On her morning walk to the coffee shop, Kate had seen a hawk pluck a sparrow from a tree. The tiny bird made a pitiful ruckus before the hawk killed it, a futile protest of its inevitable fate. She felt about the same – trapped in a conference room, watching Mr. Highland read through her report with a speed so impressively slow that Kate thought she might die before he finished the seven pages of two-column text. Grad students were supposed to do research, not sit around watching old guys read papers.
“You have an error in the text on the third paragraph of page three,” the man informed her. “The word ‘the’ has been spelled ‘teh’.”
Kate forced a smile. “I’ll fix it.”
Her eyes glimmered with hope. “Do you want me to go get my laptop? I could work on the write-up as you give me fixes.”
He paused and blankly stared at her. His eyes were unfocused like he had stepped out and left his body behind. A few long heartbeats later he snapped back to life. “No. You will fix your mistakes on your own time.”
“Sure thing,” she sighed.
Kate squeezed her hands together under the conference room’s table, suppressing the instinct to scream. Maybe if her advisor hadn’t abandoned her, Kate could have made an excuse and slipped out anyway.
Maybe I could tell him that I have to go to the bathroom. Then I could grab my laptop and hide in there until he leaves.
She looked at her source of funding, an old man with a ruddy complexion and cloudy blue eyes. He held his head and back perfectly straight as lifted the paper to his face.
Or maybe I could just tell him that this is a waste of time.
She almost opened her mouth to say something, but she didn’t. There was a strange intensity to him that gave him an intimidating aura. Besides, he was also her sole source of funding. Getting into a fight with him because she’d been forced to spend an hour or two in the meeting room would be stupid.
Maybe if I had more of a spine that wouldn’t hold me back.
Mr. Highland’s money and interest had started the project, but that didn’t mean he owned it. Kate technically worked for the university, and even if the weird guy threw a tantrum and took his toys home she was confident that she could recreate everything. That’s what she knew was the correct response when Mr. Highland demanded that they delay publication, even if her advisor waved if off with a chuckle, describing it as a rich man’s eccentricity.
If Professor Gardner had done her job then Kate would have had ample sources of alternative funding. As it was, Kate suspected that her advisor wanted to get even more money from Mr. Highland so she could support more students without winning any grants. Professor Gardner didn’t seem to care that the rich man was creepy enough to star in his own horror movie.
His focus drifted like he was on hallucinogens, and his chemical smell reminded Kate of the cleaning supply closet. He clothes never changed, and Kate noticed that they were never cleaned either. His black shoes had been sporting the same three spots that had been there since someone splashed a bit of creamer weeks ago. The man refused to use email – or any electronics – instead insisting that everything be printed out for him to read.
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“In figure three you have labelled two of the lines identically. Event two appears twice in the key.” He looked up at her as though her were delivering something profound. “One of the lines must be from event three instead.”
“Must be,” Kate agreed. “Speaking of that data, since we can’t predict when the high-signal events will occur I would really like to get more antennae deployed. It’s not quite triangulation since we aren’t dealing with something that can be fully explained with three dimensional physical, but we can localize the events if I–”
“There is no rush,” he cut her off. “You need to make more progress on the signal processing and transmission problems. Taking time to deploy more–”
Kate ground her teeth. “I wouldn’t be taking any time,” she interrupted, but the man continued speaking as if she hadn’t said a thing.
“–antennae would distract you from your current project. Two antennae are sufficient to test your experimental multi-dimensional transmissions. I will provide more hardware as it becomes necessary.”
Kate took a deep breath before replying. “I just need to send some information to some of the guys in the wireless lab and they can whip up some an extra antenna or two. We don’t know anything about these signals: wouldn’t it be worth it to study their source? If this is really an interaction with another spatial dimension there could be a lot of interesting research to be done.”
Mr. Highland stared at her with glazed over, unblinking eyes. They he came back to life and frowned at her suggestion. “Your lack of focus is the reason for your lack of progress. You must work on energy transmission.”
I’d be working on that right now if you weren’t wasting my time with stupid typos! she screamed in her head. God, I hope he doesn’t think that he’ll be able to send messages to his dead wife.
“Okay, fine,” she said aloud. “I’ll make more progress on that part. You eager to tell the friendly inter-dimensional aliens a few jokes?”
She was hoping for him to acknowledge the joke, or talk about how seriously he took her research, or even admit that he wanted to talk to his dead family members, but instead he stared through her without any reaction. A few seconds later he nodded. “Good. Now, with no more interruption, I will complete my assessment of your current results.”
What a micro-managing jerk, she groaned internally. At least acknowledge that I’m talking with you!
Kate came to a decision: she wasn’t going to wait for her new hardware. Matt would absolutely love to make more receivers, and she would absolutely love to know where the signals originated before she blasted noise back at them. Anyway, it would be a great way to spend more time him.
Boom, work and pleasure, two birds with one stone. And maybe Matt and I can publish together, and then we’ll go and get tenure at the same university together. Or maybe we’ll go on an adventure searching for the source of these interdimensional signals.
She daydreamed about that while she waited for Mr. Highland’s next complaint.
We would be like Grant and Sattler in Jurassic Park, she thought with a grin. Although without the dinosaurs. And I’m probably only detecting the decay of extra-dimensional particles, or maybe oscillations of branes across a contorted spacetime manifold. Interdimensional dinosaurs would be cool though.
“You have placed an unnecessary period at the end of the last sentence in the fifth paragraph on page four,” Mr. Highland stated, pulling her back to her painful reality. “Your lack of attention to details in these regards makes me question the fidelity of your work.”
Kate groaned internally, but she did her best to keep up a smile. “I’ll be sure to work extra-hard to run my spell-check before I print out the next version for you,” she answered with sarcasm. It went right over his head – as Kate knew it would – and he nodded with satisfaction.