7
Ethan blinked awake after four hours of sleep. He was perched perilously close to the edge of the mattress, one ankle already dangling into space. A rear canine paw pressed into his back, twitching to kick him out of bed, while the golden retriever sprawled across three-quarters of the blankets, snoring in bliss and slobbering on his pillow.
“Bunsen…”
The dog huffed another luxurious snore.
“What’s wrong with your own damn bed?”
That engineering miracle of fleece, memory foam, and gel pads for heat or cooling lay abandoned on the floor. Bunsen was happy to nap in his dog bunk, dragging it around the condo to an optimal position that only he could triangulate before dropping it onto Ethan’s feet for a snooze. But after dark?
“Maybe I should sleep in it.”
Groaning at the crick in his neck, he gave the retriever an ineffective shove as he stretched across Bunsen for his phone on the nightstand—and something cracked along his torqued spine, a pinch of discomfort followed by a sweet release.
“U-ugh.”
Snagging Bunsen’s pillow, he propped himself up against the wall. His mother had been harping on him to get a bedstead for years, though what was the point? His mattress on its rolling metal frame was functional, and the lengths and slats of a bedstead would just be more things to break while stuffing them into his hatchback during a move. He’d been fortunate so far with his rent, but this was Silicon Valley. No one’s luck lasted through its vicissitudes forever. Defiantly repositioning the pillow and raking a hand through his hair, he opened his SVLAC email and edged Bunsen’s creeping legs off his lap before the dog could shove him toward the door for their Saturday morning hike.
A run in Edgewood Park was an inviolable part of their weekend routine.
So was Ethan’s watch duty for overnight SVLAC messages.
Eischer-Langhoff Edits, read the subject line of a new email from Dr. Kramer.
Meyer:
Draft received.
Action items:
? Expand overview of theoretical measurement research base (cite last year’s paper from International Journal of Modern Physics)
? Reorder placement of theoretical equations and practical research data
? Cite Logan for new calculations requiring expansion of holometer tunnels from 30 to 40 meters for optimal results; otherwise, cite general Fermilab Quantum group
? Correct data in Table 5
See tracked changes in attachment for add’l revisions.
—Kramer
His thumb hovered over the linked document—but then Bunsen kicked again, this time striking into his kidney. He fumbled his phone. SVLAC’s email closed. A list of text threads appeared instead.
Aaron Forster hadn’t responded to his message about Martha Wells.
Well, he’d sent it after midnight. Maybe Forster hadn’t seen it yet. As he’d rationalized yesterday, a 650 area code was no guarantee that the writer was local. Forster could be in any time zone.
His disappointment at the blank space under his text was irrational.
He didn’t even know the man.
Swinging his feet to the floor now, he chucked his phone back toward the bedside table hard enough that Bunsen shied up in concern. When the retriever saw him shuffling toward the bathroom, however, he jumped down and heeled beside Ethan to the door, tail thwacking and the phone scare forgotten.
“Out,”
he told Bunsen before his golden shadow could follow him to the sink.
Bunsen plopped down a half-inch from the threshold. Ethan bent to splash water on his face and wet down his hair, and brown eyes were just visible at the bottom of the mirror, eyebrows pinched in a plea. A faint, high-pitched whine fluttered Bunsen’s whiskers as he tracked Ethan back into the bedroom, but when Ethan reached for his socks, Bunsen’s tenuous restraint snapped. He began to bark and spin around after his own tail.
“I’m almost ready. Get your leash.”
Paws skidded off to the door. Metal jingling against leather, Bunsen retrieved his leash and dragged it into the kitchen, where Ethan was filling their hiking water bottles.
“It’s probably good that you can’t clip this on yourself. Or open the front door. Then you wouldn’t need me at all.”
He holstered the bottles in a belt bag, attached the dog’s leash, and was towed out through the entryway to his car.
His dashboard clock only read :14 a.m., but pulling into the parking lot off Old Stagecoach Road that led into Edgewood Park, he found the pavement already busy with locals gearing up for a day on the trails. Hikers in family clusters slathered on sunscreen, offering snacks to children and reminding them that rattlesnakes’ vibrating tails weren’t an invitation to pet them. Couples coaxed goldendoodles and a lone French bulldog in a stroller to drink from collapsible dishes. A group of horseback riders tacked up beside a trailer. Skirting the crowds, he parked near the perimeter of the lot. Bunsen came hurtling out the back seat the instant Ethan opened the door, and pointed toward the main trailhead.
He checked his phone. Its screen was still blank.
After inserting his earbuds and deciding on Mumford SVLAC’s engineers occasionally bombarded sheets of plastic with defocused, low-energy electron beams traveling almost at the speed of light, then pricked the ductile material with a metal punch to break the electrons into visible tree-like arcs and create visual art. The piece was beautiful and bizarre, and Schulz had awarded it to Ethan and Dr. Kramer to commemorate their first data collection cycle on the holometer. (Dr. Kramer already had several beam trees, so Ethan had taken it.) A perfect unification of art and science, it was the only non-functional item in his space. He smiled at it, and smiled again at his phone.
Ethan
What show would you choose?
Leaving Forster to consider the question, he turned his earbuds to white noise and clicked into Dr. Kramer’s edits attachment for the Eischer-Langhoff application. His supervisor’s instruction to cite their paper from the International Journal of Modern Physics was easy enough; he got to work. He paused a while later to alleviate the stiffness in his wrists with a sudoku grid, grabbing the pen from behind his ear and inking orderly numbers onto the page. Then: ping.
Forster
I was initially thinking about the first three seasons of Battlestar Galactica. But since you mentioned a nonfiction option, maybe Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown?
Ethan
Is that a travel show?
He resumed his revisions on the grant application with a quick copy-and-paste to reorder Dr. Kramer’s salient points, then replaced several of Dr. Greg Logan’s citations with a generic mention of Fermilab to make his supervisor’s name more prominent in the text. But the data in Table 5 still presented a problem.
He combed back through his spreadsheets, tapping his lower lip with the pen. The data looked accurate on review. Dr. Kramer had questioned it, however. Correct data in Table 5. His supervisor might be referencing an outdated version of their raw holometer exports, of course… but he’d do a second analysis later today, just to be certain.
Ping.
Forster
Yes. He explores places that are off the standard tourist track—for example, the Interzone in Morocco. It used to be a prime destination for the Beat Generation and rock bands like the Rolling Stones. Somewhere to escape western “morality”
and its hold on experimental art. (I won a family trivia tournament with that fact.)
Then immediately again: ping.
Forster
Wouldn’t it be nice if Silicon Valley could breathe life back into its original creative rebelliousness, the kind that was going to save the world? If it would stop auto-strangling itself by… I don’t know, coding mobile apps that let you order laundry detergent and a dog walker with your Chinese takeout?
Forster
Focusing on what’s easy and shiny and stupid, just to get a quick profit from mercenary mythological creatures…
Forster
…like unicorn investors?
“Ha—”
Ethan burst out laughing.
Bunsen startled upright at the sudden noise. Loosening his hold on a stolen sock, he smacked his muzzle into Ethan’s elbow, and the phone slipped through his fingers, a keysmash skidded across the screen—he grabbed for the device as it fell—he missed—it thunked to the floor—
—where it chirped. A nonsensical message zipped away.
“Damn. No, no, Bunsen, it’s fine…”
Stroking the dog to soothe him, he retrieved his phone and typed out a quick response to his own gibberish.
Ethan
Sorry for the keysmash. My dog knocked over my phone when I started laughing.
Forster
No worries. (Honestly, the joke wasn’t THAT good.) But—more importantly: you have a dog? What breed?
“Smile,”
he told the golden retriever, and snapped a picture.
Ethan
His name is Bunsen.
Forster
Look at that happy face! I’d also love to have a dog, but it’s not easy—despite my detergent, walker, and takeout app—to manage in most apartments along the San Francisco Peninsula. I just admire other people’s pets right now. So hi, Bunsen!
“Forster says hi.”
Bunsen whined.
“What? You’ve already had your egg and bacon, and—oh. It’s time for our noon walk, isn’t it? What the hell happened to the morning?”
It was a rhetorical question. He knew exactly how he’d spent his morning, and what he’d learned:
Forster lived in the Bay Area.
Her straw made a gurgly sucking sound against the bottom of her glass, drawing air instead of the Greek yogurt, chia seed, and frozen raspberry smoothie that she’d whizzed up after her run along the Stanford Dish trail. Erin released the tube to inspect its malfunction.
Huh.
The glass was empty, warm in her hand. She must’ve finished her breakfast a while ago but hadn’t noticed, too absorbed with her computer and her phone. With work, with Bannister—and with Bunsen.
She enlarged the picture on her screen. Bunsen was a handsome young dog, a coppery retriever with soulful eyes, a mischievous lopsided grin, a tongue a mile long, and egg in his whiskers. Cassie was forbidden from begging at the Monaghan table but, probably like Bunsen, she somehow always ended up sampling their meals… Smiling and shaking her head, she expanded the photo farther. Those columns of steel beside the retriever were the legs of either a table or an industrial-style desk, weren’t they? That was definitely a sock between Bunsen’s paws.
Cassie liked socks, too.
Dark blue socks with golden bears around the ankles never would’ve been allowed into the Grand Arbor house, however. Bunsen’s sock—Bannister’s sock—was printed in incriminating UC Berkeley colors, with an even more incriminating UC Berkeley logo.
Cal bear.
She switched from analyzing the sock to analyzing Bannister’s phone number: a 510 area code. 510 was local to the East Bay. To the Berkeley area.
Not that it matters, she told herself again.
But a search for Bannister + UC Berkeley popped up on her screen. She scrolled, clicked, and scrolled again. The results were inconclusive. Several Banisters currently were or had previously been affiliated with the university. There wasn’t a single Bannister.
She’d already considered the possibility that the artist used a pseudonym, hadn’t she?
She shrugged away from her phone and her computer after a few fruitless minutes. The loose wire in her bra prodded her ribs. She peeled up her shirt; a red pressure point had formed on her skin from her hunch over her desk. She’d spent almost the whole morning curved toward her screens, messaging with Bannister in between stints of preliminary data modeling on her latest LIGO exports, and she anticipated a favorable outcome from next week’s meeting with Nadine, in which she’d pitch her work on gravitational waves as an additional research area to showcase during the Secretary of Energy’s visit to SVLAC.
Ethan Meyer was probably refining a similar pitch on his quantum work to his own supervisor this weekend, calculating and then optimizing each sacrosanct data point in isolation for success.
Robot, she dismissed him, rubbing at her ribs. But even if he wasn’t a robot, he was likely still being more productive than she was. Because honestly: what portion of her morning had she spent with her data, and what part had she spent distracted by Bannister? Yet again: Not that it matters. She’d best her rival anyhow, despite her preoccupation with the artist. And his dog.
Bannister had that gorgeous retriever, while she—
Damn.
She hadn’t watered her rosemary plant this month.
Emerging from her room for the first time since she’d made her smoothie just after seven o’clock, she mixed a teaspoon of fertilizer into a watering can, then fed the bushy, pungent herb sitting in the kitchen window above the sink. Its soil absorbed the moisture with instant and desperate gratitude, so she turned on the faucet and soaked it until water ran out into the saucer under its pot.
“Sorry, Grant.”
She’d named the herb after Rosemary Grant, an evolutionary biologist at Princeton who studied Darwin’s finches in the Galápagos. Wes had thought it was funny. Despite a fair amount of abuse, she hadn’t killed it yet. Survival of the fittest.
Or maybe Kai or Ashley sometimes watered it?
She replaced Grant on his sill. When she stretched up to put the watering can back on top of the refrigerator, her bra wire jabbed her again.
“Ouch!”
Grimacing in defeat, she switched into a shelf-lined tank top over a pair of old, faded jeans, shouldered the small backpack that she preferred to a purse, carried her bicycle down the stairs, wiped pollen from its seat, then pedaled off across the bridge over San Francisquito Creek toward the Stanford Shopping Center. She paused at a traffic signal to cross Sand Hill Road, adjusting the straps slipping off her shoulders as she waited for the light to turn—she’d forgotten to reapply sunscreen after her shower, and she’d likely arrive back in Menlo Park with a stripey burn—while grousing at the inconvenience of having to spend her afternoon this way. She could’ve been working, or reading, or going to a Pilates class. Or messaging Bannister. But instead, she’d be squinting against the glare of artificial lights off a sleek department store floor and trying to see her own back in a dressing room mirror.
Lingerie shopping was rarely fun. It always took much longer than she planned, too. Not because she couldn’t manage her time like Ethan claimed, but because of the fashion industry’s idiocy around sizes. Men never seemed to appreciate how easy it was to fit their clothes! Also, they could get away with a standard workplace uniform of the same collared shirt or polo in multiple colors and one pair of jeans or slacks. For women, though? The required balance between professional polish and a style that was too much, too little, too feminine, too masculine, too bright, or too drab was designed to be impossible. It was even worse in STEM fields—and worse still with lingerie, because after all the effort to find a bra that fit, in the end, the choice was invisible.
At least for her. When had she last bought anything except plain basics that only she and the bathroom mirror would ever see?
It had been a while since she’d gone on a date.
Martina would sip Chenin Blanc and remind her that this was by choice, however.
The light turned green and she sped through a clog of weekend traffic, skirting the worst of the jam near the shopping center by peeling off into the Nordstrom parking lot across the street from the main thoroughfare. She locked her bicycle outside the store’s massive brick archway and micro-cafe that led to the first floor, assailed by a disorienting blast of air conditioning and perfume as she navigated to the escalators while typing a message to her mother.
Erin
I’m at Nordstrom. Bra shopping. Help.
She edged around a group of chattering teenagers and consulted the directory. Level 2: Women’s Lingerie.
Ping.
Mom
I’m happy to consult, sweetheart. What are you looking for?
Erin
Just the basics. The wire on my nude bra popped out this week.
Mom
Send me photos once you’ve found some choices.
Those choices spanned a solid quarter of Nordstrom’s second level.
She scanned the racks and sighed.
Ignoring satin push-ups and a bralette constructed from star-sprinkled midnight blue lace, she gathered an armload of options in neutral tans, whites, and blacks, and set up in a dressing room.
Erin
Options 1–5.
She snapped pictures in the mirror, capturing herself from shoulders to hips, unposed, still in her jeans, and sent them off to her mother.
Mom
I like the third option. The tulle trim on the cups is pretty.
Erin
It’s itchy, though. And it would show through a t-shirt.
In her next batch, despite selecting the same size as before, nothing fit. She braved a third round, and found two bras that were adequate.
Mom
The black one is very practical.
It was.
Erin
It works fine. Here’s the last group.
Nothing.
Erin
Ugh. At least I found two.
Mom
They’re nice. But why don’t you experiment with something fun? You’ve been working so hard and you’ve just had your story published. What about a treat?
Erin
Well…
Mom
Try something on. See how you feel.
A new message from Bannister pinged across her screen while she debated Lori’s advice. The preview text was a commentary on his walk with Bunsen. Despite her frustration with the lingerie fitting, she couldn’t help the smile that reflected back at her from the mirror.
So she fetched the starry bralette.
The lace slipped over her head to settle in cool patterns across her skin. Its raised stitching would show through any shirt. Embroidered silver stars glimmered under the lights, barely obscuring the peaks of her breasts. It was completely impractical.
And very, very pretty.
The freckles dotting her arms and collarbones could’ve been constellations.
She angled herself before the glass, arched her back just a little, took the picture, and sent it—
—to Most Recent Contact.
Which wasn’t her mother now.
She’d sent the photo to Bannister.