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I wave good-bye to her. It’s a beautiful day, and I find a patch of sunlight on the grass. I have work to do before my next class, after all.
For the first two years of my college life, I worked in the bookstore like a schlub. But the summer before my junior year, my blog took off. Mentions everywhere—Popular Science, Asimov Magazine, Wired—and my subscriber count went from thousands to tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands. I get ad revenue, referral fees, and income from the occasional product link.
It isn’t a lot, in the sense that I couldn’t live on it once I graduate, but I make more than I did in the bookstore. It’s also a lot more work. It’s fun work, yes, but it’s work.
Right now, I’m working on a mathematical model of the apocalypse. I took one introductory programming class in high school, enough to manage super-kludgy code.
I check the test results I ran this morning—correct, correct, correct, finally—and then set my Monte Carlo plague simulator up for a longer run.
While I watch the output being written to a file, I pull out my phone and find my chat with Actual Physicist from last night and start writing. It’s working! I think it’s working! Although I shouldn’t count my post-apocalyptic chickens until they properly die of the plague.
I’m never sure if he’ll be around during the day. Sometimes it takes him hours to get back to me. Today, though, it takes him thirty seconds to reply.
Awesome. A pox be on you!
I smile. A pox be on everyone! I consider this, and then offer this careful amendment. Actually, the simulator starts off with a 48% survival rate. So really, only one of us should statistically be poxed.
Right now, I’m examining a very important question, for certain values of important. Most post-plague apocalypse fiction assumes that the transportation network—the trucks that bring food into cities, the warehousing and distribution facilities—will break down, but that the amount of excess food remaining—cans, boxes, and so forth—will feed the remaining population for years to come.
This is actually a really bad assumption. Most grocery stores have high turnover in shelved goods. Our cities don’t have much more than a few weeks to a month or so of food stored in them. I’m trying to figure out what percentage of people have to die so that the network of food deliveries breaks down, but the remaining population is large enough that they run through the excess food capacity and start rioting.
I get paid for this.
Hmm, A writes. That’s a 23% chance both of us survive.
I think he is flirting. It would take a giant dork to flirt with, “I hope we both survive a super-flu infection,” but since his screen name is “Actual Physicist,” odds are that he is a giant dork.
Because I am also a giant dork, this is how I flirt back: 27% chance we both die. Until 5 minutes from now, when I rerun the simulation with a 46% survival rate.
That’s about as specific as we usually get. Except this time…
Promise me that if there’s ever an apocalypse, you’ll let me join your roving band of survivors?
He would never be able to find me. He doesn’t know my name. Doesn’t have my picture. We only ever talk about meeting in the most hypothetical of senses.
Maybe, I type in return. Do you have any useful skills? Hunting, gathering, cage-fighting?
…Feynman diagrams?
I laugh out loud. Both tasty and calorically-dense, I’m sure.
He doesn’t say anything for another ten minutes, and I check my guesses against the results as they come in.
Then I get this: You know the instant you post this, someone is going to make a list of everyone who’s ever published a paper on Monte Carlo simulations of network effects?
I know. They’ve done it before. My super-fans have a list of people I could be.
I’m not on it. I’m not anywhere near it. The forums on my site have heavy odds on a thirty-seven-year-old computer science professor in Iowa, who constantly claims he’s not me, and a fifty-year-old dude in Stanford’s Management and Engineering Science Program. Daniel van Tijn (the Stanford guy) actually sent me (or, rather MCL) an email when the argument over who I was got especially fierce one afternoon.
Hey MCL—
Love your blog. No idea who you are. If you ever want to coauthor a piece on quasi-state authorities in cybersecurity, hit me up.
It’s frankly flattering that anyone thinks I could be either one of them.
I started my blog when I was eighteen and fresh out of high school. I’d planned to take a few years off before starting college to make enough money for surgery and hormones. My high-school chemistry teacher told me to be careful, that if I got out of the habit of learning, I’d lose the knack.
“People say they’ll go to college eventually,” he told me, “but they get comfortable, and then they don’t.”
I started my blog as a promise to myself that I wasn’t going to stop learning.
The first four years weren’t my best. I was fresh out of high school and had a lot to learn. I made a lot of stupid mistakes. The consensus is that someone else must have been running the blog back then.
But I did learn, and I did get better, and even if what I do is silly now, I’m proud of the fact that it’s sound silliness.
So sound that people mistake my silliness for intelligence.
I started my blog as a promise that I wasn’t going to stop learning, and maybe that’s why my final year before I graduate seems so bittersweet. I need a job—an actual job that pays adult bills—and people who hire actuaries are notoriously stodgy. I’m graduating this year, and student loans and health insurance won’t pay for themselves. I’m not sure I’ll miss the arguments over my identity, or the occasional dust-ups when climate change deniers decide I’m a political shill.
But I’ll miss making network models of flu infection.
Let them make their list, I tell Actual Physicist. I’ll just smile mysteriously.
I close my laptop and shut my eyes, letting the breeze play on my face. I know I’ll have to shutter my blog when I graduate. I won’t have time to work and do all of this. I’m going to miss talking to him about science.
Sure, I tell myself mockingly. Science. That’s all this is.
Actual Physicist doesn’t want to know who I am, and that’s fine by me. Tina says I give everyone four chances to fuck up before I really trust them. She’s joking—I think—but I really don’t believe in unconditional anything. I only believe in conditions I have yet to discover.
I like Actual Physicist. I like talking to him. I like our casual, hypothetical flirtation. I’m not in any hurry to discover what his conditions will be.
4
JAY
Two weeks later
“Gosh. Is that rap?”
I look up from my desk. There are multiple faculty offices in this hall, and I’ve made the mistake of leaving my door open and the Hamilton soundtrack on.
Eric Llewellyn is one of the older faculty—much older. He’s one of those guys who was around in the somewhat early days of quantum mechanics, back when, “but how can anything be both a particle and a wave?” was a question that real people with real doctoral degrees still asked in confusion.
For a moment, I imagine trying to explain to Eric precisely where in the musical lexicon Hamilton sits. Except someone who still thinks of wave-particle duality as a fundamental breakthrough instead of a fact of life will undoubtedly freak over the melding of hip-hop and Broadway musical.
“Yes,” I say instead. “It is.”
“Weird,” he muses. “I thought Asians didn’t like black people.”
“Uh.” I have no response to this. It is wrong on so many levels that I don’t even know where to start. The wrongness expands upon examination into more wrongness. The boundaries of his wrongness are infinite and fractal.
But he isn’t finished. “I like rap. One of my students showed me MC Hawking.”
“Uh.” This is apparently the only word I will manage. MC Hawking is a parody. Someone thought a synthetic voice sounded like Stephen Hawking’s computerized text-to-speech program, and proceeded to make an album about science. The only way this conversation could get worse would be if…
He strikes a pose and flashes an awkward handsignal. “E equals MC! E equals MC Hawking, motherfuckers!”
…Yeah. That would do it. It’s much worse when Eric starts rapping.
I turn off my music.
“Oh. Right.” He snaps his fingers. “Ryan and Dave wanted to know if you wanted to hit up Kerr for lunch tomorrow.”
No, I want to say, I’m good. But I don’t have tenure, and I can’t afford to alienate people.
My graduate advisor gave me a lot of advice when I started. Things like: Publish amazing work. Do capable service. Nobody cares about your teaching. But also: Be friendly. Let everyone feel like you’re on their side.
“Sure,” I say instead.
“Groovy, dude.” He exaggerates the last word. He probably thinks this is how people my age actually talk. “See you at the physical seminar.”
“Yeah. Dude.”
He makes finger guns at me and leaves. I consider banging my head against the wall.
I’m not lonely, I remind myself. I’m too busy to be fucking lonely. I have tons of friends. I keep in touch with them as best as I can. We have dinner together when we end up in the same place. Sometimes, as it has with Gabe, my path intersects one of theirs for a year or two.
In real life, I mostly have students and colleagues. I’m friendly with my graduate students—we work together after all—but I’d be an idiot to ignore the power dynamics at play. I control how long they labor at a scarcely livable wage. I pass judgment on their work. I’m going to be their primary reference for at least a decade. It doesn’t matter that I’m only five years older. We can be friendly, but we can’t really be friends.
As for colleagues? Colleagues can be friends, and some of them are, never mind the politics of them voting on my tenure application in a handful of years. We all speak the same language—science—and that forms bonds, MC Eric Llewellyn not withstanding.
