caption read:
Dr. Richard Coburn, standing before the future site of Coburn National Laboratory and Observatory at the base of the Abertura Mesa.
Abertura Mesa, thought Mona. She wrote that down, then scanned the rest of the article for something usable. It was mostly an interview with Dr. Coburn (rendered, bizarrely, in transcript—she guessed this just appealed to those of the scientific persuasion), centering on physics stuff, which frankly bored her to tears, so she couldn’t make heads or tails of it. The interviewer mostly fawned over Dr. Coburn, who must have been some big-shot physicist back in the day, and though he was enthusiastic he didn’t seem eager to talk details. She zeroed in on one section in particular:
LFM: So what expectations do you have for the project? If your recent publications are anything to go by, they must be very high.
RICHARD COBURN: Well, really, I think it’s only healthy to enter into any new endeavor with the highest of expectations. I mean, you want to make yourself work, naturally, and you won’t work if you don’t think you can accomplish anything. I sort of become an enemy of myself, in a way. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit it, but I tend to assume I’m failing all the time. There is so much more I can be doing at any moment. Perhaps it’s unhealthy, I’m not sure.
LFM: What more do you think you can be doing, then?
RICHARD COBURN: I’m sorry, I don’t believe I understand the question.
LFM: What I mean is, you say you’re going into this expecting great accomplishments. What would those accomplishments be?
RICHARD COBURN: Well, unfortunately, since our funding is largely through government avenues, there’s not much I can say about our plans. You know, it’s the kind of thing that has all sorts of clearance levels and such. It’s all a bit irritating, honestly. There is so much I’d like to talk about, yet I can’t. But I will say that this just might be—and I do not think I am overestimating myself, here—the first really genuine American foray into the quantum realm. And with each new thing we learn, the possibilities become more and more amazing. We’ve assembled a great team here, and though we’re all pretty much camping in the desert for now, I expect that’ll change soon.
LFM: They have you camping out there? In tents?
RICHARD COBURN: Oh, no, they have temporary housing set up. It’s fairly comfortable. I believe there are some plans to make something more permanent, but I’m only peripherally involved in those. It should be very pleasant, I think. They’re allowing us some say in the aesthetics. But I honestly cannot wait to get started. We will be examining the way the world works at the smallest level possible, and I can’t overstate how important this research will be. Things we’ve assumed, things we’ve taken for granted for hundreds if not thousands of years are being brought into question. It really is quite startling. I’d be unnerved by the whole thing, really, if I didn’t love the research so much.
Mona had expected government funding—it was a national lab, after all—but this sounded distinctly more… secret. As if whatever they’d been doing out there required housing and domesticities that were very much off the books, like a federal enclave.
Which might explain why there was absolutely nothing to be found about Wink. Having once been a reservist, Mona was dimly aware of how the government operates in situations like this: first they build the facilities, then they construct the residential area for its staff. Maybe Wink was a federal town built to house the staff of CNLO, which would explain why it never showed up on any maps, and why so many state and federal institutions had no record of it.
And this was what her mother had been wrapped up in? She’d been a government research scientist? The more Mona learned about her mother’s past, the more bizarre it all seemed.
As she copied the article, she realized it all put her in a hell of a spot: she’d been entrusted a house, but it just might be in a fucking federal enclave. How could that have happened? What would she have to do, climb a barbed-wire fence to get to it? Was any of this legal? Mona had no experience with federal law on this scale. And she still hadn’t found anything definite about the exact location of the town. All she had was the name of the mesa that might or might