I am still nursing my hip. I'm too pigheaded to get it checked at the moment. If the pain persists another week I'll probably do it. :P
In other news, I'm 7 chapters from finishing PRI 2 Hostage Rescue but I keep getting interrupted. Drama. Loads of drama going on. Hopefully things will settle down soon.
On to the snippet!
Still in the short story BELL:
“How do you split a muon?” Alexi asked as he
fiddled with the controls. Everything was kludged together; they were low on
funding again. Improvisation was the norm. The station reflected that;
it was patched together. Wiring trunks were bundled and run through the
station. Anything and everything was used to keep the station running.
Sometimes it was hard to sort out what was for the station and what was a part
of the lab.
One of their smartest purchases was a trio of
3D printers and a CNC machine. The machinery worked with various raw or
recycled materials, and it cut down on having to order expensive custom made
equipment. It did mean they needed engineering and CAD help though. They had a
cluster of engineering students on “loan.” The kids were
working for minimum wage, but that helped keep the interest on their student loan
debt down. It also gave them work credits on an actual space station that they
could use on their resumes in the future.
Everything was old and used;
they rarely had the money to buy new. Secondhand was the norm. Anything that
broke to the point where it couldn't be rebuilt was stripped of parts and then
the bits that were broken were recycled. There were bags and bins, many
repurposed from food containers to keep the parts sorted and straight for the
engineers.
Waste not, want not.
“Very very very carefully,” Pat deadpanned,
giving him “the look.”
He snorted. “Cute.”
“Okay, here is a better one, how do you spin
a split muon?”
“Ah …”
“Yeah, there is the rub.”
Whenever two objects that were connected by
quantum entanglement moved, one object was spun in the mirror image of the
second. The problem was, if either particle touched another object, poof, it
became a part of that object and the connection was lost.
Quantum entanglement, also known as Bell
entanglement, had been theorized as far back as 1935. Experiments had
been run with buckyballs, diamonds, photons, neutrinos, and other materials.
The scientific community was at odds about the results and correlation for some
time. But it hadn't been imaged until 2019 that things began to take off.
Of course the communication corporations had
gotten involved. The idea of FTL communications without a network to have to
maintain was very appealing. They'd tried to perfect FTL only to find all sorts
of problems with it. The technology was not mature—reading
the spin was hard enough, inducing it was another problem. One tended to
interfere with the other.
One thing Alexi liked about Pat was that
they'd settled into a sassy old-friend sort of relationship. She
didn't cut him any slack and she wasn't uptight. They joked all the time. Some
might protest a few things, like when he threatened her with a warm bottom.
He'd thought he'd stepped over the line,
but she'd come right back by bringing a paddle from a frat house the following
day and using it on his hind end.
He still blushed when she teased him about
that. She wasn't just someone he could relate to, a colleague, a friend, but
also a good friend. Someone he trusted implicitly.
“Okay, so …”
“Hold that thought. Trevor sent over the
latest calculations of the model you sent,” Pat said.
“Ah?” he asked, excited. Trevor Hillman was a
cyborg and had once been the head of R&D at Lagroose Industries before the
company had broken up shortly after the A.I. War. He, the company's lynchpin
Athena, and others had led an exodus for many personnel to Mars University
while Jack Lagroose had taken another group to Pyrax.
It was rumored that Athena had engineered
both exit strategies.
Athena had been a professor at the university
for some time before she had realized her software was failing. She had decided
to shut herself down, and Trevor had replaced her as the chair of computer
sciences. Trevor had taken her “death” hard.
So had Alexi, Athena had been a supporter,
and she'd helped him out a lot with computer support and number crunching. It
had taken time for him to get in with Trevor.
Really Pat had been the one to do that. She'd
wined and dined Trevor and had reminded him that Athena had been a supporter of
the project and finishing it would help with her legacy.
He hadn't quite bit into that but he had
grudgingly taken on some of their sim tasks. Apparently,
some of their work had helped him with other projects from time to time. And
both scientists were of course on hand to answer questions he might have about
particle physics, quantum mechanics, or other fields they knew about.
“The math is fascinating,” Pat said, looking at the tablet. When he tried to
look at it, she pretended to play keep away before relenting.
They sat on the old tape-covered
bench, legs tucked up to prop up their tablets as they scanned the
documentation fully. Occasionally, he'd play footsy with her just to get
her goat. She'd protest mildly, usually with a soft stop and he would … for a
little while.
“You know you are impossible,
right?” she finally said when he noted the light was fading.
“Yeah well, you started it,” he said, reaching
out and catching a bare foot. She liked to pad around in her bare feet; she
said it helped her to think.
He also knew from experience that she was
ticklish. Very ticklish.
She instantly started to snicker as he
started to tickle her. She kicked with her free foot and then reached over and
grabbed a pillow to pummel him into submission. He finally relented to fend off
her blows. They fell in a heap on the floor.
He groaned as a knee found a tender spot.
“Serves you right,” she said, poking him.
He chuckled. “So, dinner?”
“Yeah, sure, why not.”
“Chinese?” he asked.
She hit him again.
“Okay, okay, Korean?” he asked. He laughed as
he fended off another blow. “Picky picky!”
.... . .-.. .-.. ---
I still can't get the font text to work right. GRR.
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