Love and the Laws of Motion Page 4

  “Your place?” Her voice was a breathy squeak. “Not here?”

  “I’m going to need some serious computer power and storage and frankly...” He cast a look around at the scuffed linoleum, chipped paint, and flickering fluorescent overhead lights of Simmons Hall. “I doubt the departmental computers have the muscle to handle it.”

  Well, he was probably right about that. Eventually they’d have all new computers for Janet’s research, but university purchasing could be painfully slow, and in the meantime, all Adams U had to offer were crummy budget-priced desktops five years out of date.

  “I mean, honestly, we could probably do it all remotely,” Nick continued. “But when I get on a roll, I like to keep going. It’ll drive me crazy if I email you a question and I have to wait for your answer. Can you work at my place? Is that okay?”

  He looked sideways at her and her throat closed up. Alone with Nick at his place? That was probably a bad idea, but she didn’t really see a way around it. “Um, yeah, sure. We can work at your place. When do you want to start?”

  “Can you come by tomorrow afternoon?”

  She taught her class at noon. Just thinking about that was enough to give her hives. Teaching had turned out to be every bit as terrifying as she’d expected—a classroom full of undergrads, staring her down with judgment and disapproval in their eyes. And now she’d have to face Nick at the end of it.

  She missed last year, where she could sit in the back of a classroom instead of standing in the front, and her out-of-class hours were spent in quiet solitude with a ream of research instead of with this hot computer genius who scrambled up her hormones and turned her brain inside out. Last year had been easier in a thousand ways.

  “I think I can be there by two? Is that okay?”

  “Two is perfect.” He grinned, and she suffered through another wave of embarrassing tingles.

  They’d reached the front doors of Simmons Hall. Nick spun around and walked backward toward the exit. The sun pouring in through the glass doors illuminated him from behind, almost like a halo. The muscles of his upper arms were picked out in sharp relief, making him look like one of those ancient Roman statues of conquering princes, and it lit up coppery highlights in his hair she hadn’t noticed before. “I’ll see you then. This is gonna be fun, Livie.”

  She watched him turn and push open the doors, disappearing into the bright white sunlight outside. “Yeah,” she whispered to herself. “Fun.”

  This was going to be the absolute opposite of fun.

  Chapter Six

  When Livie texted Nick after class the next day to let him know she was on her way over, he replied with the code to his building, explaining that he was busy with something and might not hear the bell.

  Letting herself into the lobby, she prayed that Poppy would be there. What she needed right now was a strong dose of reality to crush these stupid, inconvenient feelings, and a six-foot blonde goddess with Nick’s ring on her finger was as real as it got.

  In the vestibule upstairs, she tapped lightly on his front door and when she got no response, let herself in there, too.

  “Nick?”

  No answer. And no Poppy. Damn.

  She made her way to Nick’s office and found him scowling at one of his monitors, his cell phone pressed to his ear. He acknowledged her with a brief glance and motioned to the chair next to his.

  “Hang on, I’m finishing this up.”

  She took a seat, then scooted back a bit when she noticed how close her knee was to his. Nick’s one-sided conversation was a series of grunts and “okay”s to whoever was on the phone. When he finally hung up, he kept tapping on his keyboard, eyes still on the monitor. “Sorry, one more thing.”

  “Are you still working? We can reschedule.” She wouldn’t complain, actually. Maybe next time Poppy would be here. Maybe Livie could plant her squarely between her and Nick, just to be safe.

  “No, this isn’t work. Something came up. These little shits,” he muttered under his breath.

  “Is there a problem?” Livie asked cautiously.

  “Not really a problem. An issue.” Exasperated, he swiveled in his chair to face her. “Do you know what a DDoS attack is?”

  “Sure. A Denial of Service attack launched by a hacker, right?”

  “Yep. There’s kind of a big one hitting Europe right now. Seems to be targeting airlines. It’s a fucking mess. Usually these things are launched by some shady black hat operators looking to ransom the company to get them back online. Anyway, I started tracking these guys through the usual sources—”

  “You started tracking them? I didn’t realize you did that kind of work.”

  Nick shook his head. “It’s not for a job. I try to shut stuff like this down when I can because it’s a shitty thing to do. Yeah, maybe the guys doing it are just making a buck, but real people’s lives are being fucked up by this. There are thousands of flights grounded right now. And we’re not talking about people’s vacations. I found out about it because there’s someone in Edinburgh trying to fly into London for a kidney transplant and she’s stuck. Her transplant window is narrowing while these assholes fuck with the system. That’s not right.”

  Ah, hell. Like the looks and charm weren’t already doing a number on her. Now he had to go and be decent. “That’s really nice of you, Nick. You’re like a cyberspace Robin Hood, minus the tights.”

  “Don’t make me out to be too noble,” he warned. “You have to put these guys in their place. Maybe it’s not affecting me or one of my clients this time, but next time it might.”

  Well, that’s what he might be telling her, but his genuine concern was hard to hide. He might be wrapping it up as a sensible business decision, but he cared, whether he wanted to admit it or not. “It’s still a nice thing to do.”

  “Thanks. But it doesn’t matter. I hit a dead end. I tracked the attack back to the server, but it doesn’t belong to the guys launching the attack. They’re renting space and automated services from a third party. I can’t shut them down at the source.”

  Livie thought about it for a minute. “Have you asked whoever owns the third party server?”

  “It takes too long to get a cease and desist drawn up.”

  “No, not legally or officially or anything. Just ask. One person to another.”

  “What...just ask them nicely to shut these guys down?”

  “Sure, why not? The anonymity of the internet makes people act like jerks. I bet if you put them on the spot about something specific, they’ll choose to do the right thing.”

  Nick scoffed. “You are ridiculously optimistic, Livie. In my experience, people are generally assholes. They only respond to direct threats.”

  His dismissal made her bristle. “And in my experience, they’re not. Just try it. What do you have to lose?”

  He watched her for a moment, considering, before turning back to his keyboard and typing something. “Okay,” he said, sliding his keyboard over to her. “Give it a go.”

  “What, me?”

  He smirked. “Ask. Nicely.”

  So what if he thought she was a starry-eyed Pollyanna? She wasn’t going to give in to his cynical worldview. He’d opened a chat window, presumably with whoever owned the server. Livie considered for a moment, then started typing. She kept it brief and painfully polite, explaining the situation and asking them to intervene. She made sure to emphasize that the server owner probably had no idea what was happening, because surely they’d never want to get involved in something so illegal and immoral, but now that they’d been made aware of what was going on, she had no doubt they’d choose to do the right thing.

  Nick, reading over her shoulder, snorted in laughter. “That is the most passive-aggressive polite request I’ve ever read.”

  “Hush. Being hostile doesn’t solve everything.”

  “It can solve an
awful lot.”

  She hit Send on the message. “We’ll see.”

  “Hang on.” He took the keyboard back and typed something else.

  “Now what?”

  His eyes were busily scanning a screen full of code. “Now we wait and see what happens. Okay, let’s get back to our programming—”

  But at that moment, a ping indicated he had a new incoming message. “Holy shit.”

  “What?”

  “They booted the hackers off the server.”

  “See?” Livie cried triumphantly. “I told you. People will usually do the right thing if you give them a chance.”

  “Well, I also informed them that they were in violation of the law in about four affected countries, even if they were only hosting.”

  “Nick!”

  “Hey, you be nice if you want. I’ll fight dirty.”

  “Now we’ll never know who won.”

  One of his eyebrows hiked and the smile he gave her made her heart beat faster. “It was a competition?”

  “Not a—a competition.” His teasing was making her all flustered and tongue-tied again, just when she’d started to relax around him.

  “Oh, yes, it was,” he replied, nudging her knee with his. Their chairs had inched closer together while they’d been sharing his keyboard. She pushed hers back. “Admit it, Livie, you’ve got a competitive streak.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Everybody has a competitive streak.”

  “Not in my experience.”

  “Because you’re at Adams. You like it there?”

  Wait...what? What did Adams have to do with anything? “Excuse me?”

  “Adams. You like it?”

  He was harder to keep up with than Janet when she was on a roll. “Sure. I mean, the research project with Janet—”

  “Aside from the research, I mean. Surely you do stuff outside of class? Friends? Fun?”

  “Oh. Not really.”

  “You don’t have other astronomy geeks you hang out with? Talking about, I don’t know, the Big Bang, or whatever?”

  Her social awkwardness was bad enough to live through. Trying to explain it to someone else was a whole other level of awful. “I don’t really have too many friends.” Don’t sugarcoat it, Livie. “Um, none, really.”

  “Really? None?”

  “I have my sisters.”

  “Family doesn’t count. So no friends?”

  “People find me...”

  Nick nudged her foot with his and she startled. “What do people find you?”

  Well, it wasn’t as if she was ever going to fool him into thinking she was cool and sophisticated. Might as well admit the whole truth. “I heard some of the undergrads in the class I teach talking about me. They think I’m odd. They don’t like me.”

  “Yeah, but they’re undergrads.” He rolled his eyes. “I’m sure they’re terrified of you.”

  “I’m not terrifying.” There was nothing even remotely scary about her. She couldn’t even manage assertive.

  “Intimidating, then.”

  “I just don’t understand how you can text through a presentation on star nurseries. It’s fascinating.”

  “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. When no one speaks it.”

  Livie’s face lit up. “Exactly! So you know what
to do?”

  Nick surged to his feet. “Not at all. But at least now I know it’ll involve some kind of machine learning, and that’s more than I knew half an hour ago. And that means I can figure out the solution eventually. I’m getting a beer. Want one?”

  “Why are you always so confident you can figure it out? And no, thank you. I don’t drink.”

  “Because whenever I’ve tried to figure something out, I always do. Your family owns a bar and you don’t drink?”

  “Surely there’s some problem out there you can’t solve. There has to be. Alcohol makes my head feel fuzzy.”

  “I haven’t found a problem yet that I can’t solve, so I refuse to believe one exists. And it’s supposed to make your head feel fuzzy. That’s the point.”

  “I don’t know if you’re the most confident person I’ve ever met or just arrogant. I don’t like it when my head feels fuzzy.”

  “I’m both. So no beer?”

  “No beer.”

  Livie got up and followed him out of the office. Nick stretched his arms over his head as he made his way to the kitchen, the problem still ping-ponging around in his brain. It was a challenge, for sure, but he’d crack it eventually. He always did. That wasn’t arrogance, that was a fact.

  Livie trailed after him into the kitchen. “Your apartment is really nice.”

  “It’s Poppy’s. Well, it was Poppy’s when I met her. Now it’s ours, I guess.” He glanced around the apartment briefly. He supposed it looked nice, although he had no sense about that kind of thing at all. He’d have been happy, though, if there was one comfortable place, outside of his office, to sit down. Poppy’s designer furniture wasn’t exactly soft and welcoming.

  “How long have you lived here?”

  Nick had to stop and think for a second. Common problem when his brain was busy wrestling with a problem. His mind was back there tangled up in Hubble coding, and real life tended to get forgotten. It drove Poppy crazy.

  “Um, a year? Nearly a year. Since I met Poppy.”

  “Where’d you live before that?”

  “Palo Alto.”