipes had to be drained and everyone settled for sponge baths.
Solar panels supplied enough electricity to keep the lab warm during the winter, but Heslin had to manually pump water from the deep well because the sub zero temperatures of a typical Margaree winter froze the waterline; and every winter he still had to freeze his ass off in the outhouse. Heslin hated that outhouse. He hated it so much that some days he prayed for constipation just so he would not have to go to that disgusting place. But, his steady diet of cold coffee made sure that prayer was never answered.