Page 14 of Love Around the Corner
“I just don’t understand how you can text through a presentation on star nurseries. It’sfascinating.”
“Don’t take it personally. The average undergrad could probably text through their own funeral.”
Okay, they’d talked more than enough about what a social defect she was. His turn. “I bet you weren’t an average undergrad.”
“You could say that. I was different in a lot of ways, starting with being sixteen.”
“I forgot that. That you went to college at sixteen.”
Nick tapped his temple. “On the academic fast track since birth. But even though I was younger than everybody I went to school with, I still managed to have fun.”
“Right. By hacking into the Department of Defense.”
“No. I mean, yes, that was fun. But I had regular college fun, too. Parties. Girls. Three a.m. pizza. Didn’t you?”
“No, but I also didn’t get kicked out of school at eighteen and arrested for a federal crime.”
He burst into laughter and held up his hands. “Okay, okay, if this is gonna get dirty, we should just focus on work. I thought we’d get started by looking at the existing Hubble data protocols.”
She sat back in her chair and watched him as he downloaded the info she’d emailed and started opening files. After that conversation, he probably thought she was nothing but an optimistic do-gooder with no social life—astronomy’s hall monitor. But she’d also figured out something about Nick that he’d probably rather her not know. For all the law-breaking and big talk about moral gray areas, he was a good guy, an honorable guy. She almost wished she didn’t know that about him, because resisting him was going to be harder than ever now.
Chapter Seven
“Okay, this stuff that’s recorded right here, isn’t that what Finch is looking for?” Nick rubbed his thumb across his eyebrow as he squinted at his principal desktop monitor. The first few times he and Livie had worked together, it was all about learning the digital layout of Hubble, how it recorded data, and what kind of pipeline processing was added before the data could be downloaded. Livie was giving him a crash course in modern astronomical optical technology. Nick had spent years up to his neck in some of the densest coding out there, but this was different. And different was good. Different was exciting.
Different could also make your brain hurt.
Hubble was a masterpiece, but it was a decades-old masterpiece, so while some of what he was learning was brand new, some of it required understanding technology that was as old as he was.
Livie shook her head. “No, those are gamma ray bursts. That’s established. What we’re looking for is, at least right now, theoretical.”
“And we can’t observe it the same way Hubble observed these gamma ray things?”
Livie scowled at the same screen, carefully puzzling through coding so dense, some of the guys he knew in Silicon Valley would be lost. Livie Romano was turning out to be a real surprise, and Nick was rarely surprised by people. She was scary-smart, probably smarter than anyone at that back-bench school she was at, including a big chunk of the faculty.
“Well, Hubble’s already observing it. See?” He moved behind her, to see what she was pointing at. “Here’s Hubble observing a primordial black hole—”
“A what?”
Livie glanced over her shoulder and startled. He had to remember not to sneak up on her. She was one jumpy girl.
She cleared her throat and kept going. “Primordial black holes. They’re micro black holes formed during the Big Bang. Some consume enough matter to grow, others wink out of existence. Those are the ones we want to observe. We just need to get Hubble pointed to the right spot in the sky at the right time.”
“Oh. Fine. We need to figure out how to point Hubble at a micro black hole at the precise moment it ceases to exist. No problem.”
“I thought you were supposed to be some kind of genius,” she teased.
“I am, I am. Some things are challenging even for geniuses.”
“Anyway,” she continued. “Hubble sees everything, which means it sees this, too, but it doesn’t know it. The only way we can find it is by sifting through years of data after the fact. We want to teach it to recognize it right away.”
“Right. Hubble can’t show us what it doesn’t know it’s seeing. And if we can’t tell it what it looks like, we don’t know what to tell it to look for.”
“Right.”
The information swirling in Nick’s brain suddenly snapped into place, like puzzle pieces that had been thrown in the air coming down and landing perfectly assembled to form a picture. “I get it. We need to teach it to speak a new language when we don’t speak it. Whenno onespeaks it.”
Livie’s face lit up. “Exactly! So you know what to do?”
