Martina
I want full details this evening.
Erin
Definitely.
With that, she shouldered her jacket and backpack, ferried her bicycle back down the stairs, and sped off for SVLAC alongside a cavalcade of commuter cars rumbling up Sand Hill Road. She waved to a guard at the campus gatehouse, flashing her employee identification badge and another smile, and grinned wider still when she passed through the parking lot outside the Modern Physics building.
Ethan’s car wasn’t there.
She’d beaten him to the office on the last Monday of the month, which meant that she’d get to schedule her next five weeks of lab time in the experimental halls before him. Numerous graveyard shifts with the machinery during her early tenure at SVLAC had taught her the importance of punctuality on scheduling day, and the even greater importance of getting her hours scheduled first.
Of course, it was his sleight of hand several years ago—her work calendar had inexplicably switched its a.m. and p.m. listings, so that a normal lab time selection of twelve noon on her calendar view became midnight on the scheduling sheet—that had brought her into contact with Martina Perez during one of the night shifts; as an operator in the experimental halls, Martina worked a brutal rotating combination of three fourteen-hour days on and four days off per week. But the fact that Ethan had inadvertently introduced her to her best friend was cold comfort.
To think, she’d once anticipated sharing theories with him!
Had been so flustered when she’d collided with him…
Well, Ethan Meyer was late to SVLAC, she’d beaten her own Dish run time, her work would be published in bothGalactica Magazineand theJournal of Supermassive Astronomy and Astrophysics, and it was a beautiful, beautiful morning.
Waving a greeting to her fellow early birds as she passed the Modern Physics coffee station and kitchenette, she sat down at her desk, tugged her utility jacket off over her light taupe sweater—SVLAC’s air conditioning was vicious—forwarded her paper acceptance email to Nadine with a few lines of gratitude for her supervisor’s support, double-checked her research plans to gauge whether she should book one weekly slot or two on LIGO, then opened the scheduling calendar.
Calendar:SVLAC East and West Experimental Halls Lab Hours
Before she could select her date and time, the grid flickered under her cursor and closed. SVLAC’s IT equipment was old and sometimes cranky. She sighed and opened the calendar again. It froze. Then it disappeared from her monitor altogether. She tried a third time with crossed fingers. It refused to open at all.
“Damn.”
Muttering under her breath, eyeing the clock, she scanned her unread emails for an explanation from the IT department about the program’s failure, ready to write a very precise, very displeased message if no information was forthcoming, and—oh.
To the SVLAC research community:
The Silicon Valley Linear Accelerator National Laboratory was the recipient of a malware attack this morning. The attack failed. However, SVLAC’s systems will be restarted out of an abundance of caution, with new security measures installed during the process.
The reboot will take place at 6 a.m. Pacific on Monday.
Email and internal messaging systems will be prioritized for restoration and are projected to be live by 6:45 a.m. Pacific, but the scheduling calendar for SVLAC’s experimental halls will be unavailable from 6 a.m. Pacific through 6 p.m. Pacific (approx.). Please submit any lab time requests prior to the system reset at 6 a.m. Pacific.
Regards,
IT at SVLAC
The IT department had sent this critical information at two o’clock in the morning. The rush of other Monday emails had pushed the message out of view in her inbox… and it was already after eight thirty.
Erin bolted up from her desk.
She hurried back past the coffee station, out the building’s main entrance—Ethan Meyer’s hatchback was in the parking lot now, alongside a shuttle bus ferrying SVLAC’s new cohort of interns to the campus—and over to an adjacent cluster of IT buildings, which housed the technicians, their servers, and SVLAC’s technical library.
“Good morning.” She brandished her badge past the scanner for entry and attention as she stepped into the technicians’ domain. “I need to be added to the lab calendar. I didn’t see your email about the malware attack and system reboot until just now. If you could slot me in manually for the LIGO control room, that would be helpful.”
“You only read the email about the system shutdown… now?” A technician seated at the support desk glanced up at her badge-waving. He paused a Linux tutorial window open over a scroll of running reboot code with a meticulous click before extracting first one earbud, then the other. He wound up the headphone cords in a circle on his desk. “And you want to be manually added to the scheduling calendar?”
“Yes.”
“Our email was clear about completing your time requests prior to six o’clock.”
“I know that. But it was sent at two o’clock, and I just saw it—”
