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HKU, 2052
When Alex forwarded him a snake wrestling instruction video with no comment, Tony thought nothing of it. Alex had a somewhat unsurprising interest in all things cold-blooded, after all, and though his usual passions lay with fish, herpetology was up there on the list. Tony privately suspected he found them relatable.
This was, after all, the man who had set his ringtone to the "pew-pew" noises of baby crocodiles for a solid month — not that it had made him any less stone-faced when picking up. Their labmates had assumed it to be a prank. Tony knew better.
But it was when Dr. Sam emailed him an article about the anatomical weaknesses of snakes that he began to worry.
"Are we branching out into biomimetics?" Tony joked, the next time he was in his PI's office. In truth, he was very much hoping they would branch out into biomimetics. Snakes were impressive animals, after all, and the field of augment engineering undoubtedly had much to learn from them.
Also, it was better than the alternative. Which was that there was something he was horrifically out of the loop on.
Dr. Sam Liu adjusted his glasses and peered at Tony over them. "I'm afraid not," he said. "I wanted to make sure you're prepared, in case the curriculum hasn't covered it in sufficient depth."
"I'm sorry, the... curriculum?" Tony repeated, feeling dangerously dumb. It was not the first time in his academic career that he'd nearly missed some important admin issue, or a bureaucratic deadline. It had been a while, long enough to lull him into a false sense of security, but the knowledge that he was missing something brought the wave of anxious dread back in full force.
Concern flickered on Dr. Sam's normally reserved face. Without a word, he tapped at his computer. A little ding marked the arrival of another forwarded article in Tony's inbox.
Tony brought up his tablet to read it. His eyes flew over it, then he read it a second time. It had to be a joke, or one of those secret personality tests — though Dr. Sam was not the type, but never mind that. An AI-generated nonsense article to see how far into the publication process it would get. Yes, that made a certain amount of sense.
He started verbalising some version of this to Dr. Sam, but his supervisor shook his head. Tony trailed off.
"To be clear," he said eventually, switching to Cantonese just to be on the safest side imaginable, "The culmination of my two and a half years of research into the neuro-computational interface is to be fighting a... large, predatory reptile?"
"Of course not," Dr. Sam replied. "You do still need to finish that thesis, too." He sighed. "Well, I suppose I had better get you up to speed..."
~~~~~~~~~~8>-<
A snake. Order: Squamata; clade: Ophidia; suborder: Serpentes. The zoological kind of snake. The kind of snake you found in zoos. Not a virtual snake, not a philosophical snake, and not a humourously customised and challenging level in the retro video game Snake. And not, Dr. Sam had stressed, a metaphor.
"You knew about this?" he asked Alex in a daze, some three hours later.
"I thought everyone knew." Alex paused in his calibrations of their new 3D-printer to shoot Tony a look. "You've never attended a defense before?"
Tony floundered. Zhigui's defense was in two months, a week after his. Their lab was small, and Dr. Sam was in no hurry to kick his students out before the project was well and truly ready — he had enough clout that he could get away with that. In the past two and a half years, who else had defended? Walter had wrapped up eight months ago, but Tony had been out of town, at that obnoxious networking thing in Boston — Dr. Sam had stressed the importance of mastering the distasteful art of talking to investors. And a few months before that, at Pei-Pin's defense, what had he been doing? He'd been late to the talk, and then he'd slunk away to wrap up an experiment, and of course he'd gotten sidetracked, so he'd missed the after-party where it might have reasonably come up. Nobody had said anything about it, because nobody had expected him to be a social butterfly. And maybe she had looked a little frazzled during the wrap-up questions, but had she really fought a snake?
"Beh. This is why I never bothered with academia," Alex was grumbling. "Too many asinine rules and formalities. I know what kind of work I need to do. I don't need absurd ancient rites devised by sentimental idiots getting in the way."
Tony nearly retorted that not everybody could sidestep their way into research via military recruitment and private corporate work, but he knew Alex's awkward status as their senior research partner was a sore point for him, and held his tongue. There was a better-than-even chance Alex was collecting neat and tidy dossiers on all of them on K&O's behalf, but Tony was the only one who knew just how much he hated it.
Dr. Sam had warned him not to get too close. Tony hadn't listened.
There was more relevant information to extract from that sentence, anyway.
"So you have never fought a snake?" Tony asked, at a loss.
Alex smiled, crooked and restrained. "No," he said. "But I can still teach you a thing or two."
~~~~~~~~~~,
<8~~~~~'
HKU, 2052 and two months later
A hush went through the crowd, and Tony stopped mid-sentence. The laser pointer hovered on the slide, then dropped down. Without thinking, he directed it at the floor, towards the flicker of movement — slithering, serpentine, as it navigated the chairs and outstretched legs.
And there it was.
The snake was alarming in size. That didn't quite make sense to him, unless he'd had a psychotic break and written a far worse thesis than he thought, and Dr. Sam had let him.
(He would later learn that one of the key figures in the Serpent Selection Committee had run afoul of one of Tony's improvised low-voltage 'anti-distraction devices' on his office door, and had been harbouring a grudge ever since.)
(He would later learn that another of the key figures in the Serpent Selection Committee had gone through several all-nighters trying to fix the computing server that Tony had inadvertently crashed for his simulation, and had been harbouring a grudge ever since.)
(He would later learn that Dr. Sam had been livid to discover those particular correlations and had tried to take it all the way up to the top, but it had been a moot point because Tony had already graduated.)
The snake was alarming in size, but it didn't look poisonous — didn't look venomous, sorry, Alex. It had large interesting patches of spangled colour on its scales, and its head was a seeker missile, sniffing him out with flicks of its tongue and dragging its body behind it.
It slithered close, and coiled, and struck.
Aggressive.
Far too aggressive.
Alex had been the one to spot it, poring over surreptitious recordings they had taken of other departments' defenses. "They are only animals," he'd said distastefully. "All they want is feed, and mate, and sleep, in that order, and they only have to feed once a month, and they mate even more rarely. I have seen snakes in zoos," he had said. "Even if they escape, they don't make a beeline for the visitors. They don't attack unless they're very hungry and are big enough to think you're prey, or they feel threatened. It makes no sense, that a snake would go into a crowded room, ignore all the people there, and single out the person who's defending."
It made no sense, barring a very specific caveat.
Tony had brought his neural coupler headset to his defense. It was bulky and uncomfortable. And, as he activated his neuro-retinal interface and targeted the coupler at the snake, it would soon be worth it.
The snake was doing its best to wrap around and strangle him, but he kept it from his critical points. That, too, was where Alex's help had been invaluable.
There. The code was rudimentary, the level of defenses laughable. He'd hijacked vending machines with better security than this. But Tony knew better than to get overconfident on (so far) the most important day of his life, so he activated the trigger for a state transition and stayed on guard.
Dr. Sam had dropped a toy snake on his desk one day — a snake in a tin, a child's toy. The snake was not a metaphor, he'd warned. The snake was very, very real.
But not quite real enough. He knew that now for certain.
When the snake curled up at his feet and went to sleep — or simulated sleep, at any rate — it was only then that Tony finally allowed himself to relax, and swept a hand through his hair to tidy it.
"Pardon me. As I was saying — before we were so rudely interrupted — my next step was to rank the classifiers using ten-fold stratified cross-validation..."
In the back, crowded into a too-small plastic chair next to a visibly relieved Zhigui, Alex beamed at him.