July nineteenth: after a dull series of trials to confirm that the atom could be successfully entangled (the true core of science is tedium, he thought) on the two hundred and fifty-sixth trial, the Lutece Field began turning on and off without his intervention. He was almost finished for the day, so he blearily wrote it up in his notes and lay down on the cot that he kept in the corner of the lab for such evenings
July twentieth: It was happening again. Hating himself for his slowness, he noticed a pattern to it. The precipitous drop of his stomach when he realized that it was Morse Code – his notes were barely readable. Transcribing the dots and dashes. Then, the scrawl indicating that it was saying, of all the things that it could possibly have said: hello.
He did not know how long he had watched it, shaking – at least twenty cycles – but at last it fell silent. He had been assuming that it was a natural phenomenon, interference from another power source, but the presence of another human being? He reached out with trembling hands and through his excitement manipulated the levers and valves to respond.
Five cycles. This time the silence was longer. He wondered if his fatigue had gotten the better of him, or if he had, as his mother always predicted, been driven mad by his research.
Then it started up again, dreadfully slow: (my name is lutece)
He signaled back: (that is my name)
A pause. Then (Rosalind Lutece)
He could not signal fast enough. (Robert Lutece)
Without preamble, the power went out in the building, and he was in the dark. It had happened before, as he had done the wiring piecemeal over the course of the years and the building infrastructure was never intended for the kind of power that the machine demanded.
He fumbled for the candle that he kept for these occasions and went to investigate the fuse box. As he walked down the hallway, the possibilities of who the woman on the other side of the transmission might be made his head spin, and he laughed out loud as he changed out the whole bank of fuses that had blown. He powered up the machine, and sat down to try again.