Though she spent days in the lab doing research, Lyle focused her restless attention in so many directions that she sometimes took sleep relievers and stayed awake for a week at a time. She was part of a social network that included artists and activists who were always hatching what they called “disruptive strategies” aimed at undermining all forms of authority: cultural, economic, scientific. Mostly their disruptions involved artistic fashion shows full of uselessly beautiful GMOs and tissue mods that said something about global recolonization.
Jack didn’t exactly fit into the group, but she got a free pass with even the most dedicated disruptors of the bunch. Her pirate-costumed arrest made her a subversive hero. None of Lyle’s friends had ever been jailed for their activism, though a few of them had been briefly detained. Their positions of relative privilege led to endless conversations about who among their circle could legitimately claim the right to speak for “victims of the system.”
When Lyle’s friends walked into the Broadway Noodle House on Saturday night, all modded and gussied up, they were a game world come to life. Their gleaming ultralight armor and festive textiles always got attention. They got more attention still when, around midnight, they arrived at their true destination: a clubhouse for hackers called Buried Spaceship.
Sure, it was packed with scenesters, kids who just liked the mad science atmosphere and weren’t actually interested in science itself. But Jack still loved that place. The black, soaring walls were flecked with stars, planets, and a massive mural depicting the jagged, icy edge of a crater that the “ship” had smashed into. From the ceiling’s high, ancient beams hung an antique uncrewed aerial vehicle, its slim body and fat nose suspended from ultrastrong translucent wire. The long, polished-foam bar curved around a row of props designed to look like antique replicators out of an old Star Trek movie. A few even had fabbers in them, just to give the full effect. People who worked the bar delighted in asking newcomers if they would like some Romulan Ale.
Memory often favors the seemingly mundane. Jack could barely recall the massive Buried Spaceship birthday party for Lyle that had been weeks in the making. But her mind retained every trivial detail of one random spring night at the club, when the weather still called for toques and parkas. She and Lyle had been dating for a couple of months, and were deliriously embracing as they listened to reverberating beats a local band scratched out of the shimmering air, their arms and hands glittering with sensors. Lights were strobing over the UAV, its life of surveillance converted into an afterlife of psychedelic crime.
That’s when Jack caught a brief glimpse of the two of them dancing in a slice of mirror at the edge of the dance floor, looking for a moment like strangers.
Lyle’s head bobbed, a manic grin on her face, her body swaying in a frothy dress of wire mesh and a bright, sheer polymer. Jack, wearing nothing but a frayed Freeculture T-shirt and dark pants, threw her arms wide, not caring that everyone knew who she was—the lowly researcher whose only accomplishments were a dead text repo and an arrest record. At that moment, watching herself jump up and down with Lyle, she realized that the woman she saw in the mirror was not a loser. Her life was going somewhere. Maybe not where she’d expected, but somewhere good. Spinning around, she saw the heavens sprayed across the walls and realized that she was no longer living in the trashed remnants of her old expectations.
Back at Free Lab, Jack was too absorbed in her work and too blissed out over Lyle to notice that Krish had gone from politely distant to politely hostile. At last, over one of their increasingly infrequent “checking in” dinners, he came out and said it. “I think this thing between you and Lyle is really bad for the Free Lab.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” He’d caught her by surprise.
“Lyle is brilliant, but she’s crazy. I’m worried what’s going to happen if things go bad between you.”
“You think she’ll take off and you’ll lose her grant money?”
“Give me a break, Jack. I’m more worried what would happen if she stayed and you had to work together.”
“You and I are working together.”
He stared at the remains of a sandwich on his plate. “That’s different. Neither of us is the infamous Lyle Al-Ajou.”
Much later that night, curled together for warmth under a self-heating blanket, Jack and Lyle talked about how Krish was obviously just jealous—of their relationship, their futures, everything.
Lyle thought Krish was right about one thing, though. She was crazy. She came from a long line of crazy women. “My mother says that smart women are always crazy. Maybe she’s right.”
Jack tried to wrap her body completely around Lyle’s, like a shield. “That sounds like junk science from two hundred years ago,” she whispered.
Lyle shook her head. “No,” she insisted. “You don’t understand.”
Her words came out in a chaotic rush. When Lyle was little, her grandmother had lost touch with reality, the neural connections in her brain clogged by dementia. At the time, there was no therapy for this particular kind of protein buildup around the synapses. The old woman thought she was still marching to get the vote for women in the Gulf. Lyle would wake up to the sound of her grandmother shouting feminist slogans in their living room. Sometimes she would just walk out the door and shout in the street.
Lyle’s mother and aunts were humiliated. First, they tried to hide their mother behind locked doors, and then they sent her to a hospice. Each of them, in their own way, believed that their mother had been insane even before the dementia set in. Some of Lyle’s aunts were deeply religious, outraging their mother by covering their heads and faces when they drove out to the voting centers to support right-wing candidates.
But Lyle’s mother didn’t care about politics; she just wanted to be a doctor, so she went to college in Dubai to study medicine. Once there, she discovered something Lyle’s feminist grandmother had never anticipated: Suffrage didn’t mean equal opportunity. Her professors expected her to study microbiology until she met a marriageable man. When she demanded more lab time, they gingerly offered sympathy and fatherly advice. After years of frustration, she gave into their gaslighting with a bitterness matched only by her ambitions for her brilliant daughter Lyle.
As soon as Lyle turned thirteen, her mother sent her to an elite prep school in the Zone, far from home and friends—and far from the cities where women couldn’t be scientists. She only contacted Lyle to inquire about her grades, her studies, her progress. If Lyle admitted to having friends or interests outside school, her mother threatened to cut her off.
Lyle had fulfilled her mother’s dreams in one way. She was a biotech prodigy, and never stopped experimenting, even after the lab was closed for the night. When she visited home the summer she turned eighteen, she had a depilated, tattooed head and flowers growing out of the backs of her hands. Her cousins called her a slut. But her mother was convinced the truth was worse: Lyle was spending too much time on politics to be a real scientist. She needed to do more than play with synbio fashions to prove her dedication to medicine.
Dependent on her family to pay for her franchise in the Zone, Lyle listened to them, and covered up her flowers every time she visited the Gulf. As soon as she could support herself on the Free Lab grant, she blocked all incoming messages from her family. But every day, she felt her mother’s judgment, as if her mitochondrial DNA contained a list of everything that was wrong with her.
“It makes me crazy,” Lyle said, for perhaps the fourth time that night.