I've spent my whole career thinking about science and scientists, and one recurring theme is the gap between how most people think research works, and how it actually happens.
Most experiments fail. The controls die, the apparatus you cobbled together breaks, or the cool thing you thought you'd discovered turns out to be an artifact. Sometimes something works as intended, which is a nice change of pace. But the best thing, the moment scientists live for, isn't when an experiment works, but when it fails in an interesting way. When you're scratching your head saying "wait, that can't happen," you just might have stumbled onto something new.
This story started out with the usual sort of sci-fi musing: "wouldn't it be cool if we could ..." Then I wondered who would discover such a capability, under what circumstances, and how would they first realize it? I decided it would probably happen when they were trying to do something else. And maybe they'd think the experiment had failed.
Initially, I started with a very different cast of characters, and had trouble deciding how to shape the story. Once I hit on the idea of a graduate student making the opening discovery, everything suddenly came together. Heather finds herself confronted with something that doesn't make sense, and gets sucked into figuring it out. She learns a few other things along the way. To the extent that there is a theme, it emerged from what these characters wanted to tell me.
I hope people enjoy reading "Half Lives" as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Interesting! Thanks, Alan! Be sure to check out "Half Lives" and the rest of the stories on August 31!
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