THREE YEARS EARLIER
Erin Monaghan
The bicycle pedal scraped under her sneaker, its rasp punctuating her hard breathing—ragged with excitement, with nerves, and with the effort of cycling up Sand Hill Road. Erin’s heartbeat steadied while she braced her body weight against the bar, waiting for a traffic light to direct her toward Innovation Drive and the Silicon Valley Linear Accelerator National Laboratory campus.
SVLAC: where quarks were identified, where cutting-edge research on the black hole information paradox was conducted, where new truths about humanity’s place among the stars stood ready to be revealed—
—and where Dr. Erin Monaghan would discover them.
She probably should’ve taken a taxi for her first day on campus, so she wouldn’t meet her new colleagues in her sneakers and with helmet hair, but Dr. Nadine Fong had recruited her straight from Stanford’s astrophysics lab for her doctoral work on gravitational waves, not her appearance. Anyhow, she’d be making contacts today that would affect her prospects in the physics field, and she didn’t want to dress in a way that might give the wrong impression and make her coworkers view her as a woman first and a scientist second. The traffic light turned green and she pedaled through the intersection, then up a last incline toward SVLAC’s research grounds.
“Identification, please.” A guard waved her to the window of a security gatehouse. She retrieved an employment letter from Dr. Fong on her phone, which authorized her to enter the campus today without a security badge. Messages chiming in from the Monaghan family chat almost hid the document, while the guard checked the name on the letter against her driver’s license. Nodding at the outpouring of well wishes, he motioned her forward a minute later. “Head left to the Science and Public Support building for your orientation.”
“Thanks.” She tucked her phone away, dodging bird droppings on the pavement and a few caterpillars dangling from the trees overhead as she walked her bicycle to a set of nearby racks. Yes, sneakers and a helmet had been the right choice. She locked up her rear tire, and the click of turning metal rotated the next several years of her life into position: department research on government-funded projects, but also her own individual inquiries into the space-time ripples created by colliding black holes. She’d study gravitational waves on the lab’s precisely tuned Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory—called LIGO for short—and probe the extreme edges of human understanding about the most violent and energetic processes in the universe.
So many unknowns, mysteries that only science fiction authors had dared to explore in the past—all this would now be her work. It didn’t seem real. But she could count the months of research, analysis, writing, and aggressive networking that had won her this recruitment to SVLAC’s Relativistic Mechanics group. Now she’d collect data alongside the leading minds in physics, including her department head and several other scientists whose work she’d admired for years.
Her nervous excitement spiking higher than ever, she ran a hand through her ponytail, wiped the sweat off her nose under her glasses, and was ready to greet Nadine Fong when her supervisor came rolling around the Science and Public Support building on a scooter. Dr. Fong nodded at her, skidded to a halt, and raised an air horn.
The noise was brief, but deafening.
Erin blinked in confusion until Dr. Fong’s voice cut through the echoes in her ears.
“Welcome to SVLAC, Dr. Monaghan. Sorry for the fanfare, but”—she pointed over Erin’s shoulder, where a flock of wild turkeys straggled away from the building—“the cafeteria’s upstairs, and they come pecking for scraps. We try to scare them off so they don’t leave feces on the pavement. Looks like you sidestepped the worst of it. Those sneakers were a good choice.”
Dr. Fong was wearing sneakers, too.
She found herself grinning now when she answered, “I’m excited to be here, Dr. Fong.”
“Call me Nadine. May I call you Erin? Good.” Propelling her scooter at a walking pace, Nadine gestured for Erin to follow her along a thoroughfare called Ring Road, then toward a squat cinder-block structure housing SVLAC’s Modern Physics department. She waved to a yawning woman shuffling back toward the parking lot with a danish and a coffee cup clutched in hand, identifying her as Dr. Martina Perez—“She’s coming off a night shift at one of the experimental halls”—before badging into the main entrance, continuing, “You’ll run through an administrative onboarding today, then meet the team for lunch and a tour of the campus. It’s a generic schedule for all new staff, though, so tell me if there’s anything in particular that you want to see.”
Erin couldn’t rearrange her giddy smile into a more professional expression as she entered the building. “I assume we’ll be touring our branch of LIGO, but will we also see the experimental hutches? The results from SVLAC’s prototype holometer could be groundbreaking, especially for Dr. Ethan Meyer’s work—”
“—on quantum mechanics?” Nadine paused while pointing out the office coffee station.
“Quantum mechanics offers a conflicting view of reality to our field, but Dr. Meyer’s research on practical quantum measurement is still incredibly elegant. Even if he theorizes that mathematical space-time is small, discrete, and probabilistic, instead of a large, smooth, deterministic continuum. I have some questions that I’d like to ask him about what the recent theories on quantum gravity could mean for modern physics.”
Nadine’s pregnant pause morphed into raised eyebrows. “You’ve done your homework, haven’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Of course.” She directed Erin down a hallway toward the central office bullpen, passing a closed door with an emphatic Do Not Disturb sign taped to its front. “Well, Dr. Meyer is finalizing a measurement report and also revising a paper with Dr. Kramer—Nature Physics—so he’s unlikely to be available for a while, especially since he’s off to Switzerland for two months after the resubmission tomorrow. Both men are perfectionists. I’m actually surprised that they even received a revise-andresubmit from the journal. Or that Dr. Kramer would deign to do—”
The next moment happened more quickly than a synapse firing.
The Do Not Disturb door swung open with enough force to drag sparks of friction from the industrial carpet. Arms stacked high with spiral-bound documents and what might’ve been an airline travel itinerary, a man stepped out into the hall, tripped over a loose extension cord, and plowed into Erin.
“Ah!”
Paperwork mushroomed into the air, reports landing heavily on her sneakers. Despite the joint impacts of the man’s shoulder and the documents, however, she managed to steady herself on a bullpen divider.
She didn’t fall.
But when she caught his startled gaze, shefeltherself fall. Vertigo looped abruptly around her ankles and her stomach, flipping her over so that a burning nebula of color hit her cheeks, because:dark hair, finger-raked and needing a trim, stubbled cheeks, irises swirled with gray and blue, flecked in silver around blooming pupils, his fleece vest charged with static, data analyses spilling from his hands—
—and the title of his reports: “The Use of Interferometer Technology to Isolate Quantum Units in SVLAC’s Experimental Holometer.”
This was Dr. Ethan Meyer.
