Archive of Our Own

The hallway outside Anderson’s office was narrow and entirely without personality. Ryland had been coming here since his first year of undergrad and had never found it anything other than hostile. The doors were identical, lined at regular intervals on both sides, each one a flat slab of institutional beige with a name placard screwed in at eye level. There were no chairs. There were no plants. There was a vending machine at the far end near the stairwell, and next to it a bin with a lid that had stopped closing properly sometime around when Ryland had been studying for his qualifying exams, and no one had seen fit to address this in the intervening years. 

He stood in front of the door. Dr. G. Anderson, the placard read. He knocked three times and waited. The G stood for Gerald, which Ryland had discovered on a conference program in his second year and never once said aloud. Anderson had never once told him to come in either. After a moment, Ryland opened the door himself.

The office smelled like books and the coffee Anderson bought from the machine down the hall. Two cups on the mahogany desk. It was the only single office on the floor, and the chair behind the desk was not the chair the department had provided. Anderson sat in it, jacket on as always, even in his own office, on a Tuesday afternoon in May.

“Ryland,” Anderson said.

Not Dr. Grace. Never Dr. Grace, not since the viva, since the handshake in the hallway outside the examination room where three people had confirmed, formally and finally, that he knew more about molecular biosignatures than most people alive. Seven years of Ryland.

“Dr. Anderson,” he replied. 

He sat and took the coffee. He had hated it ever since the first time Anderson had handed it to him across that desk, back when he’d been twenty-two and too polite to say so, and hadn’t said so in the years since. Ryland had stopped finding it generous somewhere around year three. 

“How have you been?” Anderson asked.

Ryland shot him an unimpressed look. He had never opened a meeting with anything other than the reason for the meeting.

Anderson lifted both hands slightly, placating, and moved on. “You look like you haven’t slept.”

He probably did. He hadn’t showered either, and he was wearing yesterday’s clothes, something that had not been a conscious decision. Ryland was only in this building at all because Anderson had sent him three emails and he’d run out of reasons to ignore the third. 

He hadn’t been planning to get out of bed today. He had gotten out of bed anyway, which he felt deserved some credit, and no one seemed inclined to give him any.

“I’m fine,” he said instead.

“You don’t look fine,” Anderson said, without inflection.

“What did you want to talk about?” Ryland asked, eyes on the coffee as he swirled it. 

Anderson looked at him for a moment. “Is there something going on with you? Outside of work?”

“What did you want to talk about,” he said again, still looking at the coffee.

A pause. Anderson set down his cup. “The preprint.”

Ryland let out a short breath, almost a laugh. “Yeah,” he said. “I figured.”

“Then let’s not waste each other’s time.” Anderson picked up his coffee again. “The department has seen it. Halverson has seen it. I’ve had two calls this morning, Ryland. Two. Before nine o’clock.”

 “Good,” he said, and meant it. “That means people are reading it.”

Anderson closed his eyes for a moment. Ryland felt a small, petty thrill at successfully testing his patience. 

“The Goldilocks Zone Is for Idiots section—”

“Is accurate.”

“—names fourteen active researchers by name.”

“Fifteen,” Ryland corrected. “Marchetti’s lab published in January.” A beat. “I added a footnote.”

Anderson frowned at him. “Look, nobody’s asking you to agree with them. You could simply not publish a paper that calls Dr. Michael Bennett a fossilized legacy admission to the field.”

Ryland took a sip of coffee. It was terrible. “I called his work that.”

“With his name on it.”

Ryland said nothing. Outside, someone walked past in the hallway, footsteps loud then fading. Anderson’s office had a window that faced the interior courtyard, and through it Ryland could see a rectangle of sky that was the grey of a Seattle March that had extended, unasked, into May. His father loved May. He had grown things in May, every year. Nothing complicated, tomatoes and some herbs he could never keep straight. Ryland didn’t garden and hadn’t inherited the impulse.

“This isn’t about whether you’re right,” Anderson said, more carefully now. “You may well be right. I’ve read it. The methodology is good. The argument you’re making about sulfur-reducing microbe analogs in high-pressure anoxic environments is the most interesting thing this department has produced in three years.”

Ryland looked up. His face betrayed him for a fraction of a second before he managed to contain it. 

“But being right,” Anderson said, “is not sufficient. You know this. I taught you this.”

“The field rewards consensus, not accuracy.” Ryland said it flatly, like a quote. “Yeah. I remember.”

“No, Ryland.” He shook his head. “What I tried to teach you is that the field is made of people.” Anderson leaned forward slightly. “People who are now going to spend the next six months making sure your career reflects the opinion you have expressed of theirs.” He paused. “They won’t respond well to being called idiots in peer-reviewed literature.”

“It’s not peer-reviewed yet,” Ryland said. “It’s on arXiv.”

Anderson stared at him. “Which means everyone has already read it and no journal will touch it now without knowing exactly what they’re signing up for.” He set down his cup. “Withdraw it. Clean it up. Resubmit to Astrobiology or Origins of Life with the names redacted and the section header changed to something that doesn’t look like a provocation, and you will have a paper that actually advances your career instead of—”

“No.”

“Ryland—”

“No,” Ryland said again. He was holding the coffee cup. He put it down. “I’ve been making this argument for four years. Four years of Marchetti opening his mouth at every Q&A and—” he stopped. “Four years of have you considered, Dr. Grace. Have you considered.” He breathed. “I’ve considered it. More carefully than they’ve considered anything in their entire careers. I’m not wrong. I’m just—I’m not—” he stopped again. 

He was more tired than he’d realized. The words had run out somewhere in the middle.

Anderson was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was different again.

“Is this about something else?”

Ryland said nothing. 

“Your father,” Anderson said. Carefully. “I heard. I should have said something sooner. I’m sorry.”

Ryland looked toward the window. The courtyard outside was the same grey it had been. He had the strange sensation, not unfamiliar lately, of being in a room while also watching himself be in a room from a slight distance. 

“I’m not taking it down,” he said. The steadiness of his own voice almost threw him off. “I’m submitting it to Origins of Life next week. If they won’t take it, someone else will. And if no one will, it’ll stay on arXiv and people will cite it anyway, in ten years, when the rest of the field has decided to catch up.”

Anderson said nothing. He had the expression he sometimes got, the one that Ryland had spent years trying to decode and had eventually concluded meant that Anderson was looking at something he recognized. Ryland knew this the way he knew the coffee was terrible and the bin lid hadn’t closed in years and the placard outside said G and not Gerald. 

“I’ll note,” he said finally, “that I advised against this.”

“Noted.”

“For the record.”

“Also noted.”

Ryland stood. The chair scraped against the floor, louder than he intended. He was at the door when Anderson spoke again. 

“You’ve been invited to speak at UNESCO,” Anderson said. “There’s a conference in Copenhagen in June. The department received the invitation last week.”

Ryland stopped and turned. “I know.”

Anderson studied him for a moment. “I’d think carefully about what you say on that stage. There will be people there whose names you’ve already put in print.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

He closed the door behind him and stood there for half a second with his hand still on the handle. He let go and didn’t move for a moment. 

Ryland was sure he was right. That certainty, he thought as he walked toward the stairs, didn’t seem to help much.

The classroom door was still closed when Ryland got there, meaning Kevin was running late. Ryland stood in the hallway outside his own lecture hall with his notes under his arm, with four minutes to spare that he would have preferred not to be conscious for.

He leaned against the wall. The hallway here was marginally better than Anderson’s floor, wider, at least, with a window at the far end that let in actual daylight. You were still supposed to pass through it, not stand in it. He stood in it anyway. 

The door opened and Kevin came out backwards, still talking to the last student, something about office hours, and then turned and stopped when he saw Ryland. 

“Hey man,” Kevin said. “Sorry, sorry—we ran over. They had questions.”

“It’s alright,” Ryland replied. “My students won’t complain.”

This was true. His students never complained about anything. He had first taken that as a sign he was doing well, but eventually he realised they had stopped expecting anything from him. The ones who showed up filed in, took notes, and filed out. He was not, he had accepted, anyone’s favourite teacher. 

Kevin held the door open for him and Ryland caught it, and for a moment they were just two people in a doorway with nothing urgent to say, which was more or less the way their relationship had always operated. They had shared an apartment for two and a half years during their PhDs. It was enough time to know someone’s coffee order, sleep schedule, and the sounds they made when they were stressed, and not quite enough time to become someone the other person would actually call. 

“Uh, dude,” Kevin said.

Ryland looked at him.

“I read the preprint.” Kevin had his folder pressed to his chest. “Well. Most of it. The abstract and the—the Goldilocks section.”

That was the section everyone seemed to fixate on. Ryland couldn’t blame them. It was the best part. 

“And?”

“And,” Kevin said, “I mean. Ryland.” He said it the way people said it when they meant what were you thinking, except Kevin had never been quite direct enough to say what were you thinking out loud. 

“You called Dr. Bennett intellectually unremarkable,” he said. “He’s an eminence in the field.” 

Ryland rolled his eyes. “I said his argument was unremarkable. The intelligence thing was technically a different sentence.”

Kevin looked at him for a moment. He had roomed with Ryland long enough to know that this particular conversational approach led nowhere productive.

“You know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean,” Ryland said. “I just think it’s a bad point.”

A student appeared at the far end of the corridor and Kevin stepped back slightly to let her pass. They both waited in silence until she had gone.

“Look,” Kevin said, and lowered his voice in a way that Ryland found mildly insulting, as if they were discussing something shameful. “I get it. I do. You’ve been—it’s been a weird few months. And I know the water thing has been your whole—”

“The water thing,” Ryland said.

Kevin stopped.

“The central assumption,” Ryland said, “underpinning the entire field of astrobiology—the one that’s been eliminating entire categories of possible life from our models for decades—” He stopped.

He was aware he was doing the thing again. He made himself stop doing the thing.

“Yeah,” he said. “The water thing.”

Kevin winced. “Sorry. I—yeah.” He pressed his lips together briefly. “But you can’t just name people, man. You can’t put people’s names in a paper like that and expect—”

“I can, actually. I did.” He shrugged. “It’s done.”

“I know it’s done. That’s the problem.” Kevin shifted his folder to his other arm. “Halverson’s been talking. I heard from Sarah in the admin office that the department is looking at your grant allocation for the next cycle.”

“Okay,” he replied.

Ryland had known this was coming. Knowing it was coming did not make it feel any differently. He thought, briefly, about the car he still couldn’t afford.

“Okay?” Kevin looked at him. “Ryland, that’s your funding.”

Ryland glanced down the corridor. He lowered his voice, as if the walls were listening. “If Halverson wants to pull my fucking funding,” he said, “because I pointed out half his department built thirty years of models on an assumption nobody actually questioned? Fine. Great. Fantastic use of institutional resources. I don’t give a shit.” 

Kevin stared at him.

“I don’t,” Ryland said, too quickly. “I really don’t.”

“So—” Kevin stopped. He looked like he was trying to find an angle that would work and failing. “Is everything alright? Like, actually? You look—” 

“I’m fine.”

Kevin held his gaze for a moment longer, then let it go. He had clearly decided it wasn’t worth pushing further. Ryland recognized the look. He had been getting it with increasing frequency lately.

Kevin held up a hand. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. Just—try not to blow up anything else for a while. That’s all I’m saying.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he replied.

It was the same thing he’d said to Anderson. He was starting to think he meant it less each time.

Kevin nodded, said something about seeing him around, and headed off down the corridor. Ryland watched him go for a second, then turned and pushed open the classroom door. 

Thirty-two faces looked up at him from the tiered seats. Nobody smiled. Nobody looked particularly unhappy, either. They just looked present, like people who had been told where to be and had obeyed. It was the most he seemed to be able to generate these days.

He set his notes on the lectern and brought up the presentation on the projector above him.

“Right,” he said. “Where were we? Mitosis. Prophase—we were in prophase.” 

He clicked to the next slide. A diagram appeared behind him, chromosomes condensing into their familiar shapes, spindle fibers reaching across the cell. 

“Quick recap. The chromosomes have condensed. The spindle apparatus is forming. The cell is, essentially, preparing to divide everything it is into two equal parts.” He looked at the room. Nobody was writing this down. “The nuclear envelope breaks down at the end of prophase and we move into prometaphase—that’s where the spindle fibers actually attach to the chromosomes at a structure called the kinetochore.” He spelled it out. Nobody wrote that down either.

He clicked forward again.

“Questions before we move on to prometaphase?”

Silence. Thirty-two faces, patient and blank.

“I’ll take that as a no,” he murmured, and continued.

Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over a grey Copenhagen morning. Rows of pale wooden chairs faced a podium that seemed untouched by anything as unglamorous as a dry-erase marker. It was, Ryland thought, a very good room for being wrong in front of people. 

He had arrived early and spent ten minutes by the coffee station at the back trying to look as if he had better things to do than talk to anyone. The coffee here was genuinely good, which was disorienting, and there were cookies, which were the best thing about these events. He was on his second chocolate chip one when a woman appeared at his elbow, early forties, the lanyard of a European research institute he vaguely recognized around her neck. 

“Dr. Grace,” she said, and smiled like she meant it. “It’s nice to meet you. I’m a fan of your work.”

Ryland looked at her with his mouth stuffed with cookies. “All of it?”

Her mouth curved slightly. “Yes,” she said. “I’m Dr. Martínez, Universidad Complutense. I work on chemolithotrophic metabolisms in deep sea vent systems.” She extended a hand. “Your argument about the thermodynamic viability of non-aqueous solvents at high pressure—I find it convincing.”

Something in Ryland’s chest unclenched slightly.

“The sulfur-reducing analog models—” he started, then realized he was already reaching for her hand and adjusted mid-motion, shaking it a fraction too late. “Yes. Sorry. Yes.”

“Specifically the energy yield calculations. We’ve been seeing anomalous metabolic signatures in our vent samples that don’t map onto standard water-based models.” She tilted her head. “Have you considered applying the framework to Europa’s subsurface? The pressure gradients alone—”

“I have,” Ryland said, almost giddily, and they talked for eleven minutes about Europa and chemolithotrophs. 

It was the best eleven minutes he’d had in months, possibly longer, and he was in the middle of a sentence about sulfuric acid concentrations when the session moderator called for people to take their seats. 

He found a chair in the third row, set his conference program on his knee, and read it properly for the first time. No authors listed beyond institutional affiliation. He glanced up at the podium. Dr. Carlo Marchetti was calmly setting up his laptop with the kind of ease that came from having done this before, or something very much like it, and expecting it to go well. 

Ryland sat very still for a moment. Something dropped in his chest. He had not checked the schedule.

He should have checked the schedule.

Marchetti’s presentation skills were excellent. That was the first thing. It was seventy slides of immaculate methodology, and peer-reviewed citations stacked like sandbags. The topic, Ryland understood within the first three slides, was a direct response to his paper.

He never said Ryland’s name. He never said Astrobiology and Planetary Sciences, the journal that had published the paper eight weeks ago after three others had declined. He said recent publications and some researchers have proposed and it has been suggested in certain quarters, and each time he said it he moved on immediately, efficiently, without pause, as though anything more specific would have been unnecessary. 

His paper was in the room, and Marchetti was talking around it the way you avoid stepping on chewing gum stuck to a sidewalk. 

The argument itself was not stupid. That was the second thing, and it was considerably worse than the first. Marchetti’s central claim was that the thermodynamic conditions required for non-aqueous solvent biochemistry were so energetically costly that they effectively precluded the development of self-replicating systems, that the very environments Ryland’s models pointed to as candidates, were precisely the environments most hostile to the kind of molecular complexity that preceded life. It was a real argument. It was also, Ryland was completely certain, wrong in a way that Marchetti’s methodology couldn’t see, because those models had been built on the same assumption they were supposed to be testing. He was checking his work with the same math that might have the error in it. 

He was losing. On the slides, he was losing. The room nodded in slow, synchronized agreement, as if the argument had already been settled. Ryland sat in the third row with his conference program creasing in his hands and watched it happen. 

He put his hand up during the Q&A before he had fully decided to.

The moderator nodded at him. Marchetti looked up from the podium. He had clearly been expecting this. 

“Dr. Grace,” Marchetti said pleasantly. “Of course.”

Someone handed Ryland a microphone. He stood.

“Your energy yield calculations in slides thirty-one through thirty-four,” Ryland said. “You’re using the Gibbs free energy values for standard pressure.”

“That’s correct.”

“The environments I model operate at pressures between five hundred and two thousand atmospheres. The reactions you’re calling energetically prohibitive become favorable at depth. Your methodology doesn’t account for that.”

A pause. Marchetti smiled. “The pressures required to achieve those thermodynamic conditions don’t occur in the environments most likely to support abiogenesis—”

“According to aqueous models. Which is circular. You’re using water-based assumptions to define the candidate environments and then concluding that non-aqueous environments aren’t candidates.”

“Dr. Grace.” Marchetti’s voice was patient, a tone that felt completely condescending, as though he were explaining a simple concept to a child. “The aqueous paradigm isn’t an assumption. It’s the conclusion of decades of converging evidence from geochemistry, biochemistry, and planetary science. What you’re characterizing as circular reasoning is simply the state of the field.”

“The state of the field,” Ryland said, “is that we’ve been looking for life in places that look like Earth because we started looking with Earth-based assumptions, and we’ve published enough papers in that direction that the assumptions have started to look like conclusions.”

“That’s a rather dramatic characterization.”

“Your slide forty-two cites Bennett’s review as foundational support for the energetic viability argument. That review assumes liquid water as a baseline condition in its opening methodology section. It’s in the first paragraph. If you remove that assumption the review doesn’t support your argument, it’s simply neutral on the question.” Ryland paused. “You’ve cited a water-based paper to argue against non-aqueous biochemistry. You’re begging the question.”

Marchetti looked at him and said nothing for a moment. 

“I think,” Marchetti said, carefully, “that what Dr. Grace is describing reflects a perspective that the broader community has engaged with and found, on balance, unconvincing. The paper in question raises interesting questions but the methodology has limitations that—”

“Which limitations?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Which limitations, specifically?” Ryland could hear something happening in his own voice, something rising. “You’ve had eight weeks since publication. Which limitations, specifically, in the methodology.”

Marchetti smiled again. It was a different smile this time. “I don’t think this is the appropriate venue for a line-by-line methodological debate, Dr. Grace. The broader point—”

“The broader point,” Ryland said, “is that you’ve spent forty minutes presenting a refutation of work you won’t name, by a researcher you won’t name, citing papers that don’t support your argument as cleanly as you’ve implied, in front of an audience that is nodding along because you have better funding, more citations and a nicer PowerPoint.” He stopped. The microphone was very present in his hand. “You are not engaging with the science. You won’t—you won’t even say my name. And I find that you are—”

He stopped again.

Marchetti watched him like this had all gone as expected, and there was nothing left to do. Ryland looked at the seventy slides behind him. 

“I find you,” Ryland said, quite clearly, into the microphone, “intellectually dishonest.” He paused. “And a staggering waste of carbon.”

He set the microphone on the empty chair beside him. For a moment he just stood there. The room was still looking at him, but he had nothing left to say.

Ryland picked up his jacket and his program, still creased from his hands, and walked to the end of the row. Dr. Martínez was one of the two people who shifted aside to let him through. As he passed, he caught her eye. 

“Sorry,” he said, and wasn’t sure what it was for. 

She looked back at him, and said nothing, but moved her bag so he could pass.

He left through the side door.

The episode had been on for forty minutes before Ryland remembered he’d seen it before. He’d watched it as a kid, wedged between his parents on a sofa that no longer existed, and he had the impression that he had found it very exciting at the time. He watched it now, having decided not to think about anything, and was accomplishing that much in the way you accomplished anything when you were three shots into a nine-dollar bottle of vodka at four-thirty in the afternoon. 

The vodka was bad. He had bought it because it was nine dollars and he was, as of seventy-two hours ago, unemployed, and the inheritance his father had left him was not large enough to absorb both rent and good vodka indefinitely. He had done the math on the back of an envelope, and then put the envelope face-down on the kitchen counter. He was going to have to make some decisions. He was going to make them tomorrow. Tonight he was watching Star Trek and not thinking about anything.

Ryland poured another shot. He did not look at it before he drank it.

He had watched this show with his mother first, back when she was still around to watch things with. Then with just his father, who had loved Tuvok above all other characters for reasons he had never fully explained. Ryland had never thought to ask about it and now couldn’t. He had been going to ask about a lot of things. He had not gotten around to most of them. This was the kind of thought he was specifically trying not to have, and he was not succeeding. The vodka was not helping as much as advertised. 

The doorbell rang. He didn’t move.

On screen, Geordi was explaining something important to someone who wasn’t listening carefully enough. Ryland understood both of them.

It rang again. Then knocking, three times, and then three more. Knocking with something to say.

“I’m not home,” Ryland said, at a volume he felt was appropriate for someone who was not home. 

Silence. Then, through the door, a voice he had not heard in eleven months. “What the fuck, Ryland? Are you drunk? It’s five o’clock.”

He sat up. The room had opinions about this, tilting sharply on its axis before finally calming down. He looked at the door for a moment, like it might resolve the situation on its own. 

“Marissa?”

“Open the door.”

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“Open the door and I’ll tell you.”

He got up, which was a process, and crossed the apartment, which was another process, and opened the door. Marissa looked at him. He became aware of himself through her eyes. He was fairly sure he wasn’t making a good impression.

“Damn,” she said.

“I’m fine.”

“You look terrible. Move, I’m coming in.”

He stepped back. She came in, looked at the sofa, looked at the bottle on the coffee table, looked at the television. “Is that Star Trek?”

“It’s my comfort show.”

“It is absolutely not your comfort show, Ryland, it’s a cry for help.” She dropped her bag on the floor and turned to face him. “What the fuck happened? And don’t say I’m fine again, I’m not asking how you are, I’m asking what happened.”

“How did you even know to come here? Weren’t you in California?”

“I was. Kevin called me.”

Ryland stared at her. “I thought you blocked Kevin.”

“He emailed me. I unblocked him.”

“Oh,” Ryland said. “Okay.”

“Okay?” Her voice went up slightly. “That’s all you have to say? My ex-boyfriend had to contact me by email to tell me you’d been fired, and you say okay?”

“Well.” Ryland looked at the bottle. “Stuff… happened.”

Marissa pressed her lips together, looked at the ceiling briefly. Then she looked at the bottle. “Do you have more vodka?”

He did. She found it in the fridge without asking, proving to him that she still knew this apartment better than she probably wanted to. She poured herself a glass and sat at the other end of the sofa. “Start from the beginning.”

So he did. He told her about the paper, not just the paper but the years before it, the argument he had been making in conference rooms while nothing changed. He told her about the Goldilocks section, the names in the footnotes. He told her about Copenhagen. About Marchetti and the seventy slides and the way the room had nodded, slow and synchronised. He told her what he had said, clearly, into the microphone, in front of everyone. She didn’t laugh, a small mercy he appreciated.

He told her about the letter from the department, a document that had used the word conduct three times, and the meeting, and the box, which he had carried to his bike alone on a Tuesday morning while the department had collectively discovered urgent reasons to be elsewhere. 

And then he told her about his father. He hadn’t planned to. It came out somewhere in the middle of everything else, and once it was out he couldn’t put it back. His father had been the last of anything that could reasonably be called family. A quiet man who had driven four hours to every conference Ryland had ever given, including the ones where the audience was six people and a moderator who kept checking his phone. 

She didn’t say anything while it was happening, just put her arm around him, and he cried into her shoulder for a while with the Enterprise still going in the background. He was aware this was not a dignified situation. He found he didn’t have the energy to care about that.

After a while he sat up, poured himself another shot of bad vodka and felt, not better exactly, but emptier, which was a start. 

“Kevin,” Marissa said eventually, staring into the middle distance, “is probably thrilled about all of this.”

Ryland looked at her.

“I mean it. You were way too much competition. Now he gets to be the young hotshot in the department without you standing there being annoying about it.” She laughed, loud and clear. Then she sobered, still smiling. “He was worried about you, I’ll give the asshole that. He seemed genuinely concerned in his email.” 

“Good for Kevin,” Ryland said, and meant it, mostly.

“Are you okay?”

“No,” he said. It was the first completely honest thing he had said to anyone in several weeks. “I think everyone was relieved to see me go. The department. My students, probably.”

Marissa turned to look at him. “Your students?”

“I was awful at it.”

“Ryland, I’ve been to your classes.”

“That doesn’t count,” he said. “That was years ago, and you weren’t even supposed to be there. Of course you had a good time.”

“I was sneaking in because you were interesting.” She said it simply, like it wasn’t a compliment, just a fact. “You were the best TA in the department. Everyone said so.”

He remembered her in the back row of his tutorial sessions in their second year, hood pulled up like that would stop anyone from recognizing her, giving him a thumbs up when he got something right. It had been both encouraging and slightly unhinged. She had done it for an entire semester before anyone noticed. 

“That was a long time ago,” he said. 

“People don’t stop being good at things.”

“No.” He smiled, small and tired. “They get kicked out for calling people wastes of carbon at international conferences.”

“Fair,” she conceded. She pulled her feet up under her and looked at him. “Okay. So you’re unemployed.”

“Ouch.”

“You are, though.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I am.”

She was quiet for a moment. Then she got up. Marissa paced when she was thinking, always had, small circuits of whatever room she was in. She did two laps of his living room, stepping over her bag without looking at it, and then stopped. 

“Come to San Francisco,” she said, like she’d just solved something. 

Ryland looked at her. “What?”

“I’m serious. I have a friend there—she’s a principal at a middle school. I think I can get you an interview. Science teacher.” She stopped moving and looked at him directly. “I’m a fucking genius.”

“No. Marissa—I have a PhD in molecular biology. Why would I—”

“I know what you have.”

“I’m a researcher. I’m not a—” he gestured vaguely.

“You’re an unemployed researcher,” she said, not unkindly. “Who is, apparently, decent with people you’re not allowed to insult. And you’re definitely not allowed to insult children—you’d feel too guilty.” She paused. “You’ll need to work on your swearing.” She sat back down. “But you’d be good at it.”

He looked at the bottle. He looked at the television, where the episode had ended and a new one had started.

“Can I think about it?” he said.

Marissa reached over and picked up the bottle, holding it up to the light. The glass refracted it, casting a small rainbow across Ryland’s shirt. 

“You’ve got until we finish this,” she said.

Twenty-three eight-graders looked up at him from behind desks that were slightly too small for some of them and slightly too large for others, arranged in rows that had already begun migrating out of alignment despite the fact that the school year was zero days old. The walls were bare. He had been told, at some point during the orientation, that decorating was encouraged. He hadn’t gotten around to thinking about that yet.

Ryland set down his bag and looked at them for a moment. They looked back. 

“Morning, class,” he said, tapping a finger against the whiteboard. “I’m Mr. Grace, and against all odds, I will be your science teacher this year.” He looked around the room. “Ryland works too. If you forget, just ask. I’ll be trying to learn all of your names too, so let’s just agree to forgive each other when we mess up.” 

A few of them smiled. One kid in the back whispered something to the person next to him. A boy in the third row looked genuinely concerned about the odds. 

“This year we’re going to cover a lot of… stuff,” he said, and winced.

He gestured to the whiteboard behind him. He had written one word on the board before they arrived, large enough that nobody in the back could claim not to have seen it.

“But we’re going to start here.” He uncapped a black marker and drew a sharp line beneath the letters. “Mitosis.”

He clicked the cap back on, turning to lean against the edge of his desk. “Does anyone know what that is?”

Silence. A few shaking heads. One girl in the front row looked like she might know but didn’t quite trust herself to say it. Ryland caught her eye and smiled briefly, and the look seemed to surprise her. 

“That’s fine,” Ryland waved off. “That’s what I’m here for.”

He turned back to face them. “Your body is making new cells right now. While you’re sitting there. Millions of them.” He paused. “Your old cells die, and your body replaces them. It’s been doing this your whole life, every day, without you noticing or doing anything about it. The cell copies its genetic information, everything it needs to function, and then splits into two identical cells.”

He looked at them. “That’s what we call mitosis.”

Several of them were leaning forward slightly. This was already different. 

“Alright,” he said. “Do we follow that? Any questions before I keep going?” 

Five hands shot up. He stood there for a second and just looked at them. Five hands from twenty-three kids on the first day of school. That was more than he’d seen go up in a single university lecture hall in three years.

He pointed to the boy in the second row who looked like he’d had his hand up before Ryland had finished the sentence.

“Yeah,” the kid said. “So if our cells keep replacing themselves, how come we still get old?”

Ryland opened his mouth, and felt, unexpectedly, good. Like something inside him had finally clicked into place.

“Good,” he said. “What’s your name?”

“Marco.”

“Good, Marco. That’s a great question.”

Marco looked mildly suspicious of the compliment.

“The short answer,” Ryland said, pulling up a chair and sitting on it backwards, which he had never once done at a lectern in his life, “is that the copies aren’t perfect.”

Twenty-three faces leaned forward, slightly, all at once.

He smiled. “Let’s talk about why.”