Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 63 - Credit

Becca heard the rumbling and could feel it in the concrete floor beneath her feet, through her shoes, and rattling up her bones. Everything trembled like an earthquake, a vibrato that seemed to come from all directions at once — endlessly pulsing, pulsing.

“What have they done?” she muttered. Quickening her pace, she rushed down the stairwell three levels below the main conjunction level. There, the primary causeway pipes were housed to one day allow the actual particle acceleration experiments that would lead to all of this — mayhem she’d caused but which she believed she could fix — or at the very least erase all signs of her part in this disaster.

She’d nearly been there from the beginning at ENH. James Harbash, with his scruffy beard and perpetually boiling-over belly that oozed over the edge of his belt, had once jokingly referred to her as the token woman, like a novelty or a necessity in the still burgeoning days of the feminist movement.

“You have to have at least one of them on staff these days,” he’d said, laughing. He gave her a wink as their mutual colleagues shared an uncomfortable chuckle at her expense.

She hadn’t cared about being a woman doing big things; it was just the big things she cared about. It was ironic, though, how James’s one solitary act of misogyny all those years ago had endlessly driven her over the decades to come.

Her drive was one of the things that Frankie loved about her, she believed. Upon entering a room, her focus, determination, ability to be a leader, and instantaneous expertise on almost any subject caused others to turn to her expertise regularly.

Except for that one time. The time Frankie was receiving his first Athenaeum Award for designing the Tri-Space Building on Upper Wacker Drive near downtown.

“I didn’t even wear a tux when we got married,” he’d said nervously as they dressed that evening for the ceremony.

He looked strong and handsome, his jawline shining and clean, the faint smell of aftershave filling their tiny bathroom as he adjusted his tie again.

They were still in the apartment, and ENH was still in a rented space near where this final campus would be developed. They both felt everything was changing and could feel the excitement of walking so close to all their dreams fulfilled. She often had the sense of balancing upon the edge of a razor blade, their past struggles on one side and the ever-more promising future directly on the sharpened edge of the other. It was all so very close before it began to fall away.

She’d walked into the Gaylord Hotel that night with her hand hooked into his arm, and she was confident that people were staring. She wore a silver gown with the slightest train behind her. It was curvy and tight, in a way she rarely dressed, with her seldom worn dangling pearl earrings and matching necklace. Frankie’s solid frame escorted her in, and they were surrounded by a room of ancient and fading architects and their blue-haired wives. Frankie was receiving an innovation award given to him by these men who’d seen their days of idolizing Frank Lloyd Wright lead to nothing but subdivision planning and city maintenance, and for that alone, she knew they were turning heads. But it was so much more, and she could feel the envy floating around them like glorious music.

“Look where I’ve gotten you,” she whispered into Frankie’s ear as they stepped across the lobby. They took a flute of champagne from one of the many circulating waitstaff.

Frankie stopped in his steps.

“Gotten me?” he asked with an unexpected scowl.

“All this,” Becca said, smiling. She brushed her hand, waving the champagne toward the room’s landscape like a queen waving her crozier as she surveyed her kingdom.

“Sorry, love,” Frankie said sharply. “I did this myself. Or - if you claim credit for my blueprints, should I take credit for your electromagnet whatevers?”

It cut sharply and deep, and yet Frankie made total sense. He had nothing to do with her scientific breakthroughs, yet she felt some ownership of his accomplishments. After all, she’d listened to his endless rants about cookie-cutter architecture, about the shortage of creativity in modern architecture. She’d been patient as he worked late nights in their second bedroom, hunched over his drawing board with his t-square and irregular curve tools, his wastepaper basket overflowing with discarded sheets of carbon paper.

“You misunderstand,” she told him. “It’s just I support you, is all.”

“Well, support I can take,” he said and mustered a smile, but somehow, he’d unhooked her hand from the crook of his arm without her even realizing it.

“But you still owe me,” she muttered years later as she recalled the memory. Using her keys once again, she unlocked the lower-level access doors that led through the corridors of laboratories, where they pieced together the various components that would eventually become part of the whole in the final construction of the Large Hadron Collider.

A hundred yards in, there was another shimmer followed by another far-off echoing boom. At specific points along the corridor, like mile markers on a highway, arrows were painted on the wall to denote locations in relation to the primary conduit system housed on the levels above her. Next to each arrow along the path were six-foot tall junction boxes, painted dark green, containing multi-level circuit breakers and system safeguards initially intended to shut off sections of electrical current in the event of an accidental power overload. In other words, if their systems generated too much electricity, they could immediately shut down sections of their power grid without affecting the rest of their operations, allowing them to troubleshoot specific partitions when the LHC was fully operational.

Of course, back in this reverted version of 1986, the grid system was still in its infancy, and the final construction of the North American LHC was still at least two decades away. But the infrastructure was in place, and the safeguards were working. With the rumbling below her feet, Becca suspected some of her past colleagues were already at work.

As soon as she and Gordon approached the front gate and saw the cut-off padlock, she knew there was no worry of scavengers. If anything, it was the work of saboteurs, of colleagues past and present, who’d riddled her own initiatives with continual setbacks and contingencies, warnings and unabashed threats, while she herself had been doing the same to them.

Though she had no way of knowing for sure, she fully suspected that one of those saboteurs was most likely the only other woman to have ever made as much traction at ENH as she had, and surprisingly so under the tutelage of Dr. James Harbash.