TWO MONTHS LATER
Ethan Meyer
Having sat cramped in a middle seat for eleven hours with his knees bumping the tray table, his window-side neighbor standing up to pace the aisle every thirty minutes and his aisle-side neighbor muttering over a slide deck, Ethan had willed himself to snatch a few minutes of sleep during his return flight from Switzerland.
Mind over matter. Mind over matter.
He couldn’t afford to lose productive time in the office for something like jet lag, which should be well within his control.
Mind over matter.
He’d touched down in San Francisco’s pervasive summer fog late on Sunday night and arrived at SVLAC this morning before seven o’clock, eyes gritty, tongue thick, head tender, and ready to tackle Dr. John Kramer’s backlog of research and administrative needs. Not to mention, the follow-ups from his stint overseas. He’d already forwarded a list of new contacts to his supervisor. Now the process of outlining why Dr. Kramer’s finicky, experimental holometer was the physics field’s best chance at identifying quantum units of space loomed. The European Organization for Nuclear Research’s Large Hadron Collider hadn’t been powerful enough to generate the energy required to isolate those infinitesimal and hypothetical units, and maybe a machine with ten tera electron volts could do it, but the LHC at CERN was already the world’s most potent particle accelerator at just under seven tera electron volts. There might be a viable paper in contrasting its energy failure with the potential success of the holometer, however.Thank GodDr. Kramer had promoted him out of the bullpen and into an actual office last year. The months he’d spent untangling his supervisor’s data after Dr. Kramer’s spreadsheets went haywire from a virus-filled download had been worth every minute for the quiet he could now command with a closed door.
It didn’t matter that he’d had to tack his nameplate over the door’s existing designation as “Supply Closet.” Even if he’d had to move out several industrial shelving units to fit a chair and a convertible standing desk inside, it was still a closing, locking space. It was still his own office.
If he’d still been seated in the bullpen, though, would he have seenheragain?
Strawberry blonde ponytail tilting past her flushed cheek and over her shoulder with a cascade of sweet, fresh scent, kneeling to organize his reports, dark eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses catching on his before swiveling to his research, lighting with interest—
But she hadn’t been wearing an SVLAC badge.
She might not be on the Modern Physics staff at all.
Or maybe she was just new?
Ping.
An incoming message chimed into his inbox before he could waver in his resolve not to crack open his door for a scan of the bullpen desks.
Dr. John Kramer (Urgent):Nature Physics Article
A muscle spasmed along his neck at the simple, innocuous subject line.
Frowning and wondering how long he’d be suffering cramps from his transatlantic flight, he opened the email. Its only content was a link to aNature Physicspaper proposing their methodology for measuring quantums of space—the paper that he and Dr. Kramer had submitted after a brutal revision process, just prior to his term at CERN. He knew every word of its ideas about measuring the universe’s smallest unbreakable unit of distance. He’d written them all, under Dr. Kramer’s first-author directorship.
He expanded the document and scanned through.
What the hell?
The paper was missing several critical revisions.
Those critical revisions—Ethan’srevisions—had been made late in the editing process, after he’d reconstructed a data set in Dr. Kramer’s section. Another virus must’ve disrupted several of his supervisor’s inputs, he’d assumed, given the mess he’d uncovered upon closer inspection during the revision work. Dr. Kramer had been occupied with negotiations for a high-profile collaboration with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, so he’d initialed the revise-and-resubmit form certifying that the necessary changes had been made, then instructed Ethan to manage them. Like many geniuses, Dr. Kramer was temperamental and secretive, but he’d trusted Ethan with revisions tohis own work.
He’d been exhausted and ecstatic when he’d finally submitted the revise-and-resubmit form. Maybe he’d even be moved into an office with a window, he’d rhapsodized through his sleep deprivation.
Except that his revisions weren’t in the published paper.
No. No, fuck, no—
His fingers flexed over the keyboard in a futile effort to erase or at least mitigate the damage. But there was no time for that—for anything—because the door to his office swung open now, so hard that its mounted stop vibrated against the wall. Dr. John Kramer caught the rebounding panels on his palm, which quaked and stilled. Then he looked at Ethan.
“What happened, Meyer?”
“I…”
“This paper was published less than an hour ago.” Dr. Kramer took a step toward Ethan’s desk, voice neutral even while a vein ticked in his temple beyond a line of receding but immaculate iron gray hair. “Six o’clock Pacific time is nine o’clock Eastern. It would’ve been the first email in every subscriber’s Monday inbox.”
“Yes—” His own voice cracked.
