OAK RIDGE, TENNESSEE
Ted had the good sense to leave without a word, shutting the door quietly behind him.
Forty-two years old, with short red hair and dark green eyes, Kate Parsons was as hard and efficient as the Peloton bike she rode every morning. She was in the middle of her live forty-five-minute HIIT ride when he approached her, his eyes warm and welcoming. But a single icy glance from her sent him slinking back to the bedroom to grab his stuff and leave without a shower or even a cup of coffee.
Parsons didn’t care. She’d met Ted—or was it Tad?—on a run yesterday afternoon on the dirt service road in the rolling hills just beyond the Spallation Neutron Source facility. He was testing titanium jet engine parts at the SNS, the head of his own company, the name of which escaped her. Their eyes locked as she ran by. That was enough for the shirtless man to turn around. He finally caught up to her, his six-pack abs glistening with sweat and his eyes full of longing. Thirty minutes later they were in her bed, where she taught him her favorite form of high-intensity interval training.
Finally spent, he passed out.
This morning, she left him sleeping and got up to ride. The RAPTURE project was on her mind as it had been constantly for the last three years. It was her baby, and the only one she would ever have. Perhaps it was even her only true love. She didn’t need a husband or an infant to care for; her ambitions were loftier than dirty diapers and forgotten anniversaries.
When loneliness struck, men like Ted always appeared. Her momentary despair seemingly exuded musky pheromones in her wake, drawing the nearest stallion to her loins when she most needed him.
She began toweling off in the cooldown part of the ride, still turning the crank on her Peloton. She was deeply satisfied that she had ranked number one on the leaderboard of 2,948 other riders who had finished the same harrowing workout. Not unusual. She almost always finished on top. She flipped through her history screen. She ranked number one in a dozen other recent rides, and never lower than number three in five more. Not bad for a woman who worked an average of eighty hours per week.
Number one was important in Parsons’s world. Always had been, in everything, including physics as she clawed her way up in what was largely a man’s world. She took after her late father, also a physicist, and was less like her mother, also dead and gone. The dowdy homemaker, mother of seven, and church organist had given up a full ride to Berklee College of Music to marry her dad.
Parsons’s kitchen was white marble and stainless steel, spotless and organized like the rest of her house and her life. No art hung on the walls because the only beauty she cared about was the invisible quantum particles she manipulated, or the chiseled obliques she’d carved out of her own torso. She had no pets and no friends ever came to call, nor had she any need to visit or be visited by her siblings or their children.
Still only a quarter to six, Parsons fired up her Vitamix with her premeasured containers of organic coconut milk, protein powder, and micronutrient supplements. The machine roared and whirred like a particle accelerator. She didn’t hear her phone vibrate on the snow-white Carrara marble countertop but the light from the text window caught her eye. The contact info read “RHODES,” her boss at ORNL. EMERGENCY MEETING MY OFFICE AT 8AM TOMORROW. PLEASE CONFIRM.
She did. It wasn’t like it was a request. But that didn’t matter to her at all. There was an emergency and she was needed. There was no one else who could fix it because that’s what she did. There were a lot of emergencies and a lot of emergency meetings, especially of late. This was nothing new. That was the nature of government projects with evolving mandates, shortened deadlines, and oversight committees chaired by people who thought quarks were the sounds that ducks made while they were fucking.
Just another emergency that really wasn’t an emergency, unless you were Dr. David Rhodes, the RAPTURE project manager, a position she’d once held in function if not title before he arrived on the scene.
She’d fix this emergency, too.
The Vitamix stopped roaring and whirring and she poured her protein shake. Food was only fuel to her. She was a machine, a well-conditioned, efficient, and, she daresay, an attractive one.
She picked up her phone again to text Tad, asking if he was free tonight.
Or was it Ted?