Code

The final bits of code have been debugged and compiled. Everything seems to be working as designed. Three years in the making, and finally everything is in place.
The lab is a squat, 20,000 square foot building. The walls are three feet thick in places and lined with lead in critical areas. Everything is grey - the walls, the ceiling, the floors. Everything but the personalities - they are as colorful and unpredictable as the particles they study.
There are two general classes of techs here - the geeks and the grunts. The geeks are the ones at the computer screens and the white boards. They are the ones with for whom verbal communication is a second language. Their first language is mathematics, preferably binary or hexadecimal.
Despite the derogatory title, the grunts are not intellectual slouches. Most of them are fulfilling the work aspect of their scholarships and are at the top of their class. They are here to serve the geeks - a position they worked hard to get and work even harder to keep. And so they put up with the jokes and jests of the geeks.
It's an unstated understanding. Despite their crushing intellectual power, they have no social standing in the real world. In the cereal aisle of the grocery store, they are indistinguishable from a RadioShack employee or a video game junkie. As children, many of them were the target of adolescent bullying and some put upon the grunts as a way to assert the first position of power they've ever had.
The geek/grunt stratification is strict, delineated by diploma and degree. But there is one who floats between states. An anomaly in every way - female in a male saturated environment, a social butterfly in field of wall flowers, smarter than the grunts but not (yet) conversant at the level of the geeks.
She leverages her gender in every way possible, although no one at the lab will argue that gender is what got her the job. As an object of nearly everyone's affection, she is exempt from the taunts of the geeks. And she's not above trading dates for time on the campus supercomputer - as good as gold. Although she hates the word, she is most often described as cute when not described as a genius.
She loves her place here, among men who appreciate, rather than reject, her for her intellect but she secretly longs for a relationship that rises above the platonic. She can explain how the random, chaotic dance of subatomic particles contributes to the evaporation of black holes and how those emissions can and have been used to detect the presence of super-massive black holes. Start her talking about her work at the lab and you'll be treated to an introduction to the concept of the desk-top super-colider - how they are attempting to surf atoms on waves of photons, launching them at near-light velocities with the aim of smashing them into other atoms to study the subatomic debris. Ask her about the possibilities and her face lights up as she describes superstrings vibrating in eleven dimensional space and how the theories they are testing can potentially unite all of the hard sciences under one umbrella idea - a theory of everything. Once she starts, try to stop her and you will fail. Tell her you don't understand and she'll construct an analogy out of whatever experiences you give her. But ask her how to find a good man, someone she can love. She will tell you she has no idea, not a clue.
At home, at night, after she's put her numbers to bed - on legal pads, on spare scraps of paper - she lies in her empty room on her empty couch watching empty programming on TV. She does her best to avoid romantic sitcoms or romantic dramas or thrillers with romantic subplots. But what's left after all this whittling away but cooking shows and infomercials?
Of all the men among her peers, apart from the two other women in a lab of thirty-five and a department of seventy-two, there is only one who holds her attention. He is one of the new interns and he is in danger of being cut from the program. Perhaps it was his good looks which got him this far (unlikely in a discipline saturated with males), perhaps his charm (even more unlikely), perhaps his wealthy and credentialed parents (bingo). Whatever it was, it was on the verge of running out.
And she wants to save him - to tutor him on the particulars of point particles, to lend speed to his calculations, but most of all to run her fingers through the tangles in his hair. She so longs to draw up a formula of seduction but there are no numbers, no formulas, no tensors or matrices for such things.