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Mano hadn't noticed at which time she'd begun to talk to herself and hear voices in her head talking back to her all the time, but it must have been sometime around the middle of the fall. It had happened so seamlessly and she'd had enough time to get used to it that it'd never really stood out to her as something all that unusual for her to have been doing or experiencing. There'd been no one around to tell her that there'd been something wrong with it, and she'd eventually decided that without someone around to tell her that, it hadn't been. That had been the first time that she'd really understood what Klein had meant by hell having been other people, that it hadn't necessarily been supposed to have been as negative as it'd sounded to her at first. With no one around to judge her, she'd finally begun to glimpse at just how pointless and artificial shame could be.

Her initial motivation for it may have changed, but she hadn't been about to come back from her dive into hibernation quite yet, not by a long shot.

First of all, she'd known her supplies hadn't been going to last her forever, and even an ascetic needed a way to put some food on the table. She hadn't known how many limbs a loan shark would have broken on her if she'd had to borrow money from one and hadn't been able to reimburse it on time, two because that was the usual number, four because it had to be half or six because it had to leave only two intact, but she hadn't wanted to have to find out.

She'd remembered that Elizabeth hadn't said she had to do the same thing that she'd done, and although she'd wanted to continue to do everything she could to help others and make the world a better place to live in, she'd believed that she'd have to find her own way of doing that from then on, one which would bear her own brand of craft and ken. One central criticism of religion which Elizabeth had brought up was that it promised panaceas to the world's problems which didn't deliver what they promised, and that this made them false advertising. Mano hadn't agreed with that at the time and was no longer sure of what she believed in or not, but she'd thought that if she could somehow use the skills and resources she'd had to get the world just a little closer to how she'd known that Elizabeth had wanted it to be, to bring about a repeatable, measurable and consensual improvement on people's behavior, that maybe she could atone for what she'd done or had failed to do.

Given what she'd ended up coming up with after tinkering with her plants, lab equipment and med kits for several months on end, she'd had to calmly consider the possibility that building the sub had just brought her that one step closer to full-fledged mad scientist which she'd still been short on, and she'd shrugged it off with all six shoulders. If that was what she'd have to be to get what she'd had to do done, then so be it and happen what may, she'd just have to make sure to be the best damn possible mad scientist she could be.

She'd remembered the reasons for which Elizabeth hadn't liked being on meds, that it'd made her feel dissociated from others' feelings in a way she hadn't cared for and had drained her creative juices. On the other hand, she'd known that some creative types had used pharmaceuticals to increase their creativity, and she'd begun to wonder if it could be possible for her to create an associative, so to speak. She'd heard aikido described as 'medicine for a sick world', and she'd begun to wonder what a literal application of this concept could have been like. Something like the concepts in Brave New World and Giving Plague, but without the part about doing things without people's consent, altering their personality or removing their free will.

Something which would offer people's brains a bigger carrot for understanding and reciprocity than for proving something and saving face, for doing right than for being right. The brain already had mechanisms in place which chemically rewarded competitive, predatory and territorial behavior, which were basically lurking in the shadows waiting to punish them for admitting defeat, so she'd only thought of herself as evening the odds, not tipping the scale. She hadn't wanted to hold people by the hand, just to give evolution a push in the right direction.

She'd learned about what neurologists called empathy neurons, or mirror neurons, which were the part of the brain related to relating to others, and found a way to temporarily create a specific connection in people's brains between the exercise of empathy and endorphin production, which made it so that whenever people who were under the influence of it showed empathy toward others, they'd get a direct and intense neurochemical reward released into their organisms for doing so, at least as intense as any other drug on any market could boast of. It'd reward people for keeping an open mind, putting themselves in other people's shoes, admitting when they'd be wrong and other things she'd observed that people hated to do even though they generally yielded better results than not in the long run. She'd combined the neural connection acceleration and metabolism-boosting effects of smart drugs and steroids and found a way to neutralize their negative side-effects to give its users the perceptiveness and physical capacity to still not be taken advantage of for caring too much.

It wouldn't tell people which decisions to make, but it'd increase their capacity for perceiving the facts for what they were instead of for what they wanted them to be. She'd decided she might as well top it off by throwing in the green tea genes which made it a cancer prevention agent while she'd been at it. She'd decided that, money problems or not, she'd have to sell it at an affordable price because she'd really wanted as many people as possible to be able to have access to it. Since medical marijuana had already been legal and that she'd been taught the rudiments of herbalism while she'd been growing up, she'd decided that her creation would take the form of a plant which, when dried, crushed and smoked, should deliver exactly what religion promised, or at least what she'd wanted it to be. If you smoked enough of it, you could feel as though you'd grown horns, claws, antennae, tendrils, feelers, tentacles, wings, tails, fangs, fire breath and any other number of things you didn't know what it was like for other creatures to have and would carry the memories of with you long after, which wasn't that different from visions, either. It grew in saltwater, like seaweed did, and you could make some terrific waterproof hemp from it, at that.

She'd privately wondered if she'd invented it back when Elizabeth had been alive, if that could have been enough for them to finally really understand each other, but there had been no way of going back to find out, she'd regretted.

She would call her creation Looking Glass Weed.