For the Love — Full Story
By Marie Vibbert
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One of the unexpected and delightful consequences of breaking the light barrier is our ability to chase down signals sent into space by our ancestors. This boon to archeology cannot be ignored. If you could recover the lost library of Alexandria, would you quibble about the cost?
From “For the Love: FTL Media Recovery” research proposal by Mandee Luxor
Mandee did not expect to win the grant. She was so sure of failure, in fact, that she was meticulously revising a scathing blog post on how foolish they were to turn down this opportunity. Oops, she’d already used the phrase “soulless minions of orthodoxy.” Her finger hovered over the thesaurus tool, not sure which word to look up.
The door to her office slammed open and Cheng, her office-mate, narrowed his eyes at her, radiating jealous anger. “I thought I’d lose out to some big name, or a proposal that was already making headlines. You’re not even in your second year! Did you tell them it’s for Dr. Who?”
Wait… what? Her heart leapt into her throat. “I got the grant?”
Cheng stomped past her and addressed the high, Victorian window that looked out on the back wall of the chemistry building. “Three years I’ve been stuck here, no thanks to my advisor! And you waltz in from undergrad and get the NASA grant on your first try.”
Her throat-heart did a pirouette. “I got the grant!”
Cheng slumped into his desk chair, long, expressive fingers covering his eyes like one of the face-huggers in Alien. She felt a momentary pang for him. He had the misfortune to have his thesis advisor retire abruptly – some scandal with funds – killing his thesis project, and then had his new thesis advisor die on him four months in. He was her senior in all respects, but Mandee couldn’t make her cheeks stop smiling. “How did you find out?”
Glaring between fingers, Cheng said, “Dot.” The Case Western Reserve University department of Non-Einsteinian Physics, or CWRU-NEP, shared a notoriously chatty admin with Astrophysics. Many had called them “The country’s finest news source.”
Cheng groaned. “I lost out to Space Tivo for British Sci-Fi.”
She refreshed her email. No official letter yet. “It’s for priceless cultural artifacts. We’ll recover what we recover.”
He dropped his hands. “But mostly lost episodes of British sci-fi.” His face had a very clear “I’m gonna tell on you” vibe.
That got her cheeks to finally relax. He could tell on her. A post to social media. An email to the funding agency. It wouldn’t matter that everything in her proposal was true, the stigma of “fangirl” could scuttle the whole thing.
She felt him at her back. Heard him breathing. She stared at her inbox, unsure what to do.
Cheng huffed and stomped out of the office, slamming the quaint wood-and-glass door.
How to fend him off? Fingers shaking, she opened her project’s Gantt chart, hoping she’d made a “rumor mill control” project. She hadn’t.
Mandee was twelve and looking for something to fill her empty day, flipping channels up and down, when she caught the bizarre image of a trio of people in old-fashioned clothes running in fear from an upturned trash can with a plunger sticking out in front. She stopped to see what this was. The long intro to a comedy sketch?
The sets were cheap, the effects laughable, but there was a young man with a troubling secret, who seemed to be working for the bad guy, and Mandee had to know his story.
And the episode ended with a cliffhanger, with the young man in danger! She saved the show to her favorites, but this was a local broadcast station, so all the episodes weren’t available. It was from overseas, she would have to buy something called BritBox, and her family didn’t even have Netflix.
Mandee discovered the sweet agony of waiting a week for the next episode, and the next. The tragedy of Turlough the space refugee imprisoned in British Boarding School eked out for almost a year, by which time there were new plot lines with new cliffhangers. Then the local station lost its rebroadcast rights or something and she was cut off!
It wasn’t until she was in college that she was able to access all the streaming sites and binge every doctor, going forward from her start with Peter Davidson, then back to number one… and that’s when she hit the gap. Episode missing. Episode missing. Cliffhangers left hanging, jumps in plot unexplained.
Was there a disastrous fire at BBC headquarters? A copyright lawsuit? No. The cash-strapped television studio had simply deleted archives for years, to re-use the tapes. Ninety-seven episodes from the first six years of the series were simply gone.
Mandee, a devotee of novels about lost civilizations, ruins on Mars, and time travel, could never let go of that loss. A world crafted and created by actors, writers, set decorators: all blown away like a sand mandala.
Her hunger was only stoked higher by audio-only fan-recordings, production photos and artist renderings. To see a face half-veiled is to see the most beautiful face of all.
Of course, she had to convince people this project was about anything else. Historical significance. It wasn’t a lie.
Dot was her key. Say anything to Dot, and it would be repeated throughout the university. Mandee contrived to hang around the front desk, waiting for Dot to not be busy. She waited a long time, developing a new respect for department assistants. They hardly sat down, a whirlwind of pink buzz cut and overalls. Mandee learned Dot’s favorite drink and started bringing it every morning. They’d grunt about being able to get their own tea, but smile, a little color rising to their freckled cheeks. Mandee would start in, “So, I just got this huge grant…”
“That’s nice.” And Dot was off again.
It wasn’t gossip-worthy, that was the problem. Dot wouldn’t stop for normal news. “Send it in an email,” they’d bark, and already be doing something else.
Mandee switched tactics, breaking in next morning right away with, “Cheng wants to tank my project.”
Dot set a stack of colloquium brochures aside and asked, “Wait, the time-traveling thing?”
“Sort of!” Mandee set the mug of Earl Grey in Dot’s easy reach. “It’s more that by traveling faster than light, we can outpace light rays, as well as radio and other electromagnetic rays, that emitted from the Earth in the past, catching time with space!”
“That’s so cool,” Dot said, which was, of course, just what Mandee needed to hear.
“Of course, the Earth hasn’t been sitting still all this time, so we have to track its past position through space.” Dot’s eyes flicked to their computer, so Mandee changed back to the main subject, “do you think that’s worth doing? Considering it’s funded already? Isn’t it petty, to want to undermine that out of jealousy?”
The word “petty” lit up Dot’s eyes like a promise of free lunch.
Mandee gasped, “Oh, I’m late for a conference,” and hurried away. Leave them wanting more. It worked for gossip as well as for television episodes. She went to check on her calculations.
The work to track Earth’s position in space over time had been done before, though CWRU-NEP’s calculations would be focusing on Northern Europe’s specific facing, particularly in the evening Greenwich mean Time; Mandee argued that this would be a primary source of early EM-waves. All routine except…
When she shook her mouse to wake her computer, instead of the expected “your computations have completed” message with attached link to the file, there was a terse “query rejected.”
Of course her query was rejected. Cheng was in charge of the server they used for the computations, having picked up the sysadmin job when he lost his stipend.
She couldn’t find him, only to stumble on him in the lunch line in the cafeteria. When she confronted him, he folded his arms smugly. “I think you’ll find there was more radio traffic over North America.”
Mandee tightened her grip on her tray, picturing whacking him over the head with it. “I think we won’t.”
He lifted one shoulder in a shrug, and was annoyingly silent. Other, happier students passed on either side of them, carrying trays to tables or the return counter. Mandee groaned. “Don’t make me say it.”
His eyes crinkled. “Say what? The central reasoning behind your entire project?”
Did that old guy walking past pause and look? Mandee set her tray on top of the trash can and tugged Cheng’s sleeve, pulling him out of the flow of traffic. “You know… I have budget to pay a NASA liaison.”
He raised an eyebrow. “If you’re offering me a bribe, I want a publication credit.”
“If you want publication credit, you have to help.”
He shifted his weight, not looking at her. She knew he wanted the money, if he could let go of his stupid manly pride.
He shifted his weight again. Mandee felt a quiver like a fish on the hook.
“I’ll think about it.” He slipped into the stream of people.
Mandee was tweaking the layout of the experiment module, trying to cram everything into the space allotted on the vehicle. The main part was a receiver to collect EM with sensitivity focused on the bandwidth of early television. Everything else had to fit around that.
The vehicle was already designed at NASA Glenn Research Base, with its own fact-finding goals and other modules doing similar things, something about filling in weather and population data on old longitudinal studies. A thousand tiny micro-satellites would burst out to create the array to pick up the signals. They had an ingenious spring-launch system based on the seeds of the jewel weed plant.
The mission was called Project Narcissus. She loved that. She couldn’t remember the Dr. Who episode that had a villain named Narcissus, but she was sure there was one.
Cheng stomped in so hard that the Tardis on her computer monitor wobbled. Wavering rays of anger seemed to lift from his scalp. “We can’t use the Singham module.” He threw his arms wide. “Too heavy. And they also don’t like the housing material.”
“It’s the lightest we can get!”
He mimed throwing something over his head. “It’s never been tested in space. They say let some other mission be the first.”
“But—”
“Look! You’re making me have to be your little go-between. I’ve been back and forth to Berea all week. I’m done arguing for you.”
He was turning to march away, and she saw her project vanishing before her eyes. If they couldn’t reach a compromise, NASA could simply cancel their berth on the vehicle. And there weren’t that many FTL missions. The fuel costs were so high.
“Second author,” Mandee blurted, and saw Cheng freeze in the doorway. “Fix this, and I’ll move you up to second author credit.”
He stared at her. He knew, like she did, that one’s advisor traditionally got second author credit, and it could destroy a post-doc’s career to be seen as ungrateful. “You… really love your old TV shows.”
“Cultural artifacts,” she corrected automatically.
His shoulders dropped. “It doesn’t matter. We still need to shave off thirty grams of weight. There’s nothing left to cut, even if we can use the lighter material.”
Cheng looked as sorry as she felt. It was a moment of connection. She turned back to her design documents. “We could cut processing. Just collect the raw data. That would eliminate the need for the heat sink. That’s nearly forty grams.”
“You said the noise ratio would be too high if we didn’t pre-process.”
Mandee shrugged. “Do you have another idea, co-author?”
Cheng sucked his teeth, then held up a finger. “I’m… going to go get a beer.”
He left with soft steps, face folded with concentration. Despite the uncertainty, Mandee felt confident. He was as hooked as she was, now. No researcher can resist a knotty problem.
Mandee ran simulations of a hundred scenarios. How dense the signals would be, how degraded, how much noise from galactic radiation and solar flares. It looked like it could work?
If only NASA could afford to run Narcissus a dozen times! They could aim for different time periods… different angles… lost radio plays, never-preserved Eastern Bloc science fiction? Oooo.
Mandee sighed. Her module was under the weight limit and approved at last, that’s all that mattered.
Then she saw the email from her advisor titled “Urgent: Second Author??”
She barely skimmed the email, which had more exclamation points and all caps than one would expect from a PhD. This sort of thing was better handled in person. She trudged to Dr. Bank’s office as if to an execution. It was only one floor up and two doors over, the glass panes covered with New Yorker cartoons so admin wouldn’t catch him smoking in his office.
The pungent smell of pipe tobacco was hard to miss. Dr. Bank looked up from his computer, snatched his pipe from his mouth to hold under the desk as she stepped in and closed the door. “This isn’t up for debate,” he said. “Cheng is at best fourth author.”
“He single-handedly got our design through NASA.”
He waved his pipe. “A glorified errand-boy. You did the hard work.”
Mandee slipped into the worn leather seat in front of the desk. “You know, he needs an advisor.”
“Don’t pity him. He’s got to learn to make it on his own.” Dr. Banks sighed and put his leather-patched elbows on the blotter. “Kid, all we have is the paper. The mission is on hold.”
“Wait… what?”
“It’s an election year.”
Mandee stared, waiting for more. Who cared about election years since the bad old Trumpist Insurrection of 2024-2026?
“The Green Party has made NASA’s budget a debate item. They’re promising to slash funding for launches that aren’t tied to human colonization.”
“… what about the Social Democrats?”
Dr. Bank swiveled back to the computer. “Don’t get your hopes up. Fourth author. We go to print this week.”
She and Cheng watched the election returns together. She’d made a pitcher of kiwi daiquiris and one of grape. They were supposed to drink state-by-state. As the night wore on, they lost stomach for the game and let the daiquiris melt. As they turned off the television, Cheng took a long, defiant drink from the purple pitcher. “Well,” he said as he set it back down. “I’m going to bed. See you in the morning if we still have funding.”
Narcissus, of course, was the first on the chopping block. They found out that Monday. Mandee drowned her sorrows in fanfiction, staying up all night, reading thousands and thousands of words. Donna/Doctor. Sarah Jane Saves the World. Even, regretfully, Doctor/Master. Then she drunk-posted to the Dr. Who Forum.
“People are sad about the election results. Not to make you sadder, but I had a project set to launch through NASA to re-capture all the lost episodes of Dr. Who! It would have been amazing.”
She closed her laptop and fell on her bed fully-clothed, drooling into her Dalek pillow.
She woke up, as she often did after getting drunk, with perfect recall of every stupid thing she’d done. Specifically, she’d admitted in public the purpose of the project was fangirling!
She didn’t dare log in to see the response. She called Cheng.
He answered on the third ring of the second attempt, sounding dead. “… ‘lo? It’s not noon yet. This better be because we got our funding back.”
“I sort of posted about the project on my Dr. Who forum, admitting it was all to get the lost episodes.”
She heard Cheng take in a breath. Her head ached. “Hello? Cheng?”
“Fuck it,” he said. “We can’t get more cancelled than cancelled. Look, better drop me as a co-author; I’m obviously the kiss of fucking death.”
“No! You’re not! You were bril—” but he’d already disconnected.
Mandee got herself a glass of water and an ice pack. She wrote in her journal and read fanfiction until she felt strong enough to look through her notes for other projects to submit for grant money.
Mandee was so embarrassed by what she’d posted that she didn’t dare look at the fan forum for days. So she didn’t see the replies, or the replies to replies, or the person who posted links to her proposal and the debate on if it would work…
Or 70sWhoFan#1 posting, “It’s not fair. We could have had this. We could have had closure.”
Or Gallifreyan29, “Are we going to sit around and wait for a time lord to solve our problems, or are we going to jump in and solve it ourselves like Donna would?”
“Donna! Best doctor’s companion ever!”
“Eh, I prefer Sarah Jane.”
“Same point. Sarah Jane wouldn’t take this lying down.”
She didn’t see the GoFundMe announced, or the very rich Dr. Who fan in Nigeria who placed the largest donation.
Cheng, Dr. Bank, Dot, and the top three donors crowded close as Mandee pulled up the first data results. It looked like fuzz, like an old television not coming in. She applied the smart filters, shifted out the frequencies of solar radiation, and the known signals from declassified cold-war sattelites.
Dark bands formed, thickened, wriggled, and then snapped. An elderly man turned to the camera, one eye squinting, a look of haughty disdain, “Daleks? Are you sure?”
The room screamed. Mandee didn’t know if the tears and shouts were coming from her or from Cheng or someone else.
They were still jumping up and down and hugging when the administrator of NASA called. She smiled warmly, projected on the big screen at the front of the room. “We at NASA have always had a great respect for science fiction and its fans. That you crowd sourced the entire budget has excited investors everywhere, and I’m pleased to announce that congress has approved a Narcissus 2, to recover lost Buck Rodgers radio plays. And as a side-effect, more vital meteorological data.”
She winked an awful lot like Donna.
Afterword
Mandee’s experience of Dr. Who is, unsurprisingly, closely based on my own. I fell for Peter Davidson one Saturday afternoon when the cartoons ended and I didn’t want to get up just yet, so I turned the dial and found something I hadn’t expected on the local PBS station.
