"Absolutely not."

"Really?"

"Yes! And the reason why I have no idea what is going on is that everyone keeps being all cagey and talking in riddles! Just tell me what's happening!"

"There's no need to be rude."



"Yes! There is! Everyone in this whole mess has just been jerking me around! Tell me what is going on!"

There is a long silence.

"Please just tell me!"

"I'll try, but it's not exactly easy."

"Why not?"

"Well, it's complicated."

"It's not that complicated! You were doing an experiment, right? Something to do with energy. You said you could power stuff just by having people look at it."

"That's what I said."

"And something went wrong."

"Oh something had gone wrong a good deal earlier then that."

"Aaargh -

"Now don't get angry. I'm trying to tell you what happened but, like I said, it's not easy."

"Why isn't it easy?"

"Well first, because you're not a physicist, but even when you were it didn't help much."

"When I was what?"

"When you were a physicist. The one you call 'B3', she was a physicist. Quite a good one. A little reckless perhaps, possibly slightly unhinged, but very sharp."

"And you couldn't explain it to her?"

"Parts of it I could, and parts of it we worked out together. The observable parts at least, we sort of hashed that out, but the important bits, the why's, we never figured out. She may have done so later, I don't know, but when our conversation ended, neither of us were much further along in figuring it out than we were when we started."

"Figuring what out!?"

"Well," she pauses, looks down at her toast. "I don't like to -

"Josephine!"



"Whatever you're dancing around, just say it."

"My device, my experiment. It never really made any sense in the first place."

Notes