When she knew that he was brilliant.
Even in her earliest and most hostile tirades against Dr. Ethan Meyer to Martina, long before she’d been forced into partnership with him and learned to value his aggravating, effective research methods beside his results, she’d never denied his ingenuity.
But as the familiar heat of anger gathered on her tongue, she recognized that she wasn’t angry with Ethan.
She was angry with Dr. John Kramer: decorated director of SVLAC’s prestigious Quantum Mechanics group, Ethan’s supervisor,de factomentor—and complete asshole. He was more interested in the packing materials for his awards than in their quantum gravity report, and what he’d bothered to glean from their update was only criticism of their progress. They’d been tasked with researching one of the most fundamental and difficult unsolved questions in physics, and he was dissatisfied that they hadn’t presented publishable findings in under two weeks? He denigrated Ethan’s contributions and demanded that his subordinate provide more and better results, but gave no guidance as to how.
He ignored the merits of Erin’s own work and field.
She hadn’t expected anything else from a man like him.
The way Kramer treated Ethan, however?
For a supervisor to speak to an employee this way—casually dismissive, casually cruel, completely unhelpful, without any fear of repercussion—was wrong. Even a failing one. And Ethan wasn’t failing.
But worse still: Ethan’s rigidity wasn’t surprise.
She knew his surprise, the zest and the spark of it.
No, he was rigid because he’d known to brace himself for this abuse.
Maybe he endured it for the sake of opportunities and funding, or because he thought he didn’t have an option to protest his working conditions under such an esteemed name, not when a line of eager physicists would’ve clogged the freeway to San Francisco for a chance at his position, or because…
Is your old supervisor still at SVLAC?
He is. Promoted to department head, too, andFermilab, time crystals, quantum effects on avian migration, quantum circuits, first-author papers—
Suddenly, everything slotted into place.
No dissertation awards from Kramer’s alma mater were being packed into his archival boxes; his doctoral work clearly hadn’t garnered him any particular notice. But once he’d networked his way into a leadership position at his first lab—failing upward into management at Fermilab?—and had access to a cohort of research fellows and totheirwork? A glance at his stack of abstracts confirmed that his first-author papers had begun to appear during the early aughts, in the same time period when, given the duration of his PhD, he’d likely taken on his first supervisory position: the use of quantum effects for navigation by migrating birds, the exotic construct known as a time crystal, quantum circuits, and Ethan’s units. He’d actually framed those abstracts and hung them in his office like trophies! And theyweretrophies, tributes to his brilliance, because only a genius could specialize in so many diverse areas.
A genius, whose published research was very close to the expertise areas of his mentees: his subordinates and second authors, STEMinist Online’s women. They had their credit—as collaborators. But his was the name associated with the discoveries. With the fame. If the women posting on the forum were right, his subordinates often left his department soon after their papers appeared. Some left the field entirely.
Why would they lie?
They had nothing to gain from venting their anonymous rage on the internet, from passing on their experiences and hardwon warnings. But she? She’d enjoyed the rush of righteous outrage—ofentertainment—from their reports. The grueling, demoralizing experiences hadn’t touched her, hadn’t been her responsibility to confront, so she’d treated them like recreational reading.
She’d been part of the problem…
“Well?” Kramer’s finger rapped his keyboard, a reprimand against Ethan’s continuing silence.
“Uh, I—”
…but not anymore.
What contributions can you offer, Meyer?
She knewexactlywhat she could offer Kramer, Ethan, all the women from her forum—and herself.
Ethan might think he had to take Kramer’s abuse.
But she didn’t have to take this. Any of it.
She reached across Kramer’s desk and closed their progress report.Click. Nowthatwas surprise. She answered with a smile that showed more fury than teeth and said:
“What contributions areyouoffering to our quantum gravity research, Dr. Kramer? Nothing that I can see. I don’t think we actually need your input. We don’t need your status update sessions either, and…oh.” She snapped her own fingers, straightening. “This—thisis how you’ve appropriated your subordinates’ work! Demanding all this micromanaging meeting bureaucracy so you can identify interesting research concepts in their infancy, then resource and claim them as yours as you oversee their growth. Most physicists would be too grateful for your funding and attention to notice until it was too late, until the papers were written with your name as a first author. Maybe not even then. It’s almost genius—”
Genius at spotting promising ideas.
