The next afternoon I dropped in on Steve’s office. I guess Hansen had actually sent that email right away because as soon as she saw me she turned and opened up her filing cabinet. Somehow she did it without knocking off any of the magnets attached, although a silvery fish attached by string to a magnetic fishing pole and rowboat wobbled as the drawer passed underneath. Three forms got pulled out, already neatly paperclipped together.
I pulled them across her desk to me, and signed the first one – a glance told me it was a pretty standard liability waiver. The next made me pause though, I’d expected a W-2 or something, instead, it was some sort of bonus schedule. The third was a non-disclosure form.
“You know that Dr. Hansen is an adjunct, yes?” I nodded, and Steve continued after pursing her lips into a tight wrinkled circle. “He teaches, and publishes, and uses our facilities, but his research is controlled by his own LLC. The university has full access to his research, and most of the financial proceeds, but he’s retained the right to license, market, or otherwise exploit his patents.”
“Dr. Hansen prefers that his research assistants function as employees of his LLC, rather than as the university. Our employment office handles most of the paperwork and such, but you’ll be working for him, not us. We still have to protect our students, so most of the rules are the same.”
It started out basic, but that last bit surprised me. What kind of professor actually hands out stock?
“Um, is this normal?” I asked her.
“It’s not abnormal.” She turned away from me to look at her computer screen. “A lot of the adjuncts have their own companies and negotiate for more control of their work. The school likes the prestige, and the professors get better resources.”
“No, I mean handing out shares to researchers like this.”
“Ah.” She pursed her lips again and I was forcibly reminded of my mother’s shorthair. She reached over to check the form, then turned back to her cabinet, pulling out yet another piece of paper. “Sorry, that doesn’t apply to you. You’re an assistant, not a research assistant. Research assistants are usually PhD candidates, not undergrad part-time workers.”
The form she handed me basically outlined all the things I could be fired for, and the things I couldn’t be hired for. It was nice to know that Dr. Hansen couldn’t fire me for chewing gum too loudly. Although it was worrying that they had to spell it out on a form.
“You should be thrilled, Ward.” She bared her teeth at me while stretching her lips back to either side, “I’d never have recommended you as an assistant. Dr. Hansen must like you.”
“Thank you,” I thought the sarcasm would be obvious.
“You’re welcome.”
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I swiped my card under the scanner to clock in. And, like clockwork, heard “Why aren't you on time?” I'm beginning to think Sarah might actually have a learning disability or a missing chromosome. I hadn't been one of the student janitors for a month and he still tries to give me shit. Of course, he's easy to ignore as he never likes to maneuver his bulk out from behind his desk.
I think he might sleep there.
But I'd been doing this for almost four weeks now, so the routine was basic enough. I'd come in, get shit from Sarah, make my way upstairs. I'd joyfully ignore the smells and debris visible in other offices on my way up, and if I was lucky I could exchange a knowing nod with a student janitor. Once in the lab, I'd grab my helmet, my box of gizmos, and spend a few hours plugging them in as fast as I could. Once done, I'd pick up the dead ones. I could plug them back into another computer and it'd usually be able to record which plug they'd been set into, and usually even have a pretty good idea where the failure was.
Tonight it was Friday, so the building was quiet. Even eager little Oppenheimers like to get out a bit like the rest of us, I guess. Hansen had a giant stack of papers sitting next to his computer tonight. Seriously, he had a big loose pile of paper that must have been close to three feet tall. His station was surrounded with loose paper scattered around him on the ground. The papers may have been centered on his wastebasket, but if that was true the professor certainly wasn't aiming very hard.
I came in and got ignored. He was taking a page down, glancing over it, and entering a few numbers into his computer, and then dropping it and moving on to the next. I waited until he was between pages and cleared my throat.
He cleared his throat right back at me.
“Don't take physics 2010. Or 1010. Or any physics class, God help you. And God help me.” Another page dropped to the ground and he pawed at another.
“Professor Hansen... is this something I should be helping with?”
“No. And I wish.” This page was crumpled before getting tossed over his shoulder as he entered some numbers into the spreadsheet on his computer. “Damn T.A., little fart quit three weeks before finals. Now I have to grade all these quizzes and assignments.”
“You teach? I thought all you researchers just used grant money to hire teachers for your classes?”
“They're little farts too.” Another paper dropped.
I stood quietly for several minutes while I watched papers drop down. Some of them sailed quite far. “So... want me to come back tomorrow?”
“No, just run the machine tonight by yourself. It'll take a bit longer since you'll only be doing one side. Just watch out for red lights.”
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I had gotten my first 'red light' on my third night with professor Hansen. He had dropped one of the regulator gizmos and didn't get it replaced quickly. While I was swapping out mine one of the other thingies beeped loudly and flashed a bright red LED. I remembered what he’d said on the first night, but it wasn't automatic or anything, so the burst of flame only got some hair on the top of my head, and not any eyebrows. The devices were basically a little fuse of sorts, and usually just burnt out the little filament inside. But sometimes it was the socket itself that burnt out, and when that happened there would be a more catastrophic failure than usual. Hence the ducking. By now I was pretty used to it, although I also had started bringing a face shield and helmet that I'd stolen from a chem lab in another building.
I put the helmet on and pulled down the Plexiglas shield. Remember Plexiglas? That stuff is either in landfills or museums now. You're welcome.
Tonight it took eight full cycles to run through the box of repaired gizmos. With two of us it usually only took one or two. It was pretty much impossible to keep up with the failure rate on my own, but that was ok. By the time I finished the professor only had about a foot of paper still to wade through.
And then I just sat and waited. I still felt like a janitor, so I tried to pick up and toss the graded papers he’d dropped on the ground, but stopped when Hansen growled at me. While I'm not surprised why lots of people quit working for him, compared to Sarah the Prof was a paragon of reasonable bosses. So I went back to the machine and picked through the broken bits out of boredom. I pried open one of the failed regulators, unsurprised to see that it was just a few microchips and a bunch of wires connecting the leads. The same sort of cookie-cutter electronics that you see in everything from toasters to high-end gaming rigs. There was one of those brown ribbon wires, with lots of filaments, connecting some of the leads to the board with the chips. The ribbon had apparently been severed – it looked clean, like it had been done with a knife or scissors. Nothing melted, no fragments, just a clean break.
A couple of other regulators showed the same sort of damage – not in the ribbons, but had wires severed right where they connected to power. A couple even had damage right on the microchip. No scorching, no melted plastic, no debris; I'd almost say the chips had been drilled out, except there wasn't any tool scoring either. It was just weird. Even the red-light devices looked like a clean break, with just some heat damage to the casing around it.
“Hey, Prof, why would the breaks be all clean like this?”
Hansen stood up, stretching his neck while he walked over to me. “What do you mean?”
“You've been keeping track of all this, right? What breaks, where it breaks, how it breaks, and so on?”
“Yup. And we've been varying the voltage slightly each run, looking for patterns.”
“So why would it break like this? I mean, it doesn't look like any burnt-out wiring I've ever seen. My roommate did something screwy when he rebuilt his computer last year, it quit working – when we opened it up the boards were scorched and melted. Same deal when I blew up a bunch of microwaves in high school, they really blew up. Even the old school lightbulbs my grandpa insists on using leave black marks all over the inside of the bulb when they burn out.”
“These are clean, professor. Is that weird?“
Professor of Applied Physics, Marshal Hansen, just stood quietly. Not even growling or muttering to himself like he had been all evening. The quiet was unusual, which may have been why I was emboldened a bit. I didn't usually offer opinions to Hansen, just did the work assigned. I remember he called me a little fart once when I tried to clean up a bunch of wrappers left over from his dinner.
Keep in mind that I know jack squat about science beyond what gets taught in remedial high school courses. I didn't know it, but I was with the devil at a crossroads, fiddling for all I was worth.
“What if it's not burning out? I mean, I know we're all assuming this is just overload burning out machinery, right? I've cleaned up enough burst pumps and melted and scorched wiring that it makes sense. But I dunno. Your generator uses less power, but stuff burns out just as fast. Except it isn’t burning out – it’s just making bits disappear.”
Hansen was still silent. I continued babbling, “So, like, what if dark energy is more like antimatter, or maybe anti-energy, and when it feeds into the generator it's burning out wiring. Like it’s sucking bits and pieces down a wormhole?
Hansen finally jolted and looked at me, “It's not antimatter. If it had been, you'd know it. Each burnout would be like a grenade going off, or worse. And wormholes don’t work like that.”
Now it was my turn to stand in silence.
Hansen said, to himself more than to me, “But you're right, aren't you? I've been assuming more than I should, and I know better. I have no idea what the mechanism is...”
“You know what? Take next week off. I've got to do some design work, and then we'll rebuild some.”
“Good thinking with the old light bulbs. We're gonna do an Edison, and find our filament.”
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The unintended consequence of my week off was that I got the best grades of my five-year-yet-still-abbreviated college career. I didn’t even worry about what filaments had to do with Edison.
Ayup. First night 'off,' a Saturday, I skipped my last class and came home for a good old-fashioned deathmatch with my floormates who had been bugging me about slacking off with them since I had gotten conscripted to the mop brigade. And I proceeded to remain on the mop brigade, as they all managed to consistently clean the floor with my poor ragdoll of a digital avatar. It didn't matter what mode, I clearly hadn't been keeping up. I guess first-person shooters aren't like riding a bicycle.
Sunday morning I tried again and continued my losing streak. At that point, I decided to put my dignity away next to my kill count and quit. And then I proceeded to get seriously day drunk.
I don't know what I did Sunday night, but on Monday morning I was confident I didn't want to repeat any of it. I dragged myself to class, though I'm not sure how worth it the trip was – I'm pretty sure I didn't remember anything from classes by the afternoon. But Monday night was possibly the most boring night I'd had since I was ten. Games were out, drinking was out, work was out. I didn't have a girlfriend (thanks to the work, drinking, and games, to be honest). So, by default, I ended up doing schoolwork.
I finished a paper – outlining the parallels in how the authors describe mental illness in Catcher in the Rye and Slaughterhouse-Five – with enough time to proof it and even write a second draft. I skimmed chapter summaries for my communications course. I even completed and reviewed a practice test for statistics. And I did it on Tuesday, too. And Wednesday, though on Thursday I tested the waters and got roaringly drunk again. I had learned from Hansen though and tested a variable. This time I was drunk on vodka instead of cheap beer. It was faster, but I did manage to prove the null hypothesis again.
On Friday I studied more. After the hangover faded.
On Saturday I was back in Hansen's lab. In hindsight, I think the fact that one week of effort outside of class was enough to net me a 3.1 GPA for the semester was probably a large part of why I was screwing up in the first place. I think that might have been the first time in my life I put effort into classes outside of attending and participating. But I've always had better things to do than to revise notes. Like work in Hansen's lab. If anything, the lab was more mind-numbing than cleaning up spills had been, but somehow I felt a part of things there. Hansen clearly needed someone to do the work, and I was doing it. It felt good, more than good enough to be a happy monkey that yanked little boxy doodads in and out of a machine for hours on end.