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 irritatingclick,click,clickagainst 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.”
