{#777 “I shouldn’t have consumed that water from Saturn”}

My name is Amy Farrah Fowler Cooper. I married the world famous string physicist Sheldon Cooper in a small ceremony five years ago, and to date, this has been my greatest accomplishment. Admittedly, this is a fairly disparaging state of affairs, as I should be as famous as he is for my work in neuro-biology. But I’m not.

So, one day about four years ago, Rajesh came to me bragging about how they were putting a man on Saturn like they had back in the sixties with the moon. Howard was designing a top-secret Rover for it. Howard would not be going, seeing as how the one fiasco in space nearly did him in. Of course, the excitement was palatable among our little group. And now we await the return of our cadet and all the spoils from deep space nine.

Rocks for the geology lab. Some dirt for the ecologists. And data for everyone! Except me. I could study the brains of the astronauts, but I didn’t expect to find anything different than I ever had before. Maybe some endorphins from going where no man had ever gone before, pardon the pun, but no Earth shattering evidence of anything.

I was bemoaning my woes to Sheldon that evening over dinner when he said in that offhand way he has with actual interesting information (instead of his usual tedious fact sharing), “You know, don’t you, they brought back water from Saturn?”

“There’s no water on Saturn,” I quickly replied, cutting my pork chop into more chew-worthy cubes.

“Oh, contraire,” he said in his condescending way. “They have some.” Sheldon, of course, wasn’t eating pork chops, had instead elected to eat pasta noodles. Plain. He toyed with the idea of adding some low salt soy sauce or spicy mustard but refrained. He didn’t want gastronomic distress on a Wednesday night by upsetting his routine.

So the next day I called Howard at the lab to determine if this were true. Not that Sheldon would lie to me, but we all know about his “Bazinga!” tricks he considers wily. Indeed it were true. “Have any effects been tested on an animal post-ingestion?”

“As it were, we haven’t given it to any,” Howard informed me. “We don’t have much, so they’re using it sparingly. Know of a test subject in case we find something in a rat?”

“As a matter of fact….”

And that’s how it came to be that I drank the water. Looking back, it wasn’t the most brilliant idea I ever had. Of course, first I tested it on my monkey, Lizzie. She’s game for anything. And what I found….well, what I found was what made me want to drink it in the first place. Lizzie’s brain lit up a like an Edison light bulb. No prior lab work had ever yielded such a profound result. Both right and left hemispheres not only sparked, they glowed. I couldn’t type fast enough to note all the differences. And it appeared that Lizzie desperately wanted to communicate something with me, but her primate brain just couldn’t articulate. So she lapsed into the bit of sign language I had taught her.

“Trapped,” she signed. “Not happy.”

I assumed this must mean when she was in her cage.

“It’s the only way,” I signed back.

“Mean. You try it,” she replied.

“Try being married to Sheldon,” I aid aloud. I wondered if I passed her the keyboard if she would be able to type. But that was a ridiculous notion..and impossible to resist. I slipped it under the lip in the cage, not daring to unlock it. With all her smarts, she might decide to latch onto my face once and for all.

Like a fish to water, she typed furiously. I read, and after I did, I fainted. And when I woke up, I drank the water from Saturn. I should have never consumed it. But it was too late. And now, now I knew things. I knew what it was like to be a test monkey. I knew what was said when my sample of water was collected. I knew what it felt like to be born, and not as a born-again Christian, but really and truly born. I knew who liked me, who didn’t, and who tolerated me. I knew what color car you drove in high school, and how much gas was in the car you are driving today.

And the knowledge would kill me. It was too much. I forced myself to throw up, because I knew, too, that would be the only way I would live to tell about it.

I lay on the cold tile floor of my lab. That’s where they found me that night when I didn’t make it for Taco Night Trivia.