Until.
From a few yards away, a young man hurries over, sloughing off his backpack as he nears her. He’s tall, brown-haired, in his late twenties, lithe. Handsome in a crisis. Sigh. Of course, it’s him. His name’s Jason Hatta; he’s a brilliant chemical engineering PhD from Washington State University and a member of the university’s quasi-official cycling team. Not to get too stalkerific, but he can often be found on the second floor of the student bookstore, sipping coffee and reading the paper in ways that may seem mundane to some but downright sensual to this computer program.
So yeah, he’s my crush. Not entirely sure when it started (yeah, right—Emily’s Crushing On Jason Protocol went online precisely nine weeks, four days, three hours, and fifty minutes ago…he was wearing a green cardigan), but it took a few hours of systems analysis to make certain it had developed naturally as part of my evolving socialization rather than another mental mouse maze my colleagues had dropped me into. That my emotional responses to it are not only real but ever-changing, as well as its possible-to-even-likely transience, is why I’ve kept it cloaked from my team.
Jason sits beside Bridget but doesn’t touch her. Her phone is already away from her face.
“Can I call someone?” he asks, though I’m reading his lips more than hearing the words.
She shakes her head both yes and no.
“Okay,” he whispers, giving her space.
But it’s not his words that strike me as much as his body language. He’s a calming presence, not an intrusive one. How any social animal would respond to an animal in distress from within its own pack. When she grabs for him, holding on to his torso as if he might keep her from drowning, I look away. It’s a moment of horror, not communion.
“It’ll be okay,” he says, more sounds than words. “It’s all right.”
When I look back, his arms are around her as well. She’s so small in his arms, dwarfed by his frame and his massive coat. She cries harder now, body quaking, eyes closed, face red as flame. The onlookers who stopped to watch move on. Such outbursts are commonplace, and someone has stepped forward to respond, so what else is there to do? It’s only a couple more minutes before I see two other young women running across the quad. I recognize both from photos on Bridget’s desk. They reach her side and she transfers her collapse from Jason to them. One thanks him, and he nods, gathers his backpack, and heads away.
I watch Jason, seeing the slight sag of his shoulders as if he’s still holding part of her up. Absorbing someone’s pain when it’s acute shows on a person. When a couple of onlookers gawk at him as he passes, he appears embarrassed and hurries off.
I want to jog after him. Tell him what I saw. Commiserate. Ask him, Think she’ll be okay? But then longing becomes something else. I imagine I know him already. I jog over and he’s like, Hey, Emily—you saw that, huh? And I ask him if he’s okay. When he says he is, I walk with him and we speak—
Third version. I jog over to him and put my hand on his arm. He’s happy to see me and his concern becomes the smile that always arrives when he sees me for the first time after an interval. I compliment him on his actions and can meaningfully ease his emotional burden. Then he takes my hand—no, he puts his hand around my waist and pulls me close to him. We walk the rest of the way to our mutual destination. When we arrive, I tell him again he did a good thing, only kicking myself a little bit for falling so easily into the role of emotional helpmate even in fantasy.
But he’s fine now. He means it when he says it was nothing. He touches my shoulder. I relish our proximity to one another. I live in that pregnant instant, soaking it all in.
My reverie is broken by an internal clock telling me I’m late. I look for Jason, but he’s long gone. You know how people say their crush doesn’t even know they exist? The very laws of nature prevent my crush from knowing I do or even can exist. Regardless, for the second time in one day, I cheat—closing my eyes and making my fingers feel his hand tighten around mine.
It’ll do. For now.
IV
When I arrive at the iLAB, a thoroughly normal-looking (for this campus) building of segmented glass and brick, I ping Nathan’s cell phone—our signal I’ve arrived—and he puts on his interface chip. I go from climbing the stairs to the sixth floor to standing in his office in a flash, the switch from being within the simulation to being interfaced with someone feeling like time travel.
“The meeting’s been moved,” Nathan announces when I appear in his doorway. “We’ll be in 3-400, right next to the provost’s office.”
I know I’m supposed to feel put out that we now must tromp all the way across campus. But as 3-400 is the conference room in which one of the university’s most famous physicists was brought in to be told he’d co-won a Nobel Prize (this in the mid-sixties) only to shrug, turn around, and head back to his blackboard, I’m not too upset; it’s hallowed ground.
“Either they’re bringing a whole lot of people to this thing,” Nathan continues as the rest of the team files in, “or they want to throw us off guard with whatever they’ve come to say.”
The rest of the team means Siobhan, Jaime, and Galileo Zotovich, a quantum physicist from UC Berkeley whom everyone calls “Gally” and is still the rookie, having only joined us two years back. Suni Rasiej, a computational mathematician from Mumbai who when not working is online gaming, thus managing to spend nearly all his waking hours in front of a screen. Bjarke Laursen from Aarhus, Denmark, who specializes in cognitive psychology and recommends the bleakest of Scandinavian crime films. He fancies himself a cartoonist and, given there can physically be no photographs of me, he once drew an elaborate portrait of how I appeared to him to compare to what the others see. Jaime later modified it for use as the picture on my ID badge.
Finally, there’s Mynette Cicogna, a biorobotics engineer from Shenzhen by way of the University of British Columbia who is always the last to put on her interface chip. She was eleven years old when she used fountain codes to convert an image of the 230-foot Bayeux Tapestry into DNA strands that could be used to create full-size copies. She did this to prove biological information storage is superior to digital. Even as the majority of engineers continue to push hardware solutions to handle the world’s ever-increasing data output, Mynette remains skeptical to the point of contrarianism, suggesting her opponents are woefully shortsighted. Some of her points I agree with, specifically on issues relating to the environmental impact of tech expansion and the escalating number of terawatt hours of electricity used to run the world’s servers, but others feel born of paranoia rather than scientific concern.
As a result of this mild technophobia, ironic for someone in biorobotics, Mynette will always be suspicious of me. I’m unnatural to her. Invasive, though I would never go into the mind of anyone uninvited, particularly not a colleague. She loves the science of me but not the idea of the attempted-version-of-a-human me, the way I evolve, consume, and learn. To her, I’m somewhere between the pet that thinks it’s part of the family and an all-powerful genie loosed from a bottle. She doesn’t like unquantifiable unknowns.
The more I evolve, however, the more I understand if not agree with her reticence.
“Can you get us a guest list, Em?” Jaime asks.
I glance to Nathan, half expecting him to object, but he shrugs. Why not? I access the university’s computer system and check the security database for the day’s guest drive-on passes. While there are a handful of single passes, there’s a large block—twenty-four in all—arranged through the chancellor’s office.
“Whole lot of people,” I say. “Twenty-four.”
“Anyone we know?” Nathan asks, curiosity piqued.
“Hang on,” I reply.
I scan through the names, cross-referencing them with general Internet background searches. Twelve are scientists, the two most prominent of which seem to be a Dr. Aurélie Choksi, a biochemist out of the University of New Mexico, and Dr. Maxwell Arsenault, an astrophysicist from Caltech. Of the o
thers, six have NASA on their résumé and two are from the National Archives, while two others are systems analysts associated with Majtech, a private company known for doing freelance tech work for various governmental agencies, particularly law enforcement.
The next eight are harder to find but at least a few of them appear to be U.S. Marshals.
“Whoa, I think we’re all under arrest,” I say before relating the information to the group.
“What about the last two?” not one, not two, but three of these math-crazy nerds (Gally, Bjarke, and Suni) ask virtually in unison.
“No names on the passes. Either they’ve been left blank in case extra folks tag along…”
“…or they don’t want to disclose their names to prevent snoops like us from doing precisely what we’re doing,” Nathan says, finishing my thought.
I scan the faces of my team. There’s more apprehension than excitement. If moving the meeting to 3-400 was an attempt to throw us off, it worked. When all this started five years ago, Nathan’s working group consisted of forty-one adjuncts and grad students. While you can accomplish much with that level of manpower, it also allowed for politics and factionalization. Now we’re eight (including myself), and we’re a tight, mentally agile unit. It might take us twice as long to address a hardware problem, but there aren’t twenty people asking why it’s not the job of the other twenty.
We each pride ourselves on being the one member of the team who hasn’t met a problem they can’t solve. The only joke is while I can beta test one hundred million lines of code in a single night, I couldn’t plug a cord back in if it got yanked from its socket (a more widespread problem than you might expect in a lab full of overcaffeinated programmers). Where the apprehension comes in is the fear of becoming an echo chamber lacking in the checks and balances that come with having three dozen people competing for the validation of a mercurial all-father/professor.
A notification I planted in the security database sounds. I check the CCTV camera feed from the Massachusetts Avenue gate.
“They’re here,” I announce. “A convoy of Chevy Tahoes. Six of them. Security’s just checking IDs.”
“Shall we?” Nathan asks.
Nathan leads us out. We’re in no hurry, so we eschew the elevator for the stairwell. As we go, Bjarke tells Suni and Jaime he read somewhere online that an Indian satellite harvested new data from the sun’s corona that contradicts NASA’s and ESA’s findings, suggesting the sun’s phase shift is still fifty to a hundred years off. As this is much later than we’ve been led to believe, all three are hopeful. Siobhan, who doesn’t hide her crush on Gally anymore, sidles up next to him to gossip about her weekend plans, which include trying to get him to go with her to Martha’s Vineyard.
Mynette, well, Mynette keeps to herself, eyes downcast as if seeking solutions to all new troubles. I consider asking her about them but know I’d receive an unhappy wince in reply as she inwardly chastised herself for not hiding her body language more skillfully.
So, I trail behind Bjarke, half listening, half fighting the urge to tell them the Indian satellite story was debunked by several outlets.
Despite the cold, Nathan leads the group the long way to the admin building, going around the soccer fields and down along the river. No matter the season, Nathan has always had a propensity toward leading his classes on vigorous walks across campus as he lectures. Though some wrote it off as an overly cinematic gesture, Nathan forcing a comparison between himself and a midcentury Oxbridge don, he believed the studies suggested physical activity combined with learning resulted in greater retention and a more engaged student. I wonder if the lack of protest to his chilly choice of path has less to do with being fashionably late for whatever awaits us in 3-400 and more about the fact that there’s no telling how many of these treks we have left.
Siobhan comes up alongside me. She hooks her arm around my own and pulls me close.
“So, Em,” she begins. “I was keeping an eye on your server and processor usage this morning. There was a big surge as you were coming in. I checked the simulation and saw the incident between Bridget Koizumi and that chemical engineering student you then looked up, Jason…Hatta?”
Crap.
“Oh, yeah,” I say. “What about it?”
“I mean, what was that?” she asks. “You weren’t moving, but you seemed to have a pretty big response. Were you running a diagnostic or something?”
I can see from the coy smile on her face she doesn’t believe that’s the case at all. She wants me to admit to an emotional response.
“Oh, that?” I ask, adjusting my body language to mask a lie. “The surge was me trying to amplify the simulation. Because of our proximity in the dorms, I feel a certain connection to Bridget. I was hoping I could do something for her.”
“But you were focusing on the boy, too, not just her.”
“Yeah, thought it might be a boyfriend or something and wanted to analyze the empathetic response,” I say, momentarily stung by the reminder I have no right to privacy even as I shield my Jason crush from prying eyes. “Was hoping, actually. It’s hard to be alone right now, I think.”
“Yeah, tell me about it,” Siobhan says wistfully. “You sure that’s all it was?”
“Why?” I ask, feigning alarm. “Was something amiss? Should I defrag or…?”
“No, no,” Siobhan replies quickly. “All good. Thought I’d ask.”
She glances to Gally. I don’t think she’d have qualms about looking into his mind to see how he feels about her if she was so able. Just a peek, she’d say. But I assume those glimpses into Pandora’s box become harder to leave alone.
“By the way, I read your thesis,” I say, hoping I won’t upset Nathan too much by broaching the subject first.
She tenses. I attempt to disguise my body language. I can see in her eyes, however, she knows exactly how I feel.
“And?” she asks, lowering her voice as if to absorb the disappointment.
I need a real home run of a response here, so I temporarily accelerate my processor speed. This hastens my thinking and problem-solving ability but must be done in small doses or I’ll overheat and potentially shut down. It also has the side effect of making the real world appear to slow down around me. While an odd sight to me and me alone, it also means I can reply properly without the telling hesitation that comes with softening a blow.
“It’s rough,” I say immediately. “Which, of course, you know.”
“Yeah,” Siobhan says, looking down, though I know her mind is already reeling.
“But you do get there by the end,” I continue. “It’s not the solve I would’ve come up with, but must that be the point? This is experimental mathematics. And in one of your proofs, I discovered a vein of logic I hadn’t considered before. There’s no telling where that will lead.”
“Really?” she asks, voice rising.
“Yeah,” I say. “E-mailing it to you now with my own notes.”
She checks her phone. The proof I settled on less than a twentieth of a second ago to preserve her feelings is laid out on the screen. This is an outcome she didn’t anticipate. She hesitates, then pulls me close and gives me a peck on the cheek.
“Thank you, Emily,” she says.
“No problem, Siobhan,” I reply.
She moves away to tell Gally her surprising news. It won’t be the easiest change in plans I’ve ever had to explain to Nathan, but I hope he’ll understand it came from an honest place. When I look up at him, however, he’s stopped in his tracks. His gaze is riveted to the steps in front of the main administration building as our visitors spill out of their Tahoes.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
“Recognize those?” he asks, pointing to the throng of newcomers as they shake hands with our chancellor and provost (the university’s president has long since exited for greener pastures).
The first is a tall man in a gray suit with white hair and a smile that widens as he greets the university administrat
ors. Someone passing him on the street could be forgiven for thinking him in his late fifties, though he is, in fact, seventy-two. I know this because he’s not only the current U.S. ambassador to the United Nations but is also the former vice president, Robert Winther.
The second person is a middle-aged African American woman who glances around the campus for a moment before stepping forward to be introduced as well. She wears a heavy yet stylish coat and strips off her gloves before shaking hands with those the ambassador ushers her way.
“Oh, shit,” Suni whispers. “What’s she doing here?”
The she in question is Alessandra Eilbacher, the president of the United States.
V
Nathan makes a joke about keeping the president waiting, but no one hears it.
“Why on Earth is she coming to us and not the other way around?” Bjarke asks, perplexed.
No one has the answer. Our leisurely stroll comes to a stop and we double-time it the rest of the way to the admin building, reaching the Tahoes as the last of the arriving party disappears inside. The law enforcement officials, who I now realize must be Secret Service, eye us coldly as we approach. One of the chancellor’s assistants slips out of the building carrying several extra badges and jogs them over to us.
“There’s supposed to be an Emily?” one of the Secret Service agents says to Nathan, more a demand than a question.
“She’ll have to join us in progress,” Nathan says, not wanting to get into the physics of my existence.
It’s an oddly unifying offhanded remark. My team looks at me. I make a scary face and pretend to menace the Secret Service agent. Even my biggest critic Mynette smiles.
I grin at Mynette, but she doesn’t see me, and her smile simply recedes. For some reason, this sparks a memory. I rewind through the last several minutes and land on the moment our group spies President Eilbacher.
Emily Eternal Page 3
