"Knives."

The scientist looked up. The musician was bright-eyed, excited, although there were bags under his eyes. She replaced her spectacles (why did she always take them off for the close-up work? It didn't make sense) and gave him her full attence. "Knives?"

"Knives." He sat down on the stool, gangly, limbs too long. He was not suited for the labratory - not a huge surprise, really. "Knives are the answer. We...we cut."

It was almost cute, watching him try to describe what he presumed the scientific method was. "Do you mean dissection?"

He nodded, enthusiastic, excited. "Yes! Yes, we cut it, we use the knives."

"When did you last sleep?" The scientist asked gently - he is wild-eyed, wild-haired.

He waved a hand - a gallant, outreagous, very musicianly action (he could almost be conducting a brass section). "Sleep doesn't matter. What matters is that we can... disect it." He sounds like he's tasting the word, trying it on, seeing if he likes it. "We can understand it. We can dismantle it, and we can rebuild it, and we can - "

He stops talking. He looks, for a moment, as if he has forgotten how.

"You want to disect it. You want to extract the mechanism."

He nods, wild.

"It doesn't work that way." The scientist tells him softly, placing a hand on his shoulder, bringing him back to reality, back to the realities of the lab. "All we'll find will be blood, and veins, and cells."

He doesn't understand.

"We can't extract the mechanism of your heart."