I had heard the words “Val Verde” before, but I don’t know if I could have told you it was a country. I could have told you it was in the Caribbean, but other than that, nothing. I couldn’t look it up either because Dr. Sealy had taken my phone. I immediately felt like a dope for not having anticipated this.

“That’s not even close to Puerto Rico,” Sid said, amazed.

“Depends on what you mean, but yeah, we’re closer to Venezuela than PR right now. And actually, if you don’t mean proximity, you’re still right, it’s also not all that similar to PR. Puerto Rico is basically a US state, just without statehood. It has all the same federal laws, and all of the people are US citizens. Val Verde is its own country with its own government, its own money. It’s small and out of the way, and most people couldn’t tell you where it is, though it seems that Sid is not most people.”

“I was the champion of the Orange County Geography Bee in sixth grade,” Sid said. I laughed, thinking he was joking. He was not.

Dr. Sealy herded us through the terminal, which was clearly brand-new, and immediately onto the Altus Labs campus.

“As Sid could no doubt tell you, Val Verde has been through some tough times. That mountain is indeed an active volcano, and it erupted in the eighties, causing much of the population to flee. A further hit from a few successive hurricane seasons has kept the country from rebuilding. The founders of Altus wanted a place where secrecy could be preserved and we could also be a part of rebuilding. The economy has already grown 80 percent since we moved to the island.”

Paxton asked the question I wanted to ask: “So the volcano is … active, then?”

“Mount Belain is an active volcano, and there is a wide area around which no one is allowed to live, and visitation is strictly controlled. But there are no signs that it will erupt any time soon. We do keep an eye on it, though.”

I feel like I have to tell you right now that this volcano does not erupt in this book. Like, it seems like foreshadowing, but it’s not. But it is important that you understand that Val Verde was in a terrible place economically before Altus showed up.

Our first stop was the dorms, where I was given a room to myself, and Sid and Paxton discovered that they would be, at least for the moment, sharing a room. This, it turned out, was one of the nice things about being a woman at Altus. Guys all shared a central bathroom, so women were given the rare rooms that had bathrooms in them. This was only possible because women at Altus, I would soon find, were uncommon. I have two brothers, so I spent more time with guys than with women growing up. For a brief moment in middle school, I was even one of those intolerable “I hate hanging out with girls” girls. I grew out of that blessedly quickly, but even before I started on a clear track to a career in science, I was OK at working in majority-male environments.

After dropping our stuff in our new rooms, we moved across the courtyard to the main lobby. A massive bank of TVs in the two-story-high room each showed elegantly designed graphs that made no sense to me.

The carpet was made up of hexagonal tiles in the Altus logo colors of gray and red. Two women, apparently local to the island, stood behind a desk on the side of the room that featured a huge Altus logo constructed from driftwood. We went over to them to get security badges and lanyards stating that we were visitors. They were the only women I could see.

When we did a walk-through of the cafeteria, which was serving chicken and rice that looked completely serviceable but definitely not San Francisco start-up fare, I was finally able to do a head count. The male-to-female ratio was over 10 to 1. I’d never seen anything like it. It was like I’d gone back in time forty years.

Then, before our one-on-one interviews, Dr. Sealy took the three of us into a working lab and I forgot … everything.

My lab in Berkeley had all of the equipment I needed, but it was also built in the 1960s. As the needs of labs changed and personal computers started existing, lab benches had been repurposed over and over again. Tiles were chipped where things had been dropped, and no one ever let me forget that the red specks on the ceiling above my workstation were from when a chemist used the wrong flask for a vacuum distillation and the whole thing imploded.

Basically, my lab was cluttered and cobbled together, and it looked as old as it was. This lab at Altus was modular. Plug spools hung down from the ceilings; every computer monitor was on a track along the back of the bench and could be adjusted up or down for sitting or standing and moved through the whole length of the bench. All of the cabinet doors were Altus red, and the phenolic resin lab benches were Altus gray. Everything that wasn’t hooked into ventilation was on wheels. The floors were gleaming white concrete. Centrifuges spun, fume hoods quietly whooshed, and everywhere men (every person I saw was a guy) made it all happen. This was a little surprising as it was 7 p.m., a little after most labs shut down for the day, though not that weird in the context of a start-up, where a forty-hour workweek is far less than expected. It’s not like I’d never pulled an all-nighter in the lab.

Windows on one side of the room looked out over the forest. On the other side, windowed walls showed further labs with more specialized equipment. Through one, I spotted a massive, twenty-foot-high binocular transmission electron microscope, which I ran toward, drooling. Paxton and Sid marveled at my reaction, having no idea what it was. I wanted nothing more than to put some of my samples inside of that thing to see what they’d look like with that level of resolution.

“That’s not even the highest-resolution microscope we have,” Dr. Sealy told me, “though the Hitachi is hugely in demand and hard to keep running because the island’s power supply gets hit pretty hard when it’s operating. We’re working on it.”

Next we went through the computer engineering area (where Paxton would be working) and then to our one-on-one interviews.

My first interview was with Dr. Sealy, which was comfortable.

“So I guess, before we start asking you questions,” he said to me, “how do you feel about this place?”

“I mean, it’s hugely impressive. I want to ask two questions to start out, if that’s OK?”

“Of course.”

We were in Dr. Sealy’s office, on a corner of a building with windows on two of the walls. It wasn’t like a fancy office tower; it was roomy and functional.

“First, what are you doing here?”

“I can’t tell you that right now. I know that’s frustrating, but you get it. Your guesses are good, but they’ll have to remain guesses unless you end up working here.”

“I thought you’d say that. My other question is, like, so, there are always more men than women in a chemistry lab or software start-up, but …” I didn’t feel like I had to finish, so I didn’t.

Dr. Sealy tapped his teeth with his fingernails for a second before he began speaking.

“You’re absolutely right. It’s a problem, but we don’t know how to fix it. Ultimately, the pool of applicants has been overwhelmingly male. I think that has to do with a lot of things. Part of it is our founders, who have male audiences. Part of it is that this is risky, and women tend to be more risk-averse and less motivated by being a part of something world-changing.” He saw me getting irritated and continued, “And that’s just tendencies, not absolutes, of course. You’re here, obviously, and you’ve already done world-changing work in your short career. But we’re going to hire the best candidates from our pool of applicants. We don’t consider race or gender, and we don’t see any reason to. We look at talent first, and your talent is impressive at all levels.”