In the backseat of the car, Rebecca saw Sean snoring indolently, and feverishly manipulating the joysticks of his portable gaming console, and kneeling in the seat so he could look out the rear window at the headlights of the car behind them.
“Now, consider that the group of people now coming into middle age are the first in history who can’t really remember a time before the World Wide Web. They have always viewed the world through these electronic windows; they have always had that false feeling of control. And, for all of us but the most fortunate or the least introspective, middle age is the time in our life when we look back on our past and begin the long process of coping with regret. For these children of the Information Age, who have grown up feeling that they had an unprecedented ability to shape the world and their place in it, but who have also been made acutely aware of all the other directions their lives could have taken—because you only have to spend five minutes online to prove to yourself that someone else out there in the world is living one, or all, of your possible lives—wouldn’t that feeling of regret be greater still? Wouldn’t it metastasize into some other dysfunctional psychological phenomenon for which the word ‘regret’ just isn’t adequate?”
“Okay, now that part’s just pop psychology,” Rebecca said. “I never felt like I could change the world when I was younger—if anything, it was the opposite! If there’s anything I regret from that time, it’s the hours and hours I wasted holed up in my bedroom in my parents’ house, drinking cheap wine and browsing online. But the rest of it—I don’t know. I think there’s something there. That there’s some sort of disease that technology has something to do with. That makes perfect sense.”
“It’s just hysteria,” Philip replied as Rebecca turned off Route 1 and onto a smaller, less congested two-lane road, her shoulders relaxing. “Fear of technological change brings these things on. Thirty years ago it was fear that radiation from mobile phones was microwaving our brains. Now it’s this. In three years we’ll have forgotten all about it.”
Neither of them spoke until they arrived at Carson’s sprawling apartment complex in Plainsboro. Like many similar abodes in the Jersey hinterlands, the place was a maze, full of little alleys named after flowers and trees and dead presidents, and parking lots with spaces numbered out of sequence. When they finally found the building, Philip was a little clumsy getting out of the car and ended up jostling the cupcakes inside the container, turning one of them over entirely and bouncing several others so that they left smears of frosting against the lid. But Rebecca figured they’d at least still taste the same.
She felt the tiniest pang of guilt as she locked the car doors and walked away, as if she were doing the kind of carelessly awful thing that landed you on the eleven o’clock news. But she wasn’t, clearly. There wasn’t anyone left behind in the backseat; there had never been anyone there.
Kate greeted the two of them at the door to Carson’s apartment, overdressed in a vaguely ball-gowny thing with a slit in the side that went to the thigh. In her hand she cradled a crystal tumbler two-thirds full of Pinot Grigio. “Carson doesn’t like to drink while cooking: he says it dulls his edge,” she said. “He treats it the same way he treats one of his physics problems: deadly serious about it. But someone has to drink while the food’s on the stove because of tradition, and I like drinking. So. Q.E.D.”
Kate led them into the apartment, slightly unsteady on too-tall heels. The outfit was a bit much, and Rebecca began to suspect that Kate was in that phase of her relationship with Carson where she convinced herself that she was really going to make a go of things. This phase usually came just before the one in which Kate suddenly called it off. Lately when Kate talked to Rebecca about Carson, her comments indicated a general unease about how things were going, one that didn’t seem to have a clear cause. (“i dunno,” she’d said one evening by IM. “not sure about the overall vibe.”) Though the closest she got to anything specific was saying that he “didn’t seem motivated sometimes. i say hey let’s hang out and he’s not like, awesome! he’s just like yeah ok. wanna go to the movies? ok. wanna hook up? yeah ok. maybe he’s not the kind of person who takes initiative. you know?” Rebecca could easily recall times when Kate had said the exact opposite about a man—too driven with respect to his work; too controlling; too eager to jump in the sack—but when Kate was casting around for reasons to cut loose from a man, it wasn’t the details of the excuse that mattered so much as the fact of its existence.
Carson was in the kitchen, his back to the rest of them as he huddled over the stove. Rebecca immediately surmised that bringing the store-bought desserts might have been a mistake—the kitchen looked like a chemistry lab. Had the cupcakes not been in Philip’s hands, she would have tried to spirit them back to the car under some guise or other, but it was already too late for that: Philip was stepping forward to hand them over. Rebecca looked at Philip and sensed that he knew that something was a little off as well, but it was too late for him to pivot to another script.
“We brought some cupcakes!” Philip said, his tone halfway between apology and command.
There was no other noise in the kitchen besides the whirring of the centrifuge that sat on the granite countertop. Carson turned from his work to look at the half-dozen cupcakes, at the pale smudges of icing on the inside of the lid. Once again Rebecca reminded herself that she was going to have to take Philip out for a wardrobe refresh, even if he didn’t want to spend the time: Philip’s plain white button-down shirt, with its limp collar and its frayed cuffs, made a poor contrast to Carson’s shirt in a tasteful lavender, his deep purple tie, and a pinstriped chef’s apron that seemed like it needed its own apron: it was too nice to get stains on.
Behind Rebecca, Kate went toward the refrigerator to retrieve the bottle of wine.
“I told you not to bring anything,” Carson said quietly, assiduously avoiding Philip’s gaze.
“Cupcakes!” Philip barked, shoving them forward.
Carson took the cupcakes from Philip and placed them on the counter. They looked sad, and he looked sadly at them. “I’m sure we can integrate these into the meal somehow,” he said, smiling weakly.
The first course was a caramelized carrot soup—Carson had been spinning one of its ingredients in the centrifuge when Rebecca and Philip arrived. “A centrifuge opens up all kinds of possibilities in the kitchen,” he said. “You’d be surprised. I didn’t have the room for the one I wanted in this apartment—that’s a priority when I move into a larger place. But the chem lab will let me borrow their equipment whenever I want to separate a liter of something, or spin something really fast. Have you ever had pea butter? It’s wonderful!”
“No, I’ve never had pea butter,” Kate said, her wine sloshing around in her tumbler. “I’ve never had butter, made out of peas.” She was the only one at the table who was drinking, really: Rebecca and Philip had goblets filled with sparkling water, and though Carson had a glass of wine in front of him in order to keep Kate company, he’d barely touched it. Rebecca got the impression that Carson felt as if drinking in front of Philip would be like drinking in front of one’s own teetotaling father.
“Well,” said Carson patiently, “if you take a pea puree and spin it in a centrifuge, it’ll separate out into three discrete layers: the juice at the top, the starch at the bottom, and a thin layer of bright green fat in the middle. A pea is about three percent fat. Now, if you siphon off the juice and remove that middle layer of fat, you’ll be able to treat it much as you would butter. It’s a great spread on toast!”
“That’s weird,” said Kate.
“Carson, this soup is very tasty and smooth,” said Rebecca.
The second course was something that Carson referred to as “American barbecue”: each of their plates held six parallel strips of boneless pork, coated in a transparent sauce. “Did you use a centrifuge for this, too?” Philip asked, delicately cutting at the meat with his fork and knife.
“Tomato confit, brown beef jus, mal
t vinegar, a dash of maple syrup, a little bit of rendered bacon, and some other ingredients, reduced and spun for an hour at 27,500 gs,” Carson said, sounding a little like a bright student who was overly eager to prove himself. “It’s clear, but if you spin off and discard the solids that would provide the color, the remaining solution has a strong and unique flavor. I had to cheat a little here and there with the rest of the recipe—I don’t have a proper hot-smoker—but with a ceramic grill you can do a lot of surprisingly sophisticated things with temperature control. Slow-roasting is a lot easier than you’d expect.”
“You’re funny,” Kate said. “I mean, you do all this research in order to make simple barbecued ribs, when I’d think that’d be the one recipe that’d be in your blood, you know?”
Carson looked up at Kate, frowning slightly.
“I mean, that’s the kind of thing where I’d figure you’d come out of the kitchen with, like, a platter, and the ribs would be hanging off the edge and dripping with sauce, and when we asked you how you did it you’d say, ‘Aw, you know how we do: I just got back there and threw together a little something-something.’ ”
“I just remembered that I have a Cabernet I meant to pair with this course,” Carson said, getting up to go into the kitchen.
“How are things at work?” Rebecca hastily said to Philip.
“Great!” Philip said, perking up suddenly. “Oh. Oh! I have a funny story to tell all of you. I have a story about Alicia Merrill.”
“Is this about the calibrator?” Carson yelled from the kitchen.
“Yes!”
“She was in rare form,” Carson said, returning from the kitchen with a bottle of red and two empty glasses.
“So one of the instruments we use in the lab is a calibrator for the causality violation device. Some parts for it are off the shelf; some are printed; some we have custom machined to our specifications. But the whole thing has to be hand built and hand maintained. The calibrator basically ensures that certain elements of the CVD are behaving as they should, and that the readouts it’s giving us are accurate. Now, the design for this was a collaborative project—Alicia and I designed it, with Carson making a few vital contributions—but Alicia is the only one of us who has actually built one of these.”
Kate opened the bottle of Cabernet and poured a serving of it into her tumbler along with the dregs of the Chardonnay. She swirled the wine around, smirked at Carson, and said, “Rosé.”
“Now there are two other labs attempting to build a CVD right now: one’s in Frascati; the other in Perth. And if any one of the three of us succeeds, it will be a massive step forward for human knowledge. But at the same time, I would greatly prefer that my lab build the first working version of the device, because I am human. And I’m sure that the physicists at Frascati and Perth feel the same way. It can be difficult to hold both these contradictory positions in one’s head at once, and yet in a way, that tension between collaboration and competition is what drives good science.
“So because we collaborate, we’ve published the schematics for this calibrator along with instructions for assembly: not just the construction, but where to order parts or get them machined, the templates for those components that can be printed, and so on. And we’re happy that Frascati and Perth have been able to build calibrators that are accurate enough to verify the validity of our design. But we cannot help but be pleased, perhaps guiltily, but still pleased, that the other two labs have failed to produce calibrators as accurate as the two that Alicia built for us, even though they followed our instructions to the letter.”
Carson laughed.
“Alicia and Carson composed the design document, and it’s as precise and careful as can be. We’re not leaving out some sort of secret ingredient: we really do want Frascati and Perth to succeed, if only to have a stronger confirmation of our work. But there’s a phenomenon in practical physics called ‘golden hands.’ Just as a Stradivarius violin has a unique sound compared to other violins because it was built by Stradivarius, so can an instrument function better because it was built by a particular person. One might suspect that a person with golden hands has picked up some additional knowledge in the lab through experience and instinct, something that is known with the muscles rather than the mind—the kind of thing you can’t document because you don’t even know you know it. At any rate, when it comes to building this calibrator, it looks like Alicia has golden hands. One of the calibrators she built for us gives readings that are accurate to four decimal places; the other is accurate to five. The calibrators that were built at Frascati and Perth are accurate only to three places at best.”
“Even though they’re supposedly following the instructions to a T,” Rebecca said.
“Exactly. And unless the calibration is accurate to as many places as possible, you can’t be sure if the causality violation device is failing because the fold in spacetime is misaligned, or because of one of a hundred other possible reasons.”
“So we get this phone call in the lab a couple of months ago,” Carson cut in, “and it’s from Perth. And what they want to do, at their own expense, is fly a few members of their team from Australia to New Jersey, as well as sending us two sets of the components necessary to construct one of these calibrators. And they want Alicia to build one at a workbench, while a physicist at another workbench matches her move for move, and two other physicists watch. And they want to videotape this, too.”
“It takes six hours to assemble one of these things, by the way,” Philip said.
“So Philip tells Alicia this and she says, ‘As long as we can get an extra calibrator out of the deal at no cost—because damned if I’m going to spend a workday building one of those things just to hand it over to the Aussies—then, sure, I’ll do it. Send them over.”
“Days later,” Philip said, “the parts for this calibrator start showing up by FedEx, two by two. And soon after that the team from Perth is on its way over: they want to do this as soon as possible. They show up, take over one of the rooms in our lab, and set up shop: two long workbenches facing each other, with all the necessary components laid out on them identically, along with tablets that have PDFs of all the design documents. And they’ve got two cameras to film both of the tables. Because at this point they’re thinking that there’s something about building the calibrator that we didn’t document because we didn’t realize it mattered. Maybe Alicia licks her index finger before she touches a component, or maybe she turns a particular screw five times instead of six. Some stupid little thing like that.”
“So they set this thing up,” said Carson, “and at nine o’clock sharp, Alicia comes strolling in. She’s actually got—she’s wearing this red T-shirt with two golden Ws on it, like on the bustier that Wonder Woman wears. She brings a little stereo in with her, and she puts it down on her workbench. Then without a word, she turns it on—it starts playing James Brown; ‘Mother Popcorn,’ I think the song was called—and starts assembling this calibrator without even looking at the schematic.”
“And I’ll say it again,” Philip continued. “We really do want these Perth guys to be able to build this thing. We really do believe that the transmission of as much information that is as accurate as possible is to the mutual benefit of all. But at the same time, we are human, and we would not mind, it would not kill us, if these people were forcibly made aware of what they were up against.”
“So Alicia goes about putting this thing together, not saying a word to anyone. At one point one of the observers wants to stop her so he can ask a question, and as soon as he gets out a few words she gives him this look. And she stabs a finger at one of the cameras and says, ‘I assume you brought those so you wouldn’t have to interrupt me while I’m engaged in the non-trivial task of assembling a causality violation device calibrator. Or did you people spend twenty-four hours on a plane so you could chat. Do me a favor and stay quiet: save your applause for the end.’ And except for Alicia’s music it was silent in there for the rest of
the day.”
“And their guy who was supposed to be watching her while he assembled his own fell behind after about a half hour. He wasn’t counting on her actually having the design memorized, right? Well, she helped design it, so he should have accounted for that. She finishes putting the calibrator together in about five hours—an hour ahead of schedule. She didn’t even have lunch, except for a protein bar she’d squirreled away somewhere, and occasionally she’d take a drink from a water bottle. And she sits there for another hour with her arms folded, staring at this physicist from Perth while he finishes up. And of course he doesn’t want to ask for help now—it’s a matter of pride.”
“And there was some gender stuff going on there as well, I think,” Carson said. “And maybe some nationalist stuff, too. I forgot to mention that Alicia had her hair tied up in a ponytail with this scarf that had blue stars on it, to match the Wonder Woman T-shirt.”
“So this guy finally finishes, and Alicia says, ‘Well, okay then!’ They take their calibrators into the room in our lab with the CVD. And Alicia’s is well within spec—it probably won’t turn out to be as good as the second one she built, but it’s probably better than the first.”
“But this Perth guy hooks his up, right? And—hell, I don’t even know how this happened.”
“I don’t know, either. It was an inexplicable phenomenon.”
“I don’t—”
Carson and Philip both dissolved in laughter, while Rebecca and Kate caught each other’s glances and shared a mutual rolling of eyes.
“He hooks his calibrator up—” Philip said once he recovered.
“And honest to God—” Carson continued.
“Smoke started coming out of it! Like the smoke that comes off the tip of a lit cigarette.”
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