It had been five years since Jessica Moon was last happy. Five years since her last good night of sleep. Five years since she had any hope for the world. And, coincidentally, five years since she started her PhD program.

  In that time she had been subjected to incompetent administrators, abusive faculty advisors, irritating undergrads, research setbacks, pulled grants, and so much more. All of this left her with a big black pit where her soul had once been, and at the bottom of that pit was a pile of sludge called ‘job prospects.’

  Her friend Melina whistled for her attention. “Jess!”

  Jessica blinked. A very concerned waiter was staring at her, pad in hand.

  “Just… a coffee. Black,” she said.

  “She’ll have a falafel wrap too,” Melina said.

  “Mel, I’m not—”

  “Gonna keep starving yourself? Of course not. Cuz I’m treating you to a wrap.”

  The waiter raised an eyebrow as if to ask Jessica if her friend was serious. She sighed and nodded. If she didn’t finish it she could always take it home in a box where it could rot for a month.

  After the waiter left Melina reached across the table to grab Jessica’s hands.

  “You’ll feel better with food on your stomach, I promise. And water. Water that doesn’t have caffeine or alcohol in it.”

  The two of them were sitting outside at Little Aleppo, a café just off campus run by a Syrian guy named Omar. Jessica liked it because Omar scared the undergrads by screaming at them for bringing in outside food and drink.

  The café’s brick porch also faced the campus, so rather than having to see a bunch of ugly, cookie-cutter apartments, Jessica could gaze at the herb garden outside the College of Medicine or the pine trees swaying in the October breeze. It was almost enough to drown out her anxiety.

  “I know. I know. I need to be better,” Jessica said.

  Melina huffed. “I oughta keep track of how often you say that.”

  “It’s easier to take care of yourself when you’re doing creative writing instead of—” Jessica blushed and stopped herself. "I'm sorry, Mel, I—"

  Melina waved her hand. “Pfbt, please. My program’s nowhere near as hard as yours. My dissertation is I’ve gotta write a book. Big whoop! I’ve written five. I know STEM’s hard, Jess. I’m trying to make it easier by keeping you from self-sabotaging. What if you end up so tired and malnourished you blow yourself up!?”

  Demonstrating the explosive power of chemistry with her arms, Melina nearly knocked their drinks out of the waiter’s hand.

  “Whoops! Sorry!” Melina said.

  Jessica moved to accept her drink and accidentally bumped it, sending black coffee across the waiter’s apron.

  “Oh my God, I’m so sorry!” Jessica said, looking around for napkins.

  “It’s fine. I’ll get you another,” he said, flicking his wet hands as he walked away.

  Jessica put her head in her hands. “I really am gonna blow myself up.”

  “No! No, babe, I was just joking!” Melina said, laughing sympathetically as she reached over to rub Jessica’s arm. “Just take a moment to relax and focus! Y’know, y’oughta come with me to yoga this Saturday. We’ll get you back in your body.”

  That was part of the problem. Jessica was stuck in a body trapped in an awful time and place. Academic research jobs (if you could get them) were beholden to the government or people with deep pockets. Meanwhile, private sector jobs involved pushing data around or doing research for idiot MBA-types who overpromised and underdelivered.

  Once upon a time, Jessica had mistakenly believed she could help improve the world. That was why she had picked materials science. She wanted to make stuff more affordable. More efficient. More clean.

  Childish and naive though it was, that stereotypical meme image of utopia with the towers soaring against gravity and walkways of translucent opal magically connecting everything? That was what she wanted to do. Unfortunately, no one was paying for that.

  Jessica picked at her uneaten falafel. “You know what I wish?”

  “Whgh?” Melina asked with a mouth full of shawarma.

  “I wish I could’ve been a medieval alchemist or something. You know, someone with stupid amounts of money to screw around with until I accidentally discover something that changes the world forever. No grant proposals, no job applications, no literature reviews. Just me, a bunch of chemicals, and a king who wants to live forever and ignores me while I invent the Haber process,” Jessica said.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  Melina swallowed. “Pretty sure you’d get burned at the stake first.”

  Jessica’s head slumped. “You’re not wrong.”

  While swimming in self-pity, Jessica’s phone buzzed. The tiny rumbling sent a landslide of dread tumbling through her mind. She drew the phone out and saw the message notification from the head of her lab, Dr. Yoneda:

  Have you finished the exfoliation yet?

  Ice replaced blood in her veins. She hadn’t even started it and if it wasn’t done by tomorrow her lab would be behind by a day.

  Ironically, she was the most meticulous member of the Yoneda group. Infamously so. To the point she often pissed off her labmates by refusing to start a reaction before everything had been cleaned and checked. If she hadn’t been so focused on editing her manuscript this wouldn’t have happened.

  “Shit! I’m so sorry, Mel! I forgot to start my reaction!” Jessica said, leaping out of her seat and throwing her book bag over her shoulder.

  Jessica was halfway down the steps when she felt a hand grab her wrist. Melina held out her falafel wrap.

  “Eat it on the way. You need something on your stomach.”

  “Thanks,” Jessica said, grabbing it and running toward campus.

  At the chemistry building, Jessica sprinted up the stairs to the third story. She stopped for a moment as her vision danced with little black dots. She brushed sweat over her greasy black-brown hair and took a few deep breaths. Annoying as it was, there was nothing unusual about her lightheadedness. It came with being 5’10” and malnourished.

  Once she was well(-ish), Jessica jogged past undergrads giving her weird looks. Her stained grey sweatpants and three-sizes too large GA union shirt wouldn’t have been out-of-place in most colleges, but her giant red rain boots and graphite-smeared lab coat very much were. Between her strange clothes, gangly figure, and baggy, sunken eyes, she probably looked like some random culture’s folklore monster.

  Jessica threw open the doors to her lab. Ugly grey walls and ugly grey machines and ugly grey countertops greeted her. The only other colors in the room came from fake wood counters and gossamer strings of electrical wires powering the lab equipment. Through this thicket she carved a path to her intimate work partner: the High-Pressure Homogenizer.

  Setting her falafel wrap down, Jessica washed her hands to remove any oils before doing her usual check of the homogenizer. The valves, nozzles, fasteners, and seals were clean. There was no residue in the chamber or leaks in the pump. The homogenizer valve was set to zero. Perfect.

  Finding everything satisfactory, she went to retrieve her solvent.

  In the cabinet she found a canister that was not the one she put in there yesterday. Attached to it was a note:

  In a hurry

  Needed your solvent

  Made some more

  Ethylene glycol (pH 11.1)

  – Galveston

  “Are you fu—rragh!”

  The smart thing to do was throw whatever Galveston made into the hazardous waste bin. Theoretically, Galveston was part of the Yoneda group and knew how to properly mix the solvent. But he was also an idiot who couldn’t be trusted to synthesize chicken stock. She wouldn’t have been surprised if he wasn’t really in a hurry so much as wanted to use a better chemist’s materials.

  Unfortunately, six hours behind on the liquid exfoliation, she didn’t have time to make more solvent. She had to do something she absolutely loathed: Place her faith in her fellow human beings.

  “You better not screw me, Galveston,” she said, setting the canister beside the graphene flakes to be fed into the homogenizer.

  Her main fear was that her labmate hadn’t measured the pH of the solvent after adding the alkali solution. The result would be graphene strands of lower quality than the Yoneda group needed. Of course, it was never impossible for someone in a chemistry lab to do something completely stupid, like mixing a flammable solution and leaving it outside a flammable storage closet. Galveston wasn’t that dumb, surely. Someone had given him a bachelor’s degree.

  Praying for the best, Jessica started the high-pressure homogenizer and poured the solution of graphene and solvent into the feed before setting the pressure gauge. She could have left after that but she liked to make sure the machine was working properly before leaving the reaction to run.

  She slumped into a desk chair.

  Freed momentarily from the shackles of rationality, her mind wandered to her fantasy of being a court scientist. Why stop there, she wondered? Why do science on behalf of a monarch when she could be the monarch? If she wanted to improve society, what better position?

  Empress Jessica. It had a ring to it.

  Maybe she could earn the title by becoming a powerful adventurer who brought real life chemistry knowledge to her medieval fantasy world. Napalming haughty elven mages. Outcompeting dwarves with hydraulic mining. Fielding an enormous army by fixing atmospheric nitrogen into the soil. She could do all that and rule as some kind of villainess empress.

  Her dreams of megalomaniacal conquest were interrupted by the gurgling of a steel stomach.

  Jessica looked up to the high-pressure homogenizer. She froze, her mind treating the groaning like a predator who could be tricked into going away. She had done everything the same as usual down to checking the machine. The only thing that had been different was…

  “Oh no…”

  Flames licked against the window port of the high-pressure homogenizer.

  “No, no, no! Galv—!”

  There was nothing after that.

  No light. No darkness. No worries. No hopes.

  Just nothing.

  There was hardly even a Jessica left save a thread of desire coursing through everything that was or had been or could be. This formless desire curled back in on itself like an ouroboros, searching for anything to attach itself to, terrified of an eternal, lonely unity.

  But although there was no longer a Jessica Moon to make a choice, and no matter or energy to make it with, there was a choice. The choice was whether or not this desire would carry itself forward into… something.

  Simmering with potential energy, this formless desire was being asked what it wanted. What would it become the moment it burst into existence once more? Did it want to rule the world as an empress?

  No.

  Whatever or whoever went wherever or whenever, it would not be for the sake of domination. It wanted to help. It wanted to help the last time it took form too, and this time would be no different.

  Then, there was light.

  And after that, a horse.