'See whether.' She stepped out of my jeans and handed them over, and walked back to her potatoes wearing only a T-shirt. 'I mean, really. Your generation is so prudish.'
'Oh, are we?' I slipped off the gown and came up behind her. 'Come on. I'll show you prudish.'
'That doesn't count.' She half-turned and kissed me. 'The experiment was about clothes, not sex. Sit down before one of us gets burned.'
I sat down at the dinette and looked at her back. She stirred the food slowly. 'I'm not sure why I did that, really. Impulse. Couldn't sleep but didn't want to wake you up, going through the closet. I stepped on your jeans getting out of bed and I just put them on.'
'Don't explain. I want it to be a big perverse mystery.'
'If you want coffee you know where it is.' She had a pot of tea brewed. I almost asked for a cup. But to keep the morning from being too full of mystery, I stuck with coffee.
'So Macro's getting a divorce?' Dr. 'Mac' Roman was dean of research and titular head of our project, though he wasn't involved in the day-to-day work.
'Deep dark secret. He hasn't told anybody. My friend Nel passed it on.' Nel Nye was a schoolmate who worked for the city.
'And they were such a lovely couple together.' She laughed one 'ha,' stabbing at the potatoes with the spatula. 'Was it another woman, man, robot?'
'They don't put that on the form. They're splitting this week, though, and I have to meet with him tomorrow before we go to Budget. He'll be even more distracted than usual.' She divided the potatoes between two plates and brought them over. 'So you were out blowing up trucks?'
'Actually, I was lying in a cage, twitching.' She dismissed that with a wave. 'There wasn't much to it. No drivers or passengers. Two saps.'
'Sapients?'
''Sapient defense units,' yeah, but that puts a pretty low threshold on sapience. They're just guns on tracks with AI routines that give them a certain degree of autonomy. Pretty effective against ground troops and conventional artillery and air support. Don't know what they were doing in our AO.'
'Is that a blood type?' she said over her teacup.
'Sorry. 'Area of operations.' I mean, one flyboy could have taken them out in a single treetop pass.'
'So why didn't they use a flyboy? Rather than risk damaging your expensive armored carcass.'
'Oh, they said they wanted the cargo analyzed, which was bullshit. The only stuff besides food and ammo were some solar cells and replacement boards for field mainframes. So we know they use Mitsubishi. But if they buy anything from a Rimcorp firm, we automatically get copies of the invoices. So I'm sure that was no big surprise.'
'So why'd they send you?'
'Nobody said officially, but I got a thread on my vertical jack that they were feeling out Sam, Samantha.' 'She's the one who, her friend?' 'Got beaten up and raped, yeah. She didn't do too well.'
'Who would?'
'I don't know. Sam's pretty tough. But she wasn't even half there.'
'That would go rough on her? If she got a psychiatric discharge.'
'They don't like to give them, unless there's actual brain damage. They'd either 'find' that or put her through an Article 12.' I got up to find some catsup for my potatoes. 'That might not be as bad as rumor has it. Nobody in our company has gone through it.'
'I thought there was a congressional investigation of that. Somebody with important parents died.'
'Yeah, there was talk. I don't know that it got any further than talk. Article 12 has to be a wall you can't climb. Otherwise half the mechanics in the army would try for a psych discharge.'
'They don't want to make it that easy.' 'So I used to think. Now I think part of it is keeping a balanced force. If you made an Article 12 easy, you'd lose everyone bothered by killing. The soldierboys would wind up a berserker corps.'
'That's a pretty picture.'
'You should see what it looks like from inside. I told you about Scoville.'
'A few times.'
'Imagine him times twenty thousand.' People like Scoville are completely disassociated from killing, especially with the soldierboys. You find them in regular armies, too, though-people for whom enemy soldiers aren't human, just counters in a game. They're ideal for some missions and disastrous for others.
I had to admit the potatoes were pretty good. I'd been living on bar food for a couple of days, cheese and fried meats, with corn chips for a vegetable.
'Oh... you didn't get on the cube this time.' She had her cube monitor the war channels and keep any sequences where my unit appeared. 'So I was pretty sure you were having a safe, boring time.'
'So shall we find something exciting to do?'
'You go find something.' She picked up the plates and carried them to the sink. 'I have to go back to the lab for half a day.'
'Something I could help you with?'
'Wouldn't speed it up. It's just some data formatting for a Jupiter Project update.' She sorted the plates into the dishwasher. 'Why don't you catch up on your sleep and we'll do something tonight.'
That sounded good to me. I switched the phone over, in case somebody wanted to bother me on Sunday morning, and returned to her rumpled bed.
THE JUPITER PROJECT WAS the largest particle accelerator ever built, by several orders of magnitude.
Particle accelerators cost money-the faster the particle, the more it costs-and the history of particle physics is at least partly a history of how important really fast particles have been to various sponsoring governments.
Of course, the whole idea of money had changed with the nanoforges. And that changed the pursuit of 'Big Science.'
The Jupiter Project was the result of several years' arguing and wheedling, which resulted in the Alliance sponsoring a flight to Jupiter. The Jupiter probe dropped a programmed nanoforge into its dense atmosphere, and deposited another one on the surface of Io. The two machines worked in concert, the Jupiter one sucking up deuterium for warm fusion and beaming the power to the one on Io, which manufactured elements for a particle accelerator that would ring the planet in Io's orbit and concentrate power from Jupiter's gargantuan magnetic field.
Prior to the Jupiter Project, the biggest 'supercollider' had been the Johnson Ring that circled several hundred miles beneath Texas wasteland. This one would be ten thousand times as long and a hundred thousand times as powerful.
The nanoforge actually built other nanoforges, but ones that could only be used for the purpose of making the elements of the orbiting particle accelerator. So the thing did grow at an exponential rate, the busy machines chewing up the blasted surface of Io and spitting it out into space, forming a ring of uniform elements.
What used to cost money now cost time. The researchers on Earth waited while ten, a hundred, a thousand elements were chucked into orbit. After six years there were five thousand of them, enough to start firing up the huge machine.
Time was involved in another way, a theoretical measure. It had to do with the beginning of the universe – the beginning of time. One instant after the Diaspora (once called the Big Bang) the universe was a small cloud of highly energetic particles swarming outward at close to the speed of light. An instant later, they were a different swarm, and so on out to a whole second, ten seconds, and so on. The more energy you pumped into a particle accelerator, the closer you could come to duplicating the conditions that obtained soon after the Diaspora, the beginning of time.
For more than a century there had been a back-and-forth dialogue between the particle physicists and the cosmologists. The cosmologists would scribble their equations, trying to figure out which particles were flitting around at what time in the universe's development, and their results would suggest an experiment. So the physicists would fire up their accelerators and either verify the cosmologists' equations or send them back to the blackboard.
The reverse process also happens. One thing most of us agree on is that the universe exists (people who deny
