PRESENT DAY
1
She’d beaten her own best time running the Stanford Dish trail this morning.
Erin’s legs quivered with exhaustion and sweat dribbled into her eyes as she grabbed her bicycle and pedaled back to Menlo Park. But she grinned up at the sky, its color just beginning to morph from gray to pink, to the smoggy blue and gold of a May sunrise over the East Bay mountains. She needed a shower, and also a celebration—she’d beaten not just her own record, but her brother Adrian’s, too.
Carrying her bicycle up her apartment’s exterior flight of stairs, mindful not to catch creepers of trailing bougainvillea in the spokes, she locked her rear tire to the railing, nodded at one of her roommates leaving for work while she shucked off her running shoes on the mat, then padded into the bathroom. The apartment on Live Oak Avenue was a three-bed, one-bath layout, which wasn’t ideal for three women and various partners who dropped by for the night, but the location was good, close to a weekend farmers’ market, public transportation, and Kepler’s Books, and they managed.
On a government salary, living alone wasn’t usually viable in Silicon Valley.
She dropped her sports bra and running shorts, slipped on a pair of rubber shower sandals—which she’d learned were a necessity second only to good headphones in a shared living situation—and stepped under a sluice of hot water. After luxuriating in the heat for a minute, she switched the temperature to tepid out of consideration for her other roommate, who would need to use it next. She was toweling her hair dry in her bedroom a few minutes later, while scanning through the influx of Monday emails flooding both her SVLAC and personal addresses, when a message chirped into her private inbox: Your Submission to Galactica Magazine.
Dear Aaron Forster,
We are delighted to inform you that your short story, “Pandora Rising,”
has been accepted for publication. You will receive a complimentary copy of the next issue of Galactica Magazine, where your work will be printed. Our editors enjoyed your story and would be pleased to receive additional submissions in the future.
She’d done it.
She, Erin Monaghan—or “Aaron Forster,”
for anonymity—was going to be a published author!
She’d submitted “Pandora Rising”
to the Bay Area science fiction magazine almost three months ago, and had largely given up hope of hearing back from the editors by this point.
But now?
Her fingers danced over her phone, closing out her personal email and opening the Monaghan family chat. But before she could bombard her parents and brothers with multiple exclamation points, a notification from her SVLAC inbox zipped onto the screen under her thumb.
Journal of Supermassive Astronomy and Astrophysics: Submission Results
The peer review committee from one of the most prestigious, if admittedly niche, journals publishing work on large-scale astronomical objects and phenomena had completed its evaluation of her sole-author research paper—and on the same day that the editors from Galactica Magazine had also made their decision.
Oh, God.
Pressing her tongue against a slight gap between her front teeth and crossing her fingers and toes for luck—she would’ve crossed her eyes, too, if it wouldn’t have impacted her ability to read the committee’s decision—she swallowed, exhaled through her excitement at Galactica’s acceptance, and opened her second set of results.
Dear Dr. Erin Monaghan,
Thank you for submitting “Investigating the Impact of Tidal Disruption Events on the Axis Rotation of Galaxies Proximal to Black Holes”
to the Journal of Supermassive Astronomy and Astrophysics. Following a process of peer review, your manuscript has been recommended to the journal’s editors for publication in its current form. No revisions are required prior to the appearance of the paper in the journal’s September issue.
We remind you at this time of the journal’s copyright and open-access policies, and request your signed author agreement by June 1st.
Regards,
Dr. Ronald Sams, Editor-in-Chief
Her paper was the result of years of experimental lab time and data analysis, assessing and describing the behavior of galaxies when nearby stars were consumed by black holes. It was the first sole-author piece she’d submitted for publication, and it had been accepted without even requiring revisions!
That wasn’t unheard of. But it was rare.
Almost breathless now with too much good news, she clicked back into the Monaghan family chat.
Erin
So, it’s a big day for me.
Galactica accepted Pandora Rising…
Erin
…and the Journal of Supermassive Astronomy and Astrophysics accepted my research paper! Next up: take down quantum theory and definitively prove the superiority of relativistic mechanics.
Typing notifications immediately bubbled across her screen; early morning on the West Coast was post-caffeine time for her family in Michigan and New York.
Mom
I’m so proud of you, sweetheart. I can never quite get my head around these competing theories, but it sounds very impressive.
Wes
That’s your scientific paper with an unpronounceable title about tides, right? You didn’t consult my professional expertise before you wrote it. I’m hurt.
She snorted, smiling, bouncing on the balls of her feet.
Erin
Only because you would’ve tried to shoehorn in a joke about starfish.
Wes
It would’ve been hilarious.
Erin
Scientists famously have no sense of humor.
Wes
I guess you’ve just proved your point. And scientists also have no ability to simplify their research for the layperson. Mom, here’s the plain-language version of what our Dr. Monaghan has been spouting off about for the last ten years. Relativistic mechanics plays well with gravity, planets, and galaxies. Quantum mechanics deals with matter on an atomic scale. But the logic of relativistic mechanics falls apart if it’s reduced down to the quantum size of things, and if you try to apply quantum mechanics on a cosmic level, that fails, too. Plus, everything goes sideways for both of them when their different explanations about the behavior of matter collide around Erin’s black holes. They’re separate theories of reality with separate formulations. It’s all still physics, though.
Mom
That’s helpful, darling. Thank you.
Erin
Don’t listen to him, Mom. The relativistic versus quantum mechanics debate is much more complex and interesting than that.
Wes
But stripping away your fancy jargon, does my breakdown make sense?
Erin
No!
Erin
…sort of.
Erin
Fine. Yes.
Adrian
Great. But can we leave any leftover litigation between you two to Dad? It’s always going to be too early for this topic.
Erin
Fine!
Adrian
Now, back to your story. If you didn’t negotiate a contract of at least five figures, we’ll need to talk. (Seriously, though: science and all, I’m happy for you, Frizzy.)
Erin
I’m happy for me, too. Because I also beat your Dish time this morning.
Adrian
WHAT?!
Wes
Is this story going to the sci-fi magazine that wanted you to add tentacles?
Erin
Not yucking your yum, but I turned that option down. You’re the one with experience, anyway. Not everyone has gone sea diving to photograph octopuses. Why don’t you write it?
Dad
What about tentacles?
Wes
Never mind, Dad.
Erin
Ignore him.
Dad
Well, good job, kiddo.
Erin
Thanks. I need to head to the lab, but I’ll be on our call later.
Adrian
Good. I’ve got some questions about the route you took on the Dish.
Erin
I’m sure you do. Bye, slowpoke!
Adrian
I have QUESTIONS.
The conversation pivoted away to Robert Monaghan’s progress on the model train track he’d begun to construct through the back garden of their house in Grand Arbor. Laughing over Adrian’s competitive outrage, she turned to her messages with Martina Perez while she shimmied into a pair of jeans and combed her damp hair into a ponytail.
Erin
I have exciting news! (How was your shift?)
Martina
Did you find an error in Ethan Meyer’s latest data set? (Ugh. A couple of grad students kept trying to enter an accelerator hutch while the machinery was active. I had to babysit and adjust beam quality at the same time. So tired. Heading home now.)
Erin
As if he’d ever let me see his raw data. Jerk.
No—it’s even better than that. (Get some sleep!)
She whirled up a protein smoothie in the kitchen, then hurriedly brushed her teeth before another roommate stumbled into the bathroom for a shower, texting one-handed and spraying toothpaste in her glee.
Martina
What could possibly be better than spotting flaws in his quantum research? Unless you got to spot it publicly?
Erin
Two things. Having a sole-author paper published in the Journal of Supermassive Astronomy and Astrophysics, and having a short story published anywhere. Now… drumroll, please… Galactica Magazine said yes—and so did the journal!
Martina
What?! Oh my God! Both at once? That’s great, Erin! Much better than finding a data flaw.
Erin
They’d all be about equal. But yes, I’m so excited!
Martina
I want full details this evening.
Erin
Definitely.
With that, she shouldered her jacket and backpack, ferried her bicycle back down the stairs, and sped off for SVLAC alongside a cavalcade of commuter cars rumbling up Sand Hill Road. She waved to a guard at the campus gatehouse, flashing her employee identification badge and another smile, and grinned wider still when she passed through the parking lot outside the Modern Physics building.
Ethan’s car wasn’t there.
She’d beaten him to the office on the last Monday of the month, which meant that she’d get to schedule her next five weeks of lab time in the experimental halls before him. Numerous graveyard shifts with the machinery during her early tenure at SVLAC had taught her the importance of punctuality on scheduling day, and the even greater importance of getting her hours scheduled first.
Of course, it was his sleight of hand several years ago—her work calendar had inexplicably switched its a.m. and p.m. listings, so that a normal lab time selection of twelve noon on her calendar view became midnight on the scheduling sheet—that had brought her into contact with Martina Perez during one of the night shifts; as an operator in the experimental halls, Martina worked a brutal rotating combination of three fourteen-hour days on and four days off per week. But the fact that Ethan had inadvertently introduced her to her best friend was cold comfort.
To think, she’d once anticipated sharing theories with him!
Had been so flustered when she’d collided with him…
Well, Ethan Meyer was late to SVLAC, she’d beaten her own Dish run time, her work would be published in both Galactica Magazine and the Journal of Supermassive Astronomy and Astrophysics, and it was a beautiful, beautiful morning.
Waving a greeting to her fellow early birds as she passed the Modern Physics coffee station and kitchenette, she sat down at her desk, tugged her utility jacket off over her light taupe sweater—SVLAC’s air conditioning was vicious—forwarded her paper acceptance email to Nadine with a few lines of gratitude for her supervisor’s support, double-checked her research plans to gauge whether she should book one weekly slot or two on LIGO, then opened the scheduling calendar.
Calendar: SVLAC East and West Experimental Halls Lab Hours
Before she could select her date and time, the grid flickered under her cursor and closed. SVLAC’s IT equipment was old and sometimes cranky. She sighed and opened the calendar again. It froze. Then it disappeared from her monitor altogether. She tried a third time with crossed fingers. It refused to open at all.
“Damn.”
Muttering under her breath, eyeing the clock, she scanned her unread emails for an explanation from the IT department about the program’s failure, ready to write a very precise, very displeased message if no information was forthcoming, and—oh.
To the SVLAC research community:
The Silicon Valley Linear Accelerator National Laboratory was the recipient of a malware attack this morning. The attack failed. However, SVLAC’s systems will be restarted out of an abundance of caution, with new security measures installed during the process.
The reboot will take place at 6 a.m. Pacific on Monday.
Email and internal messaging systems will be prioritized for restoration and are projected to be live by 6:45 a.m. Pacific, but the scheduling calendar for SVLAC’s experimental halls will be unavailable from 6 a.m. Pacific through 6 p.m. Pacific (approx.). Please submit any lab time requests prior to the system reset at 6 a.m. Pacific.
Regards,
IT at SVLAC
The IT department had sent this critical information at two o’clock in the morning. The rush of other Monday emails had pushed the message out of view in her inbox… and it was already after eight thirty.
Erin bolted up from her desk.
She hurried back past the coffee station, out the building’s main entrance—Ethan Meyer’s hatchback was in the parking lot now, alongside a shuttle bus ferrying SVLAC’s new cohort of interns to the campus—and over to an adjacent cluster of IT buildings, which housed the technicians, their servers, and SVLAC’s technical library.
“Good morning.”
She brandished her badge past the scanner for entry and attention as she stepped into the technicians’ domain. “I need to be added to the lab calendar. I didn’t see your email about the malware attack and system reboot until just now. If you could slot me in manually for the LIGO control room, that would be helpful.”
“You only read the email about the system shutdown… now?”
A technician seated at the support desk glanced up at her badge-waving. He paused a Linux tutorial window open over a scroll of running reboot code with a meticulous click before extracting first one earbud, then the other. He wound up the headphone cords in a circle on his desk. “And you want to be manually added to the scheduling calendar?”
“Yes.”
“Our email was clear about completing your time requests prior to six o’clock.”
“I know that. But it was sent at two o’clock, and I just saw it—”
The technician shrugged. “Should lack of planning on your part constitute an emergency on mine?”
Who in their right mind would check for IT emails at two o’clock on a Monday morning?
But the seconds were ticking by, so despite her frustration, she smiled, leaned forward over the support desk, and said, “The malware attack was an emergency for you. Scheduling my lab time isn’t. I realize that. But it’s urgent for me, so I’m asking: could you please add me to the schedule?”
She waited, continuing to smile.
It felt like hours before eventually—eventually!—the technician sighed. He scrubbed a hand over his cheek, elbow knocking his headphone cords askew. “Sure. Yeah… look, it was a long night. I’m not in a great mood, and this Linux tutorial is complicated as hell. Sorry. What’s your name?”
“Dr. Erin Monaghan.”
“All right. Now, from the backup…”
he closed his tutorial and pulled up the pre-reboot legacy schedule, “…it seems like I can fit you into the Matter in Extreme Conditions control room for LIGO on Tuesdays from twelve midnight to twelve noon.”
“There’s nothing from twelve noon to midnight?”
“No.”
He tilted his monitor toward her. “The instruments will be tuned to the Quantum group’s holometer during that block.”
Of course.
Half of the East and West Experimental Halls’ control rooms were routinely out of order with software or instrumentation breakages that a government-funded lab had no money to fix. So cables patched the readings from various experimental hutches and distant machinery—like SVLAC’s branch of LIGO—into a few overburdened control centers.
And LIGO shared a control room with Ethan Meyer’s holometer.
“How about any other day?”
“This is the only slot left.”
“But I should count myself lucky to get a full twelve hours at this point, right?”
Her smile was bitter as she thanked the technician and returned to the Modern Physics building. Of course, Ethan had the better time. Now she’d have to see him not just in the office, but in the experimental halls, too! Once, she would’ve been thrilled. But that was before she’d known the truth. Now? A nightmare. She smacked her keycard into the entry scanner and bulldozed back toward her desk, passing the coffee station again—
—where Dr. Ethan Meyer stood leaning against the counter, waiting for the appliance to finish brewing his drink. He brushed his slightly too-long hair past the pencil tucked behind his ear as he examined a selection of oat, almond, and soy milks, and his gestures were unrushed while he retrieved a steaming coffee mug from the machine and added a splash of creamer. His stir stick made an irritating click, click, click against the ceramic. When he glanced up to toss it away, straightening to his full height and turning from the counter in her direction, she scowled at him.
Ethan’s eyebrows lifted in parallel with his coffee mug. Through a coil of steam, he took an evaluative sip, scanning her flushed, angry face and fisted hands. A dot of oat milk clung to the stubble beside his mouth. He nodded, gaze hooded and lazy. “Monaghan.”
One press of a scheduling button, one word, and he’d ruined what should’ve been a happy, happy day!
She snatched a mug from a nearby shelf and thumped it into the coffee machine. Erin jabbed a few buttons at random. She crossed her arms while the appliance sputtered and spewed.
“What were you doing awake at two o’clock this morning?”
Espresso shots fired into Erin Monaghan’s mug.
What were you doing awake at two o’clock this morning?
Even articulating her surname with the required sarcasm had been a struggle in his exhaustion, but now her voice and the artillery of the coffee machine wrenched Ethan into alertness.
Bunsen had eaten something disgusting in the park yesterday, so he’d been awake until almost five o’clock cleaning up the golden retriever’s vomit. Yes, he’d slept less in the past, on some insomniac nights… but he’d usually been lying down for at least a few hours. Hell would freeze over before he’d share that information with Erin, however, who glowered up at him with a curled lip and dark, flashing eyes—though not very far up because, even in sneakers, she was barely three inches shorter than his six foot two—as if she’d like to shove him into SVLAC’s Matter in Extreme Conditions hutch, power on its faulty X-ray, and roentgenize him. Steam from the milk frother streaked her glasses while her glare narrowed at his silence.
He took another insouciant sip of lackluster coffee, just to frustrate her—and then his brain caught up with the implications of her attack. Right, the calendar shutdown. Being awake for IT’s scheduling email had been the one saving grace from last night.
That, and the fact that his rental’s floors were hardwood, not carpet.
“You got on this month’s lab time schedule. What were you doing awake at two o’clock?”
Why not let her think that he was so dedicated to his research that he remained conscious and watching for work emails at two in the morning? It had happened before. Ethan shrugged under her accusatory stare.
“It’s probably fine if you’re lackadaisical about scheduling your hours, Monaghan. Relativistic mechanics is a relic. All other modern theories include quantum effects. So it’s not very important for you to publish any new research. You don’t need fresh data.”
Erin snatched her mug from the machine. “You have no idea what my research or publishing situation is. The Journal of Supermassive Astronomy and Astrophysics just accepted my sole-author paper on tidal disruption events—”
“Sole author? Good for you. But that publication has a readership of—what? A hundred people? Not much reach in the field, and not much opportunity for citation. Not like Nature Physics or Reviews of Modern Physics. And you still have…”
he paused, “six papers to my seven.”
“I’d much rather have just one sole-author paper published in any journal, if the alternative is being Dr. Kramer’s lackey and second author. No matter how many publications that position got me!”
He took another sip. “A publication is a publication. Numbers don’t lie. You’re behind.”
“You’ve had access to the lab machinery for more months than I have—and anyhow, LIGO’s database takes time to update with all the readings coming from Washington and Louisiana, so my exports take longer to render than your holometer’s isolated data sets—”
“Excuses? I didn’t expect that,”
and he watched, satisfied, as the annoyed color on her cheeks seeped lower to stain her throat.
“I’m not making—”
She took a swig of her own brew, and choked.
“You put in four shots of espresso,”
he told her, smirking at her contorted face. “I thought you might’ve been trying to boost your productivity, to make up for lost time in the experimental halls, but now it’s clear that—”
“—that unlike you, since it seems you’re just going to harass people at the coffee machine all morning, I have a sole-author paper accepted for publication—and things to do,”
and then she strode away, pausing only to empty her noxious concoction into the sink.
Laughter rose up in his chest. But before he could call out after her with one last parting shot—something clever, he didn’t know what—Dr. Tomasz Szymanski entered the kitchenette with yesterday’s mug in hand.
“Dr. Meyer,”
and a nod.
“Dr. Szymanski. Late night?”
Still smiling, he gestured at his colleague’s mug, which bore telltale rings of dried coffee.
“I have not yet gone to bed, and I have just now returned to my desk. I have been in the West Experimental Hall since yesterday morning. It is the last day of my data collection cycle. I have been busy. As have you, I see.”
Szymanski nodded after Erin’s retreating figure. “She is angry again, yes?”
“Isn’t she always?”
Pushing back his sandy hair with a shrug, Szymanski rinsed his mug and placed a fresh one into the coffee machine. “What is the trouble today?”
“The scheduling calendar for lab time is down. She probably didn’t get a slot. Or if she did, not one that she wanted.”
“Hmm.”
Szymanski selected his creamer. His tone was very bland when he inquired, “Dr. Meyer, you did not break the calendar for her?”
Coffee sloshed over Ethan’s mug onto his thumb. “What?”
“You did not break the calendar for her?”
“No! I’d never intentionally inconvenience a colleague that way.”
“Any colleague but…”—Szymanski dusted cinnamon over his drink—“…Dr. Erin Monaghan?”
He’d phrased it as a question. It wasn’t. Fastidious Szymanski wouldn’t make such a claim without data to back it up. Ready data, and plenty of it. Three years of evidence was incontrovertible proof, Ethan had to admit. But then, he’d never denied the facts. It wasn’t as if he was the only guilty party in the situation, either.
Erin Monaghan had caused so much damage by signing her tricksy initials—
God, when he’d been at CERN, he’d actually anticipated seeing her again.
He hadn’t known who she was, though. What she was like. What she’d done.
Idiot.
It had taken him months of sleepless nights to alleviate Dr. Kramer’s displeasure over the Nature Physics fiasco. He’d explained the revision error to the journal’s reviewers, of course; they’d identified problems in the paper’s data upon its initial submission, although with a name like Dr. Kramer’s listed as the first author and his sign-off on the revisions, they likely hadn’t reviewed the edits as closely the second time around. That was a procedural failure on their end. It was no use blaming the reviewers, however, because Dr. Kramer blamed Ethan.
That would’ve been bad enough—very, very bad—but there had also been the accompanying fallout of damage to Dr. Kramer’s professional standing from the publication, which had cost him his collaboration with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. After his testy exchanges with the Nature Physics reviewers, Ethan had put his own holometer lab time on hold and spent six months running calculations on a variety of Dr. Kramer’s other quantum hypotheses in an effort to regain even a modicum of his department head’s confidence. The formulas still haunted him.
In his frustration and fury during those first horrible days after the paper’s release—it had been retracted, but the harm had already been done—he’d reacted to Erin Monaghan’s sabotage with his own machinations around time zones and the lab time schedule. A quick switch between a.m. and p.m. on her calendar when she was away from her desk had been so easy.
Only later, after he’d slogged through the backlog of emails accumulated during his stint at CERN, had he located a note from Human Resources, alerting him about a document signing mix-up in Erin Monaghan’s onboarding process two months before.
We apologize for the glitch, and trust that the situation has not caused you inconvenience.
Erin Monaghan had received his revise-and-resubmit form for Nature Physics from Human Resources, and she’d signed it. Maybe she hadn’t actively intended to obstruct his work at that point, but she also clearly hadn’t read the document’s contents, evidence of a sloppy process from the beginning—and now?
The mix-up had caused him inconvenience.
It still was.
Because the p.m.-to-a.m. calendar switch-up might’ve seen the situation conclude on frosty but final terms, except that Erin had discovered and retaliated to his sabotage in kind. A few weeks later, she’d mistakenly received his holometer data from the West Experimental Hall, due to that unfortunate similarity in their initial-based SVLAC emails. Rather than just forwarding the information to him, she’d run a binary program on a single file to switch its zeros and ones before she’d passed on the full set of spreadsheets. He’d identified her vandalism and resolved it prior to the data erasure that occurred monthly in SVLAC’s outdated digital storage system to accommodate all new exported files, but then he’d spent several days checking his other spreadsheets for damage… which turned out to be nonexistent. She’d made him waste his time. And that had led to an ever-escalating war over the past three years. Lab time, funding, visibility with SVLAC’s directors—they jockeyed for everything, all means fair and all tactics employed—
“Any colleague but Dr. Monaghan,”
Szymanski repeated, recalling him from his unpleasant retrospection. He retrieved his coffee and left Ethan to his frown. “Good morning, Dr. Meyer.”
It hadn’t been a good morning before—except for when he’d set Erin back on the wrong foot and seen her choke on her espresso—and it certainly wasn’t now. Ethan stalked off to his office. Instead of talking with Szymanski, he should’ve been starting an application for the annual Eischer-Langhoff Grant in Physics—prestigious, competitive, lucrative, notoriously difficult—to fund his and Dr. Kramer’s next year of research. Volatile markets and an economic downturn had vaporized several sources of SVLAC’s anticipated funding, and the lab’s operational funds from the Department of Energy were stingy at best, not enough to fund fixes for the out-of-order control rooms and lab hutches, let alone his experimental work.
Working for a National Lab offered a high degree of research freedom, but not as much funding as he would’ve had in private industry, as his parents never failed to remind him.
A noisy typing clack, clack, clack sounded from the bullpen while he unlocked his office.
“Sole-author Erin”
was likely applying for the Eischer-Langhoff grant right now, too.
He swung his door closed and bypassed his ordinary morning rounds of sudoku and sketching, locating the link to the grant application in his email instead, bending to follow the message as his standing desk spasmed into an unprompted descent. He grabbed his roller chair without looking, slung his fleece vest over the back, and took his seat while the desk locked in its new height. Then he reached for his noise-canceling headphones. He’d start on the grant today and have a working copy by the end of the week.
Before he could tune his hearing to white noise or begin entering justifications into the grant’s “Need Statement”
field, however, a new message appeared in his inbox: Your Submission to Galactica Magazine.
Dear Bannister,
We are delighted to inform you that your pen and ink illustration, “Hunger,”
has been accepted for publication. You will receive a complimentary copy of the next issue of Galactica Magazine, where your work will be printed. Our editors enjoyed your art and hope that you will consider participating in Galactica’s anniversary artist–writer collaboration later this year.
A smile broke through his frown—until he sobered at the chatter of his rival loudly, emphatically, tauntingly discussing her research paper’s acceptance with Nadine Fong, debating the possible leverage that it gave her funding pitch in the Eischer-Langhoff application. She seemed to be speaking directly outside his office, in defiance of his closed door.
But at least Erin Monaghan couldn’t ruin this for him.