Especially those ones?
“She’s right, isn’t she?” He tweaked Bunsen’s ears.
Ethan
You must’ve had a dog before.
Forster
My family’s always had herding breeds. I think that was deliberate when my brothers and I were young.
Even the concept of a dog in Karen Meyer’s house was an abomination. His mother hated dishes left in the sink, too. Against every nagging instinct, he rinsed his bowl under the faucet but didn’t wash it.Mutiny. He filled a water glass.
Ethan
Bunsen doesn’t herd people, but he does collect socks.
Then, heading back to his desk, he returned his phone to white noise, opened Dr. Kramer’s comments on Table 5, and began a second review of his own holometer spreadsheets, double-checking his assessment from earlier in the day. There was no binary switching of ones and zeros in the data. Erin hadn’t gone rogue against him here. Despite the unlikeliness of her sabotage reoccurring—maybe not so unlikely right now, since they were sharing a control room?—he still examined his exports every time, and sometimes discovered other data corruptions that required resolution from the hutch operators. He couldn’t reconcile Dr. Kramer’s implied discrepancy, however. He was writing a carefully worded response to his supervisor, asking what data Dr. Kramer was referencing for the table, when Forster sent another text.
Forster
Does the blue sock in Bunsen’s picture have a bear on it?
Ethan
Good eye. It does.
Her ellipsis appeared. To avoid staring at it, he switched back to his email.
Dr. Kramer:
Thank you for providing your edits for the Eischer-Langhoff draft.
I’ve made your requested updates (attached, changes tracked), with one exception: the data in Table 5. This data reflects the holometer’s January through mid-June exports, which are my current sets. If data for the project has been collected more recently, then the table requires amendments. What data are you referencing in your edits?
I apologize for the confusion.
—E.M.
He read the draft three times before he sent it.
The best outcome would be that he’d failed to accurately track the quantum measurement project’s data collection cycles. (Maybe Dr. Kramer had begun to collect his own data again? His increasingly busy schedule and the viruses often disrupting his exports had resulted in him largely stepping back from the day-today running of the holometer, with Ethan generating, cleaning, analyzing, modeling, and forwarding data for review instead.) If so, he’d be angry with Ethan’s questionable management of their work, but the solution would be a simple one: correct Table 5 to reference the updated sets, apologize, and never make the mistake again.
Ever.
…though what if his own data really was the most current? What if the sets referenced in Table 5 were accurate?
No.
Swallowing some water to ease the dryness in his throat, he reached for his phone, where Forster’s ellipsis had resolved into a new message.
Forster
Bad eyes, good optometrist. But anyway: blue sock, yellow bear. 510 area code. Cal Berkeley?
Ethan
You’re a writer and also a detective?
