“So start at the beginning Joad Bevan,” she says. My mind dissolves into the fog of the day’s events: the big hangover, the big boom, the world shift, the gun in my chest, and the incompetent workings of a junk accelerator. I sip my water and feel a tremble in my hand, so put the glass down quickly, hoping it wasn’t noticed. I compose myself and belatedly return the woman’s smile. Then I tell them the epic tale of my day. Not the hangover, not the confrontation with Bess–not relevant–but from there on I share every detail I can remember. I’d told my story to the tabletop but now look up into the face of the woman. With her faint, natural smile she is looking back at me. Her greasy partner has a look that’s on the verge of a sneer or a roll of the yes, but he does neither. I sit back in my seat to say, well that’s it. The man and woman exchange a glance.
“I’m Jane Galois, the shift director. This is Boris Zhivov.” I look up with a start.
“Zhivov?” I say. He nods. This little shit is the Director of TMC, or at least he will be. I’d met him once years ago (years from now) when he visited the site. This is the same guy? I suppose that before thirty added pounds, an expanding forehead, and a jawline victim to gravity, this could be him. Director Zhivov did make some decisions only an schmuck could make, so now that all pieces together. It occurs to me that I’m judging the young Zhivov on nothing he’s said, and just on how he looks. Well, that’s Joad Bevan for you. Am I supposed to say nothing to him about who he is? There are no rules about that because bigger rules should prevent the question from even arising.
“You’re convincing, Joad Bevan,” the woman says. “Anything to add?”
“How about a song?” I say and slide my iPhone across the table.
TEN
They allow me to look around. Some things are as they were (as they will be) and some are not. I peer through the control room window and where there had been a wall-sized monitor, there are now four large TV screens positioned to share the world map. There’s a single red light illuminated somewhere in central Europe. What luxury. That’d be a hell of a good day where I’m from. One light! The big chair is occupied by a lean, gray-haired man in a golf tee-shirt and he’s transfixed on the four monitors, despite the little action they’re showing. The consoles now have hard controls rather than touch screens but are laid-out about the same. I think these old consoles were still there when I started work.
It gets me thinking to when I first entered this place, fifteen years from now. Bess had been confused by why, after working for years toward an escape from Risley, that I was so eager to return. There was a cover story for all TMAers about the site being there as an academic enterprise for detection of exotic fundamental particles. I convinced Bess that this excited me so she found a research job at Washington State University and Risley became our home. It all seems an age away, in one direction or the another.
I remember my first day. My heart had pounded with the excitement of being there, of being one of the elite. But the exhilaration I had felt was also part relief, having successfully gone through the grueling process of vetting. It’s not that I was worried about anything they might turn up in my background, but I’d been warned that some pretty strange things could disqualify me: things like being a sci fi reader or having been involved in role-play games. Go figure. But I guess I’d ticked all the boxes despite the occasional Asimov. Most of the vetting had taken place before I even knew I was in the running. I’m still not sure how I got singled-out. A PhD in theoretical physics at 21 and a few well received papers in the field of particle phenomenology must have had something to do with it. I’d asked my boss, once I felt comfortable with it, what if I hadn’t wanted the job after all that vetting? He’d replied you mean what if you’d wanted a job with more interesting science or more relevant to the benefit of mankind?
I recall the smell on that first day, which in hindsight I think was just the plastic furniture. But on that day, my identity changed. I was no longer Joad Bevan, physicist, but now Joad Bevan of TMA, and that went everywhere with me. Standing in a grocery store, at a road crossing or in an airport line, I thought to myself, even though no one knows it, here’s stands Joad Bevan, TMA.
On day one I had received a dump of technical reports and papers, was pointed to a cubicle, and given the instruction learn that. It scared the feces out of me. To come up to speed in a field about which you have zero knowledge is scary, but when that field borders on the incredible, it’s terrifying. In my time I had read a lot of papers sent by what we used to call cranks. These are amateurs who send their profound ideas on fundamental physics to established theoreticians, despite the fact that their knowledge of physics comes mainly from Star Trek or from a popular book or two on gee-whiz science. Now, reading these papers, they were so out-there that it was sometimes tough not to lapse into the mindset that I was reading crank literature. But whoever wrote these papers, they were no cranks. I was assigned a couple of staff to answer questions, and I had a lot.
After a few weeks I was set
