"Oh, something went wrong far earlier than that. But this won't be easy to explain, even then..."

Ant hugs Bina, and half-glares at Josephine.

"It's no slight, but, well, I don't fully understand it myself, and even the one you call Three had trouble - and she was a physicist."

"...How can Three be so different- No. No. That's not important."

"She was much the same at first, possibly, but she might have become a physicist later. Or perhaps there was indeed some change. I'm not sure, I haven't compared your histories."

"With her - parts of it I could explain. Parts we worked out together. But we mostly got to the observable parts. The why remained as much a mystery to us as it is to you. She may have figured it out on her own, later, but by the end of the conversation neither of us were much enlightened. And I haven't talked to her since."

"Figured out - Josephine. Whatever you're dancing around, just say it."

"It's. Well. My device, my entire experiment. It never made sense in the first place. I didn't actually start out trying to do what I did... I started out trying to prove that electrons behave in the same way as photons when fired through a pair of slits - though I doubt the experimental background is of much interest to you two."

"And this. Somehow ended up with you breaking time?"

"Well. That's further in the story. I did in fact prove my hypothesis, and - "

"That actually started as an accident. My second greatest discovery. It was almost immediately after I had finished the experiment with the electron emitter. My measuring device was not particularly large, but it was very complicated, and contained several fragile reservoirs of mercury gas. Mercury is a dangerous poison. A metal that - "

"I know what mercury is," Bina interrupts.

"Ah, all right, regardless. Dismantling it safely after the experiment was not a simple task and it was one I didn't feel safe trusting it to any of my assistants. I had it only half dismantled when I had to leave for two weeks. My husband and I had arranged a trip to Boston earlier in the spring, and it could not be rescheduled, so I left the emitter partially deconstructed and told our staff that they could not, under any circumstances, touch anything."

"When I returned, the first thing I did was check in on it. By that point, everyone who worked at the factory knew not to touch Madame Dubois' funny machines, not unless they had a cavalier attitude regarding the presence or absence of some or all of their limbs, so everything was where I had left it."

"I started putting things in order, I had left for Boston in bit of a hurry so everything was a bit of a mess. I tried to pick up one of the piles of reactive plating when it gave me a shock. A rather bad one."

"That was strange, but I put it down to static electricity. The plates were silver-plated and very conductive, so while it was odd, it wasn't that odd. I grounded them with a wire and went back to work."

"But it kept happening! Twice more, I got shocked, once almost immediately after I'd grounded the pile, and then again not even an hour later. Far too fast a build-up for static electricity. My lab was in the basement of the main storage warehouse and I often complained of damp. I thought it had to be a short somewhere on my work table, or maybe Chantal (she was my main assistant at the time) had left a power cell somewhere she shouldn't."

"The table itself was… busy, I am not by nature an organized person, but it was made of wood, non-conductive wood. I checked nearby and found nothing, then I checked the whole table, pulled everything off it onto the floor."

"It was clean. No batteries. No frayed wires. Nothing."

"At that point, I was tired, so I left it over night, telling myself I'd figure it out in the morning."

"Of course, the following morning was a delivery day, and then one of the haulers locked himself in the downstairs wash-room again, and with one thing and another it was the evening two days later that I finally got back to my lab."

"The first thing I did was check the plates, with a voltmeter this time, not my hand. I was getting tired of being shocked all the time." 

"The reading was negligible, exactly what it should have been in the first place, so I put everything back on the table and went back to disassembling the emitter, thinking that the problem, whatever it had been, was solved."

"I'm guessing it wasn't."

"Oh, not in the slightest."

"Less then an hour later, as I was placing one of the capacitors from the main housing on the worktable, bang! It exploded!"

"It was the size of a dime, so no damage done, but I noticed that it had rolled against that same pile of plates again."

"I grabbed my meter and checked again."

"It measured a high voltage."

"Before, I had been annoyed. Now I was intrigued."

"-Okay. I'm pretty sure most people would be at that point."

"Indeed!"

"I then did what any reasonable person would do. I ran a set of experiments."

"It took a while. We were busy, fall is always busy for anyone dependent on farmers, and the results were baffling. I spent all of September and October of that year messing with them and not getting very far.

"If you left them alone, they did nothing. If you took them out of the room? Nothing. Took them too far away from the table? Nothing."

She pauses, apparently waiting for a response.

Ant doesn't actually know what response to give to that.

"Weird," Bina produces after a long moment.

Josephine seems satisfied by that. "It was indeed weird!"

"And worse, I could never see the charge going up. I'd measure them when I got the room. Nothing. Ten minutes later, there'd be a charge! I once stood there for half an hour with the meter, staring at the needle, daring it to move, and it did nothing. Five minutes later, I checked again and there it was!"

"It was bizarre. I stopped disassembling the device, I had an inkling that the effect was connected to the electron emitter, and I was worried that taking the device completely apart would stop the effect before I understood it."

"I also tried to test if it worked with all of them. I'd had them tied with twine to a board, all forty. So I separated the stack in two. Only one stack worked. And I separated them again. And again, only one stack worked. I repeated this, until I'd narrowed it down to a single tile."

"I ran every test I could think of. Tried to see if it had a magnet, or contamination by radium, or a natural sort of battery - nothing."

"...You hadn't already looked for these things before the original experiment?"

"They weren't actually part of the experiment, you see. They were the backing to prevent the experiment from affecting other things."

Ant nods, and holds back a slightly snide remark.

"I also didn't know where that tile was from. My assistant, Chantal, had found it - she was remarkable at finding little odds and ends, but she went all over town and never kept records. Probably some pawn shop. We thought at first they made be roofing tiles, but - they had images on them. One had something about cola, one something about noodles. It seemed odd for tiles. Who'd want a drink name on their roof?"

She decides to ignore that.

"The image on the special tile. It looked like a fly, didn't it?"

"You know, that's the funny thing. We could never actually agree. One assistant, Leo, thought it looked like a bunch of scratches. Like someone was playing with the machine. My husband thought it looked like a star. I couldn't be quite sure what I saw; perhaps a tree? It was a funny little thing, regardless."

"But I continued my tests. Had Leo sit in the room and ignore it for an hour. No charge. Tried that again. Someone in the room, not looking at it - multiple someones not looking at it - no charge. Looking directly? No charge."

"It was indirectly that did it. Viewing it out of the corner of your eye, or through the slits in my electron emitter."

"Well, it took a lot more testing to confirm, but basically, anything with the image from the tile on it would spontaneously generate electrons if viewed through a pair of slits smaller then the amplitude of the wavelength of light you were using to view it. So, it didn't work in the dark, and it definitely had to be conductive, the surface. Leo etched it into several pieces of wood at different sizes and those were all complete duds."

"Oh! And it couldn't just be paint, it had to be embossed, or a relief of some kind. That was very important."

Ant nods thoughtfully. "-And it never occurred to you that you shouldn't be poking this?"