The Data As Given

When last we left Martha Hazard...

she and her mentor, Dwight Thompkins, were discussing a list of topics Professor Thompkins thought appropriate for Martha to study while Dwight took a couple of months to run home and visit his mother.

Of course, like many students, Martha went into her list with all the will in the world. But it was summer. A bit of slower time than usual.

And Dwight wasn't in the lab every day, giving her that long suffering look.

Martha really does intend to work on her list, dear reader. Right after she gets a few other things done first. Though, even within these other entertainments, as sometimes happens to the best of us, Martha finds herself having to shove everything else aside in order to deal with a more immediate crisis.

In this week's story, dear reader, let's discover how Martha Hazard adapts when her schedule turns to chaos.

The Data As Given, an In Council story by M. K. Dreysen

The first time Martha walked into her new lab space, she didn't sneeze.

Mercifully. Because if she'd started, she wouldn't have stopped. Fifty plus year of dust and old books and strange bits and pieces of hardware from experiments that hadn't really gone anywhere. Or just got forgotten, just as likely.

"It's turned into a bit of a garbage dump, I apologize," Dwight had told her. "You'll find that throwing stuff away gets harder and harder the longer you keep a lab going."

She'd nodded, which had been about all she could manage. Not that she needed to do much more. Neither of them could walk past the door, the piles in the barely more than a closet had grown too large for that. "So what do I do with all the stuff?" she'd finally managed.

Professor Thompkins had grinned as she shut the door against the steadily growing dust devils. "Keep what looks interesting, stick the rest of it in the hall. Unless it's really nasty, some of the chemicals you'll need to contact the disposal team."

She'd been more than a bit surprised at how quickly the bits and pieces had disappeared from the hall. Before the trash run, twice a week, Martha's fellow grad students picked the piles clean. Random glassware walked almost as soon as she turned her back, same thing with clamps and even hoses.

Which baffled Martha to no end. Glass, sure, you could clean it. Clamps, right, worst case you broke out a file and some paint. Hoses? The buildup alone...

Books hurt her, but those she gave herself time to do something with. In between sending email for pickup of the odd bottle of acid, Martha had stacked the books she didn't see a use for keeping in the hall.

But only after she'd checked them for Dwight's cramped handwriting. Sure, a random freshman physics book, even Dwight chuckling over the Lorentz transformations wouldn't have stood out all that much.

His notations in Carver's lab books, on the other hand. And the ancient Greek grammar with a sprinkling of phrases of power, nope, those needed to stay in the lab.

Once she'd dusted them, of course.

She discovered as well what Dwight had meant about accumulation of stuff. When she finally found counterspace, she'd carved the closet down to something like a third books, a third hardware, and a third kitchen. Almost, she had also made room for a chair, and a path to the coffee pot.

The hardware and the books fought her. She'd rebuilt and repurposed Dwight's ancient generator, which meant an extra roll or two of copper and silver wire, a handful of circuits of devious design. Brushes and bushings and an old laser Martha had torn down and remanufactured...

The books started multiplying again before she'd even attempted to order the piles. Here came a Baldwin, Dwight had picked that one up, couldn't make heads nor tails of it and passed it on to Martha with a "You might get more out of this one than I do." Newton's Extended Principles, the "unpublished" version, had shown up not long after that, and Martha had had to fight to keep Dwight from taking it on the plane with him.

The list he'd given her to investigate while he was gone sat folded and comfortable in the middle of Newton's book. "Just dig, carefully Martha. Nothing significant. And do not attempt to get close enough to see them physically. Or mentally for that matter. Just information, nothing more."

Not forgotten. Not completely, anyway. Martha did remember the list.

Usually. About the time she looked up from the bench space, absentmindedly reaching for a cup of coffee that had gone dry somewhere after lunch. That had become her habit within a day or two after Dwight had taken himself off for home.

Crawl into the lab, bleary eyed, set the coffee going, wander around telling herself "I need to read that, don't I, and I should dig a little into the first name, what's that, um, Osagi Aerospace, right..."

But then the glass would call.

Lenses. The little data locker she'd found the Rolodex in had been caught in Martha's mind. Not the purpose; the technique.

By the weekend after Dwight had taken himself away to home, Martha had lenses and prisms spread throughout her closet. Balanced precariously within clamps and stands.

And wired. Somehow. The wires were obvious, a network of thin, red yellow blue insulation, all leading back to the generator, an ancient iron and brass hand-turned thing that looked barely cared for, if the naive didn't know what they were looking at.

Such hypothetical naive viewer would have really scratched their heads over the other ends of the wires. The ones that disappeared into quartz and silvered mirrors.

But then, that hypothetical naive viewer would have had to take a good close look to see those connections. In truth, they'd have seen the wires wrapped around the brass, iron, and chrome bits of the stands that held the lenses. Martha had woven the wires around the stands, as much for stability as anything.

So precious few naive viewers would even have had reason to wonder how she'd managed to connect the lenses themselves to her wires, and then the generator.

They'd have recognized Martha's work habit, though. Coffee pot, oh it's finished it's business, pour the first cup, back to the generator, good, lens one, check, mirror one, check... lost in thought. Walking purposefully through her network.

Grinding glass. Soldering... well soldering something, even if the to-what wasn't clear.

All throughout campus, in little corner labs, Martha's fellow students conducted themselves in similar ways. And all of them had their special techniques, if for more mundane applications than those Martha pursued.

The not so hypothetical, not quite so naive viewer noticed this fact before any other. Here it was closing on ten at night, last class headed for the parking lot, halls empty.

And yet lights remained on in most of the buildings. Shadows and faces moved in front of them.

The viewer reminded himself of this fact as he caught the door into his destination building; a night class had let out, and he pretended he was just another student who'd forgotten something important at his seat, excuse me gotta get that or I'll be in trouble tomorrow.

He kept the fact that Martha Hazard may have worked by herself within the lab space he hunted, but she wasn't so very alone as that, firmly in mind. As he looked through the edge of the outer door, the one that opened to the main section, Dwight's working area of the lab, with the Professor's office directly across from the outer door.

And Martha's door on the right hand wall for the viewer.

He set his heel so that the door eased close on his foot, rather than the ancient wheezing hydraulic ram. Then, he slid himself along the wall, one hand out to trace the wall and keep his distance. Gotta stay out of view.

He walked the corner around, and while he saw the lights and the books and the random stacked hardware, our viewer didn't see Martha Hazard. He stopped at the edge of the door, then held his breath and focused his mind.

Nothing but lukewarm coffee and the faint smell of old electronics. Our viewer stuck his head around.

Verified the truth of his eyes and his mind, that the little closet of a lab was indeed empty of anyone but himself, and then wandered in to do a little snooping.

****

Martha enjoyed the fruits of too much late night coffee by spending a little time on the throne with her phone. Not that Osagi Aerospace would be hanging around the internet where enterprising researchers could dig dirt; that had been the point of that data locker, after all.

But one could, Martha reasoned, perhaps track the holes left by their presence. If one had a few minutes with nothing better to do, as it were. And besides, Dwight did have his expectations, and that Newton book didn't make good toilet reading, far too big...

The phone beeped at her just as she'd gotten into an interesting new contract let out by the Air Force, one of those "unnamed and carefully annotated, and no don't ask what it's even for" contracts where the officer in charge really wanted to call it "Garbage bins, custom" and the legal team had to rein them in a little for variety's sake.

"Huh," Martha muttered, and thumbed the little app closed. One of her own apps, as it happened.

For the laser.

****

All the business of internal plumbing taken care of for the moment, Martha wandered back to the lab, stopping only to pick up her bright and dangerous light hood from its hook next to her door.

Another pride and joy, this one. A welder's hood, with the self-polarizing glass. Of course Martha had tweaked that a little, adding a bit of this and that.

Plus the pink racing stripes over the gun-metal gray of the hood. Martha chuckled as she slapped the hood down and thumbed the glass to its "Yeah I mean it" darkest setting. "Enjoying the show?" she addressed her visitor.

Our viewer. The one who now found himself trapped behind a dancing fence of blue laser light that wove itself through the lenses and mirrors surrounding him. Also, the one who'd managed to burn the bare tip of not just one but two fingers before he'd realized that Martha's laser didn't moonlight as a Pink Floyd display on the weekends.

This laser was all business, so very little pleasure. And so our viewer had resigned himself to scanning one of Martha's books, a Franklin treatise our viewer's own mentor had told him to make time for but there just was never enough of that these days, now was there?

Martha eased her way between laser field and books to the generator. Once there, she thumbed her hood's glass to a bit lighter setting, then tapped at a few of the meters decorating the outside of the generator. "Huh, that's funny."

"What?"

Martha waited for the meters to reset themselves to a range she considered more realistic. "I think I need to change some of these. That, or you might want to schedule a doctor's visit." Martha shrugged, then put a hand on the generator's crank handle. "Ok, now that we've got that sorted..."

"Wait!" our visitor yelled. "You're gonna electrocute me, just like that?"

Martha giggled. "It's not really a generator. Well, not entirely. Just don't touch the field again, you're fine." And she started cranking.

The laser field flickered; the visitor gulped and whispered something under his breath.

And Martha cranked the generator handle like they'd made it illegal.

She kept her ear close to the coils, listening for... there. When the system hummed properly, and the meter gauges read the way she wanted them to, Martha stepped away from the generator.

The crank handle spun, a little slower, a little slower... but it didn't come to a halt. "Well, what do you know?"

Our visitor just shook his head.

Martha checked more readings, then pulled out her laptop. "And now for the show. What brings you here?"

The visitor started with denials. But the video on the laptop screen showed enough so that he eventually wound himself down to "No comment" rather than deny the pictures and the sound.

Our visitor, standing next to a nattily clad older man. "Christopher, I need you to track down what was stolen from us."

"This is about the gap in my memory?" our visitor replied.

"Exactly. The longer the information they took exists in written form outside of the locker, the higher the chance that it will be permanently released to the world. You need to recover the information."

Martha paused the video. "How do you know what to look for? There are so many ways to record something like that."

Christopher smirked. "Not with the locker still active. You had to write it down somewhere."

"I could have painted an obscure allegory?"

Christopher looked around the lab. Pointedly. "I will take your artistic skills as beyond repute. But I'll still bet on a nice handwritten list."

"Shit." Martha pushed the spacebar to let the colloquy continue.

On the screen, Christopher and his boss resumed; the rest of the discussion centered around just the sort of possibilities Martha had raised.

And one more rather interesting tidbit. "How did you discover her identity?" Christopher asked.

"The Council will always play their games. The thief's mentor underestimated my standing in one of them, and I won her identity as a consequence. Good luck, Christopher. Not that you'll need it, correct?"

"Of course."

In the lab, Martha chewed her lip while she reviewed the rest of Christopher's memories of her, his search to nail down her location, and the preparations that lead to their current situation.

Behind her, Christopher had decided on his next course of action. He did still have his messenger bag and the gear that he'd packed for the occasion.

He searched through it and pulled out a gadget.

One that Martha might have recognized if she'd been watching more closely. And one that Christopher might have hesitated over if he'd still had his memory of their first meeting. "As much fun as this is, I'm afraid it's time to move on to the next stage," Christopher said.

Martha grunted, still lost in thought.

Christopher pulled the trigger before she could return to the immediate.

His theory was sound. The electric discharge should have been relatively immune to the laser field.

And yet, the flow of electrons, at a disastrously higher speed than this makes it sound of course, flew out from the source, screamed the bare bit of distance from Christopher's outstretched hand to the blue haze of his prison.

And turned right around to come back home. Only, because the electric gun had no return feed, Christopher once again found himself on the receiving end of his own invention.

The sound of it, a crackle and a bitter smell of ozone, shook Martha from her revery. She turned to the aftermath. "What, again? You really should be more careful than that, Chris." Martha shook her head, shifted over to the generator and checked the meters.

Then she opened up a scope reader on her laptop; the waves from Christopher's brain drifted across the screen. "Hmm. When we're done here, I think I'm taking your toy away from you. It won't help your brain recover, but it might keep you from losing the memories you have left."

Martha shut the laptop, throttled the generator down, and then left the lab. She needed to park her car at the loading dock, and then hunt down the department's rolling cart.

****

Martin Reneau took three papers every morning, the Chronicle, the Post, and the Times.

One of his simple joys was to wander out into the dewy grass and track down where these various parcels had found their way to. This daily routine, and the faint smile that decorated Reneau's face as he engaged in discovering the slight madness of his paper deliveries, might have shocked his fellow counselors, given that they almost all assumed Reneau to be too uptight for such a relaxed view of the nature of the world.

Reneau didn't expect to find his apprentice snoring contentedly beneath one of the willow trees.

Nor did Reneau expect the note pinned to Christopher's shirt. "He's lost most of his memories of the last four years. You might consider asking him to work on something a little less risky to his mental state. M."

Reneau tucked the note into his pocket, then knelt down to spread his fingers across Christopher's temple and gauge the truth of Martha's statement.

When he'd confirmed it, Reneau whispered his frustration. "Damn."