While a micro-scale earthquake would’ve registered on Erin’s protected interferometer as noise to scrub from her data, it wouldn’t have delayed her collection cycles, not like he was delayed now. If Dr. Kramer agreed, maybe some of the Eischer-Langhoff funding could be used to build a protective housing for their machinery, extending its tunnels while also upgrading the prototype from its off-the-shelf parts and its exposed location on a disused loading dock behind the lab’s industrial maintenance buildings. He wouldn’t have to deal with this wait time again.
“The half-reflective mirror shifted by eight degrees in the quake. I’ve remotely adjusted it back. Are you ready for the laser to activate, or do you want to check my positioning?”
He did.
It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Martina Perez’s expertise. But trust had no place in science. So he stayed on location in the control room to oversee the holometer’s cycles, double-checking settings or acceptable margins of error (none), investigating potential problems with the instrument prior to them reaching Dr. Kramer’s desk, and ideally resolving them before his supervisor knew they’d occurred. Dr. Kramer relied on Ethan to generate accurate data, which he employed in formulating new quantum hypotheses; the only way to ensure that accuracy was to monitor the holometer and its readings live.
Ethan himself had begun to question the basic assumption of Einsteinian physics—that space was continuous and infinitely divisible—in graduate school. What if space was actually microscopically chunky? If it was, how could those chunks be measured? A pixel was the smallest unit of image on any modern device, while a photon was the smallest light unit. Why couldn’t there be an equivalently tiny unit of distance?
A quantum of space.
The idea was bizarre at first glance, plausibly the product of too much late-night philosophizing over cheap boxed wine in a dorm. But Dr. Kramer concurred that it had merit. Besides, if light was both a unit and a wave, why shouldn’t space be similar? If he could measure space at its base unit, if he could prove Dr. Kramer’s hypothesis about the existence of quantum units correct in experimental conditions—
“Activating the laser,” Perez said.
He approached the control room monitors. At the end of long lengths of cable that stretched from the experimental halls to the machinery’s physical location, focused light entered his device. The holometer split the laser, which bounced along its tunnels between mirrors and registered their precise locations, tracking any changes in their placement that resulted from the wanderings of space. Millions of readings per second leaped onto the screens.
If space could be broken into individual units, the data would show a constant, random, and microscopic variation in the mirrors’ positions. When the two laser beams recombined after bouncing off the incrementally moving reflectors, they would be out of sync. Dr. Kramer hypothesized that a replicable, standardized amount of asynchrony would reveal the scale of a quantum unit—up to a million times smaller than a hydrogen atom…
Behind him, the engineers conferred in low voices about beam quality, bounce frequency, diamonds, and—popcorn?
“…wasn’t as salty as usual.”
“I wonder if she…”
He ignored the itch of hair rising up his neck and the arrival of the next shift’s area engineer and operator. The chatter and staff changes didn’t matter. He edged around a cluster of cables to the farthest monitor. An invisible hand seemed to trace out glowing lines and numbers on the screen, the patterns abstract, jagged, and almost too complex for a human eye to recognize as art.
His breathing steadied. He watched the data flicker, and scroll, and scroll, and scroll. It was beautiful.
5
Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday. Sunday.
One week, then another.
The days passed in a whirl of hours spent revising his grant application, working with Dr. Kramer to showcase the Quantum group’s research for the Department of Energy during the Secretary’s visit, cleaning and analyzing the data from his lab time—and when he carved out a minute, centering himself through a round of sudoku or a sketch.
Despite his exhaustion, he was very careful with his ink. His hands remained clean, with no pigment stains to explain to his supervisor.
He was equally careful to avoid the twice-weekly calls from his parents.
Every Wednesday evening, his phone shrilled to rouse Bunsen from a nap and send the retriever racing to the entryway, barking at a nonexistent doorbell. It rang again on Sundays whenever he failed to make an appearance at the Meyers’ family meal—a requirement for model families.
Fortunately, his parents rarely left messages.
He called them back, but always when he could be certain of his father and Chase being at the hospital, or when his mother would be leading tours through one of the East Bay Garden Society’s estates.
You’ve reached Dr. Chase Meyer Sr. Leave a message.
You’ve reached Dr. Chase Meyer Jr. Leave a message.
Hello, you’ve reached Karen Meyer’s voicemail. If you’re inquiring about the East Bay Garden Society’s June fundraiser, please leave a message and I’ll return your call shortly. If you’re inquiring about scheduling a tour, please call the society’s office at—
On other nights, however, his condo was silent and peaceful. Only the occasional muffled thump of a door closing in an adjacent unit or the sough of water in the pipes disturbed him. He knew his neighbors’ schedules by their doors and their noisy plumbing; the tenants to his right were still watering the landscaped portion of their patio, despite the drought. They likely knew his schedule in the same way. But that was the extent of their acquaintance. Intimate and distant. His mother would’ve made herself known to every household in the Farm Hill Boulevard complex within a few days, but he’d lived here ever since he’d graduated from Berkeley and moved across the bay to the Peninsula, and he couldn’t remember the name of even one neighbor. That was preferable for privacy in such close quarters. His, and theirs.
But Erin Monaghan’s new, persistent silence wasnotpeaceful. Twelve o’clock on Tuesdays came without the inconvenience of waiting for her to complete a data collection cycle or running into her as she left the research building. He sometimes spotted her bicycle parked at the door to the West Experimental Hall—locked up with a complicated combination cable, but ripe for switching its brake configurations, if he’d had the tools—but she was never near the control room when he arrived.
No coffee rings on the operator desks.
