4
Data pings from the wall monitors.
Static pings along her spine.
Her breath hitches as the shocks corkscrew down through her stomach, hot and fast, a vicious and delicious helix. She grips an operator desk with white knuckles and angles her body for leverage, gasping again when she’s slammed forward across the surface in retaliation, weight and heat intensifying behind her, over her, inside her—but then fresh static sparks up her back, and it’s accompanied by fleece skimming her skin with contradictory softness.
“Easy, Monaghan.”
Though when has she ever been easy?
So she bucks against the softness and that command in challenge, against the fingers digging into her hips while an open palm strokes between her shoulder blades, demanding a choice, a commitment to either pain or pleasure, because she won’t wait for him to decide—
—and she can’t, not with the spirals in her belly tightening, drawing taut now, her vision brightening with stars and breathless impact, blurring—
But the data pinging on the monitors isn’t blurring.
It should be fading with the deafening rush of pleasure that’s just an inch—a breath—a pulse away, except it isn’t, it’s sharpening instead, distracting, and—
Beep. Beep-beep. Beep. Beep-beep.
“Ah!”
She thrashed awake, tangled in damp sheets, a pillow crushed between her thighs, heart pounding, disoriented, aching. Her chirping phone read a quarter after eleven. Erin switched on her bedside lamp and silenced the alarm with trembling fingers, groaning at the light, at the coil of frustrated emptiness in her core.
What the hell?
She smacked the pillow back into shape while her hands and breathing steadied, while she reminded herself of her location. She couldn’t have been napping for more than a few minutes, could she? But instead of resting itself for her research block in the control room, her brain had decided to do…
Whatever that had been.
An after-effect of the alcohol at Left Bank?
Possibly, but she’d gotten home by eight o’clock after only one glass of wine, since Martina was due at SVLAC for her brutal shift soon after their meetup, while she herself would be cycling to the campus not much later. She couldn’t still be tipsy. She shuffled out of bed on legs that wobbled only a little, across the dark living room, and into the bathroom to splash some cold water on her face.
Easy, Monaghan.
The next splash verged on a slap. Only one person called her “Monaghan”
in that mocking—though not usually so breathless—voice.
“No. Wake up,”
she told her reflection.
Maybe this was just the product of a disrupted sleep schedule. Weird dreams and hallucinations. A nightmare about fleece and data and—him.
Or could her conversation with Martina have triggered it?
She wondered, brushing her teeth until her gums stung, then pulling back her hair into a tight French braid. Even though she wouldn’t be responsible for manually manipulating machinery during her lab hours, loose hair in the experimental halls was never a good idea. In the bathroom’s unflattering light, her eyes were puffy, her skin blotched.
Not that it mattered.
She padded back to her bedroom, shook wrinkles from the jeans and graphic Sally Ride t-shirt that she’d set out earlier—the dress code in the halls was even more casual than SVLAC’s usual mode—and got ready.
11:31 p.m.
Then, with a salute to her posters, which featured prominent women in science and literature, acknowledging that all of them had certainly braved worse hours (though probably not such bizarre dreams), she grabbed her steel-toed work boots and headed for the kitchen.
At Left Bank, they’d discussed Martina’s latest daylight community activism efforts on behalf of Menlo Park’s small businesses; decades-old family operations now came under threat from commercial developers and heavyweight lawyers in San Francisco with increasing frequency. They’d also discussed Ethan Meyer some more. She’d known that their vendetta was an open secret at SVLAC. Neither of them had tried to conceal it. Especially not yesterday. However, she’d assumed that Human Resources had intentionally left them to their own devices, believing that the excellent research that they each produced in consequence of their rivalry was the reason that neither had been burdened with mediation sessions.
Now, though?
As she shoved a few energy bars and a milky cold brew coffee into her backpack, a new thought surfaced: maybe… just maybe… their research results weren’t the reason that Human Resources hadn’t reprimanded them.
Clapping.
Popcorn.
Was their rivalry entertaining to their colleagues?
Why?
She shrugged into her jacket at the door with a frown and stomped into her boots, then shouldered her bicycle down the stairs in the flickering glow of Live Oak Avenue’s street lamps. She pushed off from the pavement, tires wheezing against the cool roadway. Every stroke of her pedals repeated the question.
Why? Why? Why?
But it didn’t matter. She’d dealt with worse than Ethan’s hostility in graduate school: an assistant professor attempting to publish elements of her pre-LIGO work on the behavior of gravity as his own, or colleagues in her research group conveniently forgetting to list her among the authors on a collaborative paper that described comet orbits in the Oort cloud. As the sole woman, she’d seen the warning signs and hit back proactively and hard before any threats against her could solidify from risks to outcomes. She’d had to.
And now, a physicist at a National Lab, slated to manage her department while her supervisor was on leave—and a woman in STEM?
She couldn’t back down.
Couldn’t be easy.
Bumping over a scattering of gravel too fast, skidding through her turn, pivoting hard away from that thought, she swung onto Middle Avenue, sped along Olive Street, and up Oak Avenue to its intersection with Sand Hill Road. She wiped a film of sweat from her chin and unzipped her jacket at the stoplight, glad to glare at the red glow ahead, to focus on a simpler adversary than her own brain.
God, it was dark.
Maybe she’d include something in her next story about the crushing physical and psychological weight of getting up without light? Regardless of the hour, though, she couldn’t afford to be late for her start in the West Experimental Hall. Ethan wouldn’t grant her even a moment of grace if she ran over her allotted research block.
He never would’ve urged her to be easy about anything.
Just a hallucination.
The traffic light switched to green. She pedaled through the intersection, past SVLAC’s security booth, and along Ring Road to the experimental halls. Her watch—an analog beauty from Wes with two timekeeping faces, so that she could always track the time where he was, no matter how far away—showed its California hands pointing to eleven fifty-five.
Locking her bicycle by the west door, she swiped her keycard over a scanner and made her way inside the cold, functional building to LIGO’s makeshift control room, a vestibule outside the Matter in Extreme Conditions hutch. MEC housed machinery for experiments requiring the presence of—what else?—extreme conditions. The behavior of black holes was nothing if not extreme.
The hutch itself was out of order, however, its bright yellow laser enclosure waiting on a materials upgrade. With the X-ray laser powered down, the computers in MEC’s control room were as viable as any others in the West Experimental Hall for running the software required to remotely manipulate the lab’s interferometer.
“Morning.”
She greeted the area engineer, Dr. Viktor Hasselblad, and the hutch operator, Martina—cheerful despite the ungodly time and her indulgences at Left Bank. “Ready to eavesdrop on some neutron stars?”
“I never would’ve guessed how much overlap there’d be between my job and the work of a reporter for a Hollywood tabloid.”
Martina scooted back her chair from her operator computer and Erin entered her credentials into the running LIGO software, concentrating on her keystrokes, not on how she was bent over the desk. “Stars, they’re just like us. Weird and incomprehensible.”
“Currently, at least.”
She stepped away. “But if I could somehow solve the quantum gravity problem—”
“You’d graduate from beat reporter to CEO of the New York Times.”
“That, or publish as many sole- and first-author papers as I wanted in Nature Physics or Physical Review.”
“Right,”
with a wink.
Access Granted
Half a mile west near the lab’s klystron gallery, an L-shaped Michelson interferometer hummed to life. Mirrors placed at the ends of its forty-kilometer arms and near the beam splitter in each arm prepared to reflect light, creating an interference pattern that LIGO’s photodetector measured and converted into electrical signals for analysis. On Martina’s activation, forty-watt lasers entered the instrument, bouncing between each arm’s mirrors almost three hundred times before merging—interfering—with the laser beam from the parallel arm, the machinery exploiting the physical properties of light and space to detect the compression and dilation of gravitational waves rippling across the planet.
“The interference fringes are sharpening.”
Any lingering distraction neutralized, now; she couldn’t help holding her breath while the lasers ping-ponged down LIGO’s arms, while the beams split and reunited, any measurable interference between them signaling the existence of a gravitational wave—and depending on the signal, even its origin. Stars colliding? Black holes swallowing galaxies? Less than a mile away from the control room, instruments were tracking movements in the fusion of the three dimensions of space and the single dimension of time: space-time.
She’d once imagined that her work at SVLAC would advance the frontiers of science, enhancing humanity’s understanding of and relationship to the universe. Her radical optimism had submerged occasionally beneath the petty annoyances of paperwork and office politics. But that irritation vanished whenever she stepped into an experimental control room, whenever she saw data appearing on the monitors, knowing that it meant weeks of cleaning and modeling, months of analysis—and newfound knowledge about the interactions and behaviors of distant astrophysical bodies. No matter how many times she ran a collection cycle, her breath still shortened in her chest. Goosebumps still rippled over her skin like LIGO’s waves.
“…and now, we let LIGO eavesdrop, and just hope there’s a star-studded argument.”
Sitting back from her controls, Martina yawned and raked her fingers through her hair. “Do you think Blue Bottle is serving coffee yet?”
“Probably not. But I brought a cold brew, if you want some.”
“God, yes.”
“No food or drink in my control rooms,”
the area engineer reminded them. Then he held out a travel mug in preparation for stepping away to check on his other hutches in the West Experimental Hall. “Just a splash.”
Smiling, Erin divided her coffee three ways. She drank with the engineers in the camaraderie specific to very late nights and very early mornings, the bright lights and flashing monitors alienating them from any sense of time. There was a dissociative giddiness to those hours, potent with caffeine, sleep deprivation, and from her thrill at the march of data over the screens.
It wasn’t really necessary for her to remain in the control room for LIGO to take its measurements. Lab policy only required that she enter her access credentials to activate the interferometer each time it ran a data collection cycle, her time slot was atrocious, she couldn’t begin analyzing LIGO’s electrical signals until they were exported to her computer, and if the instrument’s lasers or mirrors went haywire, there wouldn’t be much that she could do to physically fix them.
But how could she stay away?
After an hour or ten, she set down her empty bottle and went to study the monitors more closely. “Any variations between the laser beams are too small to see with the naked eye—but still. Just imagine the pressure on the fabric of space-time necessary to generate even the tiniest real data blip!”
“Enough pressure to make a diamond, definitely.”
Martina joined her at the screens. “Maybe that’s a commercial angle for your research: no more blood diamonds. All you need is a black hole.”
“Easier than growing them in a lab, obviously.”
“Obviously. Your next grant application—or another sole-author paper?—will be dazzling. Data is a girl’s best friend.”
Erin rolled her eyes at Hasselblad as he returned to their control room after another round of checks. “If we’re doing bad song lyrics: did you know that when the white dwarf star BPM 37093 cooled, its center crystallized into one of the largest diamonds in the universe? It’s nicknamed ‘Lucy’. Lucy in the sky with diamonds.”
Martina burst into laughter. “I want to hate it. But I can’t. Now you have to use that reference somewhere in a paper or an all-hands presentation.”
“I heard that yesterday’s all-hands was an interesting one,”
Hasselblad added. He fiddled with his phone, and the electronic opening bars from “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”
began to play. “Everything’s better with a Beatles reference, though. My kids love ‘Yellow Submarine’. Drives me crazy sometimes, but I always end up singing along—”
Beep. Beep-beep. Beep. Beep-beep.
“Wait… damn, that’s not a submarine.”
Erin hurriedly fished through her backpack. The alarm on her phone was pinging again, announcing lunchtime.
Noon.
Her hours were gone, both the sun and the turkeys were up outside, Ethan would be here soon for his lab stint, and stories about yesterday’s meeting had clearly circulated through SVLAC.
Easy, Monaghan…
“Damn!”
Ethan pulled his hatchback off Ring Road and parked in a paved lot outside the experimental buildings. Edging between a shipping container and a forklift, he badged into the West Experimental Hall, opening the door wide enough to bump against a bicycle stationed by the entry.
Erin Monaghan’s wheels.
His watch read a full minute after twelve o’clock. He’d caught her infringing on his hours and violating the lab calendar. Exasperation mingled with satisfaction as he made his way through the hall’s vestibule, then into the central corridor with its branching arteries of control rooms and hutches. He scanned himself past the MEC door—and yes, Erin was there inside, bundling a jacket into her backpack, a wall of monitors still displaying the interference fringes from her latest LIGO cycle beneath wreaths of bundled cables. The area engineer was consulting a research schedule on a tablet and pulling up a list of requirements for the room’s next scientist: him. Dr. Martina Perez was inputting laser specifications into her controls under her colleague’s terse direction.
A tinny Beatles song played from someone’s phone.
“You said you’d warn me…”
Erin mumbled something quick and heated under her breath to Perez, dragging a braid out from under the strap of her backpack.
He let the door slam shut behind him.
She startled at the noise, and grimaced. He folded his arms over his vest, static snapping from a few stray Bunsen hairs; a flush stained her cheeks, overbearing the chill of her frown to creep down her neck and under the collar of her graphic t-shirt. But then she adjusted her glasses with a stiff, defiant motion and raised her chin. Fluorescent illumination flared off her lenses while John Lennon crooned about kaleidoscope eyes.
He crossed his arms tighter.
Because who the hell had scored such a slow tempo for the song? It was like listening to molasses, to the passage of light-years between Maiman Auditorium’s clap, clap, clap…
Data fraud.
When he swallowed with a dry mouth, his ears gave a painful pop of punctuation.
Mercifully, Erin averted her gaze to zip her bag.
“You’re over your time, Monaghan.”
Glad that his voice didn’t crack, even more grateful to redirect his own attention, he tapped his watch. “Not—not that I’m surprised, though. You can barely manage the timelines for journal submissions. Why would you be punctual in a control room? Or anywhere else, since—”
But she didn’t cut him off with the interjections he’d expected, and his caustic, aborted commentary died away with the Beatles’ tune, the engineers staring at him, Erin staring at the floor now—again—with her lips pursed until she finally said, stiff and polite, “Thank you for your assistance, Drs. Hasselblad and Perez. I’ll see you next Tuesday. When will LIGO’s data exports be ready?”
“They need to synchronize with the Washington and Louisiana databases, so forty-eight hours, give or take.”
“That’s fine. I apologize for running over time.”
She wasn’t apologizing to him.
But: “For someone who studies space-time, your own sense of—”
He was repeating himself. He knew it. He couldn’t stop.
And still, she didn’t look at him. She was rude, she was late, and she was—leaving.
When she strode back out into the hall, however, her backpack knocked hard into his ribs. Then she bit out two brief words of acknowledgment. “Dr. Meyer.”
Dr. Chase Meyer Jr.: medical doctor, BMW driver, engaged.
Dr. Ethan Meyer: none of the above, and every family dinner or call reminded him of that, but here at SVLAC, he was someone with value, someone with—
—no answer today for her brusque words and backpack.
The door to the control room clicked shut behind her, cutting off any other retort to her dig that he might’ve made—when had she ever called him Dr. Meyer? only his surname—and jolting his focus back to the engineers watching him over their computers and instrument panels. His fingers curled into his palms under their continued scrutiny. Dr. Hasselblad had the grace to return to his scheduling tablet, but Perez raised an eyebrow.
“Dr. Meyer, are you all right?”
“I…”
Maybe Erin’s backpack had hit him harder than he’d thought. Rocking forward off the heels of his metal-capped boots, he reminded himself to breathe. “I’m fine. Are the lasers ready?”
“Almost.”
Perez turned back to her controls. “I need to confirm the position of the holometer’s optical instruments. There was an earthquake with a one point six magnitude on the San Andreas Fault over the weekend, and since the machinery isn’t in an isolation chamber like the particle accelerator and LIGO, its mirrors might have shifted. I’m checking the instrument readings.”
While a micro-scale earthquake would’ve registered on Erin’s protected interferometer as noise to scrub from her data, it wouldn’t have delayed her collection cycles, not like he was delayed now. If Dr. Kramer agreed, maybe some of the Eischer-Langhoff funding could be used to build a protective housing for their machinery, extending its tunnels while also upgrading the prototype from its off-the-shelf parts and its exposed location on a disused loading dock behind the lab’s industrial maintenance buildings. He wouldn’t have to deal with this wait time again.
“The half-reflective mirror shifted by eight degrees in the quake. I’ve remotely adjusted it back. Are you ready for the laser to activate, or do you want to check my positioning?”
He did.
It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Martina Perez’s expertise. But trust had no place in science. So he stayed on location in the control room to oversee the holometer’s cycles, double-checking settings or acceptable margins of error (none), investigating potential problems with the instrument prior to them reaching Dr. Kramer’s desk, and ideally resolving them before his supervisor knew they’d occurred. Dr. Kramer relied on Ethan to generate accurate data, which he employed in formulating new quantum hypotheses; the only way to ensure that accuracy was to monitor the holometer and its readings live.
Ethan himself had begun to question the basic assumption of Einsteinian physics—that space was continuous and infinitely divisible—in graduate school. What if space was actually microscopically chunky? If it was, how could those chunks be measured? A pixel was the smallest unit of image on any modern device, while a photon was the smallest light unit. Why couldn’t there be an equivalently tiny unit of distance?
A quantum of space.
The idea was bizarre at first glance, plausibly the product of too much late-night philosophizing over cheap boxed wine in a dorm. But Dr. Kramer concurred that it had merit. Besides, if light was both a unit and a wave, why shouldn’t space be similar? If he could measure space at its base unit, if he could prove Dr. Kramer’s hypothesis about the existence of quantum units correct in experimental conditions—
“Activating the laser,”
Perez said.
He approached the control room monitors. At the end of long lengths of cable that stretched from the experimental halls to the machinery’s physical location, focused light entered his device. The holometer split the laser, which bounced along its tunnels between mirrors and registered their precise locations, tracking any changes in their placement that resulted from the wanderings of space. Millions of readings per second leaped onto the screens.
If space could be broken into individual units, the data would show a constant, random, and microscopic variation in the mirrors’ positions. When the two laser beams recombined after bouncing off the incrementally moving reflectors, they would be out of sync. Dr. Kramer hypothesized that a replicable, standardized amount of asynchrony would reveal the scale of a quantum unit—up to a million times smaller than a hydrogen atom…
Behind him, the engineers conferred in low voices about beam quality, bounce frequency, diamonds, and—popcorn?
“…wasn’t as salty as usual.”
“I wonder if she…”
He ignored the itch of hair rising up his neck and the arrival of the next shift’s area engineer and operator. The chatter and staff changes didn’t matter. He edged around a cluster of cables to the farthest monitor. An invisible hand seemed to trace out glowing lines and numbers on the screen, the patterns abstract, jagged, and almost too complex for a human eye to recognize as art.
His breathing steadied. He watched the data flicker, and scroll, and scroll, and scroll. It was beautiful.