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I glance up from my screen and smile politely while Hudson and the crew invade my space.
“Whoa, that’s quite the breeze,” Hudson remarks.
“Oh, you won’t notice it when you’re at your desk,” I answer. Glancing at Keenan, I see he’s narrowing his eyes at me. “But if it bothers you, I can move it. I just find the air flow helps me think.”
“No, that’s great, yeah,” Hudson says. “Good tip. See? I’m learning already and I just got here.”
Oh, he’s smooth. A smooth, smooth talker, who can go suck it.
Josie (who seems like a total beotch, by the way) says, “Hudson, let’s get some footage of you at your desk.”
“Oh sure,” he says, striding over and sitting down. He adjusts the seat, sits back and puts both hands on the desk, then runs them over the faux wood surface. “This is nice.”
No, it isn’t. It’s cheap and rickety. Oh my God, he’s not just a liar, he’s pathological.
“So, this is where the magic is going to happen,” Hudson says into the camera. “Dr. Allie here is going to show me the ropes and turn me into a radio astrologer. Crap, astronomer. Can we cut that?”
My body goes stiff at the word astrologer and I’m pretty sure the camera caught me looking like I just smelled the inside of a sweaty hockey helmet, but I do my best to recover.
Josie grins down at him. “Of course. Try the line again.”
He turns to me. “You do have a PhD, right? So I should call you doctor?”
Flatterer. I give him a quick nod that says of course I have my PhD. “I do, but you don’t have to call me doctor. I mean, if you were going to, it would be Dr. Cammareri, but Allie’s fine.”
Look at him, smiling away at me. He’s got no idea that I’m onto him. “Okay, thanks, Dr. Cammareri,” he says with a wink that I’m sure makes women around the world swoon. But not me. I’m not swooning. Okay, fine, maybe I did internally swoon the tiniest bit. I’m only human.
He looks back at the camera. “So, this is where the magic is going to happen. Dr. Cammareri here is going to be my guide as I fully immerse myself in the world of radio astronomy.”
“Awesome,” Josie says.
Hudson smiles at me. “Allie, can you tell the people at home what you’re working on?”
I pause for a second, trying to decide how much to say. “Umm, I’ve been working on a way to train an AI system I lovingly call Frank, after the late, great Frank Drake.”
Josie and Hudson both wear matching blank expressions.
“The father of SETI?”
Still nothing.
“Anyway, Frank here is learning to analyze the data we get from outer space. He’s looking for anomalies or repeated, unusual pulses of light or radio waves.”
“Wow, that sounds fascinating,” Hudson says, squinting at my computer screen.
“It really is,” I answer, even though I’m sure he’s just acting like he’s fascinated. “You see, it used to be, back in the day, that we had trouble getting signals from space. Then it was separating the radio and laser signals from Earth with those from space. We’ve sorted that out and have built up our global radio telescopes to the point where now, we’re getting too much data. Far more than we can analyze. But Frank is going to fix that because once he’s trained, he’ll be able to do the work one human would do in ten years in a matter of seconds.”
“Okay,” Josie says. “You can stop talking now. No way our viewers want to know any of that.”
Wow, rude. She could’ve at least pretended.
Josie turns to the camera with a wide-toothed grin. “All right, we’ll try to make it back here to check on Hudson sometime in the next few weeks, so make sure you stay tuned because you won’t want to miss it. From Mountain View, California, this is Josie Pedlar signing off.”
The cameraman lowers the camera to his side and Josie hands the mic to him. Then she sits on Hudson’s desk and, in a low voice, says, “So, this is really where you’re going to spend the next few weeks. Aren’t you afraid you’re going to die of boredom?”
I wait, expecting him to laugh, but he doesn’t. He just shakes his head. “Nope. I’m really excited about this. I love learning new things.”
“The camera’s off, Hudson. You can tell the truth now.”
