Nautilus

Steve grimaced and slouched down in his chair. The graduate student in front of the projector screen was trembling, biting his lip and staring at Steve with a glimmer of desperate hope in his eyes. Steve sighed.

“It seems like an ideal two-photon microscope experiment. Why are you wasting your time with a confocal?”

As they filed out of the conference room, Steve allowed himself a smile. The look of shock on the student’s face had brightened his day; no one expected good advice about cutting edge technology from an eighty-five year old.

But Steve wasn’t quite a fossil yet.

This is in honor of the Nautilus, which is a particularly ancient-looking cephalopod described as a "living fossil". And the Andrew Bird line, "I had not become a cephalopod" from "Opposite Day".

A link to Ayn's story, inspired by the same line, here.