Vivarium: The keeper of a lab's animals stumbles onto a secret [fiction]

Vivarium By James Somers The keeper of a university’s lab animals stumbles onto an extraordinary secret. For his mice the “sun” happened to rise between two and three in the morning, and so he, too, built his day around the artificial lights—even though increasingly this routine estranged him from the waking world. He’d pull in to a nearly empty parking lot, it would be him and the janitorial staff. He’d make his way down, down into the guts of the building, past airy lecture halls and glass-walled faculty offices, past some of the more expensive equipment on campus, including two eight million dollar fMRI machines—as if taking a tour of the daytime pomp his night-work made possible. The anteroom, in fact, to his little space contained something of a marvel, a thing they apparently invented here at the university. It was a huge sphere with a little styrofoam ball inside of it. A mouse, the experimental subject, would get perched atop the ball, which rotated freely on a bed of air. A ... Read full article.