Chapter 11: The One with the Thanksgiving Plans
The post-report lunch with Watson and Aldridge ran longer than scheduled, which was the sign of a good scientific conversation — the kind where the formal presentation was just the opening statement and the real exchange happened over food, with nobody watching the clock.
They ended up at a seafood place near the harbor, the kind that had been there long enough to have an opinion about itself. Watson ordered the chowder and talked about sequencing timelines with the casual authority of a man who had built the timeline and could adjust it at will. Aldridge mostly listened and occasionally redirected. Ethan asked questions and paid attention to the answers.
At some point, over coffee, he asked the one he'd been sitting on all morning.
"Professor Watson — outside the sequencing work specifically — how do you think about the relationship between genetics and complex traits? Intelligence, for example. How do genes and environment interact there?"
Watson looked at him with the particular expression of a man who recognized a question with edges. He was quiet for a moment — not evasively, but with the genuine deliberation of someone who had thought about this a great deal and was choosing his words with care.
"Intelligence is among the most complex traits we study," he said finally. "Clearly heritable in significant measure. Clearly shaped by environment in equally significant measure. The interaction between those two things is what makes it genuinely difficult — not politically difficult, though it is that too, but scientifically difficult. Anyone who tells you the answer is simple isn't doing the science."
Ethan nodded. It was a careful answer. Measured. The answer of a man who knew the terrain.
He also knew, in the way he knew things, that Watson's carefulness on this topic would not hold indefinitely — that there were remarks in the future that would cost him significantly, honors revoked, a reputation complicated in ways that his scientific legacy would have to be separated from. But that was later.
Today, sitting across from a man who had done genuinely foundational work, who was still doing it, who had just spent an hour laying out a vision for human biology that was going to reshape the next thirty years of medicine — today, Watson was a scientist in full, and Ethan sat with that.
"Thank you," Ethan said. "It's a question I'll keep asking."
"Keep asking it carefully," Watson said. "The careful version of that question is worth pursuing. The careless version causes problems."
It was, Ethan felt, good advice on multiple levels.
He drove back into the city in the late afternoon, the Long Island Expressway finally earning its name by being congested in both directions, which was its default state regardless of the day or time. He sat in traffic and watched the skyline accumulate on the horizon and thought about the Matrix.
This had been happening more frequently lately — the part of his mind that catalogued what he knew running forward, matching things he remembered against things that hadn't happened yet, measuring the distance between now and when.
The Matrix was four or five years out. The Wachowskis had the idea. The script existed, or was being written, or was about to be — he wasn't entirely sure of the exact timeline. What he was sure of was that it was an original screenplay, no source novel to negotiate rights for, and that the concept was both more scientifically interesting and more philosophically dense than almost anything else that was going to come out of Hollywood in the next decade.
He'd been thinking about the scientific consultancy idea more seriously since the conversation with Julia. She was right that there were people who would find it useful — directors and writers who wanted their science to feel real rather than decorative, who understood that audiences were smarter than studio notes gave them credit for. The CRISPR work gave him credibility in genetics. His broader reading gave him range. The question was when and how to make it a formal thing rather than just an idea he had in traffic.
After the PhD, he thought. Everything after the PhD.
He passed a bus shelter on Queens Boulevard and did a double take.
On the side of the shelter, printed large, was a public health poster — the kind the city ran periodically, clean design, clear message, stock photography. The stock photography in this case was Joey Tribbiani, looking directly into the camera with the expression he used for serious roles — earnest, trustworthy, slightly intense — above a message about flu vaccination.
Ethan pulled over slightly, looked at it properly, and started laughing.
Joey was everywhere. You couldn't escape him. You weren't meant to.
Central Perk on the Sunday before Thanksgiving had a specific energy — the slightly-too-warm, slightly-too-crowded energy of a place where people were processing the fact that a holiday was coming and their feelings about it were complicated.
Ethan came in, unwound his scarf, spotted the group on the couch, and flagged Gunther for a coffee before he'd even sat down.
"Okay," he said, settling in. "What did I miss?"
"Rachel gave everyone the wrong order," Chandler said.
"I'm standing right here," Rachel said, from behind the counter.
"She gave everyone the wrong order," Chandler said, at exactly the same volume.
"I'm working on the system," Rachel said, with great dignity. "It's a process."
"The process," Monica said, "has given Joey a sugar-free latte, which — Joey, how's that going?"
"Terrible," Joey said. "Everything about this is wrong."
"I'll fix it," Rachel said, coming around from the counter. She picked up Joey's cup, swapped it with Chandler's, redistributed something to Phoebe, looked at Ethan's, and frowned. "Yours is actually correct."
"Thank you," Ethan said.
"Don't read anything into it," Rachel said, and went back to the counter.
The moment her back was turned, everyone silently swapped back to their original drinks with the efficiency of a group that had been doing this for weeks, which they had. Phoebe produced her actual coffee from somewhere. Joey sighed with the relief of a man reunited with something that had been briefly taken from him.
Gunther appeared, watched all of this happen, and said nothing, which was his way.
"Rachel's getting better," Ethan said.
"She remembered that Chandler takes sugar," Phoebe offered.
"She gave me a double," Chandler said.
"Progress is nonlinear," Ethan said.
Rachel came back and sat down on the arm of the couch, the particular posture of someone on break who was choosing to spend it here rather than anywhere else — which was, Ethan had noticed, increasingly her default. Central Perk was becoming less of a job and more of a home base, which was either a good sign about her comfort level or a complicated sign about the job, and possibly both.
"Okay," Monica said, with the energy of someone who had been waiting to ask a specific question and had found her opening. "Thanksgiving. Tomorrow. What's everyone doing?"
A brief inventory:
Phoebe was spending it with her grandmother — the one who was alive, she specified, with the matter-of-factness she brought to anything involving her family history.
Joey was going to Queens. His mother was making enough food for seventeen people, of which approximately nine were expected, and Joey had been requested to arrive early to taste-test.
Rachel was going home to Long Island. There was a whole thing with her father — the ongoing post-wedding-that-wasn't conversation, the slow rebuilding of something that had cracked — and Thanksgiving was the agreed-upon occasion to continue it. She said this with the specific tone of someone who had made peace with a plan they weren't entirely looking forward to.
Chandler announced, with the settled expression of a man who had examined his options and chosen the most defensible one, that he did not celebrate Thanksgiving.
"At all?" Monica said.
"At all," Chandler confirmed. "Thanksgiving and I have an understanding. I leave it alone, it leaves me alone. The arrangement works for both parties."
"That's not how holidays work," Monica said.
"And yet," Chandler said.
Ross said he usually spent it with the family, but this year Carol had asked if he wanted to come over — she and Susan were doing a small dinner, and she'd thought he might want to be there, given the pregnancy. He said this with the careful, slightly complicated expression he wore when talking about Carol and Susan together — not hostile, not entirely comfortable, somewhere in the middle and working toward somewhere better.
"That's actually really good," Ethan said.
"I think so," Ross said. "I think it's the right thing. I just have to—" He made a small gesture that communicated remember how to be in a room with Susan without making a face.
"You can do that," Ethan said.
"I'm working on it," Ross said.
Everyone looked at Ethan.
"Julia's in the city through Wednesday," he said. "We're doing dinner tomorrow."
A beat.
"Julia," Joey said slowly. "Julia as in—"
"Julia as in Julia Roberts," Chandler said, to the half of the group who hadn't been at the park café. He deployed this information with the satisfaction of someone who had been holding it and was glad to finally use it. "Ethan met her at the Met. They've been — there have been developments."
"Developments," Monica repeated, looking at Ethan.
"There have been some developments," Ethan confirmed.
The table absorbed this.
Rachel looked at him with the expression she wore when she was recalibrating someone. "You met Julia Roberts at a museum and now you're having Thanksgiving dinner with her."
"That's roughly the sequence of events," Ethan said.
"How," Rachel said. Not a question exactly. More of a philosophical statement.
"He's charming," Phoebe said, with the certainty of someone who had decided and was not revisiting it. "And his aura is very open. People respond to that."
"His aura," Joey said.
"It's readable," Phoebe said. "Some people have readable auras and some people have — not unreadable, just—" She looked at Chandler. "Complicated. Yours has a lot of layers."
"I've been told that," Chandler said.
"I mean it as a compliment," Phoebe said.
"I'll take it as one," Chandler said, in the tone of a man who wasn't entirely sure.
Ethan looked around the table — all of them, in their various states of Thanksgiving planning, the holiday assembling itself around them whether they'd asked for it or not.
"So we're not all going to be together tomorrow," he said.
"Apparently not," Monica said. She said it with the particular expression she wore when something was slightly disappointing but she had accepted it — practical, forward-looking, already planning what she was going to cook anyway.
"Christmas," Phoebe said firmly. "We do Christmas together. All of us. That's the rule."
"That's the rule," everyone agreed, with varying degrees of ceremony and full degrees of sincerity.
He walked home as the evening settled in, the city doing its Sunday-before-a-holiday thing — slightly softer than usual, the traffic thinner, the lights on in more windows, people inside doing the particular preparation that happened the night before something.
His apartment was quiet. The science fiction poster sketches he'd pinned to the wall above his desk caught the lamp light — rough thumbnails, more concept than image, the kind of thing you put up to think at rather than to look at.
He sat down at his desk, turned on the computer, listened to it boot up with the particular patience that 1994 computing required, and opened a new document.
The Matrix, he typed at the top of the page. And then sat back and looked at it.
He'd been circling this for weeks. The idea of writing scripts — not as a career change, not as a distraction from the PhD, but as a longer game. The science consultancy angle was real and worth pursuing, but there was another angle that he kept returning to: if the goal was to be in the room where the decisions were made, the most direct path was to be the person who'd made the creative decision in the first place.
The Matrix was the obvious starting point. Original concept — he knew the shape of it, the core ideas, the things that made it work. Virtual reality as philosophical proposition. The body as contested territory. Action sequences constructed around a scientific premise rather than just spectacle. It was, if you stripped it back, a biology story wearing a cyberpunk coat, which meant his instincts about it were probably better than a random writer's would be.
He wouldn't steal it. That wasn't the idea. The Wachowskis had the vision; they were going to make it regardless of what he did. But there was something between nothing and theft — a conversation, a credit, an earlier presence in the room where it was being developed. The scientific grounding of the simulation hypothesis, which the film gestured at but never fully explored. The biology of the human-as-battery premise, which was scientifically ridiculous in the film's own terms and could be made not ridiculous with about twenty minutes of thoughtful revision.
He wrote for an hour. Not a screenplay — notes, ideas, the kind of document that was thinking-on-paper rather than drafting. He wrote about the premise, about where the science was and where it could go, about the difference between science fiction that used science as wallpaper and science fiction that used it as structure.
Then he wrote Source Code at the top of a new page. And then Interstellar. And then stopped, looked at what he'd written, and felt the particular mix of excitement and perspective that came from knowing both how good the ideas were and how much work stood between here and there.
After the PhD, he thought again. One thing at a time.
He saved the document, filed it under a folder he'd labeled simply Later, turned off the desk lamp, and went to make tea.
The city outside was quiet in the particular Sunday-night way — already leaning toward Monday, the brief holiday pause of Thanksgiving still a day away, everything in the slight held-breath between what had just happened and what was about to.
He stood at the window with his tea and looked out at the lit windows across the street, all those separate lives running their Sunday-night parallel tracks, and felt something that wasn't quite contentment and wasn't quite anticipation but lived somewhere usefully between the two.
Tomorrow: dinner with Julia. Wednesday: she flies back to LA. Thursday: his friends scattered across the boroughs, doing their separate versions of the holiday, each one working through something.
And then Friday, everyone back at Central Perk, the couch, the coffee, the particular reconstitution of the group that happened after they'd been apart for a few days and needed to report back.
That was the shape of it. That was enough.
He finished his tea, rinsed the cup, and went to bed.
Next: Thanksgiving dinner with Julia. Ross navigates Carol and Susan. Joey's mother makes enough food for a small country. Chandler spends the holiday alone and is fine and also not fine. Monica cooks for herself and it is exceptional.
[Milestone: 500 Power Stones = +1 Chapter]
[Milestone: 10 Reviews = +1 Chapter]
Enjoyed this chapter? Leave a review.
20+advanced chapters on P1treon Soulforger