Mythbusters fic: Like Bottled Lightning
Yuletide reveal! Am woefully behind on posting- just want to thank Philomytha for my fantastic Vorkosigan fic Secrets and Lies. I was assigned Mythbusters for 
toft which was terrifying because she's written most of the best Mythbusters fic out there.
Like Bottled Lightning
3400 words
Gen, G
Set during the pilots.
Jamie believes in consulting experts. He likes being a jack-of-all-trades, sure, likes knowing things people don't expect him to know and likes having done things people don't expect him to have done, but he knows the value of complementary talents. So he puts together a 10 minute casting tape for this new Discovery channel thing, stares at it, and decides to bring in someone with better credentials. Which is the sort of thing he believes that smart people should do without making some ego issue out of it.
Adam doesn't mind the cameras. He acts exactly the same as Jamie remembers, putzing around in Jamie's back office making phone calls on ads for used cars. He fidgets and touches things and drops things and spins around in Jamie's second-comfiest office chair while he waits for people to come to the phone, and ninety percent of the time, he just ignores the cameras.
What's the point of bringing in someone who will be better on camera, if he ignores the cameras?
"Hey. I'm calling to try-- to try-- I'm calling, believe it or not, because I really need an intact pig stomach, and trust me, I know just how strange that sounds. Can you help me?"
Jamie is still on hold with someone from the Air Force. He looks over to see Adam staring dead into the camera with a crazy, manic grin. Adam puts a hand over the mouthpiece of the phone, points straight at the little green light that means filming, and announces, "And you wish your life was as great as mine!" Then he doubles over in silent laughter, clutching the phone and making only the tiniest wheezing sound.
"Sorry, I'm here," Adam says, and suddenly he's back to completely ignoring the camera. "I see, thanks. And what is the number of your supplier?"
Then Jamie realizes someone is talking in his ear and he goes back to trying to convince the military to give him a JATO. He's trying to keep the cameras in mind, trying to give them a good angle, trying to sound professional and self-assured, trying to remember to look natural but not stupid, trying to do everything that Adam isn't doing even though Adam was supposed to be the expert.
TJ shows them a rough cut of the preparation phases, and Jamie tries not to wince at the shot, at his own shoulders telegraphing awkwardness while the whole crew around him laughs along with Adam. That moment gets lost somewhere in the second edit of the episode, and Jamie doesn’t have a clue whether he's glad about that.
***
“Look, I’ll get it, just let me tell it,” Jamie says. “Can we start again?”
“Sure, when you’re ready,” Ed says, and he just keeps standing there, pointing the massive camera.
“You’re not gonna say cut or take two or something?” Jamie asks, and tries to pretend that he doesn't immediately feel like an idiot. He grabs for his script and starts reading it through again.
“Hey Jamie, I just fell and hit my head,” Adam says, in the same infuriating conversational way he would probably say “I just spilled napalm all over your kitchen.”
“When?” Jamie asks, because he’s getting used to the clamor and clatter that follows Adam through M5, but he still would have noticed that. “Nevermind, sit down. You dizzy? Vision blurred?” There’s a penlight and some Advil in the second drawer behind him.
“Not the point,” Adam says. “The point is that I just developed severe and strangely selective amnesia. What’s going on here?”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Jamie says, and drops the penlight back in the drawer. He’s forgotten how they’re supposed to start, and when he reaches for his notes to check they’re gone.
“No, really,” Adam says, perky and sincere and infuriating. “Tell me, Mr. Hyneman, what are we doing here today?”
It takes them another two hours but they get it. Adam nods and smiles and earnestly asks leading questions, the same questions over and over and over with slightly different phrasings, about the preparations they’ve been doing for weeks, their research, the rockets, the new plan, the radio controls.
“Are you excited about this at all? I mean, seriously, at all?” Adam finally asks. “Give it to me one more time.”
“I can't think of anything more fun than doing this," Jamie says, and it’s the honest truth. They get through the rest of it and roll the blueprint up for safekeeping.
It’s time to prep the steel frame for the car, but Adam has his teeth in something and won’t let go. He dangles his fingers in front of his mouth like some demented catfish and says, “I can’t think of anything more fun than doing this” in an Elmer Fudd voice that Jamie is pretty sure is supposed to be an impression. “Is the monotone a characteristic of your species? Where’s the excitement?”
“That’s what I have you for.”
“You can’t just contract out-- oh my God. That’s exactly what you’re doing. You’re trying to subcontract the charisma.”
The back of Jamie’s neck gets hot and prickly, and he grabs for a wrench even though he doesn’t need it, just to be holding something. It’s stupid to be embarrassed. He wants to do this; he doesn’t have all the requisite skills; hence, Adam.
“We need to have a little conversation, Jamie. I need to give you a little lecture.”
“On what?” he asks.
“I don’t even know. Synergy, maybe.”
“No buzzwords in the shop.”
“So many rules with you. About things being more than the sum of their parts.”
“No metaphysics in the shop.”
“Okay, about chemical reactions,” Adam says, and Jamie doesn’t know what that’s supposed to mean but he can’t think of anything to say to shut it down.
Adam spends the next two days lighting things on fire and trying to walk on the rocket tubes like balance beams. The work is good, though. Solid and precise.
***
They watch the sun rise in the desert, and Jamie gets to ride in a helicopter, and they fire off three thousand horsepower of rockets and send up a cloud of dust that can be seen more than a mile away, and the tips of Adam’s ears and his nose and a little triangular patch on his collarbone all burn crispy in the sun. On the ride back Jamie is happy, deep-down glow type happy like he hasn’t been since the first year M5 broke even.
In the seat next to him Adam is playing with a slinky, flipping it hand to hand with tiny jittery motions. “Man, you just lit a plume of flame 15 feet long from a helicopter and you’re still not happy,” he says.
“I am happy.”
Adam turns to face him, and then does an exaggerated double take and leans in, squinting, until his nose is practically against Jamie’s cheek and Jamie has pressed as far back into the headrest as he can. “You are,” Adam says, eyes wide. Then he twists around and throws one end of the slinky at Ed’s head. “Hey Ed! Check Jamie out! He’s over the moon! He’s basically dancing a jig right now! It’s like his birthday and Christmas all at once!”
“Yup,” says Ed, and disentangles his pencil from the slinky, and goes back to his Sodoku.
***
"So, a vinyl used in sex toys?" Kari asks, bent over the workbench with her chin propped on her hand while Adam fills the mold. Standing that way she looks a lot like she did when they took the scan of her rear, except in regular jeans this time.
"Yeah, I love this stuff," Adam says, poking at the setting vinyl.
"You really wanna say on camera that that's how you know about it?"
"Hey, the sex industry drives innovation in every field. You gotta respect that," Adam says. "Besides, it's just that good. I have this dildo that would amaze you."
"Borrowed sex toys are so not okay with me," Kari says. "Now, if you wanted to buy me a new one..."
Jamie isn't entirely sure whether he ought to say something about sexual harassment. Or who to say it to, for that matter.
Adam has a blast doing the toilet seat myth, mostly because he gets to spend a lot of time smacking the big vinyl ass. Jamie decides to ignore it, just telling him to keep the fat jokes to a reasonable minimum. Adam wants to test it personally, even though they're still trying to figure out what's okay to test themselves, mostly because he wants to show his bare butt-cheeks on TV. Jamie decides to just talk him through the subjective results without comment.
Jamie was wrong about Adam ignoring the cameras; as they settle into a routine, he mugs for them and screws around in front of them and talks to them incessantly. He’s good at carrying on a perfectly normal conversation with Jamie and spinning without a pause to narrate. When he turns back, Jamie is usually tense, not quite able to pick the thread back up. He likes knowing what he’s doing, either working or explaining, and Adam doesn’t seem to think they’re different.
When Adam screws around, Jamie can’t tell if Adam’s performing for the show or just… being Adam. About two hours into the Day Of Obsessive Biscuit Can Juggling he gives up and locks himself into the back office just so he can stop wondering if he’s supposed to be being entertaining. Adam’s stuck making the biscuit can holder all by himself, and doesn’t have time to make a bandolier. Adam doesn’t say anything about it.
Jamie watches the myth rough cut, watches Adam chat endlessly at the camera about what he’s doing and just seem so delighted when he paints the title “Biscuit Bandolier” onto the holder. None of the shots of Adam juggling make it in, maybe because of the tense, twitchy look on Jamie’s face while he’s doing it. It’s too bad; Adam is a pretty decent juggler, and he wasn’t hurting anything doing it, and it makes him grin all free and easy. I can do better, Jamie thinks.
“So, Ed, if we want to create a pressure differential on either side of this glass then the enclosure behind the glass will need to be pretty near airtight. I’m sealing up the edges of the box with this resin. You want to be careful about the applicator you use. Too small and you don’t fill up the seam completely, too large and it’ll look messy and take longer to set than it really should.” It’s pretty much the longest thing he’s said to the camera without planning and making notes first.
Ed just looks baffled.
“I was, uh, I was just explaining,” Jamie says, feeling like his moment of triumph is slipping away.
“Right. That’s good, Jamie. But next time maybe don’t use my name,” Ed says.
Baby steps.
***
It’s six hours into their poppyseed drug test day before they decide they’re allowed to eat non-poppyseed foods. Adam has been whining about how stuffed he is, but it’s not too much of a surprise to see him in the kitchen snacking. Jamie throws out all the little urine cups they’ve accumulated and runs a bowl of hot soapy water for the eyedroppers.
“Are you washing the eyedroppers?” Adam asks. “Are you not throwing them out?”
“They’re good eyedroppers,” Jamie says.
“They were full of urine.”
“So? It’s sterile.”
“I don’t know if that’s true. We should test that,” Adam says.
The thought makes Jamie twitch. They don’t have a show yet. They don’t know if they will have a show. Something isn’t quite right, talking about it like that. He stays quiet and hopes Adam moves on instead of picking at it.
“Do you really have a drawer in here labeled ‘piss eyedroppers’?”
Given the choice between talking about serious future plans and talking about urine, Adam will pretty reliably choose the latter. “They should probably go with the plastic syringes,” he says. After he’s eaten his sandwich he goes to put them there, and Adam tags along.
“Oh my god, you really do have a drawer full of assorted syringes,” Adam says. “And-- oh, cool, forceps! And hey, I don’t really have any practical experience, but I’m about seventy-five percent sure that’s a speculum. You don’t have some kind of medical fetish I should know about, do you?”
“They’re all useful, multi-purpose things,” Jamie says, because there’s no point in letting Adam get to him. Still, he looks around for the cameras before he can really help it, even though he knows it makes him look twitchy.
“Out of curiosity, what’s in the next drawer over?”
“Toy animals. Mostly dinosaurs.”
Adam drops the hemostat he was fiddling with and turns to him, grinning much the same way he does whenever they light something on fire. “I love you,” he says. “I love your shop. Will you be offended if I say I love you for your shop?”
“It’s the main reason to love me,” Jamie says, and they go to get drug-tested again.
***
Things get serious fast during the gold paint. It’s worse because he can’t articulate it: he’s not sweating and doesn’t have a fever and isn’t coughing and doesn’t have a sore throat or runny nose or headache. He just feels… bad. Half of his brain is thinking ”What an interesting effect. I wonder how much is psychosomatic?” and trying to figure out how to do a blind version of the test (what do you use as a placebo for latex paint?). The other half of his brain is just trying to figure out if he’s actually weak and dizzy, or if he just feels like he is.
He doesn’t want to do the test. He said he’d do it, he should do it, he doesn’t really have a good reason to not do it, but it feels like a bad idea and he doesn’t know if he can explain it well enough on camera, not with Adam taunting him to be a good sport.
Except Adam takes him aside, waves the camera off and pulls Jamie behind the forklift. “You look scared, man,” he says.
Jamie feels the hairs on the back of his neck prickle, which he knows is psychosomatic because he just shaved those hairs this morning. “It’s not-“ he starts, but Adam cuts him off.
“Okay, fine, I’m scared. I’m not in your head, but if you don’t feel good, you shouldn’t do the test.”
Adam is looking at him, grave and intent. It’s a little disconcerting. Adam waves yardsticks around making lightsaber noises and plays air guitar on Jamie’s largest socket wrench and never met a bodily function joke he didn’t like, but now Adam is-Jamie isn’t even sure.
It hits him then, all of a sudden, that Adam is thirty-six years old and has two children, that this quiet care is in him along with the huge grin and love of falling off skateboards. It hits him a minute later that Adam is on his side.
Jamie isn’t sure what to do with the gratitude that washes over him, because thank you wouldn’t come out right and might be a bigger conversation than they want to have right now. So he just says “I don’t want to do the test,” and Adam walks him back in front of the cameras and makes it all okay again.
Three minutes later Adam is inspecting Jamie’s head and loudly commenting on his verdant ear-hair, so it’s not like anything changed. Jamie gets that in the last week or two they settled into a comic/straight man dynamic, and that means that he got laughed at a lot and just had to take it. But when it counted, Adam had his back.
***
The shop isn’t actually any quieter with Adam gone, and it doesn’t actually feel empty. It’s unusually busy, in fact, and Jamie throws himself hard into the projects that he put off or delegated during filming.
Sometimes he hears people say something, like “it’s dangerous to microwave metal” or “a goldfish’s memory only lasts three seconds,” and thinks we could test that. But he tries not to think about it too much, because Jamie believes in counting chickens at the proper time. He doesn’t have a show yet, and won’t even know if he does until after the pilots air, and anyway it’s not that different from his other work. He doesn’t look in the mirror in the morning and see a TV show host. He’s just a guy who runs a shop and does projects, and Discovery hired him to film some of them, and they might hire him for more.
Everybody in the shop gathers to watch the first two pilots air, with cake. At the end of the first hour Jamie’s phone rings. When he answers all he hears is crazy chaotic screaming. “Hello?” he says. “Is everything okay? Who is this?” It’s hard to hear anything, with the screams on the other end of the phone and chattering and whooping and laughing from the crew behind him.
Adam’s voice separates itself from the noise. “Jamie! That was fantastic!” Jamie realizes that the screaming behind it must be Adam’s boys. “They loved it! They think I’m like Superman!”
“No! Batman!”
“Right, I’m sorry, they think I’m like Batman!”
“They didn’t know that already?” Jamie asks.
From behind him, Scottie yells, “Is that Adam? Tell him nice job on the rocket frame. Next time I want to help!”
Adam must have heard her, because he says, “Tell her absolutely, she’ll be great on camera. Seriously, this was perfect. We should have a planning meeting. My boys made me promise to do something with a rotting corpse. And I have these great news stories for you, this guy whose tongue stud got struck by lightning and--”
“We don’t have a show yet,” Jamie says.
“Well, sure but we’re going to. That was great, they’ll love it.”
“I’m just saying we don’t have it yet, and I don’t think we should jump the gun,” Jamie says. It’s hard to get the words out and he’s not sure why.
On the other end of the line there’s a dull thud and the boys’ shouts are suddenly muffled. Adam must have taken the phone into another room. “Jamie, you’re meeting with the network in a week. You need to have a plan. You need to be able to talk to them about ideas and budget and shooting schedule and equipment and- what the hell, man? You’re the planner. Do you even want to do this at all?”
He didn’t realize he was doing it, but at some point Jamie took the phone away from the crowd and into his office. He can’t make himself say anything. He recognizes it now, recognizes the way his tongue feels thick and clumsy. It’s how he always feels, when he wants a contraption to work so badly that he’s afraid to speak and jinx it.
He’ll need to get over that, on the show.
“Jesus Christ.” Adam’s voice is thick with disgust. “Well, it was a fun couple of months, Jamie. Thanks for asking me to do it.”
“Wait,” Jamie says. “You should come in tomorrow to plan. You should be at the meeting next week.”
“Yeah?” Adam asks. He sounds wary, and Jamie finds himself hunting for some way to make Adam realize, the way he realized in a van in the middle of the desert.
“I want to escape from Alcatraz,” he says.
Adam is silent for a beat.
Then he bursts out laughing. “Oh my God, Jamie, it’s perfect. The two of us in the middle of the night in our little raincoat raft paddling through the bay, just the two of us--”
“The two of us and our follow-boat with a full camera crew.”
“Whatever,” Adam says. “That’s perfect. You do have a soul.”
***
They meet the people Adam insists on calling their Discovery Overlords next week and lay out a plan for thirteen episodes, to be filmed by next Christmas and aired through next February.
Jamie drops off to sleep that night and dreams about building a baking soda volcano for the science fair, detailed and lifelike and perfect, until the vinegar pours in and everything comes to life in orange lava and CO2.
This entry was originally posted at http://dragojustine.dreamwidth.org/129461.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
toft which was terrifying because she's written most of the best Mythbusters fic out there.
Like Bottled Lightning
3400 words
Gen, G
Set during the pilots.
Jamie believes in consulting experts. He likes being a jack-of-all-trades, sure, likes knowing things people don't expect him to know and likes having done things people don't expect him to have done, but he knows the value of complementary talents. So he puts together a 10 minute casting tape for this new Discovery channel thing, stares at it, and decides to bring in someone with better credentials. Which is the sort of thing he believes that smart people should do without making some ego issue out of it.
Adam doesn't mind the cameras. He acts exactly the same as Jamie remembers, putzing around in Jamie's back office making phone calls on ads for used cars. He fidgets and touches things and drops things and spins around in Jamie's second-comfiest office chair while he waits for people to come to the phone, and ninety percent of the time, he just ignores the cameras.
What's the point of bringing in someone who will be better on camera, if he ignores the cameras?
"Hey. I'm calling to try-- to try-- I'm calling, believe it or not, because I really need an intact pig stomach, and trust me, I know just how strange that sounds. Can you help me?"
Jamie is still on hold with someone from the Air Force. He looks over to see Adam staring dead into the camera with a crazy, manic grin. Adam puts a hand over the mouthpiece of the phone, points straight at the little green light that means filming, and announces, "And you wish your life was as great as mine!" Then he doubles over in silent laughter, clutching the phone and making only the tiniest wheezing sound.
"Sorry, I'm here," Adam says, and suddenly he's back to completely ignoring the camera. "I see, thanks. And what is the number of your supplier?"
Then Jamie realizes someone is talking in his ear and he goes back to trying to convince the military to give him a JATO. He's trying to keep the cameras in mind, trying to give them a good angle, trying to sound professional and self-assured, trying to remember to look natural but not stupid, trying to do everything that Adam isn't doing even though Adam was supposed to be the expert.
TJ shows them a rough cut of the preparation phases, and Jamie tries not to wince at the shot, at his own shoulders telegraphing awkwardness while the whole crew around him laughs along with Adam. That moment gets lost somewhere in the second edit of the episode, and Jamie doesn’t have a clue whether he's glad about that.
***
“Look, I’ll get it, just let me tell it,” Jamie says. “Can we start again?”
“Sure, when you’re ready,” Ed says, and he just keeps standing there, pointing the massive camera.
“You’re not gonna say cut or take two or something?” Jamie asks, and tries to pretend that he doesn't immediately feel like an idiot. He grabs for his script and starts reading it through again.
“Hey Jamie, I just fell and hit my head,” Adam says, in the same infuriating conversational way he would probably say “I just spilled napalm all over your kitchen.”
“When?” Jamie asks, because he’s getting used to the clamor and clatter that follows Adam through M5, but he still would have noticed that. “Nevermind, sit down. You dizzy? Vision blurred?” There’s a penlight and some Advil in the second drawer behind him.
“Not the point,” Adam says. “The point is that I just developed severe and strangely selective amnesia. What’s going on here?”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Jamie says, and drops the penlight back in the drawer. He’s forgotten how they’re supposed to start, and when he reaches for his notes to check they’re gone.
“No, really,” Adam says, perky and sincere and infuriating. “Tell me, Mr. Hyneman, what are we doing here today?”
It takes them another two hours but they get it. Adam nods and smiles and earnestly asks leading questions, the same questions over and over and over with slightly different phrasings, about the preparations they’ve been doing for weeks, their research, the rockets, the new plan, the radio controls.
“Are you excited about this at all? I mean, seriously, at all?” Adam finally asks. “Give it to me one more time.”
“I can't think of anything more fun than doing this," Jamie says, and it’s the honest truth. They get through the rest of it and roll the blueprint up for safekeeping.
It’s time to prep the steel frame for the car, but Adam has his teeth in something and won’t let go. He dangles his fingers in front of his mouth like some demented catfish and says, “I can’t think of anything more fun than doing this” in an Elmer Fudd voice that Jamie is pretty sure is supposed to be an impression. “Is the monotone a characteristic of your species? Where’s the excitement?”
“That’s what I have you for.”
“You can’t just contract out-- oh my God. That’s exactly what you’re doing. You’re trying to subcontract the charisma.”
The back of Jamie’s neck gets hot and prickly, and he grabs for a wrench even though he doesn’t need it, just to be holding something. It’s stupid to be embarrassed. He wants to do this; he doesn’t have all the requisite skills; hence, Adam.
“We need to have a little conversation, Jamie. I need to give you a little lecture.”
“On what?” he asks.
“I don’t even know. Synergy, maybe.”
“No buzzwords in the shop.”
“So many rules with you. About things being more than the sum of their parts.”
“No metaphysics in the shop.”
“Okay, about chemical reactions,” Adam says, and Jamie doesn’t know what that’s supposed to mean but he can’t think of anything to say to shut it down.
Adam spends the next two days lighting things on fire and trying to walk on the rocket tubes like balance beams. The work is good, though. Solid and precise.
***
They watch the sun rise in the desert, and Jamie gets to ride in a helicopter, and they fire off three thousand horsepower of rockets and send up a cloud of dust that can be seen more than a mile away, and the tips of Adam’s ears and his nose and a little triangular patch on his collarbone all burn crispy in the sun. On the ride back Jamie is happy, deep-down glow type happy like he hasn’t been since the first year M5 broke even.
In the seat next to him Adam is playing with a slinky, flipping it hand to hand with tiny jittery motions. “Man, you just lit a plume of flame 15 feet long from a helicopter and you’re still not happy,” he says.
“I am happy.”
Adam turns to face him, and then does an exaggerated double take and leans in, squinting, until his nose is practically against Jamie’s cheek and Jamie has pressed as far back into the headrest as he can. “You are,” Adam says, eyes wide. Then he twists around and throws one end of the slinky at Ed’s head. “Hey Ed! Check Jamie out! He’s over the moon! He’s basically dancing a jig right now! It’s like his birthday and Christmas all at once!”
“Yup,” says Ed, and disentangles his pencil from the slinky, and goes back to his Sodoku.
***
"So, a vinyl used in sex toys?" Kari asks, bent over the workbench with her chin propped on her hand while Adam fills the mold. Standing that way she looks a lot like she did when they took the scan of her rear, except in regular jeans this time.
"Yeah, I love this stuff," Adam says, poking at the setting vinyl.
"You really wanna say on camera that that's how you know about it?"
"Hey, the sex industry drives innovation in every field. You gotta respect that," Adam says. "Besides, it's just that good. I have this dildo that would amaze you."
"Borrowed sex toys are so not okay with me," Kari says. "Now, if you wanted to buy me a new one..."
Jamie isn't entirely sure whether he ought to say something about sexual harassment. Or who to say it to, for that matter.
Adam has a blast doing the toilet seat myth, mostly because he gets to spend a lot of time smacking the big vinyl ass. Jamie decides to ignore it, just telling him to keep the fat jokes to a reasonable minimum. Adam wants to test it personally, even though they're still trying to figure out what's okay to test themselves, mostly because he wants to show his bare butt-cheeks on TV. Jamie decides to just talk him through the subjective results without comment.
Jamie was wrong about Adam ignoring the cameras; as they settle into a routine, he mugs for them and screws around in front of them and talks to them incessantly. He’s good at carrying on a perfectly normal conversation with Jamie and spinning without a pause to narrate. When he turns back, Jamie is usually tense, not quite able to pick the thread back up. He likes knowing what he’s doing, either working or explaining, and Adam doesn’t seem to think they’re different.
When Adam screws around, Jamie can’t tell if Adam’s performing for the show or just… being Adam. About two hours into the Day Of Obsessive Biscuit Can Juggling he gives up and locks himself into the back office just so he can stop wondering if he’s supposed to be being entertaining. Adam’s stuck making the biscuit can holder all by himself, and doesn’t have time to make a bandolier. Adam doesn’t say anything about it.
Jamie watches the myth rough cut, watches Adam chat endlessly at the camera about what he’s doing and just seem so delighted when he paints the title “Biscuit Bandolier” onto the holder. None of the shots of Adam juggling make it in, maybe because of the tense, twitchy look on Jamie’s face while he’s doing it. It’s too bad; Adam is a pretty decent juggler, and he wasn’t hurting anything doing it, and it makes him grin all free and easy. I can do better, Jamie thinks.
“So, Ed, if we want to create a pressure differential on either side of this glass then the enclosure behind the glass will need to be pretty near airtight. I’m sealing up the edges of the box with this resin. You want to be careful about the applicator you use. Too small and you don’t fill up the seam completely, too large and it’ll look messy and take longer to set than it really should.” It’s pretty much the longest thing he’s said to the camera without planning and making notes first.
Ed just looks baffled.
“I was, uh, I was just explaining,” Jamie says, feeling like his moment of triumph is slipping away.
“Right. That’s good, Jamie. But next time maybe don’t use my name,” Ed says.
Baby steps.
***
It’s six hours into their poppyseed drug test day before they decide they’re allowed to eat non-poppyseed foods. Adam has been whining about how stuffed he is, but it’s not too much of a surprise to see him in the kitchen snacking. Jamie throws out all the little urine cups they’ve accumulated and runs a bowl of hot soapy water for the eyedroppers.
“Are you washing the eyedroppers?” Adam asks. “Are you not throwing them out?”
“They’re good eyedroppers,” Jamie says.
“They were full of urine.”
“So? It’s sterile.”
“I don’t know if that’s true. We should test that,” Adam says.
The thought makes Jamie twitch. They don’t have a show yet. They don’t know if they will have a show. Something isn’t quite right, talking about it like that. He stays quiet and hopes Adam moves on instead of picking at it.
“Do you really have a drawer in here labeled ‘piss eyedroppers’?”
Given the choice between talking about serious future plans and talking about urine, Adam will pretty reliably choose the latter. “They should probably go with the plastic syringes,” he says. After he’s eaten his sandwich he goes to put them there, and Adam tags along.
“Oh my god, you really do have a drawer full of assorted syringes,” Adam says. “And-- oh, cool, forceps! And hey, I don’t really have any practical experience, but I’m about seventy-five percent sure that’s a speculum. You don’t have some kind of medical fetish I should know about, do you?”
“They’re all useful, multi-purpose things,” Jamie says, because there’s no point in letting Adam get to him. Still, he looks around for the cameras before he can really help it, even though he knows it makes him look twitchy.
“Out of curiosity, what’s in the next drawer over?”
“Toy animals. Mostly dinosaurs.”
Adam drops the hemostat he was fiddling with and turns to him, grinning much the same way he does whenever they light something on fire. “I love you,” he says. “I love your shop. Will you be offended if I say I love you for your shop?”
“It’s the main reason to love me,” Jamie says, and they go to get drug-tested again.
***
Things get serious fast during the gold paint. It’s worse because he can’t articulate it: he’s not sweating and doesn’t have a fever and isn’t coughing and doesn’t have a sore throat or runny nose or headache. He just feels… bad. Half of his brain is thinking ”What an interesting effect. I wonder how much is psychosomatic?” and trying to figure out how to do a blind version of the test (what do you use as a placebo for latex paint?). The other half of his brain is just trying to figure out if he’s actually weak and dizzy, or if he just feels like he is.
He doesn’t want to do the test. He said he’d do it, he should do it, he doesn’t really have a good reason to not do it, but it feels like a bad idea and he doesn’t know if he can explain it well enough on camera, not with Adam taunting him to be a good sport.
Except Adam takes him aside, waves the camera off and pulls Jamie behind the forklift. “You look scared, man,” he says.
Jamie feels the hairs on the back of his neck prickle, which he knows is psychosomatic because he just shaved those hairs this morning. “It’s not-“ he starts, but Adam cuts him off.
“Okay, fine, I’m scared. I’m not in your head, but if you don’t feel good, you shouldn’t do the test.”
Adam is looking at him, grave and intent. It’s a little disconcerting. Adam waves yardsticks around making lightsaber noises and plays air guitar on Jamie’s largest socket wrench and never met a bodily function joke he didn’t like, but now Adam is-Jamie isn’t even sure.
It hits him then, all of a sudden, that Adam is thirty-six years old and has two children, that this quiet care is in him along with the huge grin and love of falling off skateboards. It hits him a minute later that Adam is on his side.
Jamie isn’t sure what to do with the gratitude that washes over him, because thank you wouldn’t come out right and might be a bigger conversation than they want to have right now. So he just says “I don’t want to do the test,” and Adam walks him back in front of the cameras and makes it all okay again.
Three minutes later Adam is inspecting Jamie’s head and loudly commenting on his verdant ear-hair, so it’s not like anything changed. Jamie gets that in the last week or two they settled into a comic/straight man dynamic, and that means that he got laughed at a lot and just had to take it. But when it counted, Adam had his back.
***
The shop isn’t actually any quieter with Adam gone, and it doesn’t actually feel empty. It’s unusually busy, in fact, and Jamie throws himself hard into the projects that he put off or delegated during filming.
Sometimes he hears people say something, like “it’s dangerous to microwave metal” or “a goldfish’s memory only lasts three seconds,” and thinks we could test that. But he tries not to think about it too much, because Jamie believes in counting chickens at the proper time. He doesn’t have a show yet, and won’t even know if he does until after the pilots air, and anyway it’s not that different from his other work. He doesn’t look in the mirror in the morning and see a TV show host. He’s just a guy who runs a shop and does projects, and Discovery hired him to film some of them, and they might hire him for more.
Everybody in the shop gathers to watch the first two pilots air, with cake. At the end of the first hour Jamie’s phone rings. When he answers all he hears is crazy chaotic screaming. “Hello?” he says. “Is everything okay? Who is this?” It’s hard to hear anything, with the screams on the other end of the phone and chattering and whooping and laughing from the crew behind him.
Adam’s voice separates itself from the noise. “Jamie! That was fantastic!” Jamie realizes that the screaming behind it must be Adam’s boys. “They loved it! They think I’m like Superman!”
“No! Batman!”
“Right, I’m sorry, they think I’m like Batman!”
“They didn’t know that already?” Jamie asks.
From behind him, Scottie yells, “Is that Adam? Tell him nice job on the rocket frame. Next time I want to help!”
Adam must have heard her, because he says, “Tell her absolutely, she’ll be great on camera. Seriously, this was perfect. We should have a planning meeting. My boys made me promise to do something with a rotting corpse. And I have these great news stories for you, this guy whose tongue stud got struck by lightning and--”
“We don’t have a show yet,” Jamie says.
“Well, sure but we’re going to. That was great, they’ll love it.”
“I’m just saying we don’t have it yet, and I don’t think we should jump the gun,” Jamie says. It’s hard to get the words out and he’s not sure why.
On the other end of the line there’s a dull thud and the boys’ shouts are suddenly muffled. Adam must have taken the phone into another room. “Jamie, you’re meeting with the network in a week. You need to have a plan. You need to be able to talk to them about ideas and budget and shooting schedule and equipment and- what the hell, man? You’re the planner. Do you even want to do this at all?”
He didn’t realize he was doing it, but at some point Jamie took the phone away from the crowd and into his office. He can’t make himself say anything. He recognizes it now, recognizes the way his tongue feels thick and clumsy. It’s how he always feels, when he wants a contraption to work so badly that he’s afraid to speak and jinx it.
He’ll need to get over that, on the show.
“Jesus Christ.” Adam’s voice is thick with disgust. “Well, it was a fun couple of months, Jamie. Thanks for asking me to do it.”
“Wait,” Jamie says. “You should come in tomorrow to plan. You should be at the meeting next week.”
“Yeah?” Adam asks. He sounds wary, and Jamie finds himself hunting for some way to make Adam realize, the way he realized in a van in the middle of the desert.
“I want to escape from Alcatraz,” he says.
Adam is silent for a beat.
Then he bursts out laughing. “Oh my God, Jamie, it’s perfect. The two of us in the middle of the night in our little raincoat raft paddling through the bay, just the two of us--”
“The two of us and our follow-boat with a full camera crew.”
“Whatever,” Adam says. “That’s perfect. You do have a soul.”
***
They meet the people Adam insists on calling their Discovery Overlords next week and lay out a plan for thirteen episodes, to be filmed by next Christmas and aired through next February.
Jamie drops off to sleep that night and dreams about building a baking soda volcano for the science fair, detailed and lifelike and perfect, until the vinegar pours in and everything comes to life in orange lava and CO2.
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