"Oops, how'd that happen?"

Writer's Cramp, 9-19. You really do need to pay attention, Doc.

         
          My name is Professor Graham Merr, and for fifty-nine years, I have been, to put it mildly, a well-meaning academic. 'Well-meaning' is Dean Hemlock's favorite euphemism for 'utterly unremarkable.' My college? Let's say it's more of a rumor than an institution, tucked away in an industrial park, smelling faintly of old coffee and existential dread. And me, Professor Merr, a neurobiologist of the highest... potential, I've always told myself, despite a robust physique and a scalp that abandoned ship decades ago. Original thought? An urban legend, as far as my brain was concerned.

          Then came the meeting. Dean Hemlock, a man whose smile could curdle milk, laid it out plain: 'Professor Merr,' he'd said, his eyes like tiny, judgmental ball bearings, 'this semester. Produce something of worth. Or your grants disappear, and so do you. From here. From anywhere.' My grants! My lifeblood! My barely-there research budget mostly went on stronger coffee and extra-large lab coats. Desperation, my friends, is a potent elixir. It makes a man like me, a man who has perfected the art of observing mold grow in petri dishes, contemplate genuine, honest-to-goodness innovation.

          The lab, my sanctuary of stagnation, suddenly felt like a ticking time bomb. I reread every paper I'd ever half-understood, every abstract that had ever graced my inbox. Nothing. My brain remained a desert of originality. That's when the whispers began. Not actual whispers, you understand, but the insidious little suggestions that only desperation can conjure. Graham, what if you... just... moved things around a bit? What if you... accidentally... found something?

          I started with my colony of lab mice, poor creatures. Usually, they just ran mazes I'd drawn on a cocktail napkin. But now, they were my unwitting pioneers. I was attempting to replicate some of the more outlandish (and fraudulent) neural enhancement experiments I'd once skimmed. 'Memory amplification,' I mumbled, fiddling with a particularly rusty centrifuge. 'Cognitive acceleration!' My methods escalated from 'slightly unconventional' to 'would definitely get me audited by the ethical review board, if we had one.'

          I began injecting various substances into the mice, substances I'd found tucked away in dusty cupboards. Unlabeled vials, expired concoctions, even a packet of instant coffee that had somehow ended up in the 'experimental compounds' drawer. My logic was simple: if I threw enough spaghetti at the wall, something was bound to stick. The mice, bless their rodent hearts, seemed remarkably resilient. Or utterly oblivious.

          One evening, fueled by three-day-old pizza and a creeping sense of panic, I made a truly magnificent error. I misread a label - easy enough, my spectacles were perpetually smudged. Instead of the saline solution I intended for the control group, I accidentally administered a highly diluted... well, let's say it was something typically used to clean particularly stubborn stains from laboratory glassware. A potent, industrial-grade cleaning agent, but severely diluted. I didn't realize my mistake until the next morning. My heart, already a sluggish organ, performed a frantic jig. Graham, you are absolutely an imbecile! You've poisoned them all! My career, my life, my dignity - all gone, replaced by a mob of angry animal rights activists and the lingering scent of bleach.

          But then, I looked closer. The mice in the 'bleach treatment' group were not dead. In fact, they were... peculiar. Their whiskers twitched at an almost alarming speed. Their eyes, beady and intelligent, seemed to follow me with unnerving focus. And when I put them in the maze, they didn't just run it; they sprinted it. Not once, but repeatedly, flawlessly, as if they'd memorized every turn, every dead end, every hidden treat. They were solving the maze faster than I could even draw the next one. They were... brilliant. Hyper-intelligent. Little rodent geniuses, all thanks to a scientific blunder of epic proportions.

          My mind, usually a barren wasteland, began to churn. This wasn't just a discovery; this was a revolution. Neural enhancement! Cognitive acceleration! And all because I couldn't read the label and mistook a bottle of cleaning fluid for saline. The irony was so profound, it almost made me laugh. Almost. The implications, however, were staggering. Imagine! A world where intellect could be boosted, memories sharpened, all with a simple, albeit highly questionable, chemical cocktail.

          This was it. My chance. My one, glorious shot at not just saving my career, but making a name for myself. And the cost? A secret so preposterous, so unscientific in its origin, that I could never, ever tell a living soul. Not the Dean, not my non-existent colleagues, not even the mice themselves, should they ever develop the capacity for understanding.

          I spent the next few days concocting an elaborate, entirely fictional methodology. Complex chemical formulas, intricate neural pathways, sophisticated statistical analyses - all spun from the ether of my desperate imagination. The mice, my little bleach-boosted Einsteins, continued to perform miracles, their intelligence growing with each passing hour. I even taught one of them to play a rudimentary game of tic-tac-toe. (He won, naturally.)

          Soon, it will be time. Time to present my 'findings.' Professor Graham Merr, the overlooked, the underwhelming, was about to become Professor Graham Merr, the groundbreaking neurobiologist. The headlines would sing. The grants would flow. And I, Graham Merr, would carry my ridiculous, brilliant secret to my grave, a secret born of desperation, bad eyesight, and a bottle of laboratory-grade cleaning fluid. But hey, a genius has to start somewhere, right? Even if that somewhere is in a puddle of industrial detergent.

          But then, the cold, hard splash of reality. How could I ever explain this? 'Yes, Dean, my groundbreaking discovery came from accidentally injecting lab cleaner into the brain of a mouse.' No. Absolutely not. The clanging of prison bars would punctuate my Nobel Prize acceptance speech. My fame would be as fleeting as the scent of bleach.


Words: 966
Prompt: A researcher wants to gain fame, but they must do something they can never tell anyone about.