Still speaking as calmly as she could, Grace said, “So you could yell and interrupt and hang up on me again? I don’t think so. What do you and your daughter want anyway?”
There was silence on the line for a few seconds, then Carl said, “As you know, Kary’s in Simone’s will…”
And, as I suspected, that’s what this’s about, Grace thought unhappily. She didn’t speak, just waiting to hear what else Carl would say.
After a long pause, Carl continued, “And she was worried about her aunt because we hadn’t heard anything about what was going on.”
“She hadn’t called Simone since before the wedding. Neither had you.”
“Well… we didn’t agree with some of Simone’s choices.”
“You mean me.”
After another long silence, Carl said tightly, “Among other things, yeah.”
“But now you decided she must be dead and you want to collect on her will.”
“We want to make sure Kary gets her share. Yes. What’s her due. And we figured…”
When Carl didn’t continue, Grace did for him. “You figured I might try to screw Kary out of her share, right?”
This time when Carl spoke, he sounded placating. “I’m sure you wouldn’t, but, you know…”
“Don’t worry. The will doesn’t matter because Simone’s not dead, she’s in stasis. When Arvinzamab comes available, there’s a good chance it’ll cure her.”
“Don’t give me that shit,” Carl snarled. “I looked up that stasis crap and it’s all hocus pocus. Then I talked to a lawyer. In the eyes of the law, she’s already dead.”
“She’s not dead!” Grace said, losing her cool. “She’s in stasis and that can be reversed.”
“Is she breathing?”
“No. She’s in stasis—”
“Is her heart beating?”
“No! Nothing happens in stasis.”
“Then, in the eyes of the law, she’s already dead.”
With a catch in her throat, Grace said, “How can you be so hateful to your own sister?”
“Oh,” Carl said with loathing, “she stopped being my sister when she hooked up with you.”
Voice breaking, Grace said, “Well, I’m sorry to tell you that having her declared dead won’t help Kary. When you guys stopped even taking her calls, she took you and Kary out of her will.”
“She did not! We’ve got a copy of her last will and testament in our safe.”
“But there’s a newer one.” In a saccharine tone, Grace asked, “Would you like a copy?”
“Whatever you might’ve talked her into,” Carl snarled, “it won’t hold up in court.” He hung up.
Grace sent him a copy of the new will anyway.
***
Brad Medness got a text from Kaem Seba. “Can talk if you’re not in class?”
Brad had sent Seba his drawings for the mold for his fixture. It felt a little bizarre having an undergrad checking his work, but reminded himself that the kid said he could arrange to staze his fixture for free. For that, if the kid wanted to look at his drawings, he’d allow it. He’d insisted Seba sign an NDA, but the kid had complied without a peep.
He brought his drawings up on his screen, then placed the call.
Seba came on the line. In a cheerful tone, he said, “Hi, Dr. Medness.”
Brad chuckled and said, “Hi yourself. Find any glaring errors in my drawings?” While he felt sure that an undergrad wouldn’t have understood his fixture well enough to recognize an error, he thought it politic to pretend the possibility
“Well,” Seba said, “I think you forgot that positive features smaller than one millimeter won’t form in Stade. You can form that tiny tube you’re putting your target in because it’s a negative feature. You can produce such a 0.2-millimeter cylindrical defect in a bigger piece of Stade by blocking the formation of Stade within the defect with a 0.2-millimeter mirrored glass rod, but the 0.5-millimeter bumps and structures you have on other parts of the fixture just aren’t going to form.”
Brad was distracted by the word “target” because his drawings hadn’t specified that he was going to put his fusion target in the opening. He missed Seba’s next few words.
When Brad focused back on what Seba was saying again, the kid was telling him, “…also, you can’t wrap a coil around the outside of that Stade cone and expect to produce a field to extract the energy from your beta particles. Electromagnetic phenomena don’t penetrate Stade.”
Stunned, Brad said, “Beta particles?” Not because he didn’t understand, but rhetorically, because he couldn’t imagine how Seba knew he wanted to extract energy from beta particles.
Seba said, “Oh…” He sounded puzzled. “Perhaps I misunderstood. I assumed you were trying to replicate Hora’s attempts to achieve hydrogen-boron fusion…” When the speechless Brad didn’t say anything, Seba amplified, “You know, by accelerating hydrogen into a boron target using the ponderomotive force generated by high-intensity sub-femtosecond laser pulses. Since the acceleration part of Hora’s idea worked, I thought you were going to use Stade to substitute for his failed cylindrical magnetic containments?”
Brad was pulling up the email he’d sent Seba, trying to see if he’d accidentally sent another document that described his intended use of the fixture. Nothing seemed to be attached. He said, “Um, what made you think that?”
“I’m sorry,” Seba said, “I was just guessing from your design. What are you trying to do? I could be a lot more helpful if I understood your intent.” He laughed, “I imagine I was wrong in thinking you were trying to generate a field through that cone too.”
“Um,” Brad said, trying to think how to respond without sounding like an idiot. “You know about Hora’s work?” he asked uncertainly. Hora’s ideas and the experiments he’d done were fairly well known among fusion scientists, but it just seemed vanishingly unlikely that an undergrad would have heard about them.
“Oh, yeah!” Seba said enthusiastically. “I think his ideas for achieving fusion are the best anyone’s had so far. It was a bummer his magnetic
