Her PhD complete, Guinevere set her sights higher.

“So, Lee, what do you think?”

“About what?”

“My new look.”

Lee leaned against the rickety railing of the old wooden deck.

“Well,” he sighed, “one side of your hair is a pigtail and the other side a ponytail?”

“What? Oh yeah, I forgot. The ‘drunken college coed’ look from last night. Nope, not that. This!”

She pointed at her fingernails, every one a different color with small symbols Lee couldn’t read in the bright sunlight.

“A new invention of yours?”

“Yeppers. I saw all this wasted real estate on my hands and decided to turn my nails into sensor displays. Now, I can spend less time looking at the computer screen and more time out here, watching that white-tailed hawk, in nature, getting a suntan.”

Lee raised his head to get a better view of the sky. A large shadow moved through the bare tree limbs. “Do you think the hawk is chasing the vulture?”

“Maybe. Aren’t you going to ask me about my nails?”

“Sure. What do they do?”

Guinevere explained the wireless radio technology embedded in the nails, tuned to the frequencies of the supercomputer sensors in the third subbasement of their wooded hideaway which appeared to be a decaying old house in an abandoned suburban lot.

“When did you find time to do this?”

“Oh, why sleep when there’s so much to do!”

Lee yawned. “At your age, yes. At my age, young people like you realise my dreams for me.”

Guinevere reached out her arms. “But you can create a new dance form with me without even thinking!”

Lee pulled Guinevere into a waltz frame and danced across the creaking platform, a gust of wind blowing Guinevere’s walnut-brown hair hard enough to undo the scrunchies forming the ponytail/pigtail dichotomous duo, her locks flowing in the air like sea grass in a storm.

They bobbed up and down, combining the steps of Balboa with the silent beats of a Viennese waltz.

She laughed and he grinned, their thoughts tuned to the same idea that they were tracing the lines of Gustav Klimt’s painting, The Tree of Life.

A few last brown leaves of a pin oak joined them in their dance, the leaves falling and lifting in the wind.

One of Guinevere’s nails beeped, cutting off the silent refrain of a the waltz.

Lee stared at the nail attached to the hand on his shoulder. “What does that mean?”

“We have a new formula.”

“We do?”

They both smiled.

For years, Guinevere and Lee had separately been working on the next evolution in the field of space exploration, a being wholly human but genderless, able to work long hours and perhaps decades of outer space travel without the conflicting emotional/hormonal effects of sexual orientation.

During a discussion at Guinevere’s last birthday party, she and he accidentally revealed to each other their secret research.

In the months that followed, they used the cover of dancing lessons to combine their data and see where holes in their theories had prevented significant progress.

“Is it time to celebrate?”

She nodded. “I’m pretty sure it is. Shall we go inside and see what we’ve got?”

Lee watched a squirrel scurry down a hickory tree.

He had stashed away a bottle of Prohibition whiskey for an occasion like this, his winter of discontent over, ready for the next phase in his grand plans.

How many days left? Thirteen thousand plus?

He sprinkled cayenne pepper powder into the birdseed feeder on the deck and turned toward the dusty front door with faded brass knocker.

“Yes, let’s do. Besides, you may get a good suntan but I tend to burn.”