Interversal

2

Amy had been rightfully shocked when her boss and colleague Bryan Lewis assigned a rookie reporter to such an important story. There were plenty of veterans who would have been better off, pros who could do a stand-up like this in their sleep. But she knew the pressure Bryan was under to get ratings up, how many people had been fired over the last ten years, many of them with more experience than either her or him.

And this inexperienced carpetbagger was their replacement.

Still, she couldn't help pulling for Alex. If nothing else, she deserved to make or break herself, and this was definitely her moment.

Silently reciting the opening remarks she'd written on the plane, Alex was looking somewhere in the distance, not making eye contact with Amy. Behind her, the production assistant Lori Fitzgerald was futzing with the microphone transmitter, attaching it to Alex's belt.

Amy was the definition of calm. In fourteen years with GNT she'd seen the network do strange things to reach new, younger viewers, and hiring Whitmore was among the most risky. She was a credible science reporter, but had no on-air experience. Making things worse she didn't know any TV reporting basics like how to produce a package or set up a shot. Hell, the girl looked like she hadn't slept in days. She was far too green for this, and it was Amy's job to minimize that as much as possible.

"She's your responsibility," Bryan, executive producer of the nightly news program, told her back in New York just before the redeye to Geneva. Apparently he and the higher-ups thought Amy had the skills to turn Alex into an overnight success, one the network badly needed. Their ratings had been dwindling for years, even despite major investments made in digital-first news outlets like Buzzfeed, Vice, Vox and Upworthy. But none of it moved the needle for the TV business, least of all the news division.

Whitmore came up through the internet, and the network people hoped poaching talent like her would get the internet to come along. This was not the first test of that theory, though it was the first time they'd aligned a new hire with a major story like this.

This story was bigger and more important than any other current scientific advancement, and there was steep competition. The mission to Mars was underway, as was a vast satellite network that could simultaneously connect the entire planet to the internet. And then there was NASA's working fusion reactor. Not to mention the Tesla Roadster that was, as of a few years ago, hurtling toward the Kuiper Belt.

Still, the particle experiment was possibly the most important science story of a generation. It had the potential to answer key questions about how life, the universe, came into be. At the end of the day, figuring out how existence came to be was more personally relevant to people than setting up life on a new planet.

The thinking at GNT was, dropping Alex in the middle of it might just catch a few of the millions of readers who followed her online.

Alex had earned respect in her own right. At twenty-eight, she'd been writing since before high school, and not just for the school paper. As a preteen she had been published regularly in two hometown papers, back when there still were two.

Despite her early writing success and a solid reporting record in college, Alex entered the professional world without a job. The Great Recession was on and demand for journalism work hit an all time low. The lack of jobs shouldn't have hurt a rising star like her, but the market was so weak she'd ended up working at a little-known science blog called Space Time.

But she threw herself into the work, first covering the stories no one else was, honing her knowledge and writing to small audiences. To everyone's surprise but Alex, the blog took off, thanks in some part to how easy social media made it to get tons of people looking at a single, compelling story.

Starting in 2008, there had been a steady drumbeat of new and mind-bending theories written about the nature of the universe. Alex, who had more than a knack for making the subject palatable to just about anyone, quickly learned how to build and cultivate her audience.

Just a few years after becoming Space Time's first full time reporter, it was one of the most respected physics news outlets in the United States and beyond.

When the call from GNT came, Alex knew it was the opportunity of a lifetime. They asked her to join the network as a senior science correspondent.

As excited as she was she had underestimated the level of anxiety going on air in front of such a large audience would invoke. They'd hinted during contract negotiations they may want her to cover Geneva, but she didn't really think they'd go through with it. So when Bryan asked her on the day she signed her paperwork, two days ago, she kind of freaked out.

"Amy will be with you every step of the way," Bryan promised. "She's a legend, the person I trust more than anybody else I work with. Listen to her and you'll do fine."

That was the last thing he said before sending her off with three total strangers on an overnight plane to Geneva. The time had flown by until just now, when it seemed to have stopped all together.

"What the actual hell am I doing here," she thought to herself, her eyes staring off in the distance.

"I've never seen Roker make that face," Jake said in a flat voice. "What's happening in your neck of the woods, kid?"