happened.”
I looked at her properly and did a cartoony double-take, making her giggle. She was in a short, white dress covered in silver sequins. On anyone taller, it would have practically been a shirt.
“What the hell is this?” I said. “Like, no offense, but we both know Rutger has to shoot you with tranqs to get you to dress up.”
“Yeah, like in The A-Team,” she said, pausing to do a little pirouette in the steel-toed boots she wore in her lab. “I bought this in Venice; we were coming back from the conference centre and it was just so pretty and there was only one left.”
“My God, you’re finally becoming a real girl.”
“Don’t be so gender essentialist, Nicholas,” she sniffed. “Anyway, I was trying it on between two mirrors and something just kind of... it was like... you remember that reactor I worked on a while ago?”
“The one you were working on when you were ten? That’s more than a while ago.”
“You know what I mean,” she said, speeding up to a trot. “Listen, I was looking down at the sequins, and I just kind of, I don’t know, I had had a lot of coffee, and it seemed like they were sort of moving—”
“Do you mind my asking if you slept last night?”
“—no, but listen, listen, moving in a pattern, something I knew, or I knew the start but not the end, I had seen the start on the plane, like when you’re at karaoke and you realize halfway through the opening that you don’t know the verses but just the chorus, but when the words come up you realize you do know the verses after all, so I ran to write it down, and it seemed okay, I mean it seemed like it should work if you look at the sequins as electrons? Anyway, I started the same as the old one, but this time I created the graphene substrate by making kind of a carbon snow—”
“Is one of its side effects not needing to breathe?”
“—and it works, I switched the house grid off the solar cells and onto the reactor and I’m sorry about the heat, and the smell, I think that’s mostly burning dust and bugs on the halogens, I keep meaning to switch them to the LEDs, but there’s never time...” She trailed off; her face was slick and hectic, red dots below her eyes, hair not just damp but actually dripping down her neck into her dress, turning the white to gray.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll come look. But then we’re sticking a cold washcloth on you.”
She tapped a long sequence on the keypad, thirty or forty digits, letting us into Hadrian, one of the more familiar of her many inexplicably-named research rooms.
I followed her, barking my shins repeatedly, around a maze of shin-height equipment and reels of cable to an ordinary metal table bolted to the floor, lit with the same blue Ikea desk lamp the kids had in their room. The table was cluttered with tiny bits of metal and plastic and had a shoebox-sized metal case on it sprouting a dozen black cables, one of which snaked into the darkness. It hummed unpleasantly, setting my teeth on edge like biting foil.
Next to it for some reason sat a four-pack of lemon Perrier, one half-empty. I opened a full one and offered it to Johnny, who wasn’t paying attention. I drank while she babbled.
“So normally you’d need a Grabovschi Plate to make real carbon snow, but then I thought, what have I got to get it up to the same temperatures but, and this is really crucial, just in the microcavitations rather than on the overall flake surfaces, and I figured if I used the microwave instead of the forge in Belisarius—”
I gazed stonily at it. The lab microwave was about as old as she was, smeared yellow and brown, a very ordinary little box dwarfed by the equipment around it. After a minute I said, “I made a Pizza Pop in that yesterday.”
“I suggest you not try it today. So, the new graphene torus is a—”
“What?”
“All right, the graphene doughnut is—”
“Actually, that’s not the word I was—”
“—atomically plated in silver, which I got from melting down my Cartwright medal, but it’s okay because if you tell them you lost it or had it stolen or whatever they’ll send you a new one, but it’s just stainless steel, I already sent them an e-mail, so now we’ve got this topological graphene matrix, right,