Free Earth Bound by Emma Barry & Genevieve Turner

didn’t quite believe.
    “Yes. I started in his lab when I was sixteen.”
    Something strange happened when she said that: She felt Parsons shift next to her. It felt like a gesture of… support. As if he wanted to give her his imprimatur.
    She didn’t need it.
    “I was only a coder, of course, a support staffer. Compared to what we have now, the machine was crude. Vacuum tubes, no FORTRAN, but we could predict the weather and that was the point.”
    “Dr. Eason is herself an accomplished computer,” Parsons said. “She’s promised to be the backup for the machine during the next liftoff. She predicts she’ll be able to manually confirm we’re a go in twenty-two seconds.”
    “That’s not quite what I said,” she corrected. “I gave a range of—”
    He shook his head. Barely. Imperceptibly. Like he didn’t want her to do anything to take away from her genius in these men’s eyes.
    But she hadn’t said twenty-two seconds; she’d said less than thirty-five seconds, and she’d emphasized her average was in the mid-twenties.
    Before she could get all the details out, the man from Virginia went on as if Parsons had never spoken up for her. “This is quite a bit more complicated.”
    “Oh, of course,” she said, her words both sweet and tart at once. “Let me tell you about what the department is working on.”
    The department, not my department, though of course it wasn’t hers. But neither she nor they would have known that from the way she talked for the next ten minutes, explaining the range of machines and human backups, their goals and safeguards and backups.
    When she’d finished, they were speechless—which of course had been the point.
    “That’s all very… thorough,” Stan Jensen said at last.
    It had been many things. That she’d been thorough was indisputable.
    “We’ll pass along to Hal how informative that was,” the other ASD director said. Because Hal was evidently her keeper.
    Parsons stood up, so she did too. “Let me know if you have any other questions,” she said. And she swept from the room.
    She went back to her office. Along the way, she ignored or gave half-hearted waves to everyone who greeted her—though that was hardly unusual.
    She picked up the report she was supposed to be reading. She set it down. She opened the cover, took her pen in hand… and slammed it back down.
    It would never be enough. No matter how many papers she authored, no matter how many projects she successfully completed, deadlines she met, or snafus she navigated, all they’d ever be able to see were the breasts.
    All she could hope for, the very best, was to be treated like a trained bear. A pat on the head and a whispered “freak” as she left the room: that was the best-case scenario.
    Maybe her parents were right—perhaps she ought to leave ASD and scuttle back to academia. Find a suitable professor husband and raise the next generation of scientists, as they had.
    Mother would say, “I told you so.” Not in a mean way—well, not completely mean—but she would.
    Although working here wasn’t entirely bad. Parsons, for all his flaws, was better than the rest because he was never astonished. He was also never pleased. A thing was either good, which was to say sufficient , or it was not (usually not) and that was all he ever had for anybody.
    Needing to move, she stood up and started pacing.
    She shouldn’t be shocked; she shouldn’t be upset. She should be able to take this afternoon’s meeting and put it in the case along with the fifty other meetings she’d had like this one, all the times when her sex had surprised the men across from her and had stayed surprising the entire time.
    But today, she couldn’t. She’d been happy here. She had started to feel like maybe, just maybe, she could be happy at ASD long-term, that her work would be enough to overcome the limitations everyone else placed on her.
    She stopped and listened. She’d been back in her office for an hour or so.