“Received. Please hold, Dr. Meyer.”
He waited. One minute, two, and he reached for his daily sudoku calendar. His pen drafted in the numbers without pause, clean and easy, a precise grid of nines, then scrawled beyond the margins as two minutes became five. Seven. Nebulae formed and swirled, the ink pristine against the page but the lines edgy, restless—
“Thank you for holding, Dr. Meyer. The form you’ve provided was initialed by Dr. Erin Monaghan.”
“Monaghan?”
“Yes. Dr. Nadine Fong’s latest recruit to the Relativistic Mechanics group.”
He muttered his thanks and replaced the receiver.
Dr. Erin Monaghan.
He tabbed back into his inbox and queried her name. His search returned a few general departmental threads, but also a message directly from her. That email displayed a staff identification photo in the sender line.
Dr. Erin Monaghan wore tortoiseshell glasses.
Her.
She’d sent him an introduction. He opened her message too quickly, reading even faster. An explanation for why she’d signed his form?No. Her salutation was pleasant, however, while her recap of their run-in was honest and wry, and her comments about his work were complimentary… hermanycomments. She must’ve read every paper he’d ever published, including his graduate dissertation on hypothetical quantum measurement at Berkeley. Her inquiries about the ramifications of recent quantum gravity theories on modern physics were articulate and insightful.
But his frown deepened.
Because she hadn’t apologized for—or even acknowledged—what she’d done, and again: she was very,veryfamiliar with his research. It didn’t matter that static had struck through every inch of his body from a brush of her hand. By signing hisNature Physicsrevision document, she’d stymied his progress for at least several months while he dealt with the fallout from the field, the journal, and Dr. Kramer. And her work on the interactions of matter within the space-time model was in diametric opposition to his.
His failure was to her benefit.
The data was clear.
This was sabotage.
PRESENT DAY
1
She’d beaten her own best time running the Stanford Dish trail this morning.
Erin’s legs quivered with exhaustion and sweat dribbled into her eyes as she grabbed her bicycle and pedaled back to Menlo Park. But she grinned up at the sky, its color just beginning to morph from gray to pink, to the smoggy blue and gold of a May sunrise over the East Bay mountains. She needed a shower, and also a celebration—she’d beaten not just her own record, but her brother Adrian’s, too.
Carrying her bicycle up her apartment’s exterior flight of stairs, mindful not to catch creepers of trailing bougainvillea in the spokes, she locked her rear tire to the railing, nodded at one of her roommates leaving for work while she shucked off her running shoes on the mat, then padded into the bathroom. The apartment on Live Oak Avenue was a three-bed, one-bath layout, which wasn’t ideal for three women and various partners who dropped by for the night, but the location was good, close to a weekend farmers’ market, public transportation, and Kepler’s Books, and they managed.
On a government salary, living alone wasn’t usually viable in Silicon Valley.
She dropped her sports bra and running shorts, slipped on a pair of rubber shower sandals—which she’d learned were a necessity second only to good headphones in a shared living situation—and stepped under a sluice of hot water. After luxuriating in the heat for a minute, she switched the temperature to tepid out of consideration for her other roommate, who would need to use it next. She was toweling her hair dry in her bedroom a few minutes later, while scanning through the influx of Monday emails flooding both her SVLAC and personal addresses, when a message chirped into her private inbox:Your Submission to Galactica Magazine.
Dear Aaron Forster,
We are delighted to inform you that your short story, “Pandora Rising,” has been accepted for publication. You will receive a complimentary copy of the next issue ofGalactica Magazine, where your work will be printed. Our editors enjoyed your story and would be pleased to receive additional submissions in the future.
She’d done it.
She, Erin Monaghan—or “Aaron Forster,” for anonymity—was going to be a published author!
She’d submitted “Pandora Rising” to the Bay Area science fiction magazine almost three months ago, and had largely given up hope of hearing back from the editors by this point.
But now?
Her fingers danced over her phone, closing out her personal email and opening the Monaghan family chat. But before she could bombard her parents and brothers with multiple exclamation points, a notification from her SVLAC inbox zipped onto the screen under her thumb.
