"Do you even recognize your own prison?" I ask the dining hall of laughing professors. This conference is a waste of everyone's time. Having to prove the necessity of my research grants to these out-of-touch gatekeepers is a degradation to the entire purpose of scientific experimentation.

"Do any of you," I ask, "realize how tight the walls of your cage are? The limits of your observation?"

Their smiles are fading.

I try bringing it down to a grade school level.

"The rainbow. The entire spectrum of visible light. That marginally slim window we have to the universe around us, that splinter of wavelength that sits between 400 and 700 nanometers. Is that really enough for you?"

"Stop embarrassing yourself," someone yells up to me from the far table. "Give the mic back already!"

A few murmurs agree. I can feel the hand of the research panel's director on my shoulder. He's asking me to surrender the microphone and return to my seat.

"No!" I shout, pulling away from him. "Not until I've said my piece." But my voice has stopped echoing back to me. The little red dot on the microphone has gone out.

"You have." The director extends his hand towards the stage steps. "Now please."

I toss the dead microphone towards that hand and the clumsy director can't even catch it. Then I turn to the room of cranky, balding men who all look to have quickly grown bored with my voice. "What have you got against progress?" I shout.

"Let it go!" says my old professor.

"It can't be done!" shouts my old lab partner.

"Not by you, at least!" came a voice from the back, and this returned a few chuckles.

"No, not just by him," someone else responded. "Give it just a minute of real thought and the whole notion falls apart. The size of the human eye restricts developing any cone cells possible of-"

"It's not the eye, it's the mind!" shouted my old lab partner. "You can't just introduce new signals to the nervous system and expect the mind to re-calibrate itself to turn the static of new sensation into meaningful-"

"Hello?" joined another voice, "are you forgetting about all the progress in nerve-controlled prosthetics these past twelve years?"

"Oh sure," the argument continued from across the room, "because motor function is the exact same thing as light perception and visual cognition."

"Even if it were possible to introduce artificial cones into the optical nerves-"

"Whose talking about artificial? His report claims to be able to grow existing cone receptors to-"

"In human patients?!"

"Why anyone would even finance the research, even if animal trials proved successful, when the human eye is so different from-"

"Yeah right! Like this would ever even reach animal trials!"

"You pessimistic bunch of cowardly know-it-alls!" I shout from the edge of the stage. "I've already done it!"

I clutch my glasses, my new wire-framed glasses with no focus in the lenses, just a slight shade of pink that has been laughed at twice already tonight. I hesitate to take them off. It's going to hurt. But these wind bags must see. They must see what I see.

I remove the glasses and every light in the ceiling shines twice as bright. The whispers of steam from the seated men swirl in the air overhead like the film of a soap bubble. The remnants of chicken on scattered plates still glow. And every piece of bare flesh becomes a paintbrush as it moves.

I squint through the swirls of bright fog and see someone with an arm that gives off no heat.

"You, who mentioned the prosthetics. Is that because your arm is made of plastic?"

The man looks shocked, and so do the guests seated around him. He gave no indication that the hand was not natural, and I guess I've embarrassed him in front of his colleagues.

"You there, in the wheelchair!" I point. "You've just farted."

"And you!" I point to my old college professor who gave up on me immediately after I earned my degree. "You've just pissed yourself! I can see the warmth rising from your lap."

The room says nothing.

I lower my hand, still frozen in an accusatory stabbing gesture of my upturned finger.

"No need to say anything," I tell them. "The embarrassment behind you cheeks is enough. God, if I could just make you see. See the wave of new colors rushing through your faces as the warmth fills every available blood vessel. I can see the light of your hearts trying to pump more blood to your head so you can reason your way out of this without looking like an idiot. But I can see the idiot rising in the heat off of every one of you. It's beautiful."

I return the pink-tinted glasses, filtering the waves of light past 'red' away from my sensitive eyes. The director's hand returns to my shoulder, probably to turn me around so he can apologize like a gentleman.

Only it's not the director. It's the thick hand of a security guard grabbing my shoulder, and his other hand has mine wrenched behind my back so he can steer my down the steps of the stage and out the side door of the dining hall.

I'm thrown out like a bag of garbage. I guess I should have expected as much from such pretentious society. But I could not have expected to be helped up by my own lab partner waiting out there by the gutter. Somehow she knew to wait here instead of the front doors.

She finds my glasses in the gutter and returns them to my face.

"They didn't listen." she says. Not a question, just a statement. "Of course they wouldn't. Such a backwards organization anyway, still refusing to accept woman into their research programs."

"I'm sorry to admit," I say, "but I didn't even get to explain your breakthrough. They threw me out as soon as I made a display of your results. I'm sorry. I thought I would pull your name out at the end, like some big reveal. I thought if they heard it from a man first, they could take it seriously."

She gives me a sympathetic but pitying smile and links her arm around mine to walk down the street. "I'm sure Eunice Foote was told something similar. Maybe I'll join her and Rosalind Franklin's little club in heaven, and the three of us will look down on all your friends and colleagues as they eat their conference dinners and slap themselves on the backs."

"I thought you'd be angry."

"I am angry," she says, "but my anger's directed at so many other people, I don't have any left for you my little test subject."

She slips her hand in mine to stop our walk at the sidewalk corner. The doors to the dining hall are still propped open nearby. I can hear them laughing.

"What's it like?" she asks, for what's probably been the twentieth time that question has been asked since the procedure.

"I still can't describe it," I say. "The distinction between red and infrared is constantly getting clearer, but the hue is not like a deeper shade, it's just . . . new. It's a new paint on the palette. It has a way of mixing into all the other colors. I could put a name on it, but it wouldn't mean anything."

"And if you had to express the feeling of it?" She let go off my hand to wrap her arms around me.

"Warm, obviously." I look at the imprint of her hand where it held mine, the ghost of her interlocking fingers over my knuckles. "But like a lively warm, not some red-hot metal. A kind warm. It usually gets all drowned out in direct light, but when it seeps through a covered source it's like . . . " I point at the glowing light above her heart. "It's like here. Whatever you're wearing, whatever color lies on top of it can't hide the glow. And it shines through your cheeks when you smile. And it feels like-"

I don't have to tell her what it feels like.

She brings her mouth close, and shows me that she already knows the feeling.