My sweaty fingers pulled words from the newsprint. She’s done it again. A tiny photo of Dr. Pfenzc—how would you pronounce that, I wondered?—and a big one of her, the photogenic one, in a white dress with a big red flower at her shoulder. Her hair in the photo was shorter than when she had left, in fact shorter than when I’d picked her up yesterday. She looked like a nicely-groomed ten year-old boy. I wondered when she had gotten it cut. What city in Europe, what fancy salon, a century-old pair of scissors probably, silver-plated. Must have cost more than our monthly rent.
I scoured the photo for clues. Could be that award banquet she called me from, squiffed on champagne.
(“There’s no minimum drinking age in Europe!”
“I’m pretty sure there is. Where’s Rutger?”
“Beats me.”)
She won an award that night—not the big, main one, but a smaller one. Some chemistry award to add to her display case.
The paper didn’t go into her background, for once. A tiny relief. No mention of the big white wedding cake of a house, the squash court she only used for experiments, all those secret floors underneath like an iceberg, like a Bond villain’s lair; no mention of her labs, her observatories, her factories, her ribbon-cutting ceremonies. Her prizes and magazine articles and thinkpieces and documentaries. She had been Time’s Person Of The Year in 1995 for her HIV cure. The laminated cover she’d given me was still around my house somewhere—the golden child perched on a lab stool, posing with a microscope. People keep trying to prove that she’s a fraud. They’ve all been embarrassed, discredited, publicly shamed for it. She’s legit. Not like me. If someone tried to prove that I was a fraud, they’d be trying to prove a negative, demonstrate the existence of nothing. A nothing in a nothing life.
What was she doing right now? Hopefully sleeping in her iceberg house—or, more likely, pacing like a zoo tiger, out of her mind on espresso and jetlag, her and her ‘big idea.’
It’s the way it’s always been. State of the union. But like she said: I wouldn’t have been so bothered by it if she hadn’t come back and held my life directly up next to hers for comparison, like those laundry commercials with the stained shirt and the clean one.
But when I think about not being her friend any more... it wouldn’t even be like an amputation, where you lose a visible part of yourself, but some violently invasive surgery, where you are left without organs. I can’t imagine that level of pain. And maybe she can’t either, because she hasn’t abandoned me, either, after all these years, when that would be the easier way. When she has already dismissed so much from her life.
The paper vanished from my hands and smacked onto the floor. “Whatcha got there, Osama?”
I didn’t even bother going for it, just sat back on my crate and put on a poker face, the standard when my manager arrived. “Morning, Gino.”
He snorted—but that’s key with bullies, don’t do anything that shows they got a rise out of you—and turned away, heading to the lockup and activating the timeclock so the stockers starting to trickle in could punch our cards. Several people stepped on the paper, right on Johnny’s picture. I flinched each time.
THE PHONE WAS ringing just as I came home; I heard Carla pick up, followed by a delighted squeal. I knew who inspired those kind of noises, and collapsed on the couch to wait.
“It’s Auntie Johnny! You never said she was back!” Carla shouted, dancing in several minutes later. “We talked about school! And haircuts!”
“Gross, girl stuff,” I said, and took the phone, wet from Carla’s eager breath. “J-Dawg.”
“N-Diddy,” she said, formally. “Or is it N-Puffy?”
“Puff-Nicky.”
“My God, we’ll never be rappers.”
“Well, not with that attitude,” I said. “What’s up?”
“There’s sort of a...” In the pause, I heard a highpitched hum, as if she were standing in front of a running microwave. She finally said, “Something kind of big just happened, I think. If it isn’t, then it isn’t, but if it is... I want a witness.”
“Did you literally just murder someone.”
“I’m not answering that question without my attorney present. Can you come over later?”
“Maybe. I’ll call first.” I hung up and returned the phone to Carla, who was draped, rapt, over the back of the couch.
“Aren’t you ever going to ask her to marry you?” she sighed.
“Good Lord, she’s not even old enough to vote,” I said. “And also, people don’t marry their friends.”
“Yes they do. I saw it in a movie.”
“That’s movies. Nobody does that in real life.”
“Do too.”
I tried to get up off the couch, but as often happened after a busy shift, my legs refused to work. I dug my knuckles into my thighs and stared at the TV, showing some weirdo cartoon with extremely muscular mice. “What are we watching?!”
“She’s the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen,” Carla said. “Did she really murder someone?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Maybe don’t marry her if she’s a murderer.”
“Yeah, write that down somewhere,” I said. “That’s useful advice.”
After Mom came home, I reluctantly crawled back into my car. I didn’t want to go over to John’s; I wanted to take a fifteen-hour nap and not have one single interruption for a missing backpack, broken window, loose tooth, split lip, or stolen diary. And I was keenly aware that I smelled of armpits and rotten apple—like the break room at work, basically, and I had forgotten to put on deodorant this morning. She wouldn’t say anything, I knew, but if Rutger was at the house, there would be some dirty looks. It wasn’t that he didn’t like me, exactly, but that it was far too easy to inadvertently do one of the dozens of things he didn’t like.
Halfway there I realized I had forgotten to phone her, but there was nothing doing except to cuss at myself. Cell phones were great, but both of you had to have one, and I didn’t; Johnny had about six, but I didn’t know the numbers for any of them. I was pretty sure she just used them as emergency lines for her various major labs and research centres. I couldn’t imagine how much they would cost.
For no reason, achingly, I remembered using walkie-talkies in the ravine when we were kids. We had barely needed them, though: I had always known what she was thinking, she always knew what I was about to say. My other heart, the heart that beat outside of me. Had we grown strange to each other in her absence, grown up, grown away, grown into different people? Flying away from each other like the unknowable planets she had found with her telescopes and calculations?
As I turned into her driveway, I had to pull my visor down to know where to stop. What the shit? Every light was on, every room, every floor, hard blocks of white shining in the yellow late prairie sun. No way had she turned on all those lights. And in fact, hadn’t she installed motion sensor lights a couple years ago to make sure only rooms in use were lit? Was she having a party? I glanced around at the mostly-empty street. No, if it were a party, I’d never have been able to park in the driveway. And where was Rutger’s Lexus?
Uneasy, I splashed through the lush lawn in what was rapidly turning from sunset to dusk, triggering a set of halogen spots that shone right into my face as I punched in her code, praying she hadn’t changed it when she got back. The alarm system was wired to call the police if you fed it the wrong numbers.
But it let me in, and I stepped into a blinding photosphere, forearm over my face. “Johnny?” No reply. I toed my shoes off and tried the intercom. “John? It’s me. Where are you?”
“Uh, Hadrian... let me come up and get you, okay?”
“What’s going on?” Every single light was on, even some I hadn’t known existed, tucked away in recesses in the ceiling, behind floor vents, in sunk tracks on the walls. The heat was intense after the coolness of the evening; sweat prickled on my back. Great. Stupid to believe I couldn’t possibly smell any worse. Moisture was condensing un
der my socks on the cool tiles.
She appeared at the end of the hallway and for a second I thought she’d figured out how to make herself into a hologram—all silver spangles, shimmering and shivering, not really there. I hesitated before following her.
“Sorry,” I said, “I thought maybe you were a T-1000?”
“That’s the last goal of science, not the first,” she said. “But no one will want to be a robot after I show the world what just happened.”
I looked at her properly and did a cartoony double-take, making her giggle. She was in a short, white dress covered in silver sequins. On anyone taller, it would have practically been a shirt.
“What the hell is this?” I said. “Like, no offense, but we both know Rutger has to shoot you with tranqs to get you to dress up.”
“Yeah, like in The A-Team,” she said, pausing to do a little pirouette in the steel-toed boots she wore in her lab. “I bought this in Venice; we were coming back from the conference centre and it was just so pretty and there was only one left.”
“My God, you’re finally becoming a real girl.”
“Don’t be so gender essentialist, Nicholas,” she sniffed. “Anyway, I was trying it on between two mirrors and something just kind of... it was like... you remember that reactor I worked on a while ago?”
“The one you were working on when you were ten? That’s more than a while ago.”
“You know what I mean,” she said, speeding up to a trot. “Listen, I was looking down at the sequins, and I just kind of, I don’t know, I had had a lot of coffee, and it seemed like they were sort of moving—”
“Do you mind my asking if you slept last night?”
“—no, but listen, listen, moving in a pattern, something I knew, or I knew the start but not the end, I had seen the start on the plane, like when you’re at karaoke and you realize halfway through the opening that you don’t know the verses but just the chorus, but when the words come up you realize you do know the verses after all, so I ran to write it down, and it seemed okay, I mean it seemed like it should work if you look at the sequins as electrons? Anyway, I started the same as the old one, but this time I created the graphene substrate by making kind of a carbon snow—”
“Is one of its side effects not needing to breathe?”
“—and it works, I switched the house grid off the solar cells and onto the reactor and I’m sorry about the heat, and the smell, I think that’s mostly burning dust and bugs on the halogens, I keep meaning to switch them to the LEDs, but there’s never time...” She trailed off; her face was slick and hectic, red dots below her eyes, hair not just damp but actually dripping down her neck into her dress, turning the white to gray.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll come look. But then we’re sticking a cold washcloth on you.”
She tapped a long sequence on the keypad, thirty or forty digits, letting us into Hadrian, one of the more familiar of her many inexplicably-named research rooms.
I followed her, barking my shins repeatedly, around a maze of shin-height equipment and reels of cable to an ordinary metal table bolted to the floor, lit with the same blue Ikea desk lamp the kids had in their room. The table was cluttered with tiny bits of metal and plastic and had a shoebox-sized metal case on it sprouting a dozen black cables, one of which snaked into the darkness. It hummed unpleasantly, setting my teeth on edge like biting foil.
Next to it for some reason sat a four-pack of lemon Perrier, one half-empty. I opened a full one and offered it to Johnny, who wasn’t paying attention. I drank while she babbled.
“So normally you’d need a Grabovschi Plate to make real carbon snow, but then I thought, what have I got to get it up to the same temperatures but, and this is really crucial, just in the microcavitations rather than on the overall flake surfaces, and I figured if I used the microwave instead of the forge in Belisarius—”
I gazed stonily at it. The lab microwave was about as old as she was, smeared yellow and brown, a very ordinary little box dwarfed by the equipment around it. After a minute I said, “I made a Pizza Pop in that yesterday.”
“I suggest you not try it today. So, the new graphene torus is a—”
“What?”
“All right, the graphene doughnut is—”
“Actually, that’s not the word I was—”
“—atomically plated in silver, which I got from melting down my Cartwright medal, but it’s okay because if you tell them you lost it or had it stolen or whatever they’ll send you a new one, but it’s just stainless steel, I already sent them an e-mail, so now we’ve got this topological graphene matrix, right, and it’s creating edge effects because I gave it a fractional angstrom flex and then linked it to the C-398 magnet that I sort of pulled out of the RC-NCI back end over there, it’s fine, I’ll buy a new one, and in the aqueous matrix, the electrons display independent choice behaviour and they start to generate their own topographical material, which isn’t real—”
“What?”
“—under the Yerofeyev definition anyway, but it’s so close to the border between the definition and the quantum definition that from their desire to return to their original state, because they immediately regret their choice, right, they discharge energy, and bam!”
“Bam?” I said weakly.
“That’s the loop. The choice and the second choice. A renewable electron source. Electricity. Anyway, I calibrated it to the house draw, but if my calculations are correct there’s kind of no upper limit to production,” she said, absently tightening the clamps holding the box to the table.
“Wait. Stop. Drink this.” I forced the bottle on her, as much to shut her up for a second as to get some water in her. “Are you telling me this shoebox is... powering the house? And could power... anything?”
“Uh, yeah, does that sound okay? Is that too insane?” She choked on the first sip, water trickling down her neck. “Yeah. It’s running on a little bit of Perrier because I can’t use the sink right now, I sort of welded a—”
“Johnny! You made a powerplant in a shoebox!”
“It’s not a shoebox, thank you very much, it’s a shielding setup that—”
“Is this going to cook my sperms?”
“I don’t think so, but maybe don’t hump it all the same, the shielding isn’t really necessary, I don’t think, but it does seem to dampen down the harmonics, and maybe it’ll be quieter when it’s not on a metal surface, I don’t know.”
“Harmonics? Is that what we’re calling that incredibly annoying noise? I feel like I’m chewing on tin foil. What’s causing that?”
“Beats me. I’m guessing the impurities in the silver.”
“Not the artificial lemon flavouring?”
“No, I don’t think so. It’s just an electron source, after all. Man, Dr. Yerofeyev is going to freak out when he hears about this, you remember him, he was at my Darwin Day party last year dressed as a trilobite—”
“Stop stop stop stop stop. Please stop.” I was getting lightheaded, I assumed from the heat, dehydration, exhaustion, and... whatever she was trying to tell me, which seemed to be that she had put a quantum in a box and plugged an extension cord into it.
She’s done it again. The headlines lined themselves up. Child prodigy changes world. Child prodigy... makes a million things obsolete.
Coal-fired power plants first to go. Nuclear next. No one liked those anyway. Gas, crude. Except what we needed for the plastic that could not be replaced by her vat-grown spider-silk substitute, which everyone had been using for years. Even her solar panels, her wind turbines unneeded. We could have electric cars, like in sci-fi movies. Electric... planes? Electric submarines. Electric everything, the whole world humming to her tune. No more wars over oil. The entire world looking at each other and thinking: We could get along now. We might not have to be friends, but we could be neighbours.
She had changed everything. And I could always make more sperm.
I dimly realized I had sunk to my heels next to the ta
ble. Sweat was running down my arms amd dripping from my fingertips.
“Put your head between your knees,” she said from far away.
“Hang on,” I said, and then everything went black.
I SWAM BACK up an unknown amount of time later, to find Johnny soaking blue shop towels in warm Perrier and dropping them on the back of my neck. “Let’s get out of here,” she said. “Can you walk?”
“How l-long... was...” My tongue felt thick and dry.
“Fifteen, maybe twenty seconds. Didn’t land on your head or anything.”
The walk to the main kitchen was a nightmare marathon through shivering black ghosts reaching for me from the edges of my peripheral vision. Johnny, hovering around me, was a silver moth fluttering in and out of my blind spot. The air crackled around me, as if not wind but feathers brushed against my face. I lifted my feet occasionally at dark spots on the tile; the house had a resident population of genetically modified dung beetles that didn’t want poop any more but still desperately needed to roll things, so you’d sometimes see them contentedly going along with a stolen satsuma or pingpong ball. They never looked where they were going and I knew that if I didn’t do the same there would be a horrible crunch under my sock, and in our condition that was the last thing we needed.
With its theatrical lighting, the kitchen was the hottest room yet, but we got a pitcher of icewater from the fridge dispenser and spent five silent minutes just drinking, leaning on the cool granite counters. My shirt was soaked and stuck unpleasantly to my body, and even the waistband of my boxers was wet through. I put my head under the sink faucet as Johnny got out a laptop and started turning lights off. The sun had gone down, and I watched from under my curtain of dripping hair as all the windows opened, letting in a gorgeous whiff of breeze.
She ran her hands through her wet hair, spiking it up. Sweat collected in the hollows under her eyes, trembling and jiggling like the water glass in Jurassic Park. I dug in one of the drawers and found her a kitchen towel.
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