The Edacious Heretic

There's a saying in the Intelligentsia Guild: "A covered face is a symbol of wisdom."
But unlike the rational self-restraint of a plaster head, the instruments on the scholar's head flash with danger and forbidden secrets.

"They say she never stops performing lobotomies on herself, that she is willing to sacrifice her own synapses just to keep pace with genius."
"They say she treats gray matter like raw meat, and her skull is riddled with holes from years and years of self-experimentation."

She paid no mind to the whispers until she was stopped by some busybodies.
They stared at the electrode conduits lining her metal casing, and excitedly demanded to know whether she had truly desecrated a sacred soul.
The scholar let out a cold laugh.

A mechanism opens with a crisp click that echoes through the halls of learning, electrodes flickering like a starry sky.
Beautiful, branching structures unfurl within the incubator, thinking at the speed of light as signals race across billions of cells, carrying profound knowledge and inspiration.
"Cowards. You lack even the courage to dissect the truth, yet you presume to teach others how to seek the boundaries of knowledge?"

These were the final words she left behind amidst the rising waves of gasps and exclamations.
Another 43,824 system hours later, the Technology Department welcomed a "pure" scholar. She drifted in a giant vat filled with cerebrospinal fluid, yet had connected herself to the darkest secrets of the universe.