HEIDI
Today will be a great day.
Beyond a shadow of a doubt, the young woman held this belief. With a light step, she crossed the threshold from her bedchambers only to see her loving nanny trundling up the stairs with a frustrated grimace hardening her handsome visage; surely she was agitated at the steep stairwell leading up to Heidi’s bedchambers.
“Adelheidis von Schulze! What on God’s great earth are you thinking, leaving your quarters in that thin shift?” Lady Schneider exclaimed, not waiting for a response before bodily transporting the maiden back across the threshold.
Perhaps it was not the stairs, the young woman mused, peering down at herself after coming to a stop. She heard the thick wooden door slam home a moment later. Yes, this is certainly inappropriate attire for breakfast. Heidi kept her head lowered in false shame.
A tapping foot revealed the nanny’s impatience. “For Heaven’s sake, milady, get ahold of yo—”
“Lady Schneider,” Heidi murmured, cutting off her nanny’s speech. “I am fully awake now, thanks to your abundant concern.” Heidi peered up through her thick blond lashes. “Would you like to prepare for the day with me? Or perhaps we could keep Mother and Father waiting at the breakfast table, just for nostalgia’s sake?”
She laid it on thick with a wink and a smirk before Lady Schneider finally harrumphed and dropped her arms from across her chest.
“Enough of that sass, milady,” her nanny lectured. “Don’t think you’ll get away with that attitude at court with no consequences! You absolutely must not expect your family name to save you from your usual antics! After all, you’re…” she abruptly lost her momentum.
Heidi frowned, a complex expression clouding her freckled cheeks. This was the only conceivable unpleasantry she had foreseen, and she wished it to pass quickly.
“I’m to be Confirmed at noon,” Heidi said simply.
Lady Schneider took a shaky breath and stared a small hole in the ground. “Confirmed,” she muttered, her hands balling into fists, “yes, Confirmed by the Priest and promptly shipped off to those heretics in the east to be—,” she caught her breath, “married to some faceless Preussen!” she finished.
Heidi paused for a moment in surprise. It was rare that her childhood nanny would lose her composure like this.
Lady Schneider gasped before looking back into Heidi’s eyes in worry. “Of course, I mean no disrespect to your future husband or his family!” she quickly explained. “Only that I wish that I could…”
“That you could be there to protect me,” Heidi finished softly.
After a deep breath, Lady Schneider nodded quickly, her neatly brushed brown tresses bouncing in synchronized fashion. “Yes, milady Adelheidis. To protect you from those who mean you ill,” she paused and continued quietly, “and to provide a familiar face for you in a sea of the unknown.”
Heidi smiled deeply. Never did she expect to meet a person who loved her so fully as Lady Schneider, family or otherwise. “I thank you deeply, Lady Schneider,” she began. “For you have been as steadfast and reliable as a navigator’s compass—nay—as the stars themselves. I will never replace you in my heart, and I will return as often as I am able.”
Stepping towards her long-time mentor and best friend, Heidi stretched her arms slowly around the taller woman’s waist, encircling Lady Schneider and pulling her close. Her nanny hesitantly returned the embrace, before pulling the younger woman’s head to her chest and burying her anxious, contorted face in Heidi’s soft golden nest of curls.
A few moments were filled with naught but the care and love that had defined their relationship for Heidi’s entire sixteen years of being.
“Let’s get you dressed,” her nanny breathed into her hair.
Heidi nodded, too buried in Lady Schneider’s dress to articulate a reply.
Internally, Adelheidis von Schulze recited her mantra:
Today will be a great day.
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JUN
On a day like any other, Einstein posited that time and space were intertwined.
In a manner entirely uncharacteristic of her colleagues, Dr. Kubo’s expansive desk was uncluttered and meticulously organized. It seemed likely a common curse of the modern physicist to lay out one’s work in their workspace as they did thoughts in their head.
As a necessary consequence, Dr. Kubo’s tightly disciplined mind matched her desk perfectly. Not an errant thought, nor an archived memory out of place. Even the semblance of coherence is often enough to inspire the same in other, deeper facets of life.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Dr. Kubo glanced from one monitor to the next, scribbling out vaguely legible mathematical relations with her tablet and entering snippets of code into an open Python console.
She took a sip of coffee.
She nibbled at a bagel.
She pinched the bridge of her nose to stave off an impending headache.
A knock came from her frosted glass office door. “Enter,” she called without taking her eyes from her displays. The door ghosted open on oiled hinges.
“Dr. Kubo,” the diminutive Indian researcher began, “we’ve received the correspondence we were expecting from CERN and the Future Circular Collider. To sum it up…” he trailed off in apparent consideration, hands absently leafing through a folder of, presumably, the aforementioned correspondence.
The doctor slowly looked up from her screens to meet the gaze of her colleague, her dull umber eyes falling flatly upon his.
Dr. Suresh continued unperturbed, “to sum it up, the FCC-hh’s measurements confirm the presence of a new boson with the energy that your work predicted. They wish to congratulate you on the discovery, and to invite you to their facility for a banquet and an opportunity to—,” he gulped audibly, “—to present the current state of your published works.”
Dr. Kubo gazed appraisingly at her colleague, not because she was considering her attendance, but in appreciation of Dr. Suresh’s manner around her. It was a valuable gift to have a subordinate who understood your habits so well. After running a hand through her short black hair, Dr. Kubo sighed quietly before shaking her head. Dr. Suresh cowered slightly.
On a day like any other, Curie observed that atoms were divisible.
“Let them know I appreciate the offer, but my work is progressing apace, and I am presently otherwise engaged until further notice.” After looking at the dying hope in Dr. Suresh’s eyes, she felt compelled to throw him a bone. “Actually, let them know that I’ll have their next target energy on the docket by next Monday,” she added after a moment of thought.
With grunt of surprise followed by a pained grimace, Dr. Suresh nodded his acquiescence. “Understood. Their servers are still transferring the measurement data to ours, but you should be able to access it in its entirety within the day.” He handed the folder to Dr. Kubo before making to leave, pausing for a moment at the open portal.
“You know, those folks at CERN are getting pretty anxious to meet the great doctor. I hope only that I can keep them from coming to knock until you’re willing to meet them,” he spoke over his shoulder.
Dr. Kubo considered his words silently as he swung the door shut behind him.
If you can hold the line for a week, Suresh, you’ll get your wish and a long vacation.
The “great doctor” turned back to her desk, a wan smile lifting her pale face. She pulled a thick pill organizer from a desk drawer and opened Tuesday’s noontime compartment. Lifting her mug, she took small sips as she imbibed each prescription.
After finishing the small, colorful handful of drugs, Dr. Kubo finished her bagel. An upset stomach is a small price to pay for sanity, she told herself. Indeed, there were other arguably unpleasant side-effects from the medication, but anything was better than the voices.
On a day like any other, Maxwell unified electrodynamic theory.
Her ritual complete, she opened the folder that Dr. Suresh had brought to her attention. After glancing through the pleasantries, she skimmed the summary of their report to find the subject of her fixation:
“Dr. Jun Kubo has correctly identified the exact mass of a third boson in a series of particles unpredicted by any published work on supergravity, supersymmetry, and any other permutation of the grand unified theories, common or otherwise. This unprecedented discovery is exciting, but the implications are yet unknown.”
The doctor smirked, managing her first genuine expression of the day. She was excited. She couldn’t properly feel it through the muted haze of powerful antipsychotics and antidepressants, but she knew it was there, waiting just outside of her self-induced emotional disconnect.
“I’m right,” she said aloud, her smirk slowly leaving her lips, “I’m right and I’m almost finished.” Dr. Kubo sighed deeply as she closed the folder.
“I’m right,” she continued, eyes unfocused, “so when will the gamemaster show his face?”
“Gamemaster, you say?” a distinctly male voice queried, though the source was unclear.
Jerking her head left and right, she started. Nothing was there.
No; not simply no man, but entirely nothing.
Suddenly her desk chair was gone, along with her desk, and the rest of the building around her. She arrived in a void without light, sound, smell, or any sensation at all. She expected to feel shocked or scared despite the medications but found neither emotion forthcoming.
Equally as jarringly and before her mind could reorient itself, sensation returned all at once and the doctor was again sitting in her desk chair, but on an endless plane of white under a black sky, devoid of all stars.
A breath later, another presence arrived in the form of a middle-aged man of African descent with a rough-cut beard and tight curls. Wearing an odd set of grey and black coveralls, he sat a few paces away in an identical chair with his hands clasped loosely in his lap. After a few moments of mute, mutual observation, the strange man leaned his willowy frame forward in the chair and spoke up first.
“I apologize for the rough transition,” he offered, the strange ethereality gone from his voice. “I was so excited to meet you that I ended up bringing your neural net over before your biological emulation; a mistake I won’t repeat for a natural-born individual like yourself. You called me gamemaster, but I submit that your descriptor is woefully imprecise. You can call me Tom, however. Care to learn more, Jun?”
Ignoring the man’s monologue for the moment, she marveled at the reality she found herself in so suddenly. Indeed, the idealized surfaces and colors of this plane were off-putting to one used to the imperfections of reality.
Simulated reality, she chided herself. Her theory had been evidently demonstrated, at this point. The doctor had to admit she had not been expecting her call to the unknown to be answered quite so promptly.
She slowly turned back to the man-shaped creature that called himself Tom. She wondered idly if the avatar was any indication of the true form of his person.
“Dr. Kubo,” she stated simply.
The unknown creature cocked his head, apparently confused.
“I am called Dr. Kubo, or Dr. Jun Kubo, if you must.” She elaborated, “to call me merely ‘Jun’ is, as you say, a woefully imprecise descriptor.”
The creature Tom stood up with a grin, holding out his hand. “A pleasure to finally meet you, Dr. Jun Kubo.”
The great doctor stood and clasped the offered hand, a small, satisfied smile gracing her features. “The pleasure is all mine.”
On a day like any other, Kubo cracked the simulation.