The meeting with Lucas went in the best traditions of spy movies. A far table in a half-empty cafe, two identical packages, a quick exchange without extra words or eye contact. I gave him the money, and he gave me the priceless ingredients. Already on the way back to the university, Peter called me and, in an excited voice, asked me to buy a number of specific chemicals that were not freely available in the laboratory. "Just in case," he added. It was easy for me.
Returning to the laboratory at six in the evening, I handed him the box with the purchases. I carefully put a small vial inside.
"Potion of Intellect. Drink it. The effect lasts for several hours."
Peter looked at the vial, then at me.
"What about you? Aren't you going to take it? We're supposed to be working together."
"What's the point?" I shrugged. "It doesn't create knowledge out of nowhere, but it significantly improves the basis. Conditionally, if your brain is a five-story building, then with the potion it will become an elite twenty-story penthouse. But the foundation will remain the same. And in neurobiochemistry, my foundation is nothing. I literally know nothing about it."
"But... you somehow created a muscle stimulant? And this potion too..." now Peter was looking at the vial with obvious suspicion.
"I just followed the finished recipe perfectly. I won't say where I got them from. But in the future there will be more of them, and they will not only be temporary stimulants," I hope.
"Can... can I at least test it on a mouse? I believe you and all that, but..."
"Trust, but verify," I finished for him with a grin. "Of course, you can. Give a drop to the mouse. Let's see how quickly she defends her dissertation on quantum physics."
The subsequent events took less than ten minutes, but they turned Peter Parker's world upside down. He placed a normal laboratory mouse in a complex, multi-level maze. The mouse hesitantly moved forward. Then Peter gave her one drop of the potion. The mouse froze for a second, and then took off. She didn't run chaotically. She moved with incredible speed and accuracy, never turning into a dead end, instantly finding the only correct path that had been stored in her memory, and now, thanks to the potion, she was able to use this knowledge.
"This is... a new record!" Peter exclaimed in shock, looking incredulously at the stopwatch. "Perhaps a new record among all laboratories in the USA!"
The mouse in the finish chamber silently gazed at us with its black beady eyes, devouring the well-deserved cheese.
"Now you're starting to understand why all this should remain a secret?" I asked seriously. "If someone upstairs finds out about the existence of something like this, then the fate of this laboratory mouse will seem like mercy to both of us."
"I... I understand," Peter hastened to assure me. He took the vial in his hands and, without hesitation, drained it in one gulp.
"The effect appears almost immediately, but the peak of brain activity will occur in about half an hour. Now your brain is, you might say, accelerating."
"Y-yes... I feel it..." Peter froze, his eyes widened. "So many ideas... streams of data... The recipe for your 'Beast Potion'... God, it's crude and inefficient! It's not a recipe, it's a biochemical sledgehammer!"
This was the first thing he said, running his eyes over the sheet again. His voice changed, becoming clearer, more confident, faster.
"So, the active substance, aconitine alkaloid... it forcibly opens sodium channels in neurons, causing chaotic depolarization. The creator of the recipe thought that it 'releases instincts', but in fact it simply creates a huge neural 'noise'! Signals from the prefrontal cortex—the center of logic and fear—are simply drowned in this chaos!"
"I approximately understood," I nodded, trying to keep up with his thoughts.
"Yes, roughly speaking, this is not an exacerbation of instincts, but a suppression of analytics through neurotoxic shock! Hence the huge load on the entire nervous system and cognitive 'withdrawal symptoms' afterwards."
"So, it's not just about the stimulant..." I muttered.
"Exactly! But, in fairness, it's even worse! It's a classic non-selective adrenergic receptor agonist. It hits all receptors at once: alpha-1—vasoconstriction, wild pressure. Beta-1—increased and strengthened heartbeat, a direct path to arrhythmia and heart attack. Beta-2—expansion of the bronchi, which is useful, but this effect is lost in the overall negative! This is an emergency overload of the entire cardiovascular system!"
"Shit... And what about the spider venom? Does it also add fuel to the fire?"
"Hmm, but it's the most interesting," Peter paused for a second, and I saw hundreds of options flashing in his eyes. "The venom of this species contains complex peptides. My hypothesis: one of them acts as a chaperone—a 'molecular nanny'. It binds to aconite alkaloids, allowing them to more easily cross the blood-brain barrier and, more importantly, partially blocks their effects on sodium channels specifically in the heart muscle! In short, without this venom, the potion would be instantly lethal. It's not a catalyst, but a primitive, rough safety buffer."
"And what's your final verdict?"
Peter looked at me, and his eyes burned with the fire of a genius who had encountered an impossible but fascinating task.
"This is not science! This recipe is an attempt to poison the body just enough so that it falls into a state of battle frenzy, but does not die. Crude, primitive... I..." he took a deep breath. "I can do better. Yes. Now I understand that I really can."
After this phrase, Peter turned into a walking whirlwind. He began to circle the laboratory, his brain, accelerated to unimaginable speeds, working at its limit. He muttered something to himself, gesticulated, and then ran to the laboratory board and covered it with rows of complex formulas and diagrams that looked like cuneiform to me.
"No, that's not it!" he exclaimed, erasing a whole section of calculations. "Replacing aconite with a selective CNS stimulant, for example, with a modified amphetamine... Yes, the reaction will be lightning fast, but at what cost? Tunnel vision, loss of peripheral analysis. The fighter will become fast, but stupid. He would only see the goal, but not the knife under his ribs. Failure."
He was going in circles again.
"Second option: add an 'antidote'? Introduce a selective beta-blocker to protect the heart and a nootropic to stabilize the CNS... Nonsense! It will be a pharmacological chaos! The components will enter into an antagonistic reaction. The nootropic will try to 'fix' the brain while the aconite 'breaks' it. It's like pressing on the gas and the brake at the same time. The effect is nausea, dizziness, complete loss of coordination. Another failure!"
Dozens of simulations flashed through his head in seconds. Hundreds of theories were born and died instantly. For a good hour, Peter rushed around the lab, periodically exclaiming, "This idea is Nobel-worthy!", but immediately returned to the task at hand. And then, finally...
"Bingo!" he exclaimed so loudly that I flinched. He quickly sketched something on a piece of paper and showed it to me. I saw a complex diagram of a protein molecule and understood nothing. Fortunately, Peter immediately began to explain, his eyes burning with the delight of a discoverer. "I was an idiot! I was focused on replacing the 'bad' components, overlooking the spider venom! I thought: 'it works, don't touch it'. But it was the key! It was necessary not to replace aconite and adrenaline, but to create an ideal delivery system for them!"
"And? What did you come up with?" I asked, feeling my head swell from the stream of brilliant thoughts.
"I'm synthesizing an artificial carrier protein, structurally similar to spider silk!" he poked his finger at the drawing. "It will have two active centers. One binds to a new, synthesized neuro-inhibitory peptide that will act cleanly and without toxic noise. The other—with a myo-reflective potentiator. And here's the ingenious part: this protein is programmed so that the first module is released only after passing the blood-brain barrier, that is, in the brain, and the second—in the general bloodstream, without reaching the brain! Ideal targeted delivery without side effects!"
I confess, I didn't understand a damn thing. But I understood the main thing: he solved the problem. My bet on this modest genius paid off.