19
“Coffee and sudoku. My office. Ten minutes.”
Ethan badged into the Modern Physics building ahead of her, speaking over his shoulder and almost running into loitering Marco Rossi for a second time. He adjusted a buckle sliding down the strap of his messenger bag and frowned at the Italian physicist. “Dr. Rossi. Do you have a question?”
“Uh—no?”
Their colleague’s glance between them was definitely a question.
Popcorn.
Again, Erin ignored it.
Screw our agreement.
“Ten minutes,”
she confirmed.
Back at her desk, she swallowed her dregs of cold espresso, accepted Leah’s request for a data meeting on Thursday, and scanned her email for any emergencies that had occurred in the half-hour since she’d last scrolled through her inbox; nothing, but she really did need to provide a headshot for her paper. She disconnected her computer from the lab’s highly secure, highly monitored internet service, then opened a hotspot on her phone and linked her device to that.
No point in taking unnecessary risks.
She typed her query into a search window.
Scientific misconduct
The first results were reports on the semiconductor Sch?n scandal—which had spawned a discussion in the research community about what responsibility the reviewers of scientific papers bore in detecting fraud, rather than simply finding errors or determining the relevancy and originality of an article—followed by Dr. Anna Ahimastos’s misleading data on blood pressure drugs, the invented co-authors for Sir Cyril Burt’s more questionable papers, and specious discoveries around elements 116 and 118 at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Then came a definition from the United States Department of Energy:
Scientific misconduct is the willful compromise of the integrity of scientific research, such as plagiarism or the falsification or fabrication of data.
Despite a professional consensus that deliberate plagiarism, falsification, and data fabrication was rare in the field, how many researchers like Kramer had slipped by under the radar? How many others were operating just like him?
At best, the line between bad ethics and lawbreaking was a no man’s land.
Bouncing in her seat with adrenaline and espresso, she toggled over to the post about Kramer on STEMinist Online’s forum.
SnarkyQuark64: I work at SVLAC. I know this supervisor, and I have data on his current research activity.
Then she closed her laptop and walked across the bullpen to Ethan’s office. A clock above the water dispenser flipped to 8:10 a.m. as she knocked. When he opened the door, she told him, “Ten minutes.”
“Coffee and sudoku.”
He handed her a sign made of flimsy copy paper: Do Not Disturb.
She slapped it over his nameplate and the door’s “Supply Closet”
designation beneath it. But, despite the jumble of action items zipping through her mind and her attempts to process them all simultaneously, her brain surfaced one very specific, very irrelevant thought: we should’ve used this yesterday… She braced herself against Ethan’s desk—not thinking about the twist of his tongue between her thighs—with her legs tightly crossed.
“I located the Department of Energy’s official definition of scientific misconduct and fraud. It’s the willful plagiarism of another scientist’s research, or data falsification-slashfabrication.”
“Did you—”
“I disconnected from SVLAC’s internet before I ran the search.”
“Good.”
“Do you want to use my hotspot?”
“Hot…?”
Eyes flicking to hers, did his ears flush? Then, “Right. Dr. Kramer will have VPN access to SVLAC’s systems while he’s at CERN, but not to this. What’s your passcode?”
She offered her unlocked phone. “Don’t change my settings.”
“You’re the one who ran a binary program on my data.”
“True.”
The clench of her thighs eased slightly when his focus redirected from her face to a critique of her screen wallpaper: a graphic of the Monaghan family in Ms. Frizzle’s Magic School Bus, with their heads—expressions contorted in screams or laughter during a rollercoaster ride at Michigan’s Adventure theme park in Muskegon—transposed into the yellow windows.
“It looks more like a submarine than a bus.”
“You’re a mechanical engineer, now? And a Beatles fan? What’s your phone background?”
Plain black.
“For privacy. It looks like your family had fun, though. You have the same smiles.”
“Adrian would be so offended by that. He’s the only one who wears his retainer anymore. Last Christmas, he warned me that I was starting to look like an inverse chipmunk.”
She poked her tongue against the gap between her front teeth. “Again.”
“What did you say?”
“I told him that I might be a renegade chipmunk, but he was a beaver. Since he’s an architect.”
“Nature’s engineers.”
A half-smile deepened in Ethan’s cheek. But then, sobering, flush fading from his ears, he took his chair and cracked his knuckles. “Not quantum, though. So. We could begin with a review of the papers I’ve co-authored with Dr. Kramer, and then—”
“No.”
“No?”
She reached over to close the journal articles and spreadsheets he’d begun to open. “I don’t want to include your data in our fraud set. Not unless we come up empty-handed for the rest of the search. Your papers with Dr. Kramer would be useful from a plagiarism angle. You said it yourself: he appropriated your hypothesis about the existence of quantum units and claimed it as his in publications. But if we submit your joint research for scrutiny, you’ll be implicated in his fraud by association, even though you’re the wronged party. People will identify your name with scientific misconduct—and you’re still in the physics field, still publishing. The others he’s stolen intellectual property from aren’t. So, you’re the expert on how he operates and you can spot his interference, but I don’t want to use your work.”
“Not unless we have to.”
“We won’t,”
she promised them both. “Let’s start by scanning all the journals where he’s been published. Not the Journal of Supermassive Astronomy and Astrophysics, of course—”
“No. But it’ll be on his radar now.”
“Because of me.”
Ethan’s chin jerked. He returned to his results. “This is a long list.”
“Are there any papers without second authors?”
The search compressed. “Not many.”
“Not since the very early aughts, either.”
She crammed behind his desk with him, her ponytail falling across his shoulder to tangle in the fibers of his vest as she leaned toward his screen.
He stiffened.
“Sorry—”
“We should—um. White noise.”
A stream of quiet, muffling static rose from his phone.
They should’ve used that yesterday, too…
“S-smart.”
Her voice didn’t crack. Much. She swallowed and straightened, a spark of heat hitting her stomach. Hands shoved deep in her pockets—or as far as she could shove them into the useless denim pouches that taunted women who wore jeans—she stared at the pixels on his monitor until she could make sense of them through her brain’s own static, until she could say, “The only pieces that he’s published solo since he was promoted into management at Fermilab are speculative research. He doesn’t have data—original data—to back up those claims. Let’s see his earliest co-authored papers that went through peer review. Then we’ll work our way up chronologically.”
Ethan expanded Kramer’s first paper, which examined the manipulability of weak bonds between atoms and their electrons in photovoltaic panels. “Journal of Applied Physics. The co-author is Dr. Marie Engel. Do you recognize her?”
“She could easily have an account on STEMinist Online, but her legal name isn’t likely to be her user handle.”
Opening a bookmark to the Kramer post on her phone, she scrolled back into the comments. “No, nothing about solar cells in the thread. Let’s try the next paper.”
“Electron microscopes with Dr. Amélie Chloé Archambault.”
“No, I don’t think so. Next.”
“Valence bond theory. Graduate student: Daiyu Lin.”
“That could maybe be Bond_ValinceBond. I don’t remember her commenting on Dr. Kramer’s thread, though… no, the last time she posted, she was announcing a teaching position in Boston. Hopefully Harvard. Which is great. But not useful for us. Next one?”
He opened an abstract on atomic clocks for GPS systems. “Is Forster your handle?”
“Didn’t you say that keeping art isolated from work was good hygiene? I agreed with you. So, not Forster. I’m SnarkyQuark64.”
“Because quarks were discovered in nineteen sixty-four?”
“Obviously.”
“Clever.”
“Thanks. Who’s Dr. Kramer’s lackey for this GPS clock paper?”
They compared professional names with user handles for the GPS article, then for the next paper, the next, and on through a whole sequence of nexts, but without success. The non-atomic, non-GPS clock on Ethan’s monitor had ticked almost to lunchtime before a relevant abstract appeared.
“Number seventeen: the hardness of random quantum circuits, with second-author Dr. Lethabo Swanepoel, on how random circuit sampling could allow quantum processors to perform tasks that are impossible for classical computers. Anything?”
Erin’s stomach rumbled. She ignored it. “Did Dr. Kramer publish this at Fermilab?”
“Yes.”
“Someone commented about the hardness of random quantum circuits on his post. Let me find it…”
Comment Deleted
“But why would she… damn. That was an almost.”
“Next?”
Quantum tunneling effects in negative differential resistance devices.
Superfluidity.
Orbital stability of electrons in atoms.
“No. Next.”
“This one’s with Dr. Laura-Jean Anders, about how a quantum computer created time crystals.”
Ethan pressed his thumbs into his temples, then moved to close the abstract. “No, that’s just Ted Chiang’s Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom with citations. Next—”
“Wait.”
Her hand shot out over his. “Time crystals?”
He highlighted the words for emphasis.
Her fingers skidded across her own screen now. “Someone mentioned time crystals in the thread. Look!”
DataDominatrix: Do you think he could’ve moved from Fermilab to SVLAC? I was doing preliminary research on time crystals in the Quantum group there about eight years ago. I had to take some unexpected medical leave, and by the time I got back, my supervisor had published a paper on the crystals and my job was eliminated. I was cited as a lab tech in the study, but that was it. All my research information was wiped from my computer. There wasn’t anything I could do. I remembered a lot about my data, though, since I’d spent so much time cleaning it. Some of his claims about my numbers weren’t conclusions I’d drawn—and I’m not actually sure that they were even my data sets in the paper. Not that I could prove anything.
But maybe Dr. Erin Monaghan and Dr. Ethan Meyer could.
“He didn’t just plagiarize her work. He falsified data!”
Almost giddy, she opened a private message with the user.
SnarkyQuark64: Hi, DataDominatrix. You commented on a recent post about a Fermilab supervisor to say that you’d worked in SVLAC’s Quantum group under the same man, that he’d published your research on time crystals without correct credit, and that he might’ve falsified your data. Can you verify that this person is Dr. John R. Kramer?
Not that she doubted it. But she needed confirmation.
While waiting for DataDominatrix—for Dr. Laura-Jean Anders—to respond, she switched back to the mother-post and submitted a reply to her own earlier message, where she’d identified herself as an SVLAC employee with data on Kramer.
SnarkyQuark64: If anyone is willing to make a formal claim of scientific misconduct against this man, please either respond here or message me privately.
No ellipses bubbled beneath her comment in immediate, eager response.
She refreshed the page.
Nothing.
“It’s the middle of the workday,”
Ethan reminded her.
“It’s lunchtime!”
She drummed her fingers against her phone, her impatience almost as loud as the rumbles from her stomach. “Come on…”
“It’s a substantial request. Let them think about it.”
“But—”
“Lunch,”
he said. He switched his internet from their hotspot back to SVLAC’s standard connection. “And afterward, if we’re still waiting on responses: quantum gravity in the Sidewinder conference room.”
“Fine. But I don’t have time to eat.”
She tucked her phone into her pocket. “I have a call with Nadine.”
“Didn’t she start her maternity leave?”
“Yes. And I can count the days she’s been gone on two hands—which includes her hospital stay, so she might’ve actually stopped to have her daughter on her last commute home—but she already wants to start planning for her return next quarter. Or maybe she’s just craving a conversation about something other than babies. I don’t know.”
“Do you have noon calls tomorrow, too?”
“No. Why?”
“We… maybe we could go somewhere besides the cafeteria or Blue Bottle for lunch. Um.”
He passed a palm over the back of his neck. “For research reasons. A place with an internet connection, so you wouldn’t have to use data for a hotspot.”
Oh.
“Good idea.”
Was it? She tightened her ponytail, businesslike or just busying her hands so she wouldn’t retrace the path of his fingers over his neck with hers. “How about Stanford’s CoHo? It’s an easy distance and the internet’s free.”
“No.”
“Why not? Their portobello mushroom panini is—”
He pulled up the leg of his jeans in answer, displaying a Berkeley bear on his sock.
She snorted. “Just leave those with Bunsen tomorrow.”
“No,”
he repeated.
“Then what about the Moroccan cafe in the university’s engineering quad? Some other grad students in my cohort took bachelor’s degrees at Cal, but no one sniped them there.”
Ethan’s eyebrows rose while he rolled his jeans down again. The corner of his mouth twitched. “Seems like we’ll be testing that academic tolerance tomorrow.”
“Yes, we will.”
Tomorrow.
So she stuck out her tongue at him instead of licking the aftershave from under his jaw or nibbling his smile, returning to the bullpen before she lost her battle with temptation. Fortunately, the floor’s lunchtime exodus meant that no one saw her slip out of his office. She connected her headphones at her desk in the quiet, refreshed STEMinist Online just once before she reconnected to SVLAC’s internet, and waited for Nadine to join their call.
She didn’t watch Ethan’s door to see him leave for a salad or a sandwich at the cafeteria. She didn’t. She changed positions in her chair, tried to ease the prickle on her skin.
At least the call with Nadine occupied her through lunch: the requisite protests that her supervisor shouldn’t be attending meetings right now—especially this early in her leave!—followed by congratulations to her and her wife Qadira, updates on the department’s interns, budget check-ins, routine project status reports (she didn’t mention LIGO’s detection of Hawking radiation, knowing that the topic would launch their discussion into an hours-long thought experiment, and if she mentioned Kramer… but what was the point? Nadine had worked with him for years, so she knew what she knew), and an introduction to the newest member of the Jamil-Fong family, happily burping on Qadira’s shoulder.
“Everything’s running smoothly at the lab? No scheduling or personnel issues?”
“One of the interns is asking me to be her mentor.”
“I assume you’re going to take that on?”
Nadine shifted to elevate her feet on her couch, pressing a hand over her still-swollen belly.
“Of course. We can discuss it later, though. You’ve only been gone for—”
“Yes, I know, but… ugh.”
Then, calling to Qadira, “Darling, can you help me up to the bathroom? I thought I’d be able to get a little work done, now that the baby’s out, but no one tells you that your postnatal body is almost as hard to manage as the pregnancy.”
“We’ll talk once you’re back.”
Waving and wincing in sympathy, Erin closed the call.
Her watch read six minutes before one o’clock.
As anticipated, no time for lunch.
Continuing to ignore her stomach, she gathered her federal resources—computer, blueprints, spreadsheets—and set up in the Sidewinder conference room, then refreshed STEMinist Online again. There was nothing new on Kramer’s post, so she returned to her earlier review of the quantum gravity project’s reference materials. A holometer export was the first spreadsheet to expand over her screen.
Ethan had found Hawking radiation in her data yesterday.
What if she could discover something advantageous in his?
He’d claimed earlier that the standard deviation in synchronization readings for the device’s split laser beams was low. She ran the numbers herself, now: calculate the mean of the data, find the square of each point’s distance to the mean, sum those values, and divide the sum by the data point total—millions of readings per second. As expected, the standard deviation for the results was minimal. She hadn’t doubted his accuracy. He’d stated that the holometer’s results were consistent. They were.
They were familiar, too.
She opened Liesbeth Tuinstra’s paper beside the holometer data, scrolling past its abstract, introduction, and methods sections to the results. Tuinstra had hopped electrons along a one-dimensional chain of atoms, tuning their ease of movement and creating an event horizon, which produced a rise in temperature equivalent to Hawking’s theorized black hole thermal radiation. That, she knew. Skipping the discussion portion, she hopped herself down to a list of references—and there it was: the measured distance of the electrons’ jumps between atoms on the chain. Relegated to one footnote among hundreds, it wasn’t of interest to the authors, and she’d overlooked its significance earlier in her focus on the paper’s experimental processes. But:
10–18m.
Preliminary readings from the holometer on the size of Ethan’s units of space were almost perfectly aligned with the distance of the electrons’ hops.
Oh my God.
Kramer was wrong about many things, not least his belief that he’d get credit for their quantum gravity project—but also his claim that his subordinate hadn’t yet contributed data to it. Ethan had provided as much data as she’d done!
He just hadn’t known it.
Pushing back her swivel chair, pulse spiking in her ears, too eager to wait for him to return from the cafeteria, she hurried to the door—
—where she almost collided with him. He was carrying his usual messenger bag and a… pastry box?
“I found—” he said.
“I found—” she said.
“Sorry,”
together. Then, together again, “What did you find?”
“…pastries. The Condensed Matter group is celebrating getting a paper into Nature Nanotechnology. There were leftovers in the kitchenette.”
He raised the lid: flaking cream cheese danishes, croissants, half a doughnut. “Everything’s picked over and going stale, but there were no vegetarian options left at the cafeteria, and I’m assuming that you didn’t eat after your call with Dr. Fong. What did you find?”
Yesterday, he’d made her coffee. Today, he’d brought her pastries. And tomorrow…
Focus.
“I was reviewing our reference materials again,”
she said. “You’d located the Hawking radiation signal in my exports, so I took another look at your holometer data because I wanted—well, you’re right that the standard deviation around the recombined laser synchronization readings is low.”
He nodded.
“The actual distance measured is microscopic.”
“Colloquially.”
“Yes. It’s much smaller than anything we can see with a microscope lens. And the measurement itself is ten to the power of minus eighteen meters.”
Another nod. He knew this, too.
“It’s the same distance that an electron hops between atoms in Dr. Tuinstra’s black hole model.”
“What?”
He’d started to offer her a danish. Now, the pastry tumbled back into its box as his eyes widened, interest gleaming among the flecks of silver, his eyebrows lifting, his mouth tightening around an inhale.
His excitement and his almost-smile were for her.
“Show me?”
She dragged her laptop across the table, her screen split between the holometer data and the University of Amsterdam’s paper. She leaned in to highlight the relevant footnote. Ethan bent forward with her—and then into a two-hour technical discussion that hardly left her with time to refresh STEMinist Online’s exposé post on a hotspot for responses.
“If we can establish a definitive connection between the holometer and the electrons’ measurements, or at least replicate the distance of Dr. Tuinstra’s hops during our experiments—”
Two hours became three.
“—and if the data confirms that space-time is definitively discrete, with the electrons hopping over exactly one quantum unit between atoms, then string theory will be proven false, won’t it?”
Five hours of data and a debate about what credit she’d receive on his first-author paper, while the pastries grew steadily staler.
Another refresh of the forum post.
Nothing.
Fortunately, the potential for the holometer’s readings to dismantle string theory held her attention on their project, instead of on the burgeoning stubble shadowing Ethan’s jaw, or the edge of his tongue poking over his lower lip with the depth of his interest and enthusiasm… or the continuing radio silence from STEMinist Online. They even finalized the layout of their cable network in the MEC hutch, and she focused on the electromagnetic placement of ultracold atoms, on the manipulable hop distances of electrons, on Hawking radiation, and on laser angles.
Mostly.
Seven o’clock, one last refresh of Kramer’s thread, standing to stretch out the kinks in her spine.
Post Deleted
“What?”
She scrolled down the page. “No, no…”
“What’s wrong?”
“No, no, no, no—”
Her clicking at warp speed through irrelevant comments on other postings returned nothing. “Damn. The original author who wrote about Dr. Kramer appropriating her research removed her post. It’s gone, along with all the comments. One of our best data sources just got deleted!”
She had a new private message from DataDominatrix, though.
No.
Attached was an image of a redacted non-disclosure agreement.
“Fuck—”
But then: ping, from her SVLAC email.
“Wait, maybe…”
Journal of Supermassive Astronomy and Astrophysics:
Submission Update
Dr. Erin Monaghan,
Our editors have received an allegation of fraudulent data present in “Investigating the Impact of Tidal Disruption Events on the Axis Rotation of Galaxies Proximal to Black Holes.”
Publication of your paper has been suspended at this time, pending committee review.
Regards,
Dr. Ronald Sams, Editor-in-Chief
She didn’t swear, now.
She didn’t say anything at all.
She just stared down at her email, unblinking. Unbreathing? Because if her sole-author paper was pulled from publication, its results that would’ve provided funding justifications for upcoming grants couldn’t be cited, and she’d lost a critical opportunity to establish herself as a name in their field.
Or as a name that she wanted.
She wouldn’t be linked to virtuosic analyses of black hole behaviors, Hawking radiation, or insights into the construction of space-time.
Dr. Erin Monaghan would be publicly associated with fraud.
“Ah…”
She swayed, her face white.
“Erin—”
Ethan reached for her. Despite her colorless cheeks, her skin burned under his touch. Her pulse jittered as he guided her back into her chair. He pulled apart a danish into small bites and told her, “Eat this. Breathe.”
“I…”
“I know.” He did.
Dr. Ronald Sams was a name he’d seen as an attendee at various networking dinners for which Dr. Kramer had requested reimbursement through SVLAC’s Finance department. He was also listed in the caption of Dr. Kramer’s prized golfing photo.
His supervisor knew Ronald Sams.
Now Sams had blocked Erin’s paper from publication.
Fraudulent data, just like Ethan himself had implied at their all-hands.
Fuck.
Not even twenty-four hours after she’d…
…and this—this was what he’d feared. This swift brutality, this retaliation for her defiance, her assertiveness, her challenge to Dr. Kramer’s authority. For her clear-eyed insubordination. Her honesty.
What contributions are you offering to our quantum gravity research, Dr. Kramer?
Scientific parasite.
He’d agreed to help her find evidence of his manager’s misconduct. Not in order to claim credit for his own past work, not even to ensure his attribution for the outcomes of their quantum gravity project. But to protect her. Because if they had documentation and Dr. Kramer knew it, then maybe he wouldn’t act against Erin, wouldn’t…
He’d failed.
He should’ve known that he had no time.
This is how you lose the time war.
Dr. Kramer didn’t have to prove his claim about her scientific misconduct. Sams’ review committee didn’t need to uncover fraud in her paper, either. The damage to her professional standing was already done. A researcher’s name was nearly as important as their data output for securing publication and funding; a notorious study conducted by social scientists Dr. Gabriel Bernard-Boucher, Dr. Jarred March, and Dr. Hannah Hedgehower, in which they’d submitted bogus papers to journals under their own credible names and been accepted for publication, was hard proof that reputation held greater weight than fact.
Dr. Erin Monaghan, fraud.
Whatever Dr. Kramer had told Sams over dinner or on a putting green yesterday had already impacted her career.
Maybe wrecked it completely.
He knew this, even while he was still stupidly offering his danish, even while she was clearly eyeing the pastry box not with hunger, but as a place to vomit.
She knew it, too.
“I’m…”
Not angry.
He knew her anger, knew its sizzle and flash: pyrotechnics, loud and vivid and short-lived as a lightning strike. But she was quiet and pale now, lips chapped with her thin breathing. Dilated eyes, bloodless hands.
Afraid.
She was afraid because she’d risked Dr. Kramer’s wrath not just for the preservation of her credit on their quantum gravity project, or even for the sake of the women in her anonymous network. She’d risked it for Ethan.
She’d risked her career for him.
Bold, beautiful, lucky Erin had gambled and lost.