Charlie Anders - All the Birds in the Sky

At last, after Laurence had pulled two all-nighters in a row at the lab, he decided to bite the bullet. When he crawled home, Isobel was staring at satellite images of the Atlantic Ocean, at the small kitchen table, and she pointed at an ugly smudge in the Gulf Stream. “Superstorm Camilla.”

“Oh yeah.” Laurence peered over her shoulder. “I heard about that. A near miss, on the East Coast. Everybody said it could have been way worse than Sandy or Becky.”

“Third near miss in the past couple years,” Isobel said. “And hurricane season isn’t over yet. Milton is wigging out.”

Laurence pulled up a chair. “Listen, I don’t want you to tell Milton. But we had a … a setback at work.”

“What kind of setback?” Isobel pushed her laptop shut with a click.

“We had an accident. At the lab.” Laurence tried to explain the whole story without mentioning Patricia at all. “We’re all pretty unsure how to move forward.”

“Well.” Isobel pushed her chair back and went to get a bottle of grappa from the cabinet, pouring some for Laurence and some for herself. She sat back down with her elbows on the table. “Sounds like you need more safety protocols, and maybe don’t randomly test your equipment on human subjects, without talking to Milton or myself first.”

“Yeah.” Laurence swallowed. “That was dumb. And that’s on me. But I feel like … the way the antigravity field destabilized makes me nervous. That just shouldn’t have happened. We’ve done some tests, but we have to do a lot more. But I’m thinking we may have to go back to square one and try a completely different approach.”

“Uh-huh.” Isobel sipped and narrowed her eyes at him. “The last time we spoke, you said it was looking really good.”

Laurence felt the sleepless days catching up with him. “It was. It was looking really good. Until it wasn’t.”

“You just asked me not to tell Milton. Which means you want me to lie to him, and say you’re actually accomplishing your part of the project, without which all the other teams’ work is a waste of time. You want me to tell him what? That you’re really close to a breakthrough, when you’ve actually gone back to ‘square one’?” She tossed back some grappa and poured more for Laurence.

“Hey,” Laurence leaned backward on the rear legs of his chair until he was in serious danger of crashing on his back. “Nobody’s lying to Milton. He knows we’re doing everything we can. You guys trusted me with this.”

Isobel was shaking her head. “I can’t do this. You can tell Milton what you just told me. He’s coming to town in a few days. Tell him you’re stuck, and he’ll send you to the facility he’s set up outside Denver, where you will have zero distractions.”

Laurence had a sudden flashback of his parents hauling him to a death trap of a military school, and his sleepless haze was turning red. “Just please listen to what I’m telling you,” he said, planting the chair on all four legs and gripping the table with both fists. “We’re not giving up, goddamn it. We’re just taking a fucking step back. Don’t try to blackmail me, or, or pressurize me here. The fuck.”

“It’s not blackmail,” Isobel said, pouring herself more grappa. “It’s what will absolutely happen. You signed a contract; you committed to this project. And you’ve gotten the kid-gloves treatment, because you’re my friend. Do you remember when you came to stay with me, six years ago?”

“Yes,” Laurence said. His parents had been divorcing, and he’d needed a place to hide. He’d only just reconnected with Isobel, and she’d invited him to live in her crawl space for the summer while she pulled the plug on her aerospace start-up.

When Laurence thought back to that summer now, his main impression was of the desert’s heat, smacking you in the face the moment you stepped out of an air-conditioned space. Laurence had toted an iPad as he’d shadowed Isobel, trying to make whatever she needed materialize without her even asking. A girl named Ivy, with long black hair and cherry lip gloss, had made out with Laurence behind the ozone-scented silos late at night. Milton hung around wearing a golf hat and shorts — Laurence had been startled to realize that Milton was that old guy in the turtleneck who’d yelled at him for touching the rocket at MIT. Milton had kept saying things like, “Making the leap from a planetary infestation to an interplanetary diaspora is the most important task the human race has ever attempted. It is quite literally do or die.”

Isobel hissed a little as the grappa hit her throat. “You followed me like a puppy, while I was desperately trying to hold it together. We all thought you were just a starstruck kid, but then on the last day you brought us that physics paper when we were all sitting on that sofa with the broken leg, watching Nine Inch Nails videos and crying.”

“The paper about gravity tunneling,” Laurence said. “I remember.” Some insane physicist from Wollongong had speculated about a method of interstellar travel. Milton had started to dismiss it, but then he’d read the paper a second time and started scribbling notes on his arm. And that had helped lead to Milton founding the Ten Percent Project, with the idea of getting 10 percent of the population off-world within a few decades.

“So don’t sit there and try to pretend that you’re just an innocent bystander,” Isobel said. “You helped start this. And maybe you haven’t been paying attention to the news: The world is on the edge of the cliff here.”

“I’m aware.” Laurence shifted backward and forward in his chair until the scuttling of the wooden legs became too annoying.

“So if you don’t want me to tell Milton that you’re pulling back, don’t pull back. Or if you want to go back to square one, you can tell Milton yourself. But don’t put me in the position of covering for you. And don’t try to have it both ways. Okay?”

“Okay,” Laurence said.

Isobel reopened her laptop so she could obsess over the satellite map some more, and the light from the screen gave her a spectral quality, like someone slowly phasing out of existence.

They sat without talking for a while. Laurence slipped away to get ready for bed. He got up in the middle of the night to get some water, and found Isobel still sitting at that table, weeping over a nearly empty bottle, her face wracked with tremors. He helped her up the stairs to her bedroom, supporting her on his shoulders, and got her into bed. He stayed with her long enough to make sure she slept on her side.

“ARE YOU SURE we should be doing this?” Patricia asked when they were both naked but not yet past first base.

“Lately I’ve discovered certainty can be a kind of curse,” said Laurence.

They were in Laurence’s bedroom, where Patricia had never been before. It was a sort of in-law apartment downstairs from Isobel’s apartment, with a view of a back garden out the window, behind the twin bed with a Mighty Mouse quilt. On the opposite wall, he had a workstation, with docks for a laptop computer and a 19-inch monitor, plus shelves and racks of cannibalized electronics. Including five Caddies, two of them jailbroken and two others shackled together with a mesh of crossover cables.

The remaining wall space, over by the door, was taken up with a small bookcase containing graphic novels, engineering texts, and a few science memoirs, like Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! Random action figures and toys in silly poses sat on the dresser, and one of Serafina’s robots, Jimmy, peered over Laurence’s bed frame.

Laurence was feeling pretty freaking nervous. He had been with a nontrivial number of girls — but at least half of those had been tipsy hookups where you had a certain amount of plausible deniability about sexual performance. He’d dated Ginnifer, an electrical engineer with a wicked smile, during sophomore and junior years in college, and she would devise contraptions that could stimulate Laurence’s prostate with varying levels of vibration while also enabling her to straddle his penis, and apply a similar variable-speed oscillation/vibrator function to her clitoris. Plus Ginnifer’s Sexoskeleton, which would take way too long to describe.