“That’s very good to hear,” I said, smelling the hint of truth in my lie.
—
Interview over, I needed to have a conversation with Dr. Lundgren. If I was going to leave, I needed to know what we were going to do about my research. I messaged her to ask if she could come by my lab station when she was free to talk about something important. I wanted to have the conversation on my territory, not hers. A few hours later, I heard a knock on my counter. That’s how we kept from sneaking up on each other. She looked good.
“Everything OK, Miranda?”
I figured it would be easy to say it all at once, so I just straightened up, looked her in the eyes, and said, “I had a job interview today with Altus. They’re going to call you for a reference . . . probably. I want to talk about what you might say to them.”
“I’m going to tell them the truth.”
My eyes fell, a pit opened up in my stomach, and I slouched into it.
“I’ll tell them that you are a genius scientist and communicator. That you work extremely hard and are passionate and are always solving problems fast and well. I might leave out some facts, like, for example, that you hate them.”
I had never imagined that this conversation would go so well. She looked concerned, but also deeply supportive.
I let out a sigh as my back muscles unclenched, “Thank you, Dr. Lundgren. Oh god, thank you.”
“What are you doing, Miranda?”
“I have to go to Puerto Rico. I can’t not go.”
“Did I imagine talking with you in my office and both of us agreeing that these people are trash people?”
“No.”
“Do you still think they’re trash people?”
“I think that, if I’m not there, they’ll be even more trash.” I was getting defensive.
She was quiet for a second and then pulled up a stool and sat. “I can’t tell you what to do, and I’ll support it, but I need you to tell me why.”
“Whatever they’re doing, they’re going to do it with or without me. Maybe I can have them do it in a less garbage way. And if I can’t, or I find out something really bad, maybe I can tell people about it.”
She was quiet for a really long time.
“Miranda, that is a huge thing you are asking of yourself. I am not young anymore, but I remember being your age, and I am not going to tell you to put a lid on that ambition, but it’s going to be hard to pull against their culture as it pulls on you. It will be very hard not to fall into their version of the story. But what worries me more than that is what happens if they find you out.
“There is a lot of money on the line here, a lot. I don’t know what these people are really like. They could blackball you, you probably wouldn’t ever work in pharma again. Or they could dig up dirt on you, lie about you, maybe even worse things than that.”
I thought back to my job interview. They did not seem like henchmen who would ruin a person for sharing industrial secrets, but I also had never met a henchperson, so what did I know?
“Miranda?”
I must have been zoned out for a second.
“I don’t care.” I did care.
She smiled with a hint of mischief. “Good.”
“Am I getting the job?” I could barely believe that it was a possibility. They had lots of candidates, and they’d find out that I was April’s friend and disqualify me. But Dr. Lundgren was talking about it like it was going to happen.
“I think you are, and I think you’re going to leave. And I’ll keep your lab station open until you come back.”
“What if I don’t come back?”
“Something is telling me you will. But this is going to be hard. Probably much harder than you think.”
It seemed like she suddenly wasn’t just supporting a decision she didn’t necessarily agree with, she was actually encouraging me. That was making all of this feel much more real.
“I don’t know that I’ve even really made up my mind yet.”
“Oh, you have. You just don’t quite know what a made-up mind looks like.”
I didn’t understand what she meant, but I left it alone and said, “I won’t be allowed to tell you what I’m working on. But would it be OK if I did that anyway?”
“That would be a serious crime, and honestly, yes, I want you to do that.”
“What? Even if they aren’t doing anything iffy?”
“Miranda,” she said, leaning toward me, “these people are dangerous and they’re moving too fast. I’m terrified that they’re doing human tests without proper clinical trials. I think they’ve figured out something powerful and dangerous. If I could find someone I want to put that level of faith in, it would be someone like you, not someone like Peter Petrawicki. You have the perfect background. They need people who have worked on neuro-control interfaces and there aren’t that many of you in the world. I think we’re the only ones who can do this.”
“That could end our careers, though. You were the one just telling me how dangerous this is. We could go to prison.”
“I’m ready for the risks. I just wanted to make sure you knew what they were.”
I had known Dr. Constance Lundgren for almost six years now, and this was not behavior I had come to expect from her.
“Is everything OK with you?”
“You think I’m acting strange. Maybe I am. Maybe I’ve been playing it too safe. Remarkable things don’t get done by people waiting for the status quo to crawl along.”
“But we’re not doing a remarkable thing, we’re trying to slow them down from doing something remarkable too fast.”
Her eyes got big, and she literally reached out and grabbed my arm.
“That!” she said too loudly for the conversation, leaning close to my face. “That
