19. Machine

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Jane let the lab door slam and bounce shut behind her, her arms overflowing the scattered notes she'd been making for most of the night. Not looking up from her precariously balanced tower of print-outs and notebooks, she managed to crash into the edge of one of the more solid tables and dump her burden. It dispersed itself into an uneven sprawl on top of a keyboard and a pile of star charts. She blew her hair out of her face and glanced around the room.

The top of Luke's head was visible over the back of one of the office chairs, a beacon of shocking black against the white vinyl. She stomped over, dragging her boots behind her heels with every step. Jane hadn't had the motivation to untie them enough to get her feet all the way in when she was leaving the trailer this morning. It was probably for the best that her entry was raising such a clamour. She doubted she could sneak up on Luke even if her life depended on it, but she also had a strong feeling it wouldn't be the greatest idea to startle him when he thought he was alone.

She clattered all the way up behind him before stepping out of the boots, but he made no move to acknowledge her presence. She looked down over his head to see what he was doing and found a legal pad resting on his knee. He was drawing some kind of schematic, maybe a generator, and he was making notations in a spiky scribble that she couldn't read. Leaning on the back of the chair and resting her cheek on her folded forearms, she turned to look into his face. He frowned at his work, his eyebrows pressing towards each other in concentration as he altered an angle in the design. His hair was tucked behind his ears, but it was threatening to escape out from under them, and its volume framed his face like a black halo. Falling in broad waves near his hairline, it became increasingly curly towards the ends and around the nape of his neck.

She felt the pull of a familiar urge. Jane had never cared a whole lot about social formality, but she'd been valiant in her resistance of this urge for weeks, because personal space did seem awfully important to Luke. Then again, the personal space line had definitely been crossed the night before, and it had gone pretty well, all things considered. She decided to stop resisting. Sliding one arm out from under her chin, she reached up to run her fingers through his hair. The texture was unlike anything she'd ever felt, the strands silky but resistant to friction and almost seeming to grip her fingers as she combed them through. She felt the giddy thrill of mussing his perfectness that she'd anticipated, but also a heady rising warmth that settled in her sternum, just below her throat, and made her wish she could pause the world for a second. She wanted to stay here and now for a bit, knowing she had time to enjoy it, knowing it was safe.

Luke leaned into her hand as her palm cupped the curve of his skull, letting her hold the weight of his head for an intimate moment. Then he hummed on a note which could have been appreciative or interrogative in tone.

"Good morning," was all he said.

"Hey," Jane answered, not quite sure of herself all of a sudden. A spell had been broken by his voice, and the certainty, the ease of the physical closeness seemed to abandon her.

"I've made you a present," he announced with total nonchalance, ignoring her hesitation.

Jane fluffed his hair with her nails before withdrawing her hand and raising an eyebrow at him. "Oh, really?" She felt safe again. Casual.

"Indeed." He pointed into the kitchen area with his chin. Following the direction of the gesture with her eyes, she noticed the coffee pot full and steaming.

"You made coffee?" Jane asked, surprised and not a little suspicious.

"It would seem so, wouldn't it?" he drawled, sketching something round on his legal pad.

Jane walked over to the kitchen counter, sniffing the air. It smelled like coffee. She grabbed a mug and poured, smelling again, then turned to glare at Luke over her shoulder. He wasn't looking at her, but he was smirking down at his drawing.

"What's the catch?"

"Nothing."

"I don't believe you. There is no way you randomly decided to do something domestic. You don't even drink coffee."

Luke twirled his pencil in his left hand, clearly enjoying himself. "So very much was made, by you and Miss Lewis, and even Erik Selvig, about your abject failure to use that machine. Miss Lewis mentioned she had forbidden you to touch it. I found myself impossibly curious to know what convoluted technical marvel could stymie such a capable scientist, a scientist who so excels at engineering that her entire lab is stocked with home made equipment." Luke showed every single one of his teeth when he looked up and grinned at her. "Imagine my shock to discover the mechanism so simple, the lower primates could likely be taught to manage it without great difficulty."

Jane frowned hugely and was opening her mouth to retort when he started cackling at her indignation.

"It's tricky," she insisted, miffed. She had misaligned the basket or something when she flooded the counter, that could happen to anyone, and she'd forgotten to change the filter a few times. Even simple things could go wrong when you didn't pay attention. She'd accidentally fried an automatic rice cooker once, too, because she hadn't read the instructions. Not that she would mention that to him.

"No!" Luke insisted, still laughing, "it isn't!"

"I'm surprised you lowered yourself from on high long enough to do something that close to manual labour. Weren't you worried you'd get your sleeves dirty?"

His good humour wasn't the slightest bit dented by her bitterness and his smile only grew brighter as she glared at him. "I considered it an act of charity towards the less able."

Jane squawked in outrage, half ready to dump the coffee over his head.

"Besides, you will presumably be needing one of your 'caffeine boosts' to build this." He waved the schematic at her. Tempting her with it.

Not at all forgiving him, she inched closer to his chair. "And that is what?"

"Think of it like the needle on a compass." He held it up, smugly, like he knew he'd won.

She took the drawing and he rose to stand beside her, leaning close to point out the key features of the design. This put his belly at just about her elbow level, and she was already pulling back to give him a good jab in the gut before he finished his first sentence. He didn't even pause as he moved his hand up to catch hold of her arm. She struggled, but she couldn't budge his grip. Her revenge was thwarted. Now she absolutely could not let him get away unscathed.

"Fight fair, Jane," he admonished as she squirmed, obviously amused.

She scoffed. "Like you would!"

"Victory is always fair." He chuckled when she tried to get her other arm in between their bodies. She couldn't get a good angle of attack and she couldn't get free. "Good tactics are the ultimate equaliser, and they are available to all."

"Can't argue with that," Jane agreed. She slid her hand down his side until she found a fleshy spot below his hip and pinched him, hard. When he flinched away in surprise, he bent further forward and thus down into her reach, whereupon she grabbed his face and kissed him. His guard dropped instantly, as Jane had known it would, and she nudged him in the stomach with her fist, just to prove that she could.

He made a small sound of protest into her mouth, though his focus was obviously no longer on their battle of wills. His hand came to rest tentatively at her waist, steadying her as she rolled up onto her tip toes for better access, but his posture remained awkward as he struggled to stay at her level. Jane's fingers went back to his hair, threading through it and tilting his head the way she wanted it as she coaxed his lips apart with hers. Even with the space between their bodies, only the kiss connecting them, she felt heat rushing into her face and her extremities tingling. It was like being a teenager again, kissing for the first time, everything uncertain and new and about to explode the moment they figured out how to fit together without getting in each other's way. He was so tall, if he'd only pick her up everything would be better. Everything would be mind blowing. It hadn't occurred to him yet, but she'd make sure it did.

Luke sighed something incoherent as he allowed her tongue to slip into his mouth, his fingers reflexively squeezing her hip. It had a tone almost of realisation, maybe awe. Oh.

"Well, I saw this coming," Erik's voice, dripping with disapproval, threw a bucket of ice over the proceedings.

Luke jumped away from her, blushing to the roots of his hair, but his expression was more of anger than embarrassment. Saying nothing, he looked first at Jane, then at Erik, then stalked over to the atom smasher and pretended it urgently needed his undivided attention. He started unscrewing bolts and pulling pieces off with his bare hands.

Jane put pressure on her temples with one hand, flapping the other one at Erik in what she hoped was a clear signal to shut up. He shrugged, mouthing "what?". Jane could have punched him. She was pissed about the proprietary tone of his interruption, pissed that the morning had been going really nicely and now seemed to be taking a turn for the frustrating, and above all pissed that she couldn't yell at either of them without making a scene she was dead certain she'd regret.

She made a zip it motion at Erik, seizing his sleeve to drag him over to her notes from the previous evening. Luke ignored them with such intensity that she could feel him ignoring them from across the lab.

"I know how we're going to start," Jane said abruptly, her tone insistent. She was going to pretend it hadn't happened and everyone could just damn well follow her lead.

"Start what?" Erik asked, too loudly, obviously annoyed with her avoidance and only playing along under protest. "Power transfer? Navigation? Safe-"

"Everything. Just listen. We've been thinking about this the wrong way. Luke said-"

"Oh, Luke said!" He gestured dramatically, as if that surely solved everything.

She just glared at him, crossing her arms and waiting for him to realise how insulting he was being. If everyone around her was going to start acting like a five year old, she was going to start assigning time outs.

Erik took a long, deep breath through his nose and looked away. "I'm sorry."

"I'm a grown-up now, Erik," Jane whispered fiercely, leaning close to avoid being overheard. "You know exactly how unfair you're being! We could- Luke and I- do this without you. I know we could, and I think you know it too. But I'd like you to be here, I'd really like you to be part of it and be happy for me and get to see this happen. If you can accept that this is my lab and my choice, and I'm not being impulsive or crazy this time. I've got perfectly adequate critical thinking skills."

He nodded, his eyes on the table instead of on hers. He looked suitably chastened, but Jane was under no illusions that he had stopped thinking she needed his protection and his good sense to prevail. She decided to take the acquiescence for what it was worth and leave the rest for another day.

"The keys are willpower and quantum entanglement," she soldiered on, unable to contain her desire to get back to what was really important.

"What?" Erik looked at her like she had seven heads.

She tried to explain it as best she could, adding the work she'd done overnight, expanding on what Luke had told her in words with some real math. Maybe if Luke had helped her lay it out, she could have gotten it across better, but she floundered in the attempt to articulate the ineffable truth she'd finally grasped the previous evening, even with far more concrete data. Jane wondered if she was bad at explaining the abstract without a full array of equations at her command, or if Erik's mind just wasn't fertile soil for this kind of borderline metaphysical quantum interpretation. She hoped his hostility wasn't getting in the way, because that would be such a shame it didn't bear thinking about.

"I don't understand," Erik said for the fourth or fifth time, now with an air of finality.

It had taken over three hours to reach this impasse, and Luke had gradually stopped pointedly pretending that they were not in the room, but Jane noted that his personality had retreated back behind the chilly veneer of stand-offish formality. The difference between what he was like when he was starting to relax and what he was like the rest of the time was becoming increasingly dramatic.

"Perhaps you never shall," he commented in clipped tones. He ripped a page off his note pad and crumpled it up. "Jane, if you have finished wasting time, we have much to do."

She got up and brushed herself off. Trying for a reassuring smile at Erik, she said, "We'll talk again later, maybe. You wanna start lunch or-"

"I'm not a cook," Erik muttered, apparently put out by his inability to catch up with them. "I'll go back to town. Pick something up."

"Okay." Jane watched him shrug into his coat and bustle out the door, feeling suddenly guilty that she hadn't wanted to call her mentor right away when she'd had the breakthrough. She did want to share it with him, but his approval wasn't the most important thing any more.

She turned back to Luke to see him shoving piles of paperwork and books to one side of the table, clearing a space for him to lay out all of his legal pad drawings.

"Any action carried out on an entangled particle is carried out on the whole quantum system, instantaneously, which then collapses," he said to the tabletop. "When you measure-"

Jane slid her arm around his waist and tucked herself into his side. He had faltered the moment she touched him.

"What are you doing?"

"I don't care what anyone says about this." She waved her hand back and forth, gesturing to herself and then to him. She was far from ready to put a name to it, but it was Something.

Luke stared at her silently.

"Just so you know. It's got nothing to do with anybody else and no one else is going to mess with it one way or the other. I'm not going to accept the ice prince treatment because Erik saw you being vulnerable or whatever that was about."

His hand drifted up her back, and he started winding her hair around his palm. His eyes were slitted as he leaned back to look down at her. "Jane, I fear one day you will be honest with someone who is not strong enough for the truth."

She shivered as his twisting disturbed the hairs at the back of her neck. The movements of his arm made long muscles in his back shift under her hold, and her fingers convulsed against his side as she battled an impulse to follow their contours with her hands.

"I suppose I must continuously pray for strength," he said, and it sounded like a promise. He let his hand pull gently free, then touched her lip with his thumb. It seemed like he wanted to say more, but he eventually turned back to the schematics.

"So what does this have to do with entanglement?" she prompted, trying to spare him.

He shot her a half smile which might have been grateful or might have been knowing, then returned to lecturing mode. "By observing decoherence just before it happens, by causing it, you may find the quantum system which will allow you to navigate across the stars. You know where you are going because now you have additive probability, the appearance of a wave function collapse. You have a single, knowable eigenstate, then it is a matter of your will."

"Okay, I'm hearing that this is measuring a superposition specifically to decohere the system and therefore create an observable decay in the entangled particles. And using that traceable decay, we can see where we're going, so to speak." Jane chewed on her lip, tapping on Luke's ribcage with her fingertips. She'd practically forgotten her arm was around him at this point, her brain a million miles away. "I think I follow, but you talk a lot about getting in between measurement and its effects, and I don't see how that's possible. Either you've measured or you haven't, there's no in between."

"Time is relative, Jane. All modern physics already acknowledges that it is so, but they have not followed the path as far as it goes. It goes into the dark of the great unknown." His eyes lit up with mischief, teasing her.

She found herself laughing a little, not sure why. "Oh, so we're going through the looking glass now, are we?"

He smiled uncertainly at her, obviously confused by the reference but trying not to show it. She found it really endearing that he was pretending for her sake. That's how she knew she was in trouble.

"What happens after we know where we're going?" She pulled away from him and bent over the designs, furrowing her brow as she kidded herself that she could make heads or tails of them.

He cocked his head to the side. "I imagine you've pored over everything I've said enough to know by now."

"You know, I realised last night that I've heard of something kind of like your theory before. It was the consciousness causes collapse interpretation of the measurement problem. It goes that the apparatus used to measure is just the same as the rest of the universe, made up of the same atoms and systems. It should be able to observe a superposition- but it never does, it's always a single outcome." She paced a bit, trying to dreg up more detail from a disused cold storage area in her memory; if she hadn't been in the field so long it might have occurred to her to mention this earlier, saving them both some arguments. "The theory says that it's consciousness which actually makes the wave function collapse, the non-physical mind which isn't made up of the same stuff, so the non-physical mind is actually necessary to the process. I remember thinking that was bananas."

"Such a way with words you have, Jane." He leaned against the table, his fingertips trailing over the surface. "And now what do you think?"

"I think you've convinced me that's only the tip of the non-physical iceberg."

He pushed off the table and came close to her, lifting his hands to cup the sides of her head. "Everything necessary to change your world forever is right here, in your mind. If you can't imagine doing it with your mind alone, you still have my antimatter and therefore the power, you have the knowledge and understanding to use it, you have the will. Your will burns so brightly, Jane Foster, it is amazing your form can contain it."

"I bet you say that to all the girls," she deflected lamely, embarrassed by his intensity.

Luke was, as always, totally innocent of the cliché and seemed to take her completely seriously. "I have said so to no one. Do you believe me?"

She wasn't sure whether he meant the compliment or that he'd never used it as a line. Either way, the answer was the same. She looked up into his sober, pensive expression and her heart did a little flip flop. "Of course I believe you."

"Then you'll believe me when I tell you we will have this bridge open in less than a week."

Somewhat to her own amazement, she nodded that she did. Suddenly it all seemed so clear, and if there was lingering doubt and if there was still a big black unknown spot, she had faith that she would know what to do when the moment came. It was coming together in her head, beyond theory and into actionable plans. She knew what to build and how to build it, she knew that it would work.

What would happen after the bridge was opened, she was too focussed and too excited to contemplate. The only frisson of fear was the fear that someone would snatch her victory away from her.

.,.,.,.,.,.,.

"I've got something you might want to listen to here, sir."

"If this is more super high quality audio of Ramirez eating Doritos, I'm going up the chain about you clowns."

"No, sir. Sound flickered out, dropped in suddenly, and then the conversation got real interesting. I think they might have been filtering us and whatever the disruption was, it failed."

"This whole time? Without us detecting it? Don't be-"

"I really think you should just listen, sir. You might still want to go up the chain."

"Gimmie the 'phones."