There could be a better conversation killer than plunking down your most hated childhood authority figure, shrunk to the size of a man’s thumb. But Patricia couldn’t think of one. The two of them sipped coffee and shook their heads, trapped in recursively horrible memories. Patricia had to fetch water and guzzle it. The café’s stale air had stayed almost as hot as noon, even as the sun drifted below the skyline.
Laurence was staring at Patricia’s purse, where she’d put the figurine away. “I think all the time about how close he came to ruining my life. It’s one of the reasons I’m so desperate to succeed, because I almost didn’t get this chance.” Abruptly he stood up. “Come on. I want to show you something.” Patricia was struck anew by just how tall he’d gotten. Patricia was tall too, but she came up to his collarbone. And he had enough nervous energy for nine ferrets.
Patricia followed Laurence down to Mission Street and then around a couple of side streets until they were near Shotwell, on one of those streets that goes for just a block or two. It was another itchy parched day. Patricia remembered hearing there was a creek here originally, before it was drained or paved over. Sometimes she imagined she could still feel the current of the banished ecosystem.
They reached a cement block with nothing to distinguish it from the other blocks. Laurence pulled out a key but didn’t put it in the lock on the maroon steel door. Instead, he punched a series of a dozen numbers into a keypad recessed into the wall, which Patricia hadn’t even noticed. And then he turned the key in the lock.
Two and a half flights of steps up, there was a door with a bunch of metal studs in it, and a sign that read: “PROCRASTINATION SOLUTIONS. COME BACK TOMORROW.” Laurence knocked seventeen times, in a precise sequence of long and short knocks, and the door swung open.
“Welcome to the Ten Percent Project,” Laurence said. “The local office, anyway.”
The space behind the steel door was bigger than you’d expect, and much cooler than the outdoors: a square loft, with an opaque skylight along one edge of the ceiling. Ergonomic chairs jostled against workbenches, which were stacked with equipment and soldering irons and Arduino boards and laser tools. The centerpiece of the room, though, was a massive piece of equipment, the size of a Buick, culminating in a sort of ray-gun nozzle. It was aimed at a white Plexiglas circle.
Laurence introduced Patricia, in turn, to the three people in the room:
Tanaa was an African-American woman wearing a welding mask, tank top, and shorts. Her forearms were strong, but her neck and shoulders were fluid, mercurial. Tanaa could build anything, said Laurence—in fact, she’d found Milton the same way Laurence had long ago, by figuring out some schematics on the internet. Except that these schematics were ones that nobody else had managed to make work, and they’d led to that oversized ray gun on bent legs. Tanaa waved, then went back to shooting sparks in all directions.
Anya was a freckled Midwestern girl whose nut-brown hair had blue tips, like she’d dyed it and then given up. She wore denim overalls and chunky engineer glasses, and looked like someone who never smiled. She muttered to Laurence about giving tours to outsiders.
Sougata had a thick black mustache, a Southern California surfer accent, and a Caltech sweatshirt. Laurence whispered that Sougata had wanted to work in television and had even interned at the Space: Above and Beyond reboot, but now he’d fallen back on his second-choice career of saving the world in real life.
Patricia wasn’t sure if she should ask about the big machine with the giant vacuum-tube-looking body and the pointy nozzle. But then Laurence started explaining it anyway: “We’re working on solving gravity.” He examined some readings on the machine. “We don’t have true antigrav yet, just a few isolated instances. And antigrav isn’t the point, controlling gravity is. We know that it’s a weak force in our universe, which means it’s a strong force somewhere else. And we’re trying to figure out where, or what, that is.”
“Wow.” Patricia could fly without any fancy ray, of course, but only when the situation warranted, and/or when she could trick someone into a bargain that included giving her the power of flight. (Or in dreams.) The idea of turning gravity on or off, or harnessing its power, amazed her.