With art, at least.
Ethan
The data is axiomatic. But that doesn’t mean we have to like it.
Forster
And we don’t!
He rinsed his plate before carrying the dregs of his coffee to his home desk, opening his laptop, lining up pencils meticulously organized by hardness—B, HB, F—across a pad of graph-ruled paper, and tucking a pen behind his ear. Sunlight glinting through the sliding door to his patio sparked off a beam tree mounted on the wall above his workstation; SVLAC’s engineers occasionally bombarded sheets of plastic with defocused, low-energy electron beams traveling almost at the speed of light, then pricked the ductile material with a metal punch to break the electrons into visible tree-like arcs and create visual art. The piece was beautiful and bizarre, and Schulz had awarded it to Ethan and Dr. Kramer to commemorate their first data collection cycle on the holometer. (Dr. Kramer already had several beam trees, so Ethan had taken it.) A perfect unification of art and science, it was the only non-functional item in his space. He smiled at it, and smiled again at his phone.
Ethan
What show would you choose?
Leaving Forster to consider the question, he turned his earbuds to white noise and clicked into Dr. Kramer’s edits attachment for the Eischer-Langhoff application. His supervisor’s instruction to cite their paper from theInternational Journal of Modern Physicswas easy enough; he got to work. He paused a while later to alleviate the stiffness in his wrists with a sudoku grid, grabbing the pen from behind his ear and inking orderly numbers onto the page. Then:ping.
Forster
I was initially thinking about the first three seasons of Battlestar Galactica. But since you mentioned a nonfiction option, maybe Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown?
Ethan
Is that a travel show?
He resumed his revisions on the grant application with a quick copy-and-paste to reorder Dr. Kramer’s salient points, then replaced several of Dr. Greg Logan’s citations with a generic mention of Fermilab to make his supervisor’s name more prominent in the text. But the data in Table 5 still presented a problem.
He combed back through his spreadsheets, tapping his lower lip with the pen. The data looked accurate on review. Dr. Kramer had questioned it, however.Correct data in Table 5.His supervisor might be referencing an outdated version of their raw holometer exports, of course… but he’d do a second analysis later today, just to be certain.
Ping.
Forster
Yes. He explores places that are off the standard tourist track—for example, the Interzone in Morocco. It used to be a prime destination for the Beat Generation and rock bands like the Rolling Stones. Somewhere to escape western “morality” and its hold on experimental art. (I won a family trivia tournament with that fact.)
Then immediately again:ping.
Forster
Wouldn’t it be nice if Silicon Valley could breathe life back into its original creative rebelliousness, the kind that was going to save the world? If it would stop auto-strangling itself by… I don’t know, coding mobile apps that let you order laundry detergent and a dog walker with your Chinese takeout?
Forster
Focusing on what’s easy and shiny and stupid, just to get a quick profit from mercenary mythological creatures…
Forster
…like unicorn investors?
“Ha—” Ethan burst out laughing.
Bunsen startled upright at the sudden noise. Loosening his hold on a stolen sock, he smacked his muzzle into Ethan’s elbow, and the phone slipped through his fingers, a keysmash skidded across the screen—he grabbed for the device as it fell—he missed—itthunked to the floor—
—where it chirped. A nonsensical message zipped away.
“Damn.No, no, Bunsen, it’s fine…”
Stroking the dog to soothe him, he retrieved his phone and typed out a quick response to his own gibberish.
