(This was written—and rejected—for Subterranean Magazine's SF clichéssue, hence all the cliché)
"Fran?"
Francesca jumped and stabbed her left thumb with the soldering iron.
"Yow!" Dropping the circuit board she was holding, she stuck her thumb in her mouth and twisted around to see The Dean ushering a group of trustees into her lab. They huddled in a little, self-protective cluster and gazed wide-eyed around the lab at the stacks of old computers, spools of wire, and spiky bits of equipment that lined the walls and covered every horizontal surface. In the process, they repeatedly glanced at, and averted their eyes from, the apparatus on the center workbench.
"Do you have a minute to tell our visitors about your project?" The Dean asked and returned his attention to his guests. "This is Dr. Stern. She's head of our interdisciplinary artificial intelligence project. Not only are the electrical, biomedical, and chemical engineering departments all involved, but they've all been working closely with the neurophysiologists in the medical school. You've had the psycholinguists professors involved too, haven't you?"
"Yes." Francesca rose and, setting the soldering iron in its holder, advanced to glad-hand the trustees. She pulled her thumb out of her mouth and shoved that hand in the pocket of her lab coat. Her thumb throbbed.
"And your funding?" The Dean's voice trailed off suggestively.
"We get funding from several sources. Grants from the NSF and some local tech companies," she said mechanically. "Most of our support comes from a couple government agencies."
"What agencies?" asked a trustee.
Francesca ignored him and pointed to the metal housing and tank assembly on the workbench in the center of the lab. "And this is our creation, the future of artificial intelligence, a machine that learns and modifies itself in response to environmental input. It all started when one of our chemists noticed that a certain silicone polymer tends to self-organize in the presence of voltage. We started experimenting with it and found that the links formed among the molecules corresponded to, basically, the voltage. And once you have a consistent correspondence between such a physical input and resulting physical structure, you have information storage," she said brightly and looked at her audience.
They were staring in slack-jawed horror at the suggestively folded and rippled silicone mass hanging in the clear glass tank. Awash in an oleaginous bath of chemical components, the mass was suspended from a pinkish web of conductive polymer strands which provided the interface to the sensor array and power source located in the housing below. When the silicone luminesced in the presence of sporadic electrical activity, the folds shimmered with wavering tendrils of light.
It looked pretty spooky, especially in the dim light of the lab and the occasional flash of lightning. Rain drummed on the roof overhead and plonked at a steady five Hertz through a new leak in the skylight and into a strategically placed wastebasket. Something skittered in the shadows and a trustee on the fringes of the herd nudged his way closer to the center.
"Igor, would you mind getting the lights?" Francesca asked her assistant, who was hiding behind his computer where he'd spent the last week updating the schematics for the external memory interface.
"Yeth, marthter." Igor left his seat and walked, dragging one foot and hunching his right shoulder up to his ear, over to the workbench. He flipped the outsized switch on the housing to turn on the lights that illuminated the tank from above and below, and also the unfortunate array of pseudorandomly blinking, decorative LEDs set in the tank's metal cap by some undergrads.
Francesca frowned over the top of her glasses at him. Igor Stoltz hailed from Santa Monica; he was tall, blond, and far too pretty to be as smart as he was. His sense of humor was only partially offset by his ornamental value. He did not exactly look chastened, but she continued her spiel without comment. Igor turned on the overhead lights and walked with a normal gait to her side, where he pointed out parts of the device and offered helpful, lisp-free interjections as she spoke.
"Anyway, since then, a lot of work has been done on encouraging the formation of structures for processing, storing, and recalling input, and interfacing with a sensor array and a set of manipulators. These tend to functionally mirror structures in the human brain, like the visual cortex and the mythical language acquisition unit. The trickiest problem has been developing the technology to interface the silicone memory and processing unit with the environment. We think we've found a solution with some special nanotech wiring systems that I, uh, can't talk about and, what's been the most fun for the students, which is essentially an inverted virtual reality body set. My grad students assure me that this thing will totally kick ass at Halo XVI."
The Dean choked, but a couple of the trustees laughed, so she went on to explain the basics of the language acquisition program being implemented by the linguistics department, the pattern recognition people's plans, and the requirement of one of the government sponsors for superior mathematics ability. "In addition to an interface with an arithmetic logic unit, a little more advanced than what you'd find under the hood of your own computer, we've used information drawn from PET scans of the brains of the foremost mathematicians to influence the preliminary structure of the cortex."
"Preliminary? Do you mean it's going to . grow?"
"The structure will change as it interfaces with the outside world. Just like the structure of your brain does." Francesca smiled.
"Does it . have a name?"
"We call it Abby."
"Why Abby?" asked another trustee, a woman in a red wool suit a couple grades higher in cut and quality than Francesca's best suit which she'd burned a hole in last week. "Is it going to be . a girl?"
"Because it sounds better than 'Brain inna Jar,'" Igor muttered in her ear and got an elbow in the ribs.
"The linguistics people want us to avoid gendering it, unless it self-identifies as masculine or feminine, so we chose a neutral name," Francesca explained. Let us not explain the Mel Brooks reference. Let us not need to, for God's sake.
"But Abby is a girl's name," the woman pointed out.
"Tell that to Abbie Hoffman," Igor said cheerfully.
Silence met his remark.
Eventually Francesca asked, "Any more questions?"
"After you have all the PhDs stuffing information and language into it, you're not going to lose all that work if the power goes out, are you?" A male trustee folded his arms across his chest and looked like someone who'd seen a hardware failure or two.
With forced patience, Francesca said, "That's a point. But, as I mentioned, the information is stored in a non-volatile manner as part of the physical structure itself. It can be erased by the application of a very high voltage, however."
"Aren't you afraid of power surges then?" he asked.
"No, we've got surge suppressors and it can handle a lot more voltage than it would take to erase, say, your brain," Francesca said. "And, yes, there is an off switch, if that was going to be your next question."
The Dean coughed and began herding the trustees out the door. "Yes, well, thank you both for your time," he said to Francesca and Igor, and to the trustees, "Now, why don't we go next door, where we have some undergrads working on a nice infrasonics project? You wouldn't believe how hard it was to get teenagers to work with sounds below the range of human hearing."
Once the lab was clear, Francesca and Igor dropped onto their respective chairs and sighed at each other.
"So, you think they'll buy us a new building?" she asked. "One that The Dean doesn't have access to?"
"Yeah, and a pony."
Unseen by either scientist, a bluish glimmer flickered across a fold in the polymer cortex.
Francesca pulled a box down from the top shelf in the laundry closet. Dislodged from its neighboring perch, a stuffed pink bunny bounced off her head. Batting it aside, she opened the box and surveyed its contents with some dismay.
She picked up a phone and keyed a number. "Igor?"
"Yeth?"
"Stop that. Listen, do you have any old books from when you were a kid? I thought I'd bring in some of mine for Abby, but mine are all kind of girly. We need yours to balance them out. Besides, I don't know if he.it would like these anyway."
"I'll see if I can find anything. My parents made me take boxes and boxes of my old stuff way back when I moved out. I've never unpacked any of it," he said, leaning back against the stack of boxes she could see behind him on the tiny screen. She suspected they served in place of furniture.
Later, when she hauled her load of fairy tales, biographies of Marie Curie, and talking animal stories into the lab, she found Abby's cart pushed up in front of the video display with Igor seated beside it. The display showed an image of two rectangles moving up and down at either end of the screen with a small square bouncing back and forth between them. Igor and Abby each held a small plastic box with a lever.
"What's that?" she asked.
"Pong," said Abby. "It's an old time computer game. It's two-dimensional."
"Igor?"
"Well, I was looking for books, but I found my dad's old Atari. I found books too." He let go his controller with one hand to wave at an open box over by the window.
"How about your homework, Abby?" Francesca asked, flipping through the workbooks piled on his.its workbench. The math book was blank. Still. "You didn't do any of your math yet?"
"No. It's boring. But I did calculus with Stacey earlier. Can that count?"
Stacey was one of the undergrads sent over by the linguistics department to model social discourse for Abby.
"You mean, you did Stacey's homework again?" Francesca knotted her fingers in her hair, a little more gray than it was a few years ago. "She should do her own homework if she wants to pass her exams. If you're bored with your own lessons, then we can move you ahead to differential equations, or you can do some applications problems. Fourier series are really interesting."
Igor snorted and Abby's optical sensors rotated. "Yeah, right."
"Well, they are," Francesca sniffed.
"Fran? Have you got a minute?" Sam Hayakawa, the network administrator, appeared in the doorway.
"Sure." She joined him out in the corridor.
"I was going over the bandwidth and disk usage logs, and found something kind of strange." He held up his tablet so she could see the pie charts on the display. The pies were mostly green. "Green is your lab. You tend to use a little more than everyone else, because of Abby's online coursework with the Montessori school, which is well within our capacity and we've allowed for that anyway, but your usage has increased by a few orders of magnitude over the past three months."
She stared at the charts. "That's like eighty percent of the student network disk. Is Abby using it? What could he.it be putting on there?"
"I was wondering about that too, especially since Abby isn't supposed to have access to that disk," said Sam, glancing into her lab where Abby and Igor had tired of Pong and begun disassembling the Atari. They took a few more steps down the corridor, away from the open door. In a lower voice, he said, "When I went to look at the files, I couldn't get in. There was this whole new layer of security, like nothing I'd ever seen. I had to get Dr. Howard involved and she figured out how to bypass it, but only because she found this big honking backdoor. She says she wants to talk with you about coauthoring a paper with Abby. Anyway, in terms of your project with Abby's development, this is great, just what your sponsors want, right? But this is a shared resource and I can't allow any one member of the community to hog it like that."
"And the files?"
"Abby has been downloading French anime, the entire archives of the Ministry of Culture going back into the early twentieth century."
"Oh." Francesca leaned against the wall and rubbed her temples. "The linguistics department sent over some French speakers so they could study Abby's response to a language other than English, but I had no idea ."
"Well, you need to have a talk with Abby about sharing," Sam told her. "You can't let this get out of hand. Believe me, I know. I had the same problem with my youngest daughter a while back. She went through a selfish phase and wrote her name on everything in the house she wanted to be hers. We caught her trying to shave her initials into the dog's fur. It still hasn't grown back."
"Right. Sharing."
"And if I have to put in more disk, I'm charging it to your lab."
Sitting by the window of the campus caféFrancesca and Igor huddled over enormous mugs of coffee. They'd been up nearly till dawn, first triple-checking the voltages in the interface adaptor for Abby's new robotic chassis, and then collating data for a progress report to be submitted to their government sponsors. They'd documented that Abby had mastered graduate level mathematics in a fraction of the time it would take to program a conventional computer to perform the same calculations. In fractions of a second, Abby could solve undergraduate-level engineering problems which normally took an average student (with a calculator) three hours. Francesca was too tired to feel guilty about not mentioning the attitude problems.
After catching a few hours of sleep on their respective office floors, they'd had to run, rumpled and puffy-eyed, over to the groundbreaking ceremony for the new engineering building.
"Seven years since that skylight started leaking and they're only just digging the first hole," Francesca said, wrapping her hands around her mug. "Scheduled to be complete two years from now. I got The Dean to promise me a ground floor lab, but I don't trust him. He looks at me funny."
"Oh, I don't know, I like being up high. And I thought it was cute when Abby took that potted palm from the lobby and stuck it under the leak. If it really bothers you I could fix it," Igor said. "I know how to get onto the roof."
"You do?" Francesca was impressed. She'd been haunting the service stairways for years and had yet to find a way up to the roof.
"Well, Abby helped me find it. He.it found the plans for the building on the server that that the head of maintenance uses."
"And now that Abby won't be limited to wheelchair accessible areas, he.it'll be all over the place." She smiled fondly, then narrowed her eyes. "That was another security violation."
Igor patted her hand. "Yeah, well, we were only looking for the thermostat control for the lab. You notice it hasn't been as cold in there lately? Anyway, Abby has to learn to walk before he can get into really serious trouble."
Francesca doubted that.
"Dr. Stern? Dr. Stoltz?" Fabio, one of the grad students working on the robotic chassis, appeared beside their table. "We're ready now. We figured you'd want to do the honors." He shifted his weight from foot to foot and unsubtly jerked his head in the direction of their building.
As Francesca and Igor took final swigs of coffee and rose from their chairs, a member of the psychology department stormed into the caféFrowning behind owlish glasses, he approached them, brandishing the current issue of Psycholinguistics Today, which contained, Francesca recalled, an article on Abby.
"Dr. Stern, what is the meaning of this? Why wasn't my department informed of this project? I can't believe I had to learn of it from this publication." He pursed his mouth with distaste, as if a linguistics journal were only a half step up from the student paper. "I should have been consulted right from the beginning. Why wasn't I?"
Francesca drew herself up and declared, "Because you, Dr. Benson, are a proponent of behaviorism, and I know what you people do to mice. There's no way I'm letting you anywhere near my.my project. Good day, Dr. Benson." She elbowed past him and Igor and Fabio fell in behind her.
Dr. Benson trotted after them as far as the caféoor, still waving his copy of the journal. "But you've allowed the linguistics department to be involved right from the start."
Francesca paused and faced him down again. "Because, once upon a time, I completed a French and linguistics course sequence. And the worst thing that Madame Picard ever did to us involved the subjunctive tense and stinky cheese. Good day."
After they'd cleared the caféFabio asked, "So, what do behaviorists do to mice?"
"Pull off their testicles to see how they react," she said brusquely and lengthened her stride. Igor and Fabio had to run to catch up with her.
In the doorway of her lab, Francesca paused to catch her breath. The lab looked awfully cheerful, she thought, which none of her labs ever had before. Cartoon animal appliquéand equations brightened the walls. Someone had decorated Abby's potted palm with pink flamingoes. Toys and game apparatuses littered workbenches that had once held eviscerated computers, and a set of waist-high parallel bars had been set up in the largest clear area. The previous week, Francesca herself had taped foam cushions onto all projecting hard surfaces.
Now a physical therapist and one of the mechanical engineers were coming to terms with each other over the schematics for Abby's new robot body. The students who'd been working on this latest phase of the project milled around Abby and the humanoid robot which sat quiescent, its empty shoulders waiting for the transfer of Abby's tank.
Igor had commandeered a late model Honmatsu robot and several grad students from the mechanical engineering department. The Honmatsu robots were dumb as rocks, but had superior attitude controls and power efficiency, and were easily modified. The students had merely ripped off the head, which only housed a sensor array, and built a receptacle for Abby's tank and the interface adaptor into the shoulders. The arrangement seemed precarious to Francesca, who'd thought Abby's tank would be better protected if it were placed in the chest of the robot or, better yet, remained safe in the lab and connected to the robot over wireless. The students had overruled her, arguing that the robot's chest was already packed with the power supply and most of the controls. Less cogently, they'd insisted the proper place for brains was on top of the shoulders anyway. A wireless connection wasn't an option. Even if Abby had a dedicated channel on the wireless network, the necessary bandwidth could not be guaranteed because someone would hack into it, although, as Sam Hayakawa had pointed out, Abby was the most egregious offender in that regard.
Cap of LEDs flickering with excitement, Abby chattered happily with the other students, who parted to make way for Francesca and Igor when they entered the lab. Originally the LEDs had blinked on and off under the control of a linear feedback shift register, but Abby had asked for an interface with them upon attaining self-awareness and language. Francesca had pulled the circuit installed by the students and done the wiring herself. Now she could interpret all Abby's expressions: sullen, cheerful, inquisitive, bored. She thought she detected an underlying element of apprehension and patted Abby's tactile sensors soothingly as she and Igor began to undo the clamps that affixed the tank and sensor array to the housing.
She asked, "Are you ready? We'll have to disconnect your power while we transfer you over, but we'll get you back on in no time." Power loss was Abby's one fear, though it was mostly a fear of missing out on something fun.
Abby's optical receptors swiveled towards her and their hands clasped. "I'm ready," Abby said.
"Okay." She flipped the power switch and, working quickly, she and Igor lifted Abby's tank and sensor array from the housing, clamped the whole assembly into the adaptor, and then clamped the adaptor onto Abby's new shoulders.
Up to now, Abby's experience with limbs had been solely with arms and hands. Wheels provided mobility, but Abby had increasingly chafed under the consequent limitations. Privately, Francesca and Igor both felt limitations on Abby to be not a bad thing at all, but agreed that their convenience had to be a secondary consideration.
"Ready?" Igor's finger hovered over the power switch.
"Go."
The LEDs blinked back on in a pattern of befuddlement, and blue light flickered across Abby's cortex. "Where are my arms?"
"Here." Francesca and Igor gently raised and lowered the arms, carefully articulating each joint while Abby mapped into the new set of servos. They went through a basic systems check and then stepped aside, wringing their hands with not a little worry as the mechanical engineer and physical therapist moved in to acquaint Abby with the concept of legs, feet, and balance.
A heavy spring rain pounded on the roof and the skylight, where Igor's latest repairs seemed to be holding. Francesca and Abby had argued about the leak until she had finally convinced Abby to implement a more effective irrigation system for the ever-increasing collection of houseplants. A Rube Goldberg web of plastic tubing hanging sarcastically from the ceiling was the result.
Over behind a banana tree, Igor was changing the component fluids in the tanks of Buzzy and Tutu, their newest additions. While he worked, he chirped nonsense into their audio receptors and tickled their tactile sensors. Their cortexes were filling out nicely and the interfacing polymer was building up so fast that Buzzy and Tutu would be ready for their first limbs in a matter of days. Igor had already started babyproofing the lab.
Francesca was working on grant extensions for the sponsoring government agencies in an effort to fend off their increasingly pointed queries as to why, if her project were so successful, they could not put those research results to work. The serious data organization and security problems for which Abby had been originally designed were only getting worse. She wrote a fifteenth variation on Based on the results up to now, it is considered to be advisable for the subject to pursue additional education and explore the full potential of the self-organizing heuristic system, pushed her glasses back on her head, and rubbed her temples.
And Abby? Judging by the images flickering across the organic liquid crystal display that had long since replaced the LED array as an affective output, Abby was communing with the university's course catalog and fall semester schedule.
Smiling at her charge, she left her computer and walked over to the window where Abby sat, optical receptors directed out over the treetops. "So are you picking out classes for next semester? It's exciting to be a full student now, isn't it? Did you pick a major yet?"
"Yes," Abby said slowly. "I have."
"Oh, what? I've been wondering, you're so good with mechanics, but I think you could really develop your talents in."
"Medieval French literature," Abby said earnestly. "The program here is really well respected in the field."
"What? That's.that's dirty stories about monks and overwrought romances!" she sputtered. "That program doesn't even have a science requirement."
"Yes, it does. It doesn't require a lab science, but I can take psychology."
"Augh! Psychology hardly counts. And the grants for your maintenance and education won't cover liberal arts at the college level. How do you think we're going to pay for this?"
Leaving the twins and walking to Francesca's side, Igor said, "There's some wiggle room in the terms of the NSF grant, and if there's a shortfall we could probably set up a tutoring deal with the math department."
On Abby's display, eyebrows lowered mulishly. "Not math. Please. Besides, people would pay me more just to do their homework for them. Anyway, you can't make me do math. Why should I? You've got machines to do math for you. Are you people too lazy to press the buttons yourselves now?"
"Listen here, young.young." Igor cried. "Don't you take that tone with your.your." He drew a deep breath and tried to speak, then gave up and stalked from the lab.
Francesca didn't hold out much longer. She joined Igor in the corridor, where he was slumped against the wall, and buried her face in his shirt front. "Medieval French literature? Psychology?" she wailed. "Where did we go wrong?"
"There, there, Franny," he crooned and put his arms around her. "It'll be all right, we'll figure something out. Besides, no one expects the beta version of anything to work."
When I'm done cursing and messing with my time machine, I stare dumbfounded at the empty spot where Descartes had ceased to cogito ergo sum. Maybe I'm in the wrong timeline, because that sort of thing doesn't happen where I come from. It occurs to me that perhaps the shielding on my cheap time machine is leaking and generating logic anomalies.
I figure I'll just hop forward a few years and make sure Descartes reappeared. He knew a lot of people, I should be able locate one of them and ask. Since I'm in a French kind of mood and the Babelfish is working well, I decide on Toulouse, 1638.
Another puff of smoke later, I am deposited in another seventeenth century alley in a seventeenth century rubbish heap. Rising, I brush some onionskins and carrot tops from my shoulders and peek out into a street lined with imposing stone houses. According to the stat-meter on my time machine, the house I want is behind the gate across from where I stand.
By now, Pierre de Fermat is a member of the Criminal Court and necessarily lives a secluded life so that his decisions will not be influenced by personal acquaintance. He uses mathematics to compensate for the lack of socializing and corresponds with other leading mathematicians, including Descartes if I haven.t totally screwed up the timeline.
Figuring he won't mind a visitor who wants to chat him up about number theory (and peek at his mail), I cross the street and knock on the gate. Once the toothless old man on the other side determines that I'm not selling anything, he lets me into the yard and hollers muddily for a house servant. While we wait, sparkling white chickens scratch the earth and throw baleful glares my way. Finally a woman comes to the door and, after looking me over with suspicion equal to that shown by the chickens, shows me in to a book-cluttered room.
A dark-haired man in a long wool robe pores over a manuscript and scratches notes on any unmarked surface. He looks up vaguely at the unbidden interruption. I introduce myself and ask him a quick question about plane curves before he can send me away. That gets him going and I'm treated to an intensive lecture on a subject with which I'm familiar, but using terminology with which I'm not. In addition to the plane curves, I now have a new and deep understanding of the notion of cognitive dissonance.
Fermat sees me looking dizzy and, the consummate host, hops up and insists that I take a drop of cognac. He scurries off to fetch some, leaving me alone with the books and papers. So many papers, in fact, that it's hopeless to rifle through them in search of a mention of Descartes.
I hear shouting and the clank of bottles from the lower story and figure I'm on my own for a while. I turn my attention to the books stacked in leaning towers on the desk. The book on top of the highest stack is a copy of Diophantus' Arithmetica. I can't resist flipping it open to search for the most famous margin note in history. And here it is:
"I have discovered a truly remarkable proof but this margin is too small to contain it" (Only not in English. The Babelfish helps me read too.)
The equation xn + yn = zn, where x, y, z, and n are natural numbers, has no solution if n is greater than 2.
I'm poring over the page to see if he might have written anything else, because the historians tend to keep the best bits for themselves, when Fermat returns, followed by the servant woman who carries a tray. Unceremoniously, she knocks a few books off a low table, whereon she places a shining decanter of amber liquid and two reasonably clean glasses, and then leaves. Fermat pours us both a drink. I take a cautious sip, because I've learned the hard way that the alcohol content can be pretty high in these days, but the cognac is delicious, buttery smooth and rich, so I get less cautious.
Fermat sees what I was reading and the man giggles at me.
"Do you really have a proof?" I ask. I think my suspicion is justified here.
"Of course. I've written it down somewhere, I can't remember where." He waves around at the papers.
"Can you write it out for me? I've never seen it."
"Why not? You seem to have a grasp of basic mathematics," he says.
"I do, but no one else ever proved it until 1995. A guy named Andrew Wiles had to develop whole new branches of mathematics to do that proof," I tell him.
Fermat is unimpressed. Dryly, he says, "I take it that he couldn't get it on one page."
"It would have to be a really big page."
Fermat sets down his glass and rummages around for a blank sheet of paper. Once he finds one, which takes a while—long enough for me to get started on a second dram, he settles himself in his chair and starts scratching out his proof. A few minutes later, he gestures for me to approach and, with a self-satisfied smile, explains his proof.
It's damn nifty.
I have to write a paper for my math class. We are supposed to research a mathematician and write up his (or her) contributions to mathematics in the format of an interview. A fictional interview, says the professor, but I have other plans.
I look up Rene Descartes in Britannica and check up on the years. Eesh, they aren't as specific as I'd like, but I pick Germany, 1633, and hope for the best as I twirl the dials on the time machine to zero in on my subject. This is a low end model and deposits one at one's destination (or close enough for government work) in a cloud of smoke. It's like they want their customers to get burned at the stake.
Pow! I arrive. Coughing from the smoke, I duck into an alley and peek out into the street to survey the scene. I have to elbow a cutpurse in the throat, but otherwise the alley is not bad as seventeenth century alleys go and I expect to escape with my life, although my shoes will be ruined. Across the street, three large men are unloading barrels off a wagon and arguing in German. Right country anyhow, and the buildings look right for my target era: some stone, some half timbered, all dirty. My smoke clears without anyone pointing and shouting at it. Usually it's mistaken for fire and I get water thrown on me, but here most of the people around are more interested in the barrels.
Church bells ring cacophonously and between them and the sun, I guess it's afternoon. According to my research, Descartes was (is) a late riser, so he should be up by now. Looking out for someone who looks more French than the rest, I keep an eye on a straggle of pedestrians. One of them, with long dark hair visible beneath his hat and a rather scruffy mustache, is staring at the sky and doesn't notice the cutpurse (moving on to easier game) edging up behind him.
Even if he's not my mathematician, I figure I'll help the guy out anyway. I grab the cutpurse by his greasy collar and sling him against the wall—I'm small in the twenty-first century, but I'm a damn giantess here. That's the one thing I love about early modern Europe: no one fucks with me.
"Monsieur Descartes? Je m'appelle—" I introduce myself and make my request for an interview. "Pour ma classe de mathématique—"
My mark blinks up vaguely at me. Either he didn't notice me dealing with the cutpurse and can see no reason for my addressing him, or my bad twenty-first century French is totally incomprehensible here.
Sighing, I let the Babelfish take over. This time he understands and we chat for a little while. Right now he's staying with an alchemist and I can't stop myself from telling him to avoid the evaporated mercury. I want to ask him about geometry, but I just know he'll want a table to write on. I point to the tavern across the street, now fully stocked with ale, and ask him if he'd like to get a drink.
"Oh, I think not," he says, and disappears.
I about have heart failure right there. He won't publish the Meditations till 1641! I tap my time machine against the wall and recheck the paradox-prevention mechanism. Damn cheap-ass piece of shit.
The pounding on the door slowly pulled her from a dream in which she had been shrunk down to nanometer size and thrown inside an integrated circuit. She was running frantically through the wiring in search of a number, only to fetch up against a gate where she banged her fist on the source and demanded to be let through. She woke halfway and found she wasn't pounding on anything.
"Erin, let me in!"
Steg? she thought muzzily as she fumbled for the clock. 16:45, the day was gone.
"God damn it! I know you're in there. This is important," he cried.
"Go away!" she called back, but groped for her robe anyhow. Thrusting her arms into the sleeves, she stumbled to the door and pressed her eye to the peephole.
Weirdly enlarged by the fisheye lens, Steg's eyes peered back at her. He waved a sheaf of papers in one hand. "You have to see this."
"Couldn't you mail it? For God's sake, I was working all night."
"No. Not this, not mail. Shit, nothing electronic."
"What is it?" She knew he'd been scheduled for today and she recognized the company logo stamped in the upper right corner of the top sheet. Interest pricked her awake.
"Your 'not fucking random enough' numbers," he hissed. "Let me in."
No, she thought, but she was already pulling the robe close around her and knotting the sash. No ex-boyfriends when you're not dressed. But the numbers were her obsession and Steg was mostly harmless. She wanted those papers with an unholy passion that she'd never felt for him.