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DIANA
AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS – OCTOBER 2024
The screen of my MacBook wasn’t supposed to blink back at me. Either I was running on overdrive and on the verge of falling asleep at my desk or my computer was having a meltdown.
Checking to see if my laptop was acting up in more ways than one, I hung my Bose headphones around my neck and paused Spotify halfway through “Mr. Brightside” by The Killers.
The loud whoosh of the fan running at max capacity snagged my attention, but only for two seconds, because the cursor on the screen began flying around as if possessed. Great. Something’s up. Not just me at two in the morning.
I made sure to back up my work just as my co-conspirator in our late-night work session walked into the office we shared. Bahar plopped down in the swivel seat alongside me and reached for the arm of my chair to roll herself next to me.
“Why do we torture ourselves staring at all this data as if it might magically morph into something?” Bahar was from Turkey, and her accent made the English language sound so much sexier whenever she spoke. I knew Pierce Quaid had taken notice of her, too, but Bahar was only twenty-seven, and, in my humble opinion, he was about three decades too old for her. So far, he’d only flirted and to no avail.
Bahar released my chair to cover her yawn, then ran her fingers through her mass of shiny black hair, shaking her head so the locks shifted to her back.
“Some call this torture, others call it a good time.” I was putting in all those long hours with the hopes of finding a clean energy source to help make people’s lives easier. And, well, keeping the planet spinning a bit longer would be nice, too. So, it was worth it. “You know you love these late nights, and I feel like we’re about to have a breakthrough.”
“Or a breakdown.” She chuckled. “Kidding, kidding.” She pushed away from the desk, sending her chair flying back as she stared into the adjoining room.
Only a glass wall separated us from the lab next door where my ex-boyfriend was currently kissing Bonnie, one of the lab techs. When did they become a thing?
“They know we can see them, right?” Bahar’s laughter was genuine that time, unlike her breakdown comment that would’ve worried me if I didn’t know her better.
“Surprised William would be handsy with anyone in public.” I would’ve been happy for the two of them, but I didn’t wish a relationship with William even on my enemies. And I actually like Bonnie. “Speaking of weird shit, though”—I pointed to my MacBook—“she’s making noise and acting up. I might need to pause my work and bring her to tech.”
“I love how you call your laptop a ‘she.’” Bahar rolled over and turned the screen to have a look. “Then again, didn’t clinical studies recently prove women have more brain cells than men?” Without missing a beat, she angled her head toward the lab where Bonnie appeared to be dry-humping William against a filing cabinet. “Men have even fewer cells when they’re thinking with their dicks—example A, Sir William over there. So, it makes sense that a supercomputer would be a girl.”
My laugh turned into a long yawn, and I focused back on whatever it was Bahar was doing to my computer, which didn’t seem like much of anything. The whirring sound had about as much bite to it as Pierce Quaid’s little pooch he’d brought to live with him here. Ironically, Pierce’s Chihuahua probably had a better shot at winning over Bahar than he did.
I closed my eyes and tipped my head back against my chair for a minute while she continued to do something to my computer. Maybe Bahar was channeling her brother, who was in cybersecurity, and she’d be able to figure out if my laptop was simply as fatigued as I was, or if we had a spy poking around in my hard drive.
At least something would be poking me. It’d been too long since I’d been poked, and after seeing Carter Dominick that day at the office months ago, I’d had no desire to ever be poked again unless he was the one doing the poking. And. Oh. My. God. What is wrong with me? I removed my glasses and rubbed my eyes. Poking? Seriously? “My brain is more on the fritz than this laptop.”
“You’ve been staring at the same calculations all night to the point your vision, even with your glasses, is probably blurry.”
To be fair, she was right. My gut told me I was one number away from turning theory into a reality.
“I think you have a bug,” she said without much conviction. “I mean, maybe. Who am I to know?”
I slipped on my glasses and dragged the laptop in front of me. But hey, the noise had stopped, so maybe Bahar did have the magic touch.
“You know what I’ve been thinking about, though?” Her tone was almost wispy.
Leaning back in my chair, I turned my focus her way, doing my best to ignore the make-out session still going on next door. There was fusion happening all right, just not the kind we were getting paid to create.
“Time travel,” she blurted with as much excitement as someone announcing the winning lottery numbers.
“Time travel, huh?”
“I think it’s possible.” A red manicured nail stabbed the air. I was jealous she could keep her nails so on point while there. We’d been working almost every hour of every day, full out and nonstop since Barclay Energy was sold and we’d joined forces with eleven other private companies.
I’d thought that sale was a terrible idea, but it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. The new owners provided a massive boost in funding to our research.
“Yeah, you know. With all the research we do in energy, sometimes it has me wondering if maybe what we’re doing here could transfer to that, too. I know our work can result in a lot of less desirable things, too. But time travel would be a nice byproduct of all these countless hours we put in, right?”
I highly doubted anything we did could help with time travel, but yeah, the “less desirable” stuff knocked at our doorstep every day. God forbid our research ever fell into the wrong hands. “Maybe it’s possible to go into the future, but not to the past.” I was too tired to be thinking about this, but since my laptop wanted a break from me, I figured what harm could it do to focus my energy elsewhere. A nap would’ve been nice, though. “Once the present becomes the past, it’s done. Over. Finished forever. Left as memories only.” I wasn’t a fan of revisiting the past, in my head or otherwise. “So, if anyone’s traveled to the future already, well, they’re stuck there, because their present became the past the second they joined the future time plane.”
“So, the only reason to want to time travel is to escape our present and hope the future is better.” She hiked her thumb toward the hall. Three doors down was a room where hundreds of millions of dollars in equipment was being assembled to create a reactor to generate and sustain plasma in hopes our team would pull off a cold fusion miracle. “Or it’s probably worse, right? Well, if we don’t figure out how to make fusion work outside the sun, it may be.” She smirked, picked up her mug and tipped it back and forth and stood. “I’m going to get more. Want any?”
