“Something like that.”
It was relatively easy to use my research to my advantage in keeping the conversation to a minimum on the drive downtown. For the questions she did throw my way, it was mostly small talk about work. I only replied with different versions of, “I really can’t talk about that,” or “We haven’t developed that any further.” Honestly I had no idea what she was talking about, but I needed to prolong the ruse as long as I could.
Eventually I felt comfortable enough to pretend that I really was a scientist after all. I even made up brand-new gobbledygook words that I thought sounded neat—like Nekobater and carbon-monoxynile—just to satisfy the questions that completely baffled me.
I studied the buildings that we flew by. It was unsettling to see so many locations where I ha
