Version Control

by Dexter Palmer

  “And Alicia looks at the broken calibrator—which is displaying a bunch of Xs instead of actual numbers—and she says, ‘Oh heavens to Betsy: that’s not indicated at all. You’ll notice that my calibrator, the one I built, did not combust. But we learn by doing. Maybe if you look at your tapes, you’ll see something magical. Anyway, I’m going for a run. Enjoy the rest of your stay in America!’ And she walks out of the lab and leaves these guys to pick their jaws up off the floor. It was amazing!”

  “It was absolutely amazing.”

  “Alicia’s great,” Carson said.

  “Alicia’s really great,” Philip said.

  Meanwhile, Rebecca had finished her plate of barbecue, feeling only slightly less hungry than she had felt when she arrived.

  “I’ve got to say,” said Kate as she reached for the wine bottle—she’d polished off the mixture of white and red in her glass—“that I’m not one hundred percent with you guys on the whole ‘Alicia’s great’ thing. I mean, Carson, when you brought me into the lab to visit, she came off as kind of a smartassed bitch, to be honest.”

  “She can initially present as perhaps a little severe sometimes,” Philip said. “A first impression like that is understandable.”

  “I have to say I can kind of see where Kate’s coming from,” Rebecca said cautiously. “She’s not someone I think of as having an excess of social grace.”

  “Shit, that’s a polite way to put it,” said Kate.

  “May I hazard an explanation here?” Carson said, placing his hand on Kate’s (and gently stopping her from lifting her glass to her lips, Rebecca noticed). Strangely, Carson was looking at Philip as if he were the person at the table whom Carson was most worried about offending.

  “The thing to take into account here,” Carson said, “is that physics is, and basically always has been, a field that’s mostly male. The other pure sciences are different: in chemistry there are about as many women as men by this point, and in biology there have been more women than men for a while. And there are certainly more women in physics than there used to be, but there aren’t so many that the presence of a woman in a lab doesn’t instinctively seem at least a little unusual.

  “So because physics is a field that generally has significantly more men than women, the style of discourse tends toward what we think of as masculine—physicists can often come off as assertive and blunt. So a woman who does well in the field, who gets socialized into the profession, may have, or might develop, I guess I should say, some personality traits that make her seem to be a little difficult to get along with at first. So I can see—”

  “Oh, uh-uh, no,” Kate interrupted. “Oh no no no. Give me a second to process this—see, my pretty little girly little head is full of unicorns and pink things, so it can take a while for men’s serious thoughts to push through all that stuff sometimes.”

  “Kate, I didn’t mean—”

  “Wait: still thinking! Okay. Okay, I’ve got this now. Do you mean to say that the reason I’ve mistaken her for bitchy is that she’s actually assertive? And this secretly makes me uncomfortable? Is that what you’re saying? It certainly sounds like what you’re saying.”

  “I may not have chosen my words well,” Carson said.

  “I mean, it was cool the way you covered up your mansplaining with some kind of pseudo-feminist jiujitsu, but the fact is, she’s an annoying smartass who only opens her mouth when she wants to try to cut someone up with her tongue, and the only reason you guys are all members of her fan club is ’cause she’s little and cute, so she can get away with shit. Trust me—I’m little and cute, too, and we know our own kind. Guys have always let me get away with all kinds of shit.”

  “Once you get to know Alicia better and she lets her guard down, she’s really quite likable,” Philip said. “And she’s an invaluable asset to the lab. Invaluable! And I’m certain she’s going to go on to have a spectacular career. When she leaves and gets her own lab she’s going to be great for physics as a whole, but I’m not looking forward to losing her.”

  “You’re both pussywhipped,” said Kate.

  “Hey, I could go for some dessert,” said Rebecca.

  Dessert was a strawberry gazpacho, and Carson served everyone with one of Rebecca’s cupcakes, which sat next to the soup bowls on their own little matching plates. Kate was pretty well wasted by this point: with what she’d had to drink, she would have been more than tipsy even if this weren’t the kind of meal where you were still going to be a little hungry afterward. Rebecca’s stomach was screaming out for the cupcake—she felt like she could finish it off in three bites—but out of politeness she felt that she should first try the soup. It was reddish pink with half a strawberry floating on the surface, and the ceramic bowl in which it was served was smaller than Rebecca’s fist.

  “I’m just saying something,” Kate said, swaying slightly in her chair. “Saying to say something. Saying something to say something.” Carson had filled her wine glass with water.

  “I really like this gazpacho,” Rebecca said, and hoped she made it clear that she wasn’t merely being polite. She would have liked it more if there had been more than three spoonfuls of it in the cup—the soup would be gone before she was able to become familiar with how it tasted. Still, when she got around to that cupcake she was going to punish it.

  “Because how it is,” said Kate, “is.”

  “You wouldn’t expect the ideas of ‘strawberry’ and ‘gazpacho’ to go together,” Rebecca continued. “And usually when someone puts gazpacho in front of me I think, Ugh, this soup is cold, and I want to throw it in a microwave for a couple of minutes. But this is really good.”

  Philip had somehow gulped down both the gazpacho and the cupcake—poor thing, he must have been hungry too—and he was sitting ramrod straight in his chair, wringing his hands in his lap. He was ready to go.

  Carson had provided everyone with forks that seemed too large to be salad forks but too small to be dinner forks—Rebecca would not have been surprised to find that they were called cupcake forks. He carefully extracted his cupcake from its paper wrapper, slid the fork into it and broke off a piece, and placed the fork in his mouth.

  “Yeah,” Kate said. “Yeah.”

  “Do you taste that slightly bitter note under the sweetness?” Carson said. “That’s from the red dye. Most people think food coloring is tasteless, but if you put enough of it in a dish, it actually will change the flavor a bit. So using cream cheese in the frosting to complement that slight bitterness makes sense. Did you know the most common form of red food coloring is derived from petroleum?”

  Rebecca didn’t care about petroleum. She tore the wrapper off her cupcake and lifted it to her mouth. No need for the fork; no need, at this late date, to stand on ceremony.

  “You know what would’ve been a really good dessert for this meal?” Kate said. “Watermelon. You could treat it if you wanted. With a process.”

  Carson looked at Kate, whose eyes were smiling even as she covered her mouth. “Actually, you can do some interesting things with watermelon,” he said in a barely audible voice. “If you place it in a dehydrator for twelve hours, the result will be something that is very much like meat.”

  “Oh, goodness, I think we need to go,” Rebecca said, putting her cupcake down untouched.

  “A bulgogi glaze would go nicely with it,” Carson said.

  “Come on, Philip,” Rebecca said, standing. “Time to go.”

  “Did I miss something?” Philip said.

  “Just—I forgot there’s some stuff I need to do at home. It was a lovely dinner, Carson,” Rebecca said, removing her purse from where it hung on the back of her chair. “You’re an excellent cook. If you ever get tired of physics I’m sure you could find a place in a fancy restaurant somewhere.”

  Carson looked up at Rebecca placidly. “Are you sure you can’t stay longer?” he said, his voice admirably free of sarcasm.

  Rebecca’s phone rang the next morning at around ten th
irty, interrupting a reverie in which she was thinking of Bloody Marys. (The tomato juice counts as nutrition, which is why it’s socially acceptable to drink them in the morning. You pour the vodka into the glass first and then the tomato juice; then, as an afterthought, you pour in an additional half shot of vodka. But you never fail to leave room for the afterthought in the glass.) She did not hear garbled noises of play coming from the living room as she sat in the kitchen; she did not hear the nonsense syllables that Sean strung together to tell the stories of his lame and decapitated action figures. He was not pushing into this world from another.

  Kate’s voice sounded slightly hoarse, and a little sheepish. “Hey, Becca.”

  “Hey, Kate.”

  Rebecca patiently listened to the silence on the line.

  “So it was nice of you and Philip to come over to Carson’s last night,” Kate finally said.

  “He’s a great cook,” said Rebecca.

  “So, hey,” said Kate after a pause, “you’re not going to believe this. But—okay. Before you guys showed up, Carson and I had had a cocktail, and then I had a glass of wine. And this morning when I went into the kitchen I saw one empty bottle of white, and a bottle of red that was only like half full. And…well, it looks like I drank almost all of that by myself. It was kind of ridiculous.”

  “You were drinking a lot,” Rebecca said.

  “I hope I didn’t get too crazy. I mean, I woke up this morning with an insane headache. I don’t even remember anything past, like, the beginning of the second course. I remember him getting ready to bring out those little plates of pork, and next thing I knew I was waking up in his bed this morning. Though it looks like I puked in his bathroom. And he cleaned it up. I feel like an ass.”

  “Really? You don’t remember anything? You were that drunk? Kate.”

  “Yeah, it’s a blank. I guess I can’t drink like a college kid anymore. I feel like I’ve been saying that once every couple of months for the past ten years.”

  “I know how you feel,” Rebecca said.

  “So…I don’t know how to ask this.”

  “Just ask.”

  “Did I do anything stupid? Like, did I say anything stupid? Sometimes my mouth gets out of control when I drink.”

  “No,” said Rebecca after a moment. “You looked like the same old Kate to me. I wouldn’t have known you were blackout drunk if you hadn’t told me just now.”

  “Oh, good. You know how it is—you can’t remember what happened, and you worry after the fact that you made a fool of yourself.”

  “We’ve all been there.”

  “Carson was already gone when I woke up this morning. So I haven’t had a chance to talk to him yet.”

  “You were fine.”

  “Awesome. It’s really a relief to hear that. So what are you up to today?”

  “I’ve got a Lovability shift from noon to four. Other than that—cleaning the house and other, you know, goofy homemaker stuff. And I’m making a beef stew for dinner in a slow cooker—you throw the stuff in the pot when you get up in the morning, and by evening your whole house smells good, like beef stew.”

  “That sounds delicious.”

  “It is. It’s not like you need a chemistry PhD or anything to make it, but it’s good.”

  “I am totally going to go out today and buy a slow cooker,” Kate said.

  “So, hey, as long as we’re making confessions…”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t embarrass you in front of Carson by bringing over cupcakes I got at a grocery store, did I?”

  “No!” Kate said excitedly. “No, you didn’t!”

  “Because when we went in the kitchen and saw that Carson was making basically the fanciest dinner in the world, I looked at his food and I looked at my pathetic red velvet cupcakes and I was like, oh shit—”

  “No no no! Don’t worry about it! He loved those cupcakes! Because as soon as you guys left he totally scarfed down the one on his plate, and then ate the one you left on yours, too! He had this look on his face; he ate those cupcakes like he was angry with them—”

  Kate cut herself off in mid-sentence, and both of them were mute for a few moments. Rebecca felt the time stretching, felt it trying to pry her mouth open to wrench something out of it. But she had no idea what she should say.

  Then Kate said, “Okay. Bye, Becca.”

  The line went dead.

  13

  POINT ZERO

  The limousine making its way down I-295 toward Stratton held four people in the back: Rebecca; Philip; Sean, who was a few months old and asleep in Rebecca’s lap, snug in a baby sling; and, sitting across from the three of them, drinking champagne at eleven a.m., was Edmund Taligent, the millionaire who had been funding the development of Philip’s causality violation device for the past several months.

  Edmund Taligent was twenty-seven. He wore cargo shorts, a pair of Birkenstock sandals with soles that had been worn down to the cork, and a T-shirt that proclaimed in bold, fluorescent letters: SCIENCE! He was lanky and fidgety, and he boiled over with exuberance. “I feel really good about this,” he said to Philip, sloshing his champagne around in its fluted crystal glass as he gestured. “I feel like today’s your big day, like tomorrow you’re going to look back on yesterday and think, Shit, that was a big day.” Today was the day when Philip and his team were to activate the Planck-Wheeler clock and establish Point Zero, the fixed end of the wormhole that was still an idea, rather than a thing. If all went correctly, and the Planck-Wheeler clock functioned as intended, the place that would mark the other end of the wormhole would travel with the researchers forward through spacetime as they continued their work. Eventually, at some point that was likely to be at least several years in the future, the physicists would figure out how to send an object into the end of the wormhole that stayed in their present, out through the fixed end that was anchored in the past, and back again to the place it had left, bearing evidence of some kind that it had taken the trip. Then the experiment would be considered a success.

  Philip was a little bothered that Edmund had wanted to make this relatively uninteresting moment, the simple flipping of a switch, the metaphorical driving of a stake at an arbitrary point in spacetime, into a grand ceremony. There was no need for a limousine; there was no need for champagne. The science hadn’t happened yet. But Edmund Taligent was footing the bill, and he demanded his amusements in return. “This is big,” he’d said to Philip over the phone, his voice high and wheedling. “We’re going to play this like it’s big. Here’s what I’m seeing. I pick you up in a limo like you’re a rock star, and we go over there in style. In this lab there’s the whatever it is, the Point Zero, and it’s cordoned off by a velvet rope, the kind that stops guys who don’t have arm candy from getting into clubs. And there’s a bouncer. This big dude in a black suit, with a black shirt and a black silk tie and sunglasses. He unlatches the rope and he lets you in. Then you turn to everybody and you raise your arms, like a priest, because that’s what you are now, you guys need to step up and own that, you are our new priests, the priests of the secular—”

  “I’m not a priest,” Philip had said. “I just want to do science.”

  But Edmund had barreled on as if Philip had not spoken. “You raise your arms—I’ll have someone tailor a nice bespoke shirt for you for this, something special with a little give in the sleeves—you raise your arms and you say something like, ‘With the activation of the Planck-Wheeler clock, we begin the next step in humanity’s relentless endeavor to comprehend all knowledge. Behold. The future is, quite literally, now.’ Then you flip the switch! And everyone applauds! And the next day we have a press conference, where I announce that I’m funding this project in perpetuity, until it’s done. We’ll put out a couple of really nice cheese plates for the press guys and the bloggers. You put a nice cheese plate in front of a blogger and he’ll bark and clap like a trained seal—I’ve seen it before. We have this press conference, and I give you one of those
big novelty checks for like a million dollars.”

  “This all seems a bit much.”

  “Science! Goddamn. I get so excited when I think about this stuff, you know?”

  In the limousine, Rebecca felt Sean shifting in his baby sling as he slept. She listened as Edmund Taligent told her how he made what he called his “mad money,” the cash reserves he used to back scientific projects on a whim. He’d carved out a space for himself in the R&D division of his father’s robotics company, Taligent Industries. “I’d walk around the halls and I’d hear people saying, you know, Here comes the kid. Thinking I was Dad’s spy or something, instead of somebody who could think for himself. But then I cracked that problem with the baseballs and that shut the haters up. You know who figured out how to automate baseball production? Me. You probably didn’t even know that up until recently, baseballs were made by hand! Because that was a difficult problem to solve—not just figuring out how to join these two pieces of leather together into the shape of a sphere, but telling a machine when to start and stop the stitching, and how to know when to vary the tension of the stitches so the cover won’t tear. Engineers had been trying on and off to work this out for, like, sixty years. Anyhow, most baseballs, like the ones used in pro games, were made in Costa Rica—these guys in the factories there were fast. Like, they could make five or six balls an hour. And what looks like some hard-ass mathematics and engineering problem to an R&D division is nothing to these guys. They watch someone make a baseball, and then they can make one themselves. Simple.

  “So here’s what I do. I fly out to Costa Rica along with a bunch of smarties and some gear. Because the mistake these other engineers have been making is asking these guys how they make these things, or maybe watching them and taking notes and trying to, you know, quantify all this stuff. But these guys who make baseballs all day long don’t know what they’re doing, not in the way an engineer knows something. I mean, they don’t know consciously. The knowledge is in their muscles and their instincts—that’s what we have to get to.”