“Nothing’s guaranteed,” Becca said, and shrugged. “This question is my personality litmus test. Lets me know if the other person thinks we’re compatible.”
“Ah. I have one of those.”
“When do I get to take it?”
“Right now. Professional wrestling: sport or entertainment?”
“Neither.”
“You pass.”
“Good,” Becca said. She grinned and looped her hand through Rachel’s. Her colors fluttered when her fingers brushed against Rachel’s cast, and she loosened her grip. “Your turn.”
“Hmm,” Rachel murmured. “This doesn’t seem fair. I asked a question; you want a story.”
“Should have picked a different litmus test, then.”
Rachel chuckled. She flipped off the emotional spectrum to keep herself honest, and ran through her Big List of Dangerous Topics until she found one that had nothing to do with OACET or her eyesight. “My dad took my mother’s name.”
“I figured that out already. Unless your dad was Chinese but born in Texas?”
“Nope. I think he’s mostly Scottish.”
“You think? You don’t know?”
Rachel shook her head. “Mom got a visa to Texas A&M to study architecture. This was the early ‘80s, when Chinese students didn’t leave the country, and Chinese women basically never went to college, period, so something else was going on there. They still won’t tell me how my mom got to America, or why they got married, or why I’ve never met any family members on my dad’s side.”
“Suspicious.”
“Very!”
“And you haven’t tried to find out?”
“Of course I have,” Rachel said. “They said I’d find out when they’re dead.”
“That’s a terrible story. That’s not even a story. That’s…” Becca jabbed Rachel in the side with her thumb. “That’s the promise of a story! That’s even worse than not telling a story at all!”
Rachel held up her free hand, surrendering. “That’s what we’d talk about on the tenth date.”
Becca glared at her. “The implicit threat that I’d have to know you after your parents died to get the entire story?”
“Well,” Rachel offered in a lilting sing-song, “maybe if you tell me something tenth date-y, then I’ll give you a better one.”
“Fine.” Becca was quiet for a few moments.
Rachel flipped on the emotional spectrum for a quick peek; Becca’s colors were a blend of Rachel’s southwestern turquoise and an almost-anxious orange. Uh-oh.
“I’ve never dated someone for more than five months.”
“What?” Rachel was shocked. “How old are you? Twenty-eight?”
“Twenty-seven, thank you. And my relationships tend to… They start strong and then fade out.”
“Well,” Rachel said. “I’ve heard you’re never supposed to date someone who’s more than thirty and who’s never been in a long-term relationship. Twenty-seven is safe.”
“Yeah,” Becca said. She was grinning, but there was anxiety behind it. The yellows and oranges grew and began to bubble over into Rachel’s turquoise. “Just so you know, though, I’m done with rushing into relationships. Move too fast, and it’s over before it starts.”
“You’re right,” Rachel said. “You’re absolutely right. And this is an excellent tenth-date conversation, so I think we should wait until the tenth date to have it.”
“Fair enough,” the other woman said. Her grin lost its pinched edges and the soft pops of yellow-orange slowly began to fade. “Just so you know, I’m a bit of a control freak. It tends to put people off.”
“Becca? My roommate has turned my entire house into an arboretum. I think I can cope.”
The other woman laughed. She smelled of jasmine, and the sleeve of her blazer was soft raw silk against Rachel’s forearm. Rachel cast around for a good tenth-date story… Jade green. “I think my maternal grandmother is gay.”
“No! Really? The same grandmother you were telling me about over dinner? Your… um… Low-low?”
“Close. Lăo lao.”
“Why do you think she’s gay? Did she tell you?”
“Oh God no! She’s practically a caricature of the Chinese matriarch. Everything has to be just! so!” Rachel said, and jabbed at the air with her free hand. “My parents tell me she was furious when my mother emigrated to America, and nearly disowned her when she married my dad. And she loved me—I mean, she had to love me, she practically raised me once she moved in with us—but if I had suddenly turned into a full-blooded Chinese boy, she would have been totally okay with that.
“It was only after I came out to the family that she finally started to like me. After that, we used to stay up all night, talking.”
“About girls?”
“Girls, boys, women, men, movies, music, religion, politics, China, America… It’s weird to have known someone for almost your entire lifetime, but never, you know, have known them.”
“Small reason to think she’s gay.”
Rachel nodded. “Yeah, but there’s also some winking and nudging in the family. Her husband died awfully young, and she never remarried.”
“That could be cultural. Or maybe she isn’t the remarrying type.”
“Could be,” Rachel said. The other woman’s hand was warm in her own, even through the cast. “I’ll probably never know for sure. We’re close, but there’s family-close and then there’s close-close.”
They stopped talking long enough to run across a four-lane road. Rachel had been following their route through downtown D.C. on her stored copy of MPD’s map of the city, and her instincts were starting to itch. They were wandering into an unsavory part of town, and the usual weight of her gun on her hip was conspicuously absent. Becca was oblivious in the way of the rich: this neighborhood might be tame enough in the day, but she didn’t realize that most predators were nocturnal, and the riots had lured them out of their holes. It was a relief when they turned that last corner and arrived at the pastry shop.
Which was out of business, of course. The store was shuttered up, a handwritten note on a sheet of copy paper thanking customers for their loyal, but obviously insufficient, support.
“Damn,” Becca swore. “Do you know how hard it is to find a good ensaïmada around here?”
“There’s a…” Rachel said, then paused as she ran a quick search. “There’s a bakery that does brioches a few blocks from here.” The bakery was nearby, but was also located (by sheer coincidence, surely) on a casually gentrified street with more than a few afterhours clubs and pricey restaurants. The two of them would fit right in.
She and Becca fell back into their comfortable stroll, with Rachel casually steering them onto brightly-lit roads.
“Did she defend you when you came out?” Becca said as she picked up the thread of their previous conversation.
“Hm? My grandmother? No! I mean, she didn’t need to,” Rachel said. “Coming out as being part of OACET was way harder on my family than coming out as a lesbian. I sort of vanished from their lives for five years, and then, hey guys! It’s your daughter, the cyborg! I’m back, and… And I see you’ve remodeled my bedroom into the new kitchen. Yay, ranch house layout.”
Becca laughed. “OACET wouldn’t let you contact your own family? Why not?”
“Sorry, can’t tell you.” Rachel grinned at her. “That’s an eleventh-date conversation.”
“Give you time to make something up, you mean.”
Rachel sighed and dropped Becca’s hand. “Pick a streetlight.”
“Hm?”
“Pick a streetlight. Actually,” Rachel corrected herself, “pick three of them, and point them out in order.”
Becca gave her a wry smirk.
“Just do it,” Rachel sighed.
The other woman pointed at the lamp directly above them.
Rachel glanced up, and the light popped off.
“Oh,” Becca said.
“They’ve got solar se
nsors,” Rachel explained. “I told this one the sun had come up.”
The loss of one lamp made no difference to how Rachel saw the street, and shouldn’t have affected the temperature one iota, but there was a chill in the night air that hadn’t been there before. She released the lamp and the small dark pool they had been standing in vanished, but the chill hung around.
“Okay. Pick two more,” Rachel said.
“I believe you,” Becca said. “Why do you think I don’t believe you?”
“Because…” Rachel flailed. “Because they don’t believe me until they do, and that’s when the date is over.”
Becca found Rachel’s hand again, and started walking. There was an awkward moment when Rachel’s feet didn’t realize they were supposed to follow, and then they tripped and fell back into step with Becca’s.
They walked without speaking for the better part of a block, and then Becca said, “I’m sorry you’ve had problems, but those other women? They aren’t me.”
“Yeah,” Rachel said. “I’m starting to get that. Why doesn’t this bother you, by the way?”
“I don’t know,” Becca replied. “It’s like watching someone freak out about their cell phone. It’s sort of… overly dramatic.
“Certain people might,” she added, “even think it was boring.”
Rachel chuckled. “Okay,” she said. “Point taken. I’m done.”
“No, no, I’m sure it’s very interesting how you can turn lights on and off. It’s just that I’ve been doing it my entire life, so…”
“Shut up,” Rachel said, bumping Becca’s hip with her own.
They walked in comfortable conversation for another few blocks. The street was beginning to feel familiar; Rachel recognized the high-pitched chitter of the security cameras.
“Oh, hey,” she said, stopping. “I know where we are.”
The loft Santino had brought her to the week before was two streets over. Rachel pushed past her self-imposed limits and ran a cursory scan through the building. The lights were on upstairs, a single figure was bent over a worktable: Bell’s conversational colors were a beam of intense blues and whites as she immersed herself in her work.
“Want to see what might be the most incredible place on the planet?” Rachel asked Becca.
“Big promise,” Becca said, smiling.
“Statement of fact,” Rachel told her. “It’s a workshop, but not like dad’s ol’ trashheap in the corner of the garage. A bunch of kids built it.”
“I don’t know. My mother warned me about going into dark warehouses with strange cyborgs.”
“Really? That must have been hell. I would have hated it if I were raised by a psychic.”
“Come on,” Becca laughed as she took Rachel’s arm. “Show me the most incredible place on the planet.”
They rode the rattling elevator up to the top floor, Becca swearing to commit revenge from beyond the grave with each jolt of the cables. Rachel was laughing as the cage swayed back and forth and bumped its way skyward, doing her damnedest to keep the panic off of her face when the elevator started bucking like a rodeo bull. When they reached the loft, Rachel folded the old safety cage in on itself, and they stepped into a pool of warm yellow light.
“Oh,” Becca said, staring up at the door. “That is beautiful.”
The skylight was a black hole in the ceiling, and with the sun down, the massive metal door was lit only by the clean light from the twinned gas lamps. Rachel flipped frequencies to try to see the door from Becca’s perspective, but gave up and enjoyed the warm reds and blues flowing from the other woman instead.
“There’s no knob,” Becca said as she ran her fingertips over the words minted into the door’s face.
“Watch this.” Rachel guided Becca’s hand until it lingered over ENTER, and the two of them pressed against the raised metal until they heard the click of the hidden mechanism. Instead of the door swinging open as it had before, they heard a sound like fluted birds coming from the other side.
As the chiming fell away, Bell’s voice echoed through the hall. “Agent Peng?”
“Hey, Bell,” she said, scanning the hallway. Whatever was carrying Bell’s voice wasn’t digital; she couldn’t find the source until she followed the sound waves to a series of small holes cut into the lintel. “Can we come in?”
The metal door opened on silent hinges. Bell stood on the other side, skeptical in yellows. “Yeah, I guess. I wasn’t planning on giving a tour tonight, though. I’ve got a project to finish.”
“She’s a potential donor,” Rachel said, grinning at Becca.
“In that case…” Bell said, bowing and ushering them inside. “Welcome, friends, and enter.”
The loft seemed larger at night. The computer lab at the far end of the room was illuminated from within, but the rest of the space was dark. Bell flipped a wall switch and the metal solar system began to glow; Rachel realized the planets were topless, their bodies hollowed out and fitted with hidden bulbs. Golden light filtered through their seams, causing the alchemists’ workroom to come alive.
“Oh, this is going to cost me,” Becca said as she wandered into the center of the loft, drinking in the space with her mouth open and eyes wide.
“Tour first,” Bell laughed. “Money later, if ever.”
The girl gave them a simplified version of the tour she had given to Rachel, skipping over the technical projects and stopping to linger on the art pieces. Becca’s surface colors swept into happy blues and yellows as she took in the room: she began asking about the cost for custom work, and Bell’s colors began to match Becca’s as they blended into the same conversational patterns.
Rachel followed them, her scans wandering. Her dress fluttered in the warm air coming from the heavy industrial radiators. She and Becca tapped along in their low-slung pumps while Bell padded around in old sneakers, the girl making as much noise on the worn wood floors as a kitten. No wonder Santino comes here, she thought. Quiet, thoughtful, with enough hard edges to keep you on your toes… The loft felt like him.
She fell behind to inspect the progress Jake had made on his inlaid box. A quick, shallow scan of the box revealed the same hidden mechanisms as the door. She tapped a piece of polished maple with a fingernail, and the box unlatched itself and opened smoothly on secret hinges.
“Hey Bell?” she called. “Did Jake make your front door?”
“Yep,” the girl replied from across the loft. “And the lights. He does art fabs, like I said.”
Fabs are fabrications, she reminded herself. After their first visit to the loft, she and Santino had a lengthy discussion to help her learn the terms she needed to know to navigate this unfamiliar world. “Fabrications” was the generic catch-all term for the projects that Bell and her friends pursued. The whole place was a Fab Lab, a space where makers with diverse skills and interests could share tools and skills, collaborate if the mood struck them…
It was a little too fruity-utopia for Rachel’s tastes, but she did appreciate the sentiment.
She meandered over to the windows on the east side of the loft, and paused. Resting in a quiet space in the corner was what could only be described as a kitchen sink giving birth to a copper octopus. The wild snarl of tubes was topped with a small canister about the size of a soda can, with a small digital display positioned on its side. The display was ticking away, the numbers climbing. She tracked the purpose of the timer: it counted the rotations of an impeller, spinning as water was pumped up from the sink and through the tubing.
Oh… Rachel thought, as the water tugged at her. How beautiful.
Water was her new poetry. It fascinated her: there was something about how it moved which tickled her brain on a primordial level. Sometimes when it got slow at work, she’d walk the four blocks up to the Southwest Duck Pond and pretend to read a book as she let her implant have its way. Hours could fly by as the two of them explored patterns within the movement of the water. She’d wake as the sun went down, coming aware as if pu
lling herself from deep meditation, her legs asleep but her mind refreshed and clean.
The copper octopus was spinning water through itself. Rachel followed its path, down and up, back, sideways… At the end, another soda can with a second impeller ticked away with its own digital count before the water poured out into the basin to start the process all over again.
“Oh, careful,” Bell called out as she caught Rachel about to poke the uppermost canister with her finger. “That’s one of our future moneymakers.”
“What is it?” Rachel asked, trying not to shake her head as she broke the water’s hold.
“It’s… uh…” Bell put down the mandolin she had been showing to Becca, and came over to the octopus tank. “The short answer is it’s a machine to measure pressure loss. How much do you know about hydrology?”
Rachel almost laughed. “Let’s assume I know nothing.”
“Okay,” Bell said, her conversational colors glazing over slightly in polite resignation. “Assume that water flows from Point A to Point B.” The girl tapped the sink first, then the outlet where the water spilled back into the basin. “If a pipe is perfectly straight, there should be nothing to block the flow, right?”
Rachel nodded. Beside her, Becca was leaning over the octopus, her fingers knitted across her purse to keep it from clanging into the tubes.
“If you put something in the pipe, it’ll slow down the flow,” Bell continued, running her finger up the main straightaway of the copper tube. “Sometimes this is sediment which clogs the line, but it’s just as likely to be a bend in the line itself.” Her emerald green nails tapped the first kink, a knot which wrapped around itself like a bow. “Hydrologists, engineers? They’ve got to work out how to build bends into a water line and still get enough pressure to keep the water moving.”
“So…” Becca said, pointing at the two canisters, “these are measuring water flow?”
“No,” Bell said, grinning at her. “They’ve already got water pressure down to a science. What we’re doing is testing whether we can make renewable energy from it.”
Just when you thought you were used to nerd-speak… Rachel closed her eyes and tried not to sigh. “There are impellers in the soda cans,” she said to Bell. “Are they generating power?”
Maker Space Page 29
