He would look at anything but her – out the window, all around his storefront.  His own hormones  had  come up  in some half-forgotten response. He was trying not to feel helpless. ‘I’ve seen you up and down the street,’ he said. ‘This stuff of yours, it isn’t just some franchise  job.’ She smiled and  asked him  his name, which he gave as George. She said he shouldn’t talk himself down. He was just the expert she needed. She said she thought she might have an ion channel problem. ‘You should go to Preter Coeur,’ he tried to persuade her. ‘Here we just do the cheap bolt-ons.’ She made him meet her eyes. He went and found a six-regime loupe, which looked like a child’s stereopsis toy from the deep historical times, and she jumped up on one of his cutting tables where he could insert probes.

‘I don’t get most of this,’ he said after a minute or two. ‘I’d be scared and confused, I met you on the street.’

‘George, you’re scared and confused in here.’

‘Keep still,’ he cautioned  her. ‘Jesus,’ he said, after a minute more. ‘They wired everything through the amygdala. You ever act without knowing why? Cry a lot? Use metaphors? Who did this to you?’ He poked around  in her ion channels. ‘Forget I asked that,’ he said. He said she could get up, she might feel as if she had low blood sugar for a time. It wouldn’t be much. ‘You got Kv12.2 expression issues. When they tuned the neuronal gates for spatial perception, they put Kv12.2 on a hair trigger. Every so often that’s going to fall over, you‘ll see damping of the potassium  channel. What happens then, the nerve cells fire excessively.’

The assistant stared at him.

‘It’s nice when you talk like that,’ she said.

‘They put a control loop in but someone like me can’t unpick it. You hear any voices when this fault happens? Speak in tongues? See anything odd?’

‘Everything I see is odd.’

‘Kv12.2,’ the cutter said, ‘is a very old gene.’

He washed his hands under a tap he had at the back of the store.

‘Even a fish has it. Are you going to kill me?’

‘Not today, hon.’

She left, but almost immediately came back.

‘Hey, look, Tango du Chat is just over the road!’ she said, as if she had only just discovered that fact about the world.