Anya was a freckled Midwestern girl whose nut-brown hair had blue tips, like she’d dyed it and then given up. She wore denim overalls and chunky engineer glasses, and looked like someone who never smiled. She muttered to Laurence about giving tours to outsiders.

Sougata had a thick black mustache, a Southern California surfer accent, and a Caltech sweatshirt. Laurence whispered that Sougata had wanted to work in television and had even interned at the Space: Above and Beyond reboot, but now he’d fallen back on his second-choice career of saving the world in real life.

Patricia wasn’t sure if she should ask about the big machine with the giant vacuum-tube-looking body and the pointy nozzle. But then Laurence started explaining it anyway: “We’re working on solving gravity.” He examined some readings on the machine. “We don’t have true antigrav yet, just a few isolated instances. And antigrav isn’t the point, controlling gravity is. We know that it’s a weak force in our universe, which means it’s a strong force somewhere else. And we’re trying to figure out where, or what, that is.”

“Wow.” Patricia could fly without any fancy ray, of course, but only when the situation warranted, and/or when she could trick someone into a bargain that included giving her the power of flight. (Or in dreams.) The idea of turning gravity on or off, or harnessing its power, amazed her.

She was going to be late for Kawashima’s latest assignment, an oil executive who was partway responsible for the North Sea disaster. But she wanted to admire Laurence’s machine. Laurence showed her the readouts of just how much energy throughput they had gotten into those sleek tubes without anything blowing up.

“That’s sure an impressive machine,” Patricia said. And yeah, there was something both aesthetically pleasing and satisfying about a great piece of engineering. Shiny and sturdy. She felt the same affection for this machine that she did for the old manual typewriters they sold in the hipster gallery on Valencia, or for a nice steam engine. These things were made of hubris, because they always broke down, or worse, broke everything. But maybe Laurence had been right and these devices were what made us unique, as humans. We made machines, the way spiders made silk. Staring at the red wasp-shaped chassis, she thought of how disgusted she had been with Laurence, not long ago. And maybe she shouldn’t judge him—judging was a kind of Aggrandizement—and maybe this device was the culmination of everything she’d always admired about him, from the start. And yes, a sign that they’d both won out, over the Mr. Roses of the world.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

Chapter 19

19