anemoi | Action at a Distance

[Video]

[Gordon looks in much better spirits than he had been in the past few days. Maybe it's because he FINALLY got all that marshmallow out of his hair... oh, wait. It's a little shorter. Looks like he has to take drastic measures. Well, at least it didn't get into his beard...]

So it turns out, as a post-doc I did some research in Austria. Spent the better part of a year there. Good times... Crisp air, awesome scenery, plenty of erenhaftprofessoren to bounce ideas off of, and arguably the best beer on the planet. If and when I go back home, I'm going back there. I don't care what else I have to do.

[And here he was worried he wasn't going to like his memories from here on out...]

What about you guys? Anyone else here have a place you remember fondly?

[Private, to Samus]

Heyyyy, uh, would you be interested in going over those power suit prints tonight or tomorrow? The library, center branch, second floor.

I'll even take the liberty of kicking the teenagers out of the hologram viewing room before you arrive.

[1% on the Innsbruck Experiment, 14% total.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[Well that's weird!]

The shielding system, and for the record, I know my suit repairs most minor damage via recharge rather than physical maintenance, so that makes sense. But... are you getting enough sleep? I know lab work can be taxing, especially since you seem like the hard-working academic type.

[Oh jeezus it's a good thing the light is reddish now or else she'd see him actually blushing at the compliment--]

Yeah sure. I'm fine, just... got sidetracked a little. [He grabs the controller and the notebook from his bag, and drops into the chair she'd provided now.]

I get the feeling the shields take most of the wear and tear in combat, just from what I saw of you in action before. Even after facing off against that overgrown centipede, it literally didn't have a scratch on it... what exactly happened down there, anyway?

Just a scrap, really, with a lot of collateral damage. It took happening upon that missile upgrade to finish it off quickly. Which reminds me, any insights as to how components of the suit can convert to energy and back like that?

[Just a SCRAP? That thing took a shotgun blast to the face and snickered at him! And she can take it down quickly on half her remembered battle ability?]

All matter has a rest energy and frequency associated with it. We're probably talking a modulation-change between matter and energy vibrational modes. Which... kind of validates string theory. Huh. Who would've guessed. How it accomplishes that, I'm not really sure yet. Hold on, maybe I can find an entry in here somewhere...

[He prods the hologram with the remote, flipping through menus upon menus of strange glyphs. He's really only running on pictures, but it's better than nothing.]

[She stares at the glyphs intently. The characters feel familiar, but not enough that she can actually read them. She must have known where the suit came from once. She wants to know again. The suit never feels like armor; it gives the strangest impression of being part of her. She doesn't feel right having forgotten its origins.]

Hm... come to think of it, it could be the same mechanism as the Morph Ball, though I believe that might involve a partial dimensional shift. Something that can transport physical objects into a pocket dimension while allowing data from them to interact with the machine on this plane... either way, this is ridiculously advanced even to me.

Partial d-- wait... Maybe--no, that'd take a couple trillon electron-volts per... hold on... a fermi-bose conversion? A simple manifold shift? THAT's why it doesn't immediately ground itself upon converting to energy! It doesn't convert to it, it transcends to it!

[He turns to her, looking excited but incredulous.]

Okay, here's what I think is going on here. First of all you're right, the matter--whether it's a bunch of missiles, an upgrade, or YOU--isn't actually changed to energy at all, it's just tucked into that pocket dimension. But no one says that that pocket dimension has to be exactly like ours, inside there the rules are different. Matter IS energy there... more or less. I can only guess what it looks like in there, but all that's left of it in this dimension is a bright point charge with a high spin, whose magnetic field easily works with the suit's mechanisms!

I see...

...

Have I mentioned I'm only slightly more than a layman in physics?

[Congratulations, Gordon. You understand future science better than the lady from the future.]

Uh, right, yeah, sorry... [He sort of overdid it there. But at least her eyes haven't glazed over yet. He used to HATE that when talking to girls in college. And after college too. It's an ongoing thing, actually.]

What I mean is that you're something more than matter when you're in that morph ball. You're pure energy, in another dimension, connected to this one by your suit. I think. In order to be sure I'd have to do lorentz calculations in ten dimensions for every atom of your body... which I don't think I'm going to do right now.

[He barely KNOWS her, after all.]

If you don't mind my asking, uh... what's it feel like? To be in that morph ball?

Action at a Distance

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