Chapter 6: Watch out cupid, stuck me with a sickness.

May 26th, 2020, Salinas, California - Earth

“Grace Finnigan-Wu, we are pleased to offer you an internship at the Institute for Extra-Dimensional Research.”

Howard Finnigan put the letter down again. He had read the letter five times. His daughter had her first real job. An internship, but a real job that paid money at a place with respectability. He handed the letter to her mother, who was sitting across the table.

“Why can't they get your name right. Wu-Finnigan! Same with your school, those letters drop my name completely.” Mira Wu-Finnigan was sensitive about this.

Grace calmed her mother slightly, “I'm sure it's just a computer thing. Anyway, back to the topic, I hope you know that this is a place with secrets, and so while you are free to ask me about my mood or generic questions about my fellow employees, I will not be talking about the details of what I do there.”

Mira went full tiger mode, “It better not interfere with your schoolwork. School is the most important thing. Then your job.”

“It's just for the summer, plus I'm only taking like one class, it'll be fine.” Grace replied.

Howard was still beaming, as such he did not realize he was about to correct his wife in front of his daughter, “Now, sometimes there are things more important than school. Let her make her own choices.”

Mira's look was sharp, eyes and face firm and held for a few seconds, where she then excused herself. Howard knew what he had just done, and he would pay for that later. But for now, it was the happiest day he'd had in a long time, and nothing could take that away from him.

“What's with her sometimes? This is important to me. I get to work under Oliver Swift.”

“You met him?” Howard kept in his excitement.

“Just a few introductions. He's shorter than I'd expect in real life. Still has a cane.”

“Well, he might be an important name in our household, but he's just a regular guy to the rest of the planet. Don't let him be bigger than he is to you. You earned your spot there just as he did.”

Grace's dad was a war nut. All dads are. His choice was the D-war. He had been bitten by something when Grace was still in high school. Some dads got into the Civil War, others into World War Two, even a few lost souls fall in love with the Falklands campaign. Her dad knew the names of all hundred bombers that launched the attack on Terra. He had the 8k Blu-ray of “Necessary Evil”. He was building a model of that plane in a bottle. She wondered if he were just excited, she would be working with the man who pushed the button.

“School is very important to your mother.” Howard softly added, unsure if it needed to be said.

“You think I don't pick that up? She's a tigress. Pushed me my whole life. Had to get into STEM too, not literature or whatever. I barely got into Polytechnic. Is this just an Asian thing?”

“No, that's not it at all. She takes after your grandmother sometimes, but it's not like that.”

“I just want to live a normal life, without pressure. Get a normal degree, get a normal job, raise a normal child. She wants me to be perfect, better than her, and I just don't know why.”

Howard sighed, OK fine, he'll walk her through it. She's old enough for this. “What's your mom's birthday?”

“May twenty-fifth, nineteen seventy-eight? We just had her forty first.” Grace answered.

“And your birthday?” Howard continued.

“August second, two thousand and one.”

“Your mom was a grad student at Caltech when I met her. We both wanted to try this new online dating thing. Your mom just wants you to have opportunities she never had.”

For the first time in her life, Grace thought nine months backwards from her birthday and put the date into context of her parents’ lives, now understanding what that meant as an adult. Thanksgiving, two thousand? Her parents’ anniversary was in January. Her mom would have been at the start of her master’s when she was pregnant.

The timeline for mom's graduate education did not line up right. Grace had a memory of being there when her mother finished grad school. And it was not Caltech. It was something local. She was four in the memory. Mom had put her life on pause for five years and settled for something less.

“I guess I had never thought of what she gave up. I'm sorry if she feels I was a burden.” Grace wondered if she would be strong enough to do that. Quit school to raise a child.

Howard assuaged her, “No, don't ever think that. She loves you more than anything, but there can be things more important than what we want. School is important for your mother, and you're going to have to make a choice between your career and what your family wants from you. All I want is for you to be happy with whatever choice you make.”

Grace hugged her father, it was the answer she wanted to hear, it was her choice. “I'll see if I can't get Captain Swift to sign a picture for you.”

* * *

June 1st, 2020, Templeton, California - Earth

The facility was far from the city. It was about a forty-five-minute drive for Grace into an industrial sector. It looked like an abandoned school, except the fences were huge. Easily twenty feet tall. Cameras were everywhere.

Grace had dressed professionally. Subtle makeup, nails professionally trimmed, hairstyle which was exactly the right length to convey the idea of sexy hair but combed and curled in a way that conveyed some authority or control. She wore a blazer and an aquamarine undershirt. Her heels were a bit too long, but she walked slowly and made it work.

Naomi was her direct superior, and above her was Mr. Swift. Naomi had a dark complexion, and she wore a pink, white blouse, and long professional skirt. Appropriate for the summer heat. She had taken Grace around, introduced her to everyone, gotten her through orientation and security procedures. Even took a picture and got her a badge printed. This was work, as in real work, not the Dairy Queen job she worked one summer. It was nothing like she imagined. It felt like school but better. Everything done here was important. Nothing she did at school mattered. Agency – adulting - was addictive.

Naomi put the forms Grace had signed into a large manila folder. The two relaxed over their lunch. She had said it qualified as a working lunch, as Grace was technically filling out paperwork while the two ate, but the forms were not difficult to fill out. It felt like the system wanted everyone to bend the rules in a way you could not do in school. That wasn't the case, Naomi was using it as an opportunity to judge Grace's temperament, see her assessment of the facility and people, and judge Grace's emotional stability.

“I'm so glad you've agreed to join the experiment and testing division. The work here is some of the most important.” Naomi started.

Grace was not sure, “Will I just spend most of my time eating exotic fruits?”

Naomi chuckled. Yes, there was that. There was a watermelon analog they had just discovered that was the size of a person. It grows like a weed. It would be a perfect sustainable crop for areas prone to droughts.

“The foods and entertainment and all that, that's all important. Beethoven's tenth is fantastic. I've had a chance to eat dodo-bird. We are actually more interested in techniques and best practices. Getting past our cultural blinders. Not just technology exchange but social exchange. Ideas. Philosophy. Your timing joining us is perfect. We've just discovered this new pedagogical technique we think would help revolutionize education forever.”

When Grace thought of pedagogy she thought of teaching children, not an adult like herself. “You know I'm in college, right? I'm not sure how useful I can be to something like that.”

“Oh yes, of course, that's actually why we wanted you. You see, we can tell you're a smart one. You didn't give us your eSs Aye Tee or Aye Cee Tee scores, but we found them. And your grades. You're struggling a bit in school, right?” Naomi was not subtle with the question.

“That's... OK, that's a bit personal. The - hell - are you guys doing here?” Grace had not expected her new employer to spy on her life.

“Now hold on, just relax. It's fine, you're perfect for this. We know how to get you back to where you were. You don't have to spend hours each night studying. What if there was a way to just put the knowledge directly into your brain? You wouldn't forget it.” Naomi started her pitch.

Like, neuralink? Wasn't that illegal? “I'd very much like that.”

“OK so the idea here is that some people are visual learners.”

“Yes, my whole life I've heard this. Different methods of teaching. It's stupid.” She was so over this nonsense. Play with this toy. Build a graph. Visualize! The whole education system was in love with looking at stuff. Even in college it was all graphics and analogies, and it was pissing her off. Just show the equation. Shut up and calculate.

“You're not a visual learner. In fact, many people aren't visual learners. You don't learn by visualizing; you learn by thinking the words in your head. You read by thinking about the words in your head. Humans are great aural learners. Think how much more you get from a podcast than a TV show. Think how easy it is to have a lecture going on in the background as you work on a paper. We want a talented aural listener.” Naomi did not say, your YouTube and iTunes subscriptions are also available to us as an employer and helpful to us in the hiring decision.

Now Grace was curious. She did listen to podcasts. Serious ones. She would often put a video on of just a person talking for an hour. She would even close her eyes in class and just listen to the teacher, never taking notes.

Grace had just learned something about herself, and more than that, they were offering her a super charged version of how she liked to learn. Put the knowledge directly into her brain. Yes. Fuck yes! First day at the top-secret lab and she was already getting a superpower.

“Can I choose what I learn?” She was thinking of the physics class she was taking. Nuclear Concepts. It was going to break her. The teacher was like eighty. He spent his time talking about Chernobyl and Three Mile Island and almost nothing on the material. Each class was getting harder. It did not help it was a summer class either. They met twice a week for three hours, and she never wanted to go.

Naomi consented, “It's your head, so I don't see why not. Go ahead and bring some stuff you'd like to learn, and we'll see how it goes.”

* * *

Grace was in an auditorium. Not too big, just a hundred seats and a small stage, but she was the only one in the room. A creak of the chair or a slap on her writing pad would echo the room more than once. The lights were distant above her and fading yellow-brown-orange. The chairs on other rows had been covered with white sheets, which made the room have a smell like an unused shower curtain. She was a kid again in her head even though she had last been in an auditorium like this just a couple years ago.

The curtain had been drawn, its ugly blue green obscuring the stage. She was told to sit nicely in the front row. The noise to expect would sound weird, both louder and deeper than a normal human range. Someone would start reading from behind the curtain, and she would just need to listen. She was given a glass of water, pen, paper, and her boss took away her phone.

Grace had been waiting for a few minutes and started to get worried. She had not been this long without a phone in ages. Being forced to sit patiently with just her own thoughts for minutes was unnatural. Like being in time out. Like being at the store or the doctor's office and needing to wait on an adult to finish paying.

As she took another sip of her water, she heard it.

“I'm sorry, this is. I can't do this. I can't read this.”

It was loud. A man's voice. Like her grandpa. Aged, distinct, a slight hoarse like from a bit of an old smoking habit. She heard Naomi's voice as well, but her boss's words were not distinct behind the curtain.

“I want to cooperate.”

There was some more talking from Naomi.

“I want to cooperate, what I mean is I can't pronounce this word.”

“Nu-clear”

“Nuc-u-lar”

“Nuke u lar. Is the whole book going to be like this?”

“OK I'll pronounce it right. I'll be fine. I'll go slowly.”

She saw Naomi hurry out the front of the curtain, “Just a slight hick up. You doing OK?”

Grace nodded.

“Well, we're just going to read the first chapter. I'm sure you've read that before, but we want to start from a clean fresh slate.”

She had not read the first chapter yet. The class was in the second week but she kind of did not give a fuck about going anymore.

The man's voice came back. “OK, well, we'll start with chapter one. Skip all this stuff at the front. Chapter one: 'Radiation History to the Present – Understanding the Discovery of the Neutron.'”

The auditorium lights were dimming. She had a memory of sitting in elementary school watching a puppet performance. Something involving Aladdin or Ali Babba. It was not like the movie though, more direct from the original story. Back then the puppeteer's voice had echoed in a room just like this was now.

“I'm sorry, before we begin. Um, hello.”

The curtain was talking with her. Was she supposed to talk back? She had not received instructions.

“Hey there?”

“I'm ... Mr. … Powell. It is a pleasure to be your um... reader, today. I'd like to know your name.”

“I'm Grace.”

“Hello Grace, but it helps if I have your family name, I need to see you as a full person not just a first name.”

She paused, this was a bit sensitive, “I'm Grace Wu-Finnigan.”

“I'm not from around here, you're the first Wu-Fin I've ever met. Is that a common name?”

“No, my parents hyphenated it.”

“Ahh like nobility! You're a princess. From the House of Wu and the House of Finnigan.”

“No... it's not like that at all. My dad is Howard Finnigan, and my mother is Mira Wu-Finnigan, and I have both last names.”

“What an unusual people. I'm not from around here, Ms. Finnigan, and I think that's a bit too much for me to remember. You should just go by your daddy's name, as it was the first gift, he ever gave you. It sounds so much nicer. Grace Finnigan.”

It was nicer. She had done it a couple times for school applications. She did not trust having an Asian last name with the California schools. That was not the real reason she had done it, though, right? She just liked her dad more, and she thought it was a bit cunty that her mom made him combine names. She wanted to be daddy's little princess and she hated her mom for not letting her be.

Well not hate.

She was almost nineteen now, she could probably change it legally. Tomorrow perhaps. Grace Finnigan. Until she got married and took her husband's name like a good wife should.

Oliver Swift had left his suit jacket in his office, but still had a white collared shirt and tie when he popped into the control room. The auditorium was far from the main parts of the facility, and his cane had slowed him down. He watched the exchange on the monitors, the giant behind the curtain, the young lady in the auditorium. Artificial intelligence was transcribing the words within seconds of being spoken and outputting it as white text on a layer above each person.

“He could be using the voice right now and we would not have any idea. Do we?” Oliver spoke his concern.

The one technician handling the computers shrugged, “We need more data before the software can guess if it's being done in real time.” Oliver instead turned to his colleague.

“Naomi. This is dangerous.”

“She's a grown woman, she can handle this. She signed up for this, we all did,” Naomi calmly replied.

“No, I mean, giving an Amazon a textbook on nuclear physics? You know they don't have the bomb, right? This guy could go and jumpstart the Manhattan project if we send him back.”

“He can't even pronounce nuclear! He has no idea what he's reading. I doubt anything will stick. Grace at least has the background from a year of schooling to get this.”

The white text started to shift, indicating the giant was reading from the book:

“We are going to retrace Chadwick's discovery of the neutron.”

“In eighteen ninety-seven it became possible to determine the mass to charge ratio of the electron...” The curtain read through the first page.

The giant was even improvising at times, “Alpha-Beta-Gamma, the names are based on their penetration. Just like your Aye-Bee-Cees! Right Grace?”

“Yes.” It was important to involve the audience.

Grace was completely zonked out on the monitor. At times it looked like she was trying to write on the paper. “And this is what makes a gamma ray a gamma ray, otherwise it is a photon. A gamma ray is like a grown-up photon.”

And then, “Oh Grace! I wish I could show you this picture here. Maybe next time we'll let you see the pictures. The hydrogen and the polonium experiment. There's this ionization chamber.”

She didn't need to see the book to see the picture. She had opened it at least once, she remembered it. She had only seen it for a fraction of a second, but daddy's voice had made her remember. Like reading the instructions for assembling furniture, dads only need to glance at it once and they could build it.

“With the original theories, the gamma ray was predicted to need 'fifty times ten to six' electron volts. And how much is that, Grace?”

“Fifty Million!” She was completely into the story.

“Mr. Polonium was releasing his alpha rays to his friend Mr. Beryllium. Oh, look there's a note to the side. It says 'Be' - open parenthesis, 'eNn', comma, two 'eNn' close parenthesis. Can you remember Ms. Finnigan? I wish I could show you the book so you can help me read it. It's special math writing. The book says you'll learn more of how to write it as you go along.”

“One neutron goes in, and two neutrons go out!” Was that from the class? Hadn't she fallen asleep in the second half of the first class when this was covered? One fish, two fish, polonium fish, beryllium fish. So easy a child could remember it.

“Oh, how exciting. One neutron goes in, and two neutrons go out. Grace you're a smart little girl.”

This went on, reading the chapter was slow, but the giant kept at it for an hour. The monitoring room was starting to relax. Oliver had his eyes on Grace though. Something was wrong. She was starting to wiggle in her seat. Too much exposure to the voice?

Mr. Powell was getting into it at this point, reading a quote “The mass defect of the 'Cee thirteen' nucleus is known both from data supplied by measurements of the artificial disintegration of boron 'bee ten' and from observations of the band spectrum of carbon; it is about ten by ten to the sixth electron volts. The mass defect of 'bee nine' is not known, but the assumption that zero will give a maximum value for the possible change of energy in the reaction: 'bee nine' plus alpha to 'cee thirteen' plus quantum.”

Mr. Powell paused “I think a quantum here is supposed to be a photon, or a gamma ray? What a silly word to describe a photon. 'On this assumption it follows that the energy of the quantum emitted in such a reaction cannot be greater than about fourteen times ten to the sixth electron volts.' Grace, you're such a tiny little quantum there, all squirming. Are you a tiny little alpha or a middling beta or a big girl gamma ray?”

Oliver was concerned, “We should get her out of there. He's regressing.”

Naomi shook her head, “No, I think he's addressing something difficult here. He needs her to see you can express mass and energy as the same thing.”

Her head popped up, “I get it! The conservation of energy! You have a big particle, and you smash it with a fast tiny one, and then you have a different big particle and a different one spin off. The mass of nucleus one plus the mass of nucleus two needs to equal the mass of the two spin offs plus the energy transfer.”

“Yes, you can express the mass of the two nuclei in terms of the initial and final energy. 'Eee' equals”

“Mass times 'Cee' squared. We can just use energy to describe these systems!”

They kept going, page after page, her daddy reading to her, her excitement and movements becoming more exuberant as the story continued.

“If there were to be a neutron, which was as big as a proton, then Mr. Beryllium plus his little alpha particle, become Carbon twelve and a neutron. Just like a mommy and a daddy!”

Grace was excited, “Both reactions are balanced in terms of mass! Do you see that daddy? If you do the full reaction and calculate the energy. Mr. Que made everything equal, just like you said. Ignore the starting kinetics because atoms don't really move. You separate out the energy and there's an inequality. The velocity for the neutron is...?”

“Four times ten to the nine centimeters per second.” The wiggling stopped. She was so excited.

Oliver saw the word thirty seconds too late, “We're pulling her. Now! End it!”

“You know you're a special little girl. I bet you need your daddy to read to you every night. Do you still wet the bed when there's no one to read to you Grace? It almost looks like you had an accident down there.” The lights came on. Naomi had raced to shut down Mr. Powell; the technician had run to get Grace. She was crying. In the confusion she must have spilled her drink. Her notes were a mess.

They got her some medical garb for her pants, and she drove home in them. She told them she was fine enough to drive after just a couple hours. Her eyes had been vacant for the first. She wanted Daddy to finish the story. They told her she was brave, that she could take time off, but she wasn't sure why. Everything was great. She loved her job. She would be back tomorrow.

That night she read the first chapter of the book by herself, getting up to the part Mr. Powell had stopped. It was like she had memorized it; she could read every word out loud. She had never seen the text but knew every word, every shape, every picture, just as he had described it. And then, chapter two. She was not reading in Mr. Powell's voice anymore. She was reading in her own. She struggled, slowly going through each word, mumbling, having to look up what the equations meant. It was not like chapter one. She cried and went to sleep. She left the lights on, and the book fell to the floor from her bed.

When she woke up, she knew she had wet herself. She still had class today. She usually dressed up, but today she would wear something girly. It was summer, it was great to wear something a bit revealing. She spent longer cleaning herself in the morning, and got her sheets cleaned in the laundry. Class was at eight, but she had woken up at five without prompting. She had not been up without an alarm clock that early since she was nine. She was the first in the classroom.

Dr. Short was not eighty. He was sixty-six. He worked summers because his wife had left him a few years ago and he needed to fill the days. She had divorced him just after his son had gone to college. Grace had never noticed how vibrant and strong he looked. Well, for an old guy. She put her butt right in the front row and stared at him. Bald up top, white along the edges and back. Glasses were not too thick and lacked a frame on the bottom of the lenses. The old man had a clean face. Today he wore a long blue sports jacket with a striped blue and white shirt. He probably shopped at JC Penny's.

Grace took in every word. The classroom was just like Mr. Powell again. She laughed at his jokes about Three Mile Island. She raised her hand to ask questions. When everyone left, she went up to him.

“Doctor Short, I was having some trouble with the reading, I was wondering if you had a few minutes to just explain some of the harder parts. Maybe in your office?”

Forty years teaching and it had finally happened. Why now? Why not twenty years ago? Decades of seeing lesser men fall for this. Getting fired. Losing marriages. He knew what was happening. The student had a crush on him. Not just any student, his student.

He was sixty-six. Would they fire him? Standards are different now, right? Let's just play the game, maybe nothing will come of it, have a bit of summer fun. Summer school doesn't count right?

“Of course, Ms. Wu, I'd be happy to help you with anything.”

He had known Ms. Wu a long time ago. He did not want to say Grace looked like her, because that felt like saying all Asian gals looked alike. Grace's hair was emphasized sexy, rare for school and rarer for summer school. She carried herself well in heels regardless.

“It's Ms. Finnigan now. I'm going by just my dad's name now.” `

They chatted about the chapter in his office. He made her a small book with the equations to reference, and helped walk her through why they are to be used. It was not the same as Mr. Powell, but it was close enough. When she got home, she would turn on a Feynman lecture and masturbate as she watched the great man discuss the finer secrets of the universe.

She had started to need night protection; the wetting was getting worse. She did not tell anyone at work, but in some sense, she did not think it was that big a deal. She would sometimes call her dad just before bed. She told him that things were going well at work. She told him that she had met a guy, and things were going serious, but he was a bit older and more responsible than her last dates. She did not know how to tell him about the name change. Or the diapers. She felt talking to her dad was helping.

Work was fine, just not as cool as on her first day. They had her tasting fruit now. “This apple tastes like a grape” “This watermelon tastes like a watermelon” They would not let her see Mr. Powell, though she had inquired when they'd get to chapter two.

The need to be read to was getting worse. She needed the voice. She needed someone to read to her. She started putting out classifieds. “Bakersfield area - Need an older man to read to me before bedtime. REAL SCIENCE background required! NO SOCIAL SCIENTISTS”

It was an open invitation for perverts. She would hand them her physics book and that weirded them out. Some tried, but it was not the same. Most just thought she was crazy. Who gets off on wanting nuclear physics read to them? Plus, so few of them actually knew how to pronounce the words or explain the equations. Why was dating so hard?

It was in late July she decided to let the one man who had both the experience and knowledge to help her, actually help her.

“Doctor Short. I have a problem.” She plopped into a chair in his office, like she owned the room.

“I've been helping you a bit in these after class sessions, I don't know if it's fair to the other students Grace.” He liked to do that, just pretend he was oblivious, make it her decision.

“Charles, what I'm about to tell you does not leave this room, OK?”

He was sixty-six years old, he had no wife, his son did not talk to him, and his work colleagues hated him. Grace was the only person he could call a friend. Maybe more than that. He looked around his office and nodded. “I can keep a secret.”

“I have a job at I.E.D.R as a research assistant. Mostly I do boring things like taste apples from other dimensions and rate them for flavor.”

“That sounds important” He kept a straight face. Stay in school kid, get yourself a real job.

“Well, one day they wanted to test this thing, it was some new learning process, and they would put knowledge directly into my brain. Something went wrong.”

Charles Short was well aware of I.E.D.R. They were huge. Almost unlimited budget. Lots of students had worked there, or wanted to work there, and the teachers too. He had a less civil opinion of the place. Stealing science from the multiverse was cheating! This universe was already infinite, we did not need a million infinities. Still, he had not heard of anything bad happening from them. Except the war with Nietzscheans. That was kind of bad.

“Um... something got in my head here, and” She was starting to sniffle, “this is stupid, but I can't go to bed at night unless I have someone read physics to me.”

“What?” That is the dumbest come on he had ever heard.

“I've gone through every Feynman lecture and they're not working anymore. I put out ads for men to come and read to me. Sometimes I have to have sex with them first, but that's the price of science. I need a real man who can read an actual physics paper and help me get to bed.”

“Look, Grace, if you want to just have sex that's fine, but this is a bit too kinky for me.”

“No, you don't understand, if I go a night without my daddy reading to me, I literally wet the bed. And it gets worse. I've been up for two days straight. I'm losing it. Please, just read me anything. I don't care if it's Newton's laws, I need a man to read to me.”

He looked at her. Shit, he did not want to admit it, but Ms. Finnigan was wearing a protective garment down below. He had seen it at one point. Had she flashed him?

“Look, this is enough. I'm done. You want to do some kinky daddy fetish thing, get it the fuck out of my office. I'm not talking to you for the rest of the semester. In fact, here. You get an Aye. Leave and don't come back. I don't want to deal with this. I'm never teaching you anything ever again. Fuck! This is why teachers and students don't make good partners.”

She cried as she ran out, his eyes spotting a flash of elastic white and teal was visible above the edge of her pants. Charles sat for several minutes, thinking about that plastic-cloth line over and over. He went home frustrated. Horny in the brain. He thought about taking Viagra so he could masturbate. He decided against it. Who gets off on diapers?

When Grace next arrived at the institute, she wore the same outfit she had worn to the first day of work. It was a bit impractical for watermelon eating, but she wanted to look her best when she met Mr. Swift again. They were alone in his office.

“Sir, I should have come forward sooner and let you know. It just took me a while to realize what had changed and why it needed to be fixed.”

“I want you to know that Commander Powell wasn't aware of what he was doing. We're only starting to scratch the surface of what this voice thing is. We're helping him come to terms with who he is and how to fix him. I do wish you had come forward sooner, I think it might have helped with his progress.”

Commander? He was Mr. Powell last time.

“Am I going to be fired for this?” Grace did not want to be fired from her first job. Her first real job.

“Why? We exposed you to a dangerous activity, and you were damaged by it. How is that your fault? It's mine. I think you and the Commander should have a nice chat.”

His look got serious, and tone dropped the sympathy he had shown, “I don't care about the grape apples or the bananas. This is an actual secret. What we're about to show you, it does not leave this facility. No one can know what we're dealing with here, but I think if you met him, you could convince him to undo whatever he did to you. He's better now.”

Swift went over the basics of Amazons. They come from another dimension. They are ten feet tall. They would take adults and force them to be babies. That was actually about it. All the other stuff did not need to be gotten into.

He brought her outside to Commander Powell. He was seated far in the courtyard at the bench near the light. He was dressed in a blue uniform, and his chest had metals that brightly reflected afternoon sunlight. As Grace and Mr. Swift got closer, it became possible for her mind to comprehend this man was huge, in a way seeing him from across the courtyard had not. He loomed over her at twice her height. Her heart was throbbing, and some sweat was forming as she got closer.

“Ms. Finnigan, I'm happy to see you again. They told me that I hurt you and I'm sorry about that.” He stood up and reached his large hand out and down.

He smiled, “It's so weird seeing you big like this. Last time we met you were like five feet tall, and now we're close to the same height. You're only a couple inches shorter than me!”

She looked at Oliver and then at Powell. The commander lacked the gravitas that she had originally associated with the voice. He was a bit broken, weak, almost squeaky. Like a boy. He looked younger than she had imagined him, not a grandpa, but someone maybe a decade older than she. Seeing him shrunk in this way gave her the confidence to deal with the situation, as equal adults.

Oliver reminded him, “Now, we only made you think you were five foot eleven. You're actually still.” Oliver pointed up.

“Oh right. Now, let me see if I can't go over the list of changes they said they think I did to you. Starting with your name.”

Hastily she shrugged it off, “I like Ms. Finnigan. I legally changed it.” She turned to Oliver. “Mr. Swift, do you mind if we have some privacy, I'd like to discuss with Mister, sorry, Commander Powell what exactly I need him to do for me. It's the stuff in my head after all, and it's a bit personal.”

Oliver wasn't sure he liked that, but she did have a point. An adult should be able to decide what goes in or out of her own head. “Certainly, I'll be at the doors if you need anything.”

Oliver monitored from a distance. This was it. Can you trust an Amazon? Grace was showing tremendous courage in going into the lion’s den again. He watched them talk. She must have been explaining what she wanted. She seemed to almost shrink and cry at times. Powell would just pat her head. He said something, it looked like a twenty, thirty second speech, Grace stood up and hugged him, started making her way back. Then she stopped, rushed back, and stood in front of him. Something was being exchanged. Talked about? He had his hands over her head, cupping her ears. This talk was long, maybe even a couple minutes.

Weird.

Grace started coming back first. She was playing with her phone. His phone beeped. He checked the e-mail of habit.

“He's faking it.” G. Finnigan (attachment)

Just one word in the e-mail - Neutrons, and a wave file attachment.

Oliver understood, “Ms. Finnigan, was it everything you needed?”

“And more. He said I didn't have daddy issues, I had mommy issues,” She smiled at that, like she was going to laugh but did not.

“How is that better?”

“Because I actually do have issues with my mother. I think I wanted to date Dr. Short because he was old enough to be her dad, not mine. I'm jealous my dad loves my mom more than me. I'm sick of the fact she raised me like a tiger mom, forcing me to do four hours of homework a night, pushing me into science, and into the job she wanted. Powell helped me realize all of this attachment was just lashing out at her, and that I would be a great mother some day because I had learned how not to do it.”

Oliver was unsure whether that was an improvement. Maybe? It was her brain. “And the e-mail?”

“I'm ready to do more than just eat watermelon.”

“You're reporting directly to me starting Monday. This is a full-time position. Class seven salary. Go get some rest, you're stepping into a much larger world.”

Grace smiled, a real job! She was not even twenty yet! The pay would be good enough to drop out of school. That would put her mother on complete tilt. Maybe she might take a class here or there, just to learn something, but of the hundred thousand worlds, ninety-nine thousand of them did not give a fuck where she got her degree.

At this point Commander Powell came up behind them. “I'm just glad I was able to help. I'm ready to go back.”

Oliver looked at the man, “Who said you could leave?”

The giant backed up confused, “I thought I was going back. You said you were happy with my progress.”

“No. I think we'll start with a nine for a few hours, gives us the option to bump up to a ten if we're not happy with how you're going. You remember nine, Mister Powell?” He would hate to use the chair here, but he was running out of options. Maybe they had to actually make him regular sized physically, and not just in his head? They could even go smaller if that is what it took.