“James,” she said. “You don’t have to just up and leave. You can take time to find an apartment. You. . . .”
Kelly steers the Acura into her driveway. She walks inside, and her heels sound like gunshots on the hardwood. It would be nice if James were here now. She’d like to tell someone about the big news at the station, that Jeff Pearson was officially hired today as the new general manager. She’d like to tell him about what her news director, Frank Mitchell, said when he heard the announcement. Just two words:
Big changes.
With three years left on her four-year contract, Kelly doesn’t necessarily like the words
big changes
when used in connection with her job. But James isn’t here, so she grabs a cup of yogurt from the kitchen, heads to her bedroom, and crawls into bed with her newest book.
Huckleberry Finn
was illuminating, Twain’s mastery of language and character so complete that she’s decided to read another of his works.
Letters from the Earth,
as it happens.
But it’s a battle between her eyelids and gravity almost at once. The next time she opens her eyes the clock radio says 3:16
AM
. So she stumbles into the bathroom and squirts saline into her eyes. Wanders around the house in a daze. Probably she should go back to bed, try to sleep for a while longer, but now she’s wide awake. Her ears are buzzing. Her head is receiving radio transmissions of some kind. Her mouth tastes like death.
So she brushes her teeth, washes her face, and then stumbles into the kitchen on a search for real food. Screw the yogurt. She makes a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and pours a tall glass of milk. Heads back down the hallway, the empty, echoing hallway. In her office the computer hums, the high-speed Internet connection always on, because Kelly never knows when a story idea might occur to her, when something she read on the wire earlier in the day might inspire the concept for a feature. She sits down and is about to open her browser when she notices the envelope in her system tray.
The e-mail messages from her viewing audience come in all forms, with such predictability and uniformity that she could set her watch by them. Praise, scorn, adulation, contempt, everything in between, repeat.
Take this one from a Mr. Stanley Ferrell (or so he calls himself):
Dear Ms. Smith,
My name is Stanley Ferrell and I just want to tell you what a great job you do on the news. I never watched the local news before you came here from Phoenix, but now I watch every night. You are very talented (and beautiful, too!)
Keep up the good work!
Stanley Ferrell
She taps out her boilerplate reply for male fans:
Dear Stanley,
Thanks so much for your message. It’s wonderful to know that our work here at Channel 8 means so much to the viewers. I appreciate your personal comments, and remember—don’t touch that dial!
Best,
Kelly Smith
The letters and messages and occasional phone calls, positive or negative, meant a lot to her when she first started as a reporter in Richmond, and her emotions often followed fan reactions to her work, their opinions of her. She cried an ocean of tears during her first several years, until she learned to temper her feelings about it all. She still cares what they have to say—these people are, as a whole, the subject of her stories, and she cares about their lives and how she reports on them—but it’s simply impossible to take the feedback too seriously when it differs so wildly from one viewer to the next. Like this one:
Dear Kelly,
You are such a complete bimbo. How could you possibly think the Dallas Desperadoes are an NFL football team? We HAVE an NFL team in Dallas already. Did you ever hear of the Dallas COWBOYS? Winner of FIVE Super Bowls? Helloooo? Earth to Kelly!
Mitch Pellner
Richardson
Kelly knows the Desperadoes aren’t an NFL team. The comment the pleasant Mr. Pellner is referring to took place last night, an on-camera joke for which he had likely missed the setup. She won’t respond to this message because all it will do is embarrass Mr. Pellner or antagonize him further. Or both. She deletes it and moves on.
A couple of polite messages follow—a woman who thanks her for being a female role model for her daughter, a viewer who appreciated her story on Mexican American children who suffer in school because they can’t speak English. Here is a viewer imploring her to wear less eye makeup. Here is one warning her against cutting her hair again (it’s finally growing out so please leave it alone this time). And then she clicks on this one from [email protected]:
My darling Kelly,
Do you know how truly beautiful you are, how incredibly sexy you are? When you come on the television at six and ten I cannot do anything but watch you and think about you and think how crazy those guys on the set must be to sit right next to you and not be able to kiss you. I want to kiss you and hug you and smell your precious hair. Don’t cut your hair anymore okay? It looks so much better long and I can picture it splayed over your naked shoulder blades, thrown there when you look back at me while I fuck you, while I FUCK you and your precious red lips pouty and wet and oh Jesus Christ you are the ONE YOU ? aRE THE ONE I THINK I ANT TO CALL you and please you want to talk to me not hang up on me your beautiful eyes glistening and sparkly
ONE OF ITS HEADS SEEMED TO HAVE A MORTAL WOUND AND THE WHOLE WORLD WORSHIPPED THE BEAST AND IT WAS ALLOWED TO RULE FOR 42 MONTHS AND MAKE WAR ON THE SAINTS. AND THEN I SAW A NEW HEAVEN AND A NEW EARTH AND BEHOLD> BEHOLD>>>BEHOLD? AND THE TIME IS NEAR BEHOLD I AM COMING SOON I AM the ALPHA the OMEGA the FRIST and the LAST the BEGINNING and the END. Amen.
What are you going to do?
GOD IS GOD.
She reads this one again. She wonders what sort of delusion would permit someone to verbally rape her and then quote from Revelations. She saves the message in a folder labeled S
TALKERS
, where she can retrieve it on Monday and print it for Frank.
It’s a relatively hidden aspect of her job, this distasteful interaction with disturbed fans. She’s received even crazier messages in the past, e-mails with attached image files of men’s exposed genitals, men kissing full-page color photos of her, and so on. One guy in Phoenix even managed to get her on the phone and whispered that he loved the way she visited his living room every evening.
The computer chimes. Someone sending her another e-mail. At 3:30 in the morning? She clicks back over to the e-mail list, ready to simply delete the new entry, when she sees the e-mail address: [email protected]. The subject: H
EY THERE
!
Hi Kelly,
My name is Mike McNair. I met you on the plane ride from Atlanta last week. Remember the photons?
I know you said you weren’t available right now, and I suppose that means you have a boyfriend. But in case you don’t, or if it’s not serious, I just wanted to let you know that I really enjoyed our conversation. I guess I already told you that. Probably I should just say that I would really like to see you again.
If you don’t check these messages yourself then some assistant is surely laughing at me right now. But if you are reading this, and if you would consider getting together sometime, e-mail me or even call if you like. I’m at (972) 555-0409.
Otherwise, it was very nice meeting you.
Mike
Okay, so it’s e-mail, not her favorite medium of communication, but he was polite. Unassuming. She turned him down and now he’s trying again.
Maybe she doesn’t have to turn him down again.
But she can’t respond right now. It’s 3:30 in the morning. Responding now would make her seem way too accessible. And she should be in bed at this time of night, anyway. And there is the book,
Letters from Earth.
Maybe she can read a little of that and then fall asleep.
Or maybe she can try to read but not comprehend the words, because her mind is elsewhere, because she keeps picturing the airplane and her conversation with Mike McNair.
5
“No,” Donovan says.
It’s Monday morning, two days after Larry’s late-night phone call, and the three of them are standing in Mike’s office, discussing the need to buy more hardware. Relaxing the software triggers, after all, will record more events, which means more processing power and more storage. Donovan reserves the approval for such expenditures.
“Landon,” Mike says.
“I told you already that I wasn’t going to spend any more money on the Grid,” Donovan continues. “This is the third time since we broke ground that you guys have asked for more computing power. And I’ve always given you what you wanted. I’ve always been a blank check. But no more.”
“Landon, you hired me to find Higgs, and that’s what I’m trying to do. We’ve come so far. How can you let a little money get in the way now?”
“It’s not a little money!” Donovan thunders. “You make more money than ninety percent of the people in this country, Mike, and still it would take you fifty thousand years to make as much money as I’ve personally dumped into this fucking super collider. Fifty thousand years! So don’t berate
me
for allowing a
little
money to get in the way.”
“So what are we supposed to do? I just told you we need to change the program because we might be producing Higgs and not know it. If you don’t want to add hardware, what are we supposed to do? Just give up?”
Donovan glances briefly at Larry—who so far has said nothing—and looks back at Mike. “We’re not giving up. You guys have invested a lot of time and energy into your detection process, and I believe it works. You’re smart men, and I know you’ve done a good job so far. What we need is to increase beam luminosity. Produce more collisions.”
“What?”
“More collisions means more opportunities to produce a Higgs particle. Luminosity isn’t something we’ve tinkered with lately, so that’s what we’ll do next.”
“Landon,” Mike implores. “You know this process is not that simple. You can’t just turn up the lights and see better. It’s much more complex—”
“Don’t talk down to me, Mike.”
“But more collisions means more data to sift through. We’ll still need additional—”
“If there turns out to be too much data, we can always tighten the software triggers a little.”
“
Tighten
them?”
“Mike—”
“Donovan, you’ve got to listen to me. We can’t just—”
“Samantha said—”
“Samantha? Is she the one making decisions around here now?”
“Be careful, Mike. That’s dangerous ground you’re walking on.”
“Landon, these things take time. You don’t just fire up a brand-new accelerator and then nine months later take home the trophy. Designing this machine, its software, tweaking everything, it’s as much an art as it is science. You have to coax the thing into delivering what you want. It’s painstaking sometimes. It could take
years
to find the—”
“You don’t have years!” Donovan roars.
“What do you mean? I explained this to you up front. I don’t understand what—”
Donovan steps closer to Mike, and Larry all but shrinks out of sight. “I’m going to make it clear for you, sir. I’m the boss here. I built this machine, and with your highly respected input I decide how it is run. Samantha is going to make her luminosity changes, and you’re going to help her with whatever she needs. If you don’t like it, you know where the door is. Have I made myself clear?”
Mike stands with Donovan, toe to toe, and for a moment considers doing what he has never done in his life—the impulsive decision that makes a good story but mangles a perfectly good career. For a moment he considers walking out the door and away from Donovan, away from his life’s work and the NTSSC forever. But in reality he could no more walk away from this multibillion-dollar facility—a project that is as much his legacy as Donovan’s—than he could ignore Kelly Smith if she marched into his office and begged him to go out with her. Because while Mike is confident enough to allow that he is something of a gifted scientist, able to understand the most specialized areas of experimental physics and also provide leadership to an army of researchers, he also knows Donovan would simply replace him with Samantha. Who would likely lead the team well enough to eventually find Higgs.
It’s a plug-and-play world, after all. Mike himself was plugged into this job when other, more experienced physicists could have been chosen. And it’s this humility, this disciplined understanding of his place in the world, that allows him to back down from Donovan. That has in fact allowed him to work so long with such a meddling tyrant in the first place. But it isn’t easy. Because as he takes a step backward, as his eyes briefly shift away from Donovan’s and toward Larry (who is obviously enjoying his front-row seat in this real-life soap opera) Mike must also admit that his billionaire boss
is
a man who cannot be replaced—it’s
his
plug-and-play world, and not only must Mike admit this to himself, he must also survive the smug look on Donovan’s face as the jerk waits for Mike to realize it.
“Yes,” Mike says finally. “You’ve made yourself clear.”
“Good. Samantha will require your assistance from time to time over the next couple of weeks. You will help her in every way possible. I will see you gentlemen later.”
Donovan turns and leaves the office. Mike goes back to his desk without looking at Larry. He clicks over to Outlook and doesn’t find a return e-mail from Kelly, but really she probably hasn’t even received the message yet. He sent it on Friday night and assumes she is a weeknight anchor. She might not even arrive at the station until three or four o’clock in the afternoon.
Larry gradually makes his way to the visitor’s chair and sits. “What do you make of that?”
Mike grunts. He senses (and dreads) Larry’s desire to dissect every beat in the previous scene.
“I’ve seen him get angry before,” Larry continues, “but wow. I thought he was going to take a swing at you there for a minute.”
“He wasn’t going to take a swing at me.”
“I know, I know. But he must be under a lot of pressure, because obviously there isn’t any other reason why the Higgs search should be on a timetable.”