Anyway, we’re immensely proud of you.
Wes
Will you be insufferable when you win a Nobel Prize?
Erin
Given how you wouldn’t stop squawking about your National Geographic win last year? Absolutely.
She snickered as both of her brothers’ responding ellipses zipped under her message. She smiled at her family’s excitement for her success, too. It was gratifying. Really. But she doubted whether her parents and brothers had been able to read “Pandora Rising” yet—not whenGalacticapromoted itself as trendy in the way that polaroids had become: offline and proud of it, with no digital readership available and print copies provided only with a subscription. She’d appreciated that when she’d submitted her interstellar tale, certain that the line between her professional scientific life and her personal creative one would remain intact. Who could possibly link Dr. Erin Monaghan, sole author of “Investigating the Impact of Tidal Disruption Events on the Axis Rotation of Galaxies Proximal to Black Holes,” with Aaron Forster and “Pandora Rising”?
While she welcomed her family’s praise, the congratulations lacked a knowledgeable basis in fact. In Lori Monaghan’s words, the Monaghans were proud of their daughter and sister. They weren’t necessarily impressed with her writing. After a day spent wrangling first graders, her mother enjoyed cozy murder mysteries. Adrian and Wes—who’d chosen to go into photography rather than biology—had inherited their father’s taste for nonfiction. None of them read enough sci-fi to objectively judge the merits of “Pandora Rising.”
Which was fine, but…
She’d lost track of time with her thoughts when the apartment’s front door thudded open.Midnight. Someone fumbled through the entryway, clumsy in the dark. Two someones: a man’s deep laughter and a woman’s giggling response. Ashley, by the pitch. Busy at SVLAC with the grant application, collecting data, and avoiding Ethan, she’d only seen her roommates in passing all week. Did Ashley have a new partner?
“Shhh—you’ll wake people up!”
“But didn’t Kai go home with that girl from the bar at the British Bankers Club?”
“My other roommate’s probably here. Erin.”
“On a Friday night?”
“Well, all she ever does is work and—shit!”
“What?”
“Stubbed my toe on the couch.”
“Oh. Okay.” A weighted pause. Then, “Come here. I’ll carry you. Which door?”
A resurgence of Ashley’s giggles seemed to distract the pair from stubbed toes and whatever she’d been saying about her second roommate. Erin pushed in her earbuds. She mostly didn’t mind sharing an apartment with Kai and Ashley. She liked them in the abstract: women in STEM making Silicon Valley life work, defiant and smart. She didn’t know them well, but that was part of what made their crowded household functional. They were friendly, and also a little distant to preserve an illusion of privacy—she’d thought. Except that her roommates commuted together, sometimes they had dinner, and apparently they also went out to bars on Fridays.
My other roommate’s probably here.
A bedstead squealed.
Wincing, she upped the volume on Phoebe Bridgers’ vocals. She snapped pictures ofGalactica’s cover and the first page of “Pandora Rising” with Aaron Forster’s author credit, sending them to Martina beside a line of exclamation points—which Martina answered in kind. Then, closing their thread, she took another photo: “Hunger.” But this time, the click of her camera was furtive. She left her phone on her bedside table against an urge to watch its screen, checked the security of her earbuds, increased their volume one more time while she swapped out her loungewear for pajamas, and padded to the bathroom in fuzzy socks and a Stanford sweatshirt. With Bridgers’ track resonating through her head, she couldn’t hear the faucet running in the sink as she brushed her teeth, washed her face, dabbed on moisturizer, eye cream, and lip balm—no smears around Bannister’s glass—and braided her hair. Mercifully, she also couldn’t hear anything from behind Ashley’s door.
As a precautionary measure, though, she kept her earbuds in after she’d returned to her room, switching her music to the soothing Norah Jones melody from Left Bank while she tossed her sweatshirt over a chair, kicked off her socks, and returned to her tangle of blankets. A notebook for jotting down midnight brainwaves, a sudoku booklet, and a pile of new novels waited with her phone on the nightstand. She ignored them and snuggled down into her sheets withExhalationin hand.
Maybe Bannister was reading “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” right now.
Unprompted, Chiang’s book fell open to the chapter. She slipped again into the author’s examination of Remem—a futuristic technology that granted its users eidetic memory—and Chiang’s meditation on whether a perfect recollection of the past was worth its cost. Could humans’ inability to accurately remember their yesterday be a biological kindness? It was a compelling, technically elegant piece, a treatise on forgiveness and narcissism; she only resurfaced to check her SVLAC email and scan STEMinist Online’s trending posts around one o’clock, before turning out her light.
No urgent flags in her inbox demanded attention.
No breaking news in the forums required SnarkyQuark64’s commentary.
But a new message from Bannister was waiting on her phone.
Bannister
The difference that Chiang explores between practical, exact truth and emotional, functional truth in the story is interesting. It reminds me of the Black Mirror anthology series.
He was right.
