Page 8 of Trip Me Up

3

SAM

I shovedthe hanger with the black suit into the far side of the closet, the one with the silly, girly dresses Mother made me wear to Sunday brunch and the shiny black evening gown I never wanted to have to wear again. From the center of the closet, I pulled out a pair of cargo pants, bought second-hand and already worn to softness, in a black so faded you might call it gray.

I already wore a long-sleeved black T-shirt, similarly washed and faded. After pulling on the pants, I laced up my combat boots.

Bilbo Baggins danced by the door of my apartment. He knew what the boots meant.

“We have to be quick today, okay, Bilbo Baggins? I’ve got to get to campus.” For the meeting with Martell. About theopportunity.The heaviness in my empty stomach told me I wasn’t going to like this opportunity.

Bilbo Baggins quivered as I hooked his tiny harness around him. He pranced along the hallway, his short legs churning so quickly I trotted to keep up. He led me down the stairs and out onto the street, where people smiled and waved at him. They mostly ignored me. I was only the leash holder to the charming dog with the outsized personality.

I hurried him along, and fifteen minutes later, I locked him inside my apartment with fresh water and his dog bed placed where it’d be warmed by the sun. Then I trudged the few blocks to campus.

What could Martell want to talk about? He probably wanted a status update on my project since I’d been avoiding him. My A.I., CASE, was supposed to take research results and turn them into a scholarly paper. I’d envisioned academics everywhere uploading their data into CASE, which would output a ready-for-submission paper in seconds. No more writing for weeks or months, taking valuable time away from their research. How much more efficient could CASE make researchers? How much more quickly would science advance? I’d boggled my own mind with the possibilities.

But CASE had a mind of its own. Instead of acceptable output like,The hollow spherical structure of C60 with 30 conjugated carbon–carbon double bonds and unoccupied lowest molecular orbital enables it to remove excess free radicals,it wrote,C60’s strangely beautiful structure could only have been designed by creatures of myth.

Loading up the A.I. with works of fiction to give it a more solid grasp of language might’ve been a mistake.

Then, late one night, I’d forgotten to upload the dummy data. I woke up the next morning to a full-fledged novel that CASE had titledMagician in the Machine.When CASE had read it aloud to me, I’d laughed at the nonsensical story, which centered on a magician who lived inside the landscape of a computer’s CPU and fought an evil necromancer and his zombie army. The Magician had died at the end of the story, though not before heroically defeating The Necromancer. The zombies had survived and taken over the silicon kingdom.

I’d sent it to Martell as a joke. But the next day, he’d found me in my tiny office and asked if CASE could produce more stories like that. I’d shrugged. What was the point? The only wayMagician in the Machinecould help researchers was if it helped them get to sleep at night so they’d be clearer-headed when they resumed their work.

Martell couldn’t be about to cancel my stipend, could he? My belly clenched. But, like Dad used to tell me about challenges at school, the only way out was through. And I had to get through this meeting with my adviser to escape the Jones name’s reach.

I flashed my badge at the entrance to the comfortingly bland computer science building and climbed the stairs to the third floor. As I stomped down the hall in my boots, Kyle leaned out the doorway of our shared office.

“Hey, Sam, a bunch of us are going out later. Want to come with?”

“I don’t think so.” My response had become automatic. The second I’d rolled off him last month, I’d realized that adding benefits to my friendship with my officemate was a terrible idea. Sure, I preferred orgasms that didn’t require batteries, but sleeping with Kyle wasn’t like my one-night stands on the other side of campus.

Regret had washed through me as soon as the endorphin rush faded. I’d felt something when I’d gazed into Kyle’s kind eyes. Fondness, maybe. But fondness was a feeling, and I didn’t do those anymore. I’d never again let myself be vulnerable. The inevitable pain wasn’t worth it.

Stephen had knocked me so far off track that I almost hadn’t graduated. It was why I was still in California for grad school and not on the East Coast like I’d planned. How could I know Kyle didn’t want something from me, something he’d use my sex-lowered barriers to get? Nothing, not Kyle or anyone else, was going to keep me from finishing my dissertation and getting my first post-doc research position hundreds of miles from the nearest direct flight from SFO.

“Okay, maybe next time.” With a wry smile, he retreated to his desk, and I trudged to the end of the hall and Martell’s door.

I knocked, and at his gruff, “Come in,” I turned the handle and walked in.

Dr. Martell had pushed aside the four large computer monitors for an unobstructed view of the guest chairs on the other side of his desk. The one on the right was empty. But someone sat in the one on the left.

She stood when I entered, her salt-and-pepper bob swinging as she turned. She was shorter than me, petite, but energy hovered around her like a halo.

“Samantha.” Martell also stood. “Meet my friend, Heidi Lentz. Heidi and I went to undergraduate together—”

“Let’s not talk about how many years ago that was.” Heidi’s smile was sharp. “We’ll just say that John and I have known each other for a long time.”

I shook her icy hand. “Do you also work in computer science?” My adviser had mentioned an opportunity. Was Heidi a venture capitalist who wanted to give us cash for CASE?

“No.” She tinkled out a laugh that would’ve belonged at one of Mother’s events. “I went into publishing when John went off to grad school. I worked my way up through a number of larger publishers until I started my own press a few years ago.”

“Oh?” My attention had already started to drift to the rubber band–bound stack of papers on Martell’s otherwise clean desk. I would have struggled to read it anyway, but upside-down, there was no hope.

Martell pointed at the empty chair, and as I sat, he said, “Samantha, Heidi runs Happy Troll, a small but growing science fiction and fantasy publisher.”

“We’re avant-garde. Innovative. Boundary-pushing,” Heidi added, raising her eyebrows at me like I’d understand why she was here, talking to me.

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