E-Book, Englisch, 416 Seiten
McGee Talk Data To Me
Main
ISBN: 978-1-80546-294-1
Verlag: Corvus
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
The BRAND NEW sizzling hot rivals to lovers STEMinist romcom for 2025
E-Book, Englisch, 416 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-80546-294-1
Verlag: Corvus
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Rose McGee is a California-based author who writes romcoms full of sugar, spice, and statistics. She holds a degree in English from Stanford University and lives in the Bay Area with a dog and several succulents.
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TWO MONTHS LATER
Ethan Meyer
Having sat cramped in a middle seat for eleven hours with his knees bumping the tray table, his window-side neighbor standing up to pace the aisle every thirty minutes and his aisle-side neighbor muttering over a slide deck, Ethan had willed himself to snatch a few minutes of sleep during his return flight from Switzerland.
He couldn’t afford to lose productive time in the office for something like jet lag, which should be well within his control.
He’d touched down in San Francisco’s pervasive summer fog late on Sunday night and arrived at SVLAC this morning before seven o’clock, eyes gritty, tongue thick, head tender, and ready to tackle Dr. John Kramer’s backlog of research and administrative needs. Not to mention, the follow-ups from his stint overseas. He’d already forwarded a list of new contacts to his supervisor. Now the process of outlining why Dr. Kramer’s finicky, experimental holometer was the physics field’s best chance at identifying quantum units of space loomed. The European Organization for Nuclear Research’s Large Hadron Collider hadn’t been powerful enough to generate the energy required to isolate those infinitesimal and hypothetical units, and maybe a machine with ten tera electron volts could do it, but the LHC at CERN was already the world’s most potent particle accelerator at just under seven tera electron volts. There might be a viable paper in contrasting its energy failure with the potential success of the holometer, however. Dr. Kramer had promoted him out of the bullpen and into an actual office last year. The months he’d spent untangling his supervisor’s data after Dr. Kramer’s spreadsheets went haywire from a virus-filled download had been worth every minute for the quiet he could now command with a closed door.
It didn’t matter that he’d had to tack his nameplate over the door’s existing designation as “Supply Closet.” Even if he’d had to move out several industrial shelving units to fit a chair and a convertible standing desk inside, it was still a closing, locking space. It was still his own office.
If he’d still been seated in the bullpen, though, would he have seen again?
But she hadn’t been wearing an SVLAC badge.
She might not be on the Modern Physics staff at all.
Or maybe she was just new?
.
An incoming message chimed into his inbox before he could waver in his resolve not to crack open his door for a scan of the bullpen desks.
Dr. John Kramer ():
A muscle spasmed along his neck at the simple, innocuous subject line.
Frowning and wondering how long he’d be suffering cramps from his transatlantic flight, he opened the email. Its only content was a link to a paper proposing their methodology for measuring quantums of space—the paper that he and Dr. Kramer had submitted after a brutal revision process, just prior to his term at CERN. He knew every word of its ideas about measuring the universe’s smallest unbreakable unit of distance. He’d written them all, under Dr. Kramer’s first-author directorship.
He expanded the document and scanned through.
The paper was missing several critical revisions.
Those critical revisions— revisions—had been made late in the editing process, after he’d reconstructed a data set in Dr. Kramer’s section. Another virus must’ve disrupted several of his supervisor’s inputs, he’d assumed, given the mess he’d uncovered upon closer inspection during the revision work. Dr. Kramer had been occupied with negotiations for a high-profile collaboration with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, so he’d initialed the revise-and-resubmit form certifying that the necessary changes had been made, then instructed Ethan to manage them. Like many geniuses, Dr. Kramer was temperamental and secretive, but he’d trusted Ethan with revisions to .
He’d been exhausted and ecstatic when he’d finally submitted the revise-and-resubmit form. Maybe he’d even be moved into an office with a window, he’d rhapsodized through his sleep deprivation.
Except that his revisions weren’t in the published paper.
His fingers flexed over the keyboard in a futile effort to erase or at least mitigate the damage. But there was no time for that—for anything—because the door to his office swung open now, so hard that its mounted stop vibrated against the wall. Dr. John Kramer caught the rebounding panels on his palm, which quaked and stilled. Then he looked at Ethan.
“What happened, Meyer?”
“I…”
“This paper was published less than an hour ago.” Dr. Kramer took a step toward Ethan’s desk, voice neutral even while a vein ticked in his temple beyond a line of receding but immaculate iron gray hair. “Six o’clock Pacific time is nine o’clock Eastern. It would’ve been the first email in every subscriber’s Monday inbox.”
“Yes—” His own voice cracked.
So did Dr. Kramer’s neutrality. “Do you know how many calls I’ve already fielded, asking what has been published under my name?”
His stomach dropped, hard and fast.
“Explain this.”
“I… I sent the corrected version—” It didn’t matter what he had or hadn’t done, however, because the flawed paper was incontrovertible proof right now that he’d failed under his supervisor’s trust. was the fact that mattered to Dr. Kramer. He swallowed the rest of his explanation with a jerky nod.
, Dr. Kramer had said.
He could. He had to.
He located the paper in his desktop filing system——then ran a query through his email for a confirmation of receipt for the revise-and-resubmit form from .
The search was void.
He should’ve received confirmation on the date of his resubmission. But that had also been the day he’d left for CERN. He’d opened more than thirty actionable emails on that date alone: airport gate changes, first day itineraries, invitations to and solicitations for presentations, a map of the Large Hadron Collider with directions to his adjacent control room, and dozens of others. In the chaos, he hadn’t noticed the missing message from . He hadn’t checked his spam folder for it. That meant that he’d committed a scientific cardinal sin. He’d only examined the data he had, rather than considering what data might be missing.
“Well?” Dr. Kramer rapped his knuckles on the desk.
“.” His gut tightened into a knot now as he opened his spam folder. He willed its list of messages to be irrelevant, useless, exculpatory. But the data didn’t lie: an automatic bounce reply for his revise-and-resubmit form from shone back at him, bold and unread. His index finger twitched, and the message opened.
Nature Physics
What?
He’d submitted his edits on the date of his departure for Switzerland. He knew he had. The link in his revision form attached to the bounce reply showed the corrected paper.
But when he returned to his spam folder, there was an earlier automated message. Sent the day before his own corrections, the reply confirmed receipt of Dr. John R. Kramer and Dr. Ethan Meyer’s revise-and-resubmit form. The paper linked in that form was a half-edited version, a draft from before he’d inserted Dr. Kramer’s reconstructed data. Certifying the updates, Dr. Kramer’s initials were present on the form from his preemptive signing during the Lawrence Livermore negotiations.
So were Ethan’s.
And the most critical of his updates were missing.
“I don’t know what… I never would’ve submitted it like this.”
“But it submitted, wasn’t it? Now it’s published, Meyer. Published under . Fix it.”
“I don’t know if I—”
“.”
“I will.”
“Good.” Dr. Kramer turned on his heel. “Tell me when it’s done. I have damage control to do.”
The last time he’d committed a mistake under his supervisor’s name, he’d spent the subsequent two weeks running a punishingly detailed analysis on Dr. Kramer’s latest ideas about what lens materials were optimal for splitting lasers in the holometer. That error had been a miscalculation presented during one of SVLAC’s department-wide monthly research updates. An...
