Correspondence College

Emma gives a lesson, but then gets one as the old dog uses the new tricks

Date: 09/21/2018 Time: 10:00pm EDT	Dr. Emma Durov's office, Hall of Science, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI
Cast: Arthur Emma
Arthur knock knock. Arthur is outside, with a duffel bag over his shoulder. It's nearing the end of her day, and Emma looks like she's all but zoned out from her labours. She's starting to gaze at the poster of Jupiter on her ceiling when Arthur comes a-knocking. She sits back upright, shaking the cobwebs out of her mind as she calls, "Come in." Arthur pushes the door open, checking if anyone else is in, then closes the door carefully behind himself. "Good evening Doctor," he smiles, setting the bag down and unzipping it. "I have good news, and bad news about the project." "Ah, hi Arthur." She calls over, when she sees who it is. Emma rises from her seat, gesturing to the couch as she rounds her desk. "Oh, what's the news?" She wonders, curiously. <<DICE>> Emma rolls per + alertness, difficulty 7 <<DICE>> 2 successes (4 8 10, Specialty: No, Willpower: No) Arthur smiles faintly as he reaches into the bag, first pulling out a gray Harvey Mudd blanket, then pulls out... nothing? Well, not nothing. There's SOMETHING on his hand, something making his hand look fuzzy. "I ran into a snag with the projector, and so to get around the probelms, I'm back to the drapery idea. I slapped this together over night, and I've been testing it outdoors, in sunlight and moonlight, seeing how this prototype performs." Emma eyebrows shooot up, trying to make sense of the scene before her. She reaches over to her desk, picking up a tricorder like device - or an extra chunky smartphone - and she waves it around in the air. "Fascinating." She says, breathlessly. "It seems like there's complete anti-photonic reversal." She says, as she reads off the screen. Arthur nods. "Yeah, I took a heating pad, and put my own core into it. The physical proximity of a solid matrix just made it more reliable. I'm having a problem getting the inductor to produce a shell of an effect a couple of meters away. I have to get the spatial geometry right." He sighs, puts the invisible pad on her desks, and sits on his Harvey Mudd blanket. "IT's frustrating, but this will work. The effect is weak because this is a quick prototype." Emma turns around and picks up a piece of chalk. She draws up a series of equations, narrating as she does. "It's an easy enough space-time problem. Remember the n-field? Just integrate over the domain and you'll get one of twelve solutions." She pauses with the chalk, turning back to Arthur. "The trick is just identifying which of the solutions are real." She adds.. Arthur looks up at what she writes. Arthur sits up, pulls out his phone, and takes a snapshot of the equations. "Intersting. Can we talk about this in depth... sometime next week? I'm going to apply that. But I don't think I have a good handle yet on how to integrate that. I need to pick your brain when it's not a Friday evening when we're both exhausted." Emma makes a few minor corrections to the chalkboard, but seems broadly satisfied with the results. Finally, she turns back to Arthur. "Oh. I don't know what I'd have to offer." She says, modestly. The young instructor leans on the back of her chair, adding. "But I guess I could try to help." Arthur smiles. "I think you could offer more than you think. While I have tended to work in physics and chemistry... this sort of..." He grimaces "Three and multidimensional projection, interference, harmonic stuff hasn't really been what I work on. Except on a very small scale inside power lines." Emma gives a small shrug. "It's just old Einstine taken to the logical conclusion. Nothing spooky about it." She says modestly. Emma remains leaning on the back of the chair, considering for a moment. "Well. Maybe there's something you could do for me, if you wouldn't mind?" Arthur nods. "Of course. Did you get a chance to pick up that book? Start refreshing yourself?" He takes the invisibility pad, looks at ... not it, and slips it back into his duffel bag with the Harvey Mudd blanket again. Emma nods a few times, before straightening up. She erases the board, and begins to write a series of relatively simple equations, and a rough sketch of a force diagram. "So there's this problem that the book posited..." She begins, making some corrections here and there. "... And I didn't quite follow it. Maybe it'd be easier to follow it in a demonstration, but I don't quite get Parreck's Principle." She finishes up outlining the problem, and offers the chalk over to Arthur. "Could you explain to me, in English, where the deflection comes in? It seems like that's pretty essential to... well, *any* advanced implementation of this stuff..." Arthur flinches. "See this is EXACTLY what I'm talking about. Stuff like that I haven't had to look at since undergrad." He buries his face in his hands, and sighs. Pulling two fingers apart, he looks up at the chackboard again. "Oh wait. I see what you're doing. That's... huh. I think you can take two of Maxwell's equations, divide them by each other to set an equality, and then subtract the AEtheric charge from both sides. Once you account for the AEther, things start canceling, and the deflection falls out." Emma retrieves a notepad and scribbles down a note, trying to write that down while it was still fresh. Then, chalk still in hand, she approaches the board tepidly, and tries to start implementing what he said. She's partially got it - clearly all that book learning, plus her own independent studies, have done her well - but her implementation of the principles is definitely incomplete. Like recognizing this, she says "... yeah, I always get stuck here." She says with a frown. "It's just... force vector should carry on it's merry way." Arthur takes a breath. He's really focused hard on this. Hands lowering though, so he's looking fully instead of peeking out like a scared student. Then he remembers. Humming, he goes socratic. "What happens to the derivative of the magnitude of that vector when it transitions between AEtheric thresholds?" Emma pauses, looking at the board, and then at Arthur and back again. "I..." She starts, without finishing the sentence. She turns and fully faces the board, bringing the chalk up to her lips as she considers long and hard. "I think..." She begins again, no quicker than before, "... that it remains unchanged? Or... no, it remains zero." This pause leads her to venture again. "... it's zero, because the magitude remains unchanged. The vector..." she pauses again, trying to scribble something out on the chalk board. "... would be different? Depending on how much etheric potential you put there?" She says, more of a question than an answer. Arthur points at the equation, at one specific term. "Right, the magnitude is unchanged. Meaning as it transitions, the entire change to the vector is in its orientation. What's catching you is when the vector hits the inflection point, and inverts from one AEtheric domain to the next. When the wave passes to the next particle." Eat your heart out quantum. "You need to divide by two." Emma stares at Arthur for a moment, like he just spoke an absolute load of nonsense. Then, furrowing her brow, she walks her way through the steps, one at a time, crossing or scribbling out terms as they become irrelevant. Finally, she's left with what Arthur was arguing to begin with. "I'll be damned." She breaths. Arthur gives a polite clap. "And with that, you've transitioned back from the 20th century, to the 19th. Which allows us to jump ahead to the 21st, and beat the bastards back." Emma shakes her head a few times. "There's got to be a way to do the same without going so old school." She says, like such a atavistic solution has left a poor taste in her mouth. "I mean, why not just change... like okay, if this was the case of the graviton, why not just... you know..." She tries to scribble something to the side, using her preferred quantum woo. It's needlessly complicated, but it could be made to work. "Or... I don't know. Divide by two though? That's all right-angles. Ugh." Arthur takes a deep breath, and folds his arms. "It'll work that way. It might be easier for you that way, to climb through the weeds and get there. Maybe for you it's a shortcut. Math is Math. I go old school because it's easier for me to program into R most of the time. Slash 2 is easy." Emma blehs, but dutifully scribbled down a few notes on the notepad to the side. She pauses as she makes one last note, looking up at Arthur with an expression that reads of resignation. If he can see what she's written down from over there, she divided by two, though only under duress. "I'll have to keep working my way through that book. It's... like you said, not bad. I've alredy got something in mind for the next book." Arthur winks. "Emma, you're a professional, and a full member of the Society of Ether. You ultimately need to follow that spark of Genius inside you." He pauses, rubs his forehead, and sighs. "Don't tell anyone I did this." He then comes around the desk, grabs the chalk, and gets to work. This time, instead of using Maxwell's equations, he starts using quantum operators, and gets there. Without dividing by two. Then silently, he puts down the chalk, and goes back into his duffle back to wipe his hands on his gray blanket. Emma starts breaking into a small grin as he does that, looking up at the chalkboard, and then to Arthur with a conspiritorial wink. "I saw nothing." She promises, hand on heart. "Nope. Nothing happened here at all." Arthur busts up chuckling after doing his best to stay stoic about this. "Look, before I was recruited I was as sucked up in the Void Engineer model as everyone else. I'm still in recovery. Hello, my name is Arthur, and I'm a quantumholic. I've been AETheric for 20 years." Emma hmmphs. "I don't know why it's a *bad* thing. If anything, the whole quantum revolution has been them trying to do damage control and make things a little more tidey and orderly. Every time they've tried, they've just made things *less* certain." Emma chimes in, shaking her head ruefully. "It'd be funny if they weren't kidnapping and murdering people over it." She lets out a breath. Arthur slumps back down. "IT's political. I've spent my entire professional career across the river from Washington DC, in an office geared towards lobbying politicans and bureaucrats. You get used to politics." The part about murdering makes him shake his head. "Yeah. So it's a point of pride to be able to do it the old school way, when we were ascendant. But seriously, as the kids say, you do you. It's your actions, not your algorithms, that pick what side you're on." "I... I do quite a few things old-school. Most of my space-time manipulations? I'd love to show you a problem I'm working on, because it's so classical it practically has a orchestral score." Emma says, leaning on the back of her chair again. "But some stuff... the multi-dimensional stuff... only works for me if I include some quantum effects." She shrugs helplessly. "Maybe it's because I never learnt that from a mentor. There could be a way of doing it that ignores all that. People were accessing the near dimension before the quantum revolution, after all..." Arthur takes a breath. "Keep working at it. My prediction? Someday, you'll have a breakthrough, and you'll start doing things you've never imagined. And it'll be on another level, so the old stuff is irrelvant. It'll be a new model. That's how it went for me. AEtheric particle flux its its own entire thing. Barely been worked on, and only in the last 20 years." He sighs again. "I should be solving droughts. I could probably fix the Sahara Desert if I had another 10 years. But here I am making blankets to avoid international incidents. But its' fun and I'm meeting exciting people like you, Rei, Ahana..." Again, the mention of Ahana causes Emma's lips to momentarily twitch down, like that wound is still fresh. "Well, who's to say you can't do that from here? Yes, there's less resources but..." She shrugs. "I think we can accomplish great things here." Arthur nods. "I'll settle for cleaning the Detroit River, recovering Dr. Varma, and solving the disappearance of Sakurazaka San. If we can solve those three things, I will have no regrets."