“Hey Kate.”

  She turned slightly and smiled at her boyfriend. “Yes, Matt?”

  He leaned closer, and the public park bench morphed into something more intimate as the background seemed to fade away.

  Is he finally going to kiss me?

  She nearly squealed.

  And then her wrist vibrated. A notification flashed on her eye display.

  “What’s up?” Matt asked. He leaned away. The moment was gone. Kate stifled a sigh.

  I swear, if it’s my mom asking when I’m going to graduate, I’ll scream!

  She blinked to pull up the notification.

  “Something wrong?” Matt asked.

  “It’s the alert I set for new signals,” she explained. “I just got a hit.”

  “You wanna go back to the lab?” he asked.

  Kate groaned. “Sorry. Yeah.”

  He shrugged. “It’s fine.”

  The park wasn’t far from their lab, which was why they’d picked it in the first place. A sunset over a field of early spring flowers had sounded perfect. And it had been, until her stupid alarm went off.

  Kate spent the five minute ride in Matt’s car chewing on her thumb. She alternated between stressing out about ruining their date and stressing out about what had caused the signal.

  “Do you think it’s real?” she asked.

  “The signal? It’s your research. You should know best.”

  “I know,” she huffed. “I mean, do you think my advisor’s theories about other dimensions are right? Or do you think Professor Kobawaltz is right and we’re just detecting the random decay of micro black holes, or some other exotic noise source?”

  Matt shrugged and turned into the lab’s parking lot. “I’m more of an optical coherence kind of guy myself, I haven’t been keeping up with your literature.”

  “I’m not asking for a paper review, I’m asking for your feelings!”

  “Well, I… isn’t that Mr. Highland?”

  Kate squeezed lower in the seat, hiding under the car dashboard.

  Matt looked at her with bemusement. “What are you doing?”

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  “I don’t know,” she whispered. “He just gives me the creeps.”

  She quickly sneaked a glance through the side mirror.

  “What’s he doing?”

  “Well, he just left the lab.”

  “After dark on a weekend?”

  “And now he’s walking to… where’s his car?”

  Matt looked around the near-empty parking lot.

  “All these cars belong to other grad students.”

  He glanced at Kate. “Does he usually get a ride here?”

  “How would I know? I’m always inside when he shows up.”

  “Well, he… wait, where did he go?”

  Kate sat up and looked around.

  “What happened?”

  “I looked away for a second and he disappeared.”

  Kate frowned and glanced at the alert still blinking in the corner of her eye display.

  “He was checking on our data collection,” she said with certainty. “Come on, I’ve got to see what triggered it.”

  She burst out of the car and scurried to the lab’s entrance, nervously looking over her shoulder as she went. Matt hurried after her, much less worried about the shadows in the parking lot. She badged through the front door, and Matt barely made it in time to follow after her.

  “What’s the alert for, anyway? More high-amplitude bursts?”

  “No,” Kate called over her shoulder.

  She tapped her keycard on the reader. It turned green and beeped happily, and she tugged the door open.

  “It was a new source, but I won’t know any more than that until I look at my–”

  She stopped halfway through the door. Her equipment was smashed. Years of work were reduced to pieces no larger than her fingernail.

  “That son of a bitch whore cock slut fucking shit!”

  Matt backpedalled, putting a safe distance between himself and the angry woman.

  “He smashed it! He smashed everything! What the hell!”

  “Mr. Highland did?”

  Matt peeked into the room and felt queasy. A few other grad students stuck their heads out from their rooms, attracted by the sudden noise, but Matt and Kate ignored their questions.

  “Wait,” Kate said, breathless. Her fingers twitched through the air, desperate for something to fix. “My backups. They should be running every ten minutes.”

  “Ten minutes? I would tell you that’s paranoid, but…”

  Kate grit her teeth. “I knew there was something wrong with that guy.”

  She turned away from the carnage and rushed towards Matt’s room. Another student called out to her, but she rushed past.

  “Let me borrow your computer, Matt.”

  “Sure,” he said, rushing ahead of her to badge into his area. “My advisor gets really paranoid if anyone touches the lasers though, so be careful around them.”

  “Yeah, don’t worry, I’m not Mr. Highland.”

  Kate hurried to Matt’s computer and unlocked it. In a few seconds she had a terminal open and was connecting to her backup machine.

  “How do you know my password?”

  “Sorry, I’ve seen you type it too many times.”

  “But it’s twenty characters long!”

  “And still weak. You should really use biometrics.”

  He rubbed the back of his head, embarrassed.

  “Ah, most of it is still here.”

  Kate leaned into the monitor. Her eyes scanned back and forth as she parsed line after line of logging information.

  “Okay,” she said with obvious relief, “I still have most of it. I’m just going to send this to my second backup.”

  She checked three times that everything had been compressed and stored remotely to a secure, off-campus machine. Then she brought up a map.

  “And now we can find out where the new signal came from.”

  She leaned forward with anticipation as she copied a GPS coordinate from her log. Matt leaned forward too, until both of their faces were nearly touching, squeezed so close to the display that they couldn’t see anything else. The map shifted, zooming to the input location.

  “The Met?” Kate said, incredulous.

  “What’s art doing sending multidimensional signals? Don’t tell me that we’ve got alien art there.”

  Kate frowned and brought up the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website. She scrolled through the entries, looking for anything that would make sense.

  “You think some ancient statue sent the signal? The Romans were advanced, but not that advanced. And don’t turn into one of those old people people who claims the pyramids were built by aliens.”

  Kate sighed. “We’ll have to go there to find out.”

  She smiled at him. “Feel like going for a late-night drive?”