13. Hermione learns a thing XII - Things are advancing...
- Location
- The general area. Possibly behind you.
Have some more wordz! We're getting closer to a number of things happening, past the things that have already happened 
More wordz will arrive quite soon, as I appear to be on a roll. Which has squashed it flat to the point it's inedible, but such is life...
More wordz will arrive quite soon, as I appear to be on a roll. Which has squashed it flat to the point it's inedible, but such is life...
"Hmm… I wonder…" Tapping the pencil on the pad that was lying across her knees, which were folded up with her feet on the bed, Hermione considered her ideas. She was lying mostly propped up on the pillows in her pajamas, Mr Boots purring next to her head on his floating platform which she'd left active since he generally seemed to like it except when she actively told him to stay there. But then he was a cat. Outside it was absolutely pouring with rain and very windy, with the result that every few seconds the house gently shook and water spattered on the window with a rattling sound. It certainly wasn't suitable weather for girl nor cat, so both had decided that spending the evening relaxing was a sensible idea. She didn't want to turf him out into such horrible weather, and was sure his actual owner wouldn't mind him staying overnight. Which he often did whether she liked it or not, to be honest.
Downstairs she could hear her parents talking to some friends that had come over to socialize, which was something that they didn't do all that often. Neither of the other couples had children, so she was a slight loose end, which she didn't really mind as she wasn't particularly interested in a dinner party past having some food. Her parents were enough for her to feel involved, and if it wasn't a research project, she'd prefer to be on her own. So she'd gone to bed early, more or less, so she could think in comfort and quiet.
The sound of the distant voices and occasional laughter was oddly comforting, she thought idly as she sketched a theoretical method for creating a teleportation HOP array with quick strokes of the pencil. Her parents were having fun, she was too, everyone was nice and warm and well fed, and the horrible weather outside was easily ignored. Mr Boots was purring loudly which added to the overall feeling of being very comfortable right where she was. Looking up at the window as a particularly strong burst of rain dashed against it, she shook her head. It had been such a nice day yesterday, and now look at it. The weather was certainly very changeable at this time of year.
Oh well. It was only half past six even if it was almost black outside, and she could happily lie here and think until she felt tired. Plus there would be roast beef left over tomorrow, which would go very nicely in some sandwiches, not to mention the trifle with custard. She loved trifle with custard…
Smiling to herself, Hermione drew a few more symbols, connecting them into the main power bus, and studied the result. Picking up the notebook next to her leg she checked a few parameters, clucked her tongue in irritation at her mistake, and corrected the drawing a little. This wasn't something she wanted to get wrong. And was very definitely not something she was going to test in person before she'd thoroughly checked it out with something inanimate.
Putting the pencil behind her ear, she retrieved one of the library books she'd asked the town library to order in for her, this one on quantum physics, opened it to one of many color-coded bookmarks, then read a few pages very carefully. Flipping the pad to the next page, she worked out some equations, looked at the results, thought for a while, changed some values, and solved them again. "I see," she mumbled. "Professor Hawking certainly seems to be right again." She pulled another Cambridge University book out of the stack of them on the table next to her head and again referred to it, this one being a collection of papers on wormholes. Again, many written by the professor.
Much of the theory went over her head as she didn't have the associated knowledge to make sense of it yet, not having read all the books so far, but she got the gist of the concept well enough. Combined with her observations on what the tool users seemed to be doing with their teleportation method, and adding in that other peculiar phenomenon she'd noticed six days ago in London, the information was beginning to suggest that the idea she'd come up with for her own spin on the concept was viable. But it was a complex thing to pull off with no margin for error whatsoever.
The tool users seemed willing to use something she was more and more convinced wasn't really safe at all, but she was a scientist, and safety was paramount in her view. Especially when it related to herself or people she valued. So she wasn't going to try to duplicate precisely what they were doing, merely the end result. After all, teleportation was a pretty common fictional idea and she had proof it was also possible via H-Field manipulation, so it should be within her ability to re-engineer into something effective and risk-free.
That didn't in any way make it easy, though.
Flipping to another blank page, she went over what she'd seen several times and broke it down into sequential operations. Each of those she further deconstructed into individual H-Field functions, finally ending up with three A4 pages of cryptic symbols which represented her own notation of exactly what the people had done with their tools. She rechecked it against her notes twice to be sure she hadn't missed anything and was eventually satisfied that it was an accurate analysis of the whole apparently over-complicated process. Even without really trying she could already see several places where the tool was performing redundant and in some cases positively contradictory things, which explained a lot of the energy leakage rather well.
The whole thing really did bring to mind a computer program that had been written by grafting together a whole series of subroutines that didn't quite line up, with patches at the joins to make everything more or less work. Or possibly a very complicated circuit diagram where the designer had been insistent on using as many components as possible to do something that could be easily achieved by one IC. It certainly hadn't been created by someone who was trying to optimize the whole process, she was almost certain of that.
Shaking her head a little she started going over the whole pattern very carefully and removing parts that weren't required, manually simplifying the whole thing while retaining the bits that actually did the work. It was a little worrying how much of it she was able to remove without disturbing the core functions. In fact, by the time she'd finished an hour later, she was down to three quarters of a page of elegantly simple operations, and was quite concerned that she'd made a fundamental mistake and overdone it to the point that she'd broken the whole thing.
So she redid the entire process from the beginning, which took another solid hour, but ended up with exactly the same result. So in all likelihood she was correct, she thought to herself. "All right then," she said to Mr Boots who lifted his head and peered at her with his ears pointed forward. She showed him the page. "This is what their method needs to do what it does, with all that unnecessary fluff taken out. But I don't want to use this directly because it could easily go horribly wrong. You see this part here?" Hermione tapped one section with her forefinger, the cat following it intently with his eyes. "It has no safeguards at all. So if you didn't get the starting parameter exactly right the wormhole wouldn't quite be big enough, or it could go all unstable half way through, and you might end up losing an arm or something! Which is ever so daft, I think. There's no margin for error even though it's using a huge amount of energy, much more than it actually needs."
Mr Boots yawned causing her to smile affectionately. Reaching out she stroked him as she thought, studying the notes and thinking. "The main point is that this does work, if you don't mind an unacceptably high risk of leaving bits behind. Or if you really get it wrong, never coming out the other end." She pondered the problem a little more, then added, "Or perhaps coming out at a terribly high relative velocity and splashing. Which would be very unpleasant for everyone." The concept was enough to make her feel a little ill and she wished that she hadn't had the thought, but the maths were obvious.
"But the main thing is that this shows me that my own idea has merit. We should be able to replicate much the same result without the attendant risk. If I'm right this makes a temporary wormhole between two points in space, much as Professor Hawking has theorized. He'll be chuffed to know he was right, I expect. But the wormhole is likely to be very unstable as far as I can work out, which makes it even more dangerous than it would be anyway." Tearing the page off the pad, she floated it where she could see it and flipped back to her partially finished HOP schematic. Studying it closely, she looked between the deconstructed technique and her own design, nodding to herself every now and then.
"Yes, that looks plausible. This part powers it, this part controls the destination coordinates, while this part controls the source coordinates. This sets the size, this is the orientation." Pulling the pencil from behind her ear again she started adding more operators to the diagram, referring to her notes and several books, which soon surrounded her in a halo of documentation. Lost in the work and very much enjoying the deep cogitation required she was finally drawn out of a haze of equations and HOP designs by a tap on her door. She looked around to see it open, both her parents looking in at her.
"Oh, hello," she said, then surprised herself by yawning widely. "Are they gone?"
"Yes, sweetie," her mother replied with a smile, looking at the dozen books and at least as many notebooks that were floating blithely around her. "You look like you've been busy."
Hermione nodded somewhat tiredly. "Yes, but it's starting to come together well," she responded. "I'm on the right track, I think." Looking at the latest draft of her HOP design, she ruefully added, "It's more complicated than I hoped it would be. I keep finding possible problems and have to think up a way around them, and that makes something else fail, so I have to fix that part too… This is nearly as complicated as my ideas for a HOP computer." She shook her head with a small smile. "If I was willing to ignore all the dangerous bits I'd probably be finished by now."
"Please do not ignore the dangerous bits, Hermione," her father urged. He indicated the ceiling, which all three of them looked at. Mr Boots did too, then rolled onto his back and squeaked. "We know what can happen if you don't think things all the way through…"
She sighed faintly, but nodded her understanding of his point. He was right, after all.
"I'll be careful, Daddy. This will be as safe as I can possibly manage."
"If you can actually pull off real teleportation I'll be very impressed," he said with a laugh. She giggled.
"I'm fairly sure I can but it's going to take quite a lot more work."
"Which you can resume tomorrow. It's a school night and it's half past eleven, so you need to go to sleep," her mother pointed out. With a slightly startled look at her clock Hermione saw that it really was that late. She yawned again.
"I was wondering why I was so tired," she commented, floating her pencil over to her desk, then stacking all the books and paperwork next to it. Her parents watched the items land neatly, then looked at her.
"Don't forget to brush your teeth," her father said with a smile. "Sleep well, dear."
"I will, Daddy." Standing up, she went past them to the bathroom and did what needed to be done, returning to bed a few minutes later. Her parents were in their room by then and she sleepily turned the light out, then made her way to bed by energy sense rather than vision, slid under the covers, and closed her eyes.
"Good night, Mr Boots," she murmured, rolling over and yawning one last time. Moments later she was deeply asleep.
The cat watched her for a few seconds then curled up and followed her example.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"I think we're essentially ready now," Jerry said, looking around the conference room in his new department, Everyone involved with the psionics investigation project, which had become quite a large and very committed group, was present from tenured staff to parapsychology students. It represented a wide range of disciplines, from his own through the biomedical ones to the hard sciences. The whole group, some thirty-seven people, was silent, listening intently, with folders containing their relevant plans and methodology in front of each of them.
"All the sub-departments are fully set up, and everyone has reported that their equipment is properly calibrated, except for that misbehaving thermal camera in medical." He looked at Farouk who nodded.
"It's on the bench and I've found the problem, I'll have it working by the end of the day."
"Good. No one else has any issues as far as I know?" He looked around the room, nobody indicating anything amiss, so he went back to his notes. "We've got two time-slots booked on the big MRI machine at John Radcliffe, which should be ample for repeating the tests we did the last time. Indications are that we'll probably not find anything, but it's worth trying just in case. Gerald is looking into some upgrades to the experimental software from the Japanese which might help, too, although he's been having trouble persuading them to let him have it without divulging what we're up to."
Taking a sip of water from the glass next to his elbow, he put the glass down again, and resumed. "Professor Hawking and a number of his own associates will be here all day on Sunday the twenty seventh, so we will need to get a first run through all the tests that may show anything that's relevant to his research requirements performed on the Saturday, ideally. I expect we can continue that the next day but it would help to have data for him right then, while he's available."
"The man, brilliant as he is, isn't going to look at our graphs and go 'Aha! It's obvious, I can tell you exactly what's happening,' you know," Christine chimed in, smiling a little. There was a small ripple of laughter around the packed room. "He's going to need to sit and think about it. Possibly for a long time."
"I realize that, thanks," Jerry said with a grin of his own. "But I'd like to be able to send him off with enough information to give him something to think about. So if we can do the physical measurements, anything related to thermal output, magnetism, gravity, all the usual things, before we move onto the genetic and medical assessments, that would probably be for the best." She nodded acceptance and he looked around again, seeing several others were doing the same. "Michael Granger sent both Doctor Thurgood and Professor Hawking a copy of Hermione's thesis, so they've been using that and our initial dataset for their own research. Anything we can add to that is only going to help. Right, then, what's next?"
He flipped to the next page in a very full notebook. "Ah. All right, I know quite a few of you here haven't yet seen any of these phenomena in person, rather only from the video recordings and other data. So I thought it would be a sensible introduction to the whole affair if we arranged to get everyone together in one of the lecture halls, with appropriate privacy measures, and have the Grangers repeat a number of the demonstrations they provided for us to the whole department. That way everyone, including those of you I am fully aware are still somewhat skeptical even if you think you're hiding it, can witness exactly what we're trying to study." He met a few eyes as he spoke, and out of the corner of his eye saw Farouk smirking a little. Christine made a muffled snicker too.
"I have to confess I would like that, Doctor," one of the students commented.
"I think we all would," a biologist added, nodding.
"Excellent. I've made a preliminary booking of a suitably sized room, so I'll firm that up for…" Leafing through his diary, he prodded the page with one finger. "Eleven AM on Saturday. That will give the Granger family enough time to settle in to the accommodation we've arranged, and recover from the drive, as well as letting those of you who stayed out too late the night before drag yourselves out of bed."
Again, most of them laughed, and all were smiling. "Allow… say an hour and a half for that? It should be more than enough. So we can start the main tasks immediately after lunch, and get a lot of work done. They've said they're fine with working late although please do remember that the star of our project is only ten, so let's not overdo it, all right? We're not in a hurry, and we'll have other opportunities in future. Peter, don't take all her blood, she needs some left to keep living." He looked at the medical expert who shrugged, making him grin. "I'll take that as a yes."
"Then the next day, we've got Professor Hawking's team here, which most likely means that Hermione at least will be talking to him most of the day. The girl does like to talk and she has a lot to talk about so I expect anyone from the hard sciences will want to sit in on that. We can continue our other tests with one or other of her parents during this time." He turned the next page. "MRIs are booked for the Monday, one morning session and one evening one. We'll be doing the same as last time, one baseline scan set, then an active scan set. It would be marvelous if we actually found something jumping out at us at that time but I have to admit I doubt it will. If we get lucky and we do find a repeatable anomaly, that will change our plans for further testing, but we'll deal with that if and when it happens."
"And if it doesn't show anything biological for their abilities?" Peter asked.
"I'll spend an awful lot of time wondering how on earth they're doing it, as I suspect everyone else will," Jerry replied, chuckling. "I think we will even if we do find a biological source."
"To be honest, from what I've seen, I'd be more surprised if we did discover something obvious in that manner," Peter remarked, shaking his head. "The energy requirements from what I understand are far past what should be possible for a brain to produce or handle without something extraordinary happening. Most likely extraordinarily bad." Anyone from the biological sciences present was either nodding agreement or looking very thoughtful. "My suspicion is that while the ability may well have a genetic component, the actual mechanism underlying it is much more likely to be nothing directly connected to biology itself."
"Which is exactly what we're trying to discover, of course. Hopefully we'll be able to manage that, sooner or later, or the Vice Chancellor is going to glare at me."
"Again," Christine put in, making Jerry give her a sharp look, which only provoked a cheerful smile. Farouk started very quietly snickering to himself.
"Your contributions are always appreciated, Christine," he sighed.
"I know, and it's my pleasure to help," she chuckled.
"Anyway… " He gave her another look, then went back to his notes. He spent the next two and a half hours going over the entire planned research session, fielding questions from his colleagues, and intermittently sighing as Christine put in an acid comment or an insightful one almost randomly. Some of the questions caused a lot of discussion, and resulted in a few things being moved around, two tests canceled as being redundant, and another one devised on the spot and entered into the schedule. When they finally reached a full agreement there was more than one sigh of relief, not least from him.
"I think that's it. If anyone has any new thoughts, please bring them to me." He slowly looked around at the whole group, thinking that the day the Grangers walked into his life was undoubtedly one that would end up in the history books, as would this group. "Never forget… What we're doing here is almost certainly going to produce as many fundamental discoveries and new fields of study as the discovery of radioactivity did, or electronics. This is the first step on what promises to be a trip that will take years, probably decades. We're standing on the threshold of something far bigger than any of us could ever have dreamed of, and who knows where it will eventually lead. Everyone in this room is going to look back on this as the moment that their entire career shifted direction, for good or ill, so let's make sure we all do the most rigorous and best documented research possible."
He smiled wryly, as they all watched him closely. "Because I assure you that we are going to get more scrutiny from literally the entire academic world when we publish than anyone has ever managed. It's going to be…" Shaking his head, he groped for the right word, then finally finished, "...awkward."
"We'll have all the proof anyone could ever ask for, though, so their opinions won't matter in the long run," Farouk laughed. "Don't worry, Jerry, this is going to be fun."
"You're not the one who had four months of articles in the local paper about running a department that worshiped the devil," Jerry growled, making his friend laugh harder and nearly everyone else join in. Christine gave him a sympathetic look, which was unusual from the woman, but only smiled ruefully. He returned it.
"I'm not completely sure fun is the right term, but I can say with no worry of being wrong that it's going to be bloody hard work," he said, closing his notebook on the last page then putting his pen on top of it and leaning back, feeling tired but pleased.
"One thing does occur to me," Alan, the psychologist, remarked, making everyone look to him. "I should have thought of it earlier, so I'm sorry. What are we doing about security?" He looked around, then back to Jerry. "Yes, we've got everyone involved fully onboard with keeping silent for the time being outside the project for reasons of academic integrity, as well as avoiding the sort of people Jerry tends to attract, but what I'm thinking about is actual physical security in the sense of heading off those who might feel that they'd like to help themselves to our research. There are a lot of implications of Hermione's work and the entire concept of telekinesis, and the H-Field, which might be worth a lot of money to certain people. Industrial espionage is a real thing, after all."
Jerry thought for a moment, then nodded. "I have to confess in the excitement I didn't think of that, but you're right. Do you have a proposal?"
"At a minimum we probably need to make sure that the department is fully secured, with access control systems rather more effective than the usual sort. I know that the high energy physics labs use some very good locks with security cards for example, due to the high value and extreme danger of their equipment more than anything else. That would be a good starting point."
"We'll also need to make certain all our computer records are encrypted," Peter put in.
"That part is already handled," Farouk told him. "I thought of it, but I didn't think enough about Alan's point. I'll look into what we can install."
"We've only got four days to do it," Jerry warned as he opened his notebook again and flipped to a blank page. "Is that enough?"
"Shouldn't be a problem, Jerry. I'll let you know if it is."
"All right."
"Anything else?" Jerry asked, looking around.
"I've got a question," Leonard Faire, one of the electronics post-graduate students Farouk had rounded up for the project, said with his hand up. Everyone looked at him, then his hand, which he lowered with a slightly embarrassed expression when he noticed.
"Go on, Mr Faire," Jerry invited. "Any and all questions are best asked now."
"All right…" He looked around, then back to Jerry. "If what Doctor Younan has said about Miss Granger's inventions so far is even vaguely accurate, which I have to assume is the case…" He glanced at Farouk who was watching him with interest. "They're going to be extremely commercially viable. Beyond the pure scientific theory of the H-Field, I mean, which is incredible on its own. But an interactive projected keyboard? A holographic display?" He shook his head in wonder as Farouk looked thoughtfully at him, and several others nodded along. "That is technology decades ahead of state of the art at least, probably more. Even leaving aside all the ramifications of how it works, the mere fact that it does work means that it could totally revolutionize information technology, more than the invention of the microprocessor itself did."
"Agreed," Jerry replied when he ran down for the moment, after looking at his friend who seemed pleased. "You have a proposal in mind?"
"We aren't really set up to take advantage of things like that right now," Leonard said, nodding. "I think we need to consider how, and when, we could if required spin off an actual company to commercialize such discoveries. Assuming they can be commercialized, of course. It's not that unusual to do that, I can think of at least four companies that came about from research here in the last five years. Not one of them has anything even vaguely close to what this could turn into, and two of them are worth multiple millions of pounds now. It would probably need some sort of collaboration with an existing technology manufacturer, which means we'd need some very solid non disclosure agreements in places first, in my opinion."
He looked around at the assembly, then met Jerry's eyes again, subsiding a little from what had become quite a passionate speech. "I don't mean to speak out of turn, but I wondered if anyone has thought about that," he finished, somewhat worriedly.
Jerry smiled at him. "We did discuss it a while ago but I'll confess that in the rush to get the new department ready we haven't given it as much attention as we probably should have. You raise a number of very valid points, Mr Faire. Thank you. I feel we're probably some way off having a solid enough grasp of the fundamentals of what this may mean from that viewpoint, but you're right, we should be ready as and when it comes up." He flipped to a new page and made a number of notes. "We'll have to discuss this with the Grangers as without them we're unlikely to get anywhere in that vein, but if they're agreeable, it's well worth chasing up."
"If we can get a working theory of understanding the root mechanism behind the whole thing we may well find dozens of commercial applications very quickly," Christine pointed out. "I'd think there are thousands waiting for us in time. More. This is like I said, we're entering a totally new and unknown world where I can't even imagine what might pop up. But he's definitely right. We need to keep a lid on the whole thing until we can get it characterized and explained, but at some point we'll need to talk to people outside the academic sphere here or at Cambridge. NDAs are essential, I think. It's pretty standard after all."
"Agreed." Jerry nodded, writing some more. "Does anyone here have any experience in finding out about this sort of thing? It's never come up with my previous research for fairly obvious reasons." He smiled as he raised his eyes to look around at the others.
Christine and Farouk's eyes met, then both nodded. "I think we both have enough of an idea what we need to know who to talk to, Jerry," the latter replied. "I'll ask some questions and get back to you on that as soon as I can."
"Wonderful. Anyone else?"
Everyone exchanged glances but no one else raised any more issues, so after thirty seconds he nodded and put his pen down. "Right, then. That's it for today." Standing, he put his hands on the table and leaned forward. "Do not forget. No one here says anything to anyone who's not in this room right now, until they talk to me. We can't afford having this get out before we have a better idea of what 'it' actually is. So mum's the word, got it?"
Each person nodded or otherwise signified assent. He was sure they were as keen as he was to learn what they could, and felt that they all had enough reason to keep quiet outside the research group. Nobody wanted to risk this project, and everyone was more than smart enough to realize just how chaotic things would inevitably get if they released anything before they had enough proof to silence any detractor on the spot.
He was damn sure they were going to get that proof, though. And he couldn't wait.
"Off you all go. We have a lot of work to do before the Grangers arrive, and a hell of a lot more work after they arrive, so let's make sure we're ready." His final words seemed to spur the department into action and the entire room changed into a hive of activity as the various researchers immediately split up into a number of groups, comparing notes and having lively and at times loud discussions. Several headed out into the rest of the department, intent on some task or another. He watched with a sense of profound enjoyment, pride, and foreboding.
"Not bad, Jerry," a voice said from his elbow. He looked at Farouk, then to the other side at Christine, who was studying the assembled group with an expression of consideration. "That went very well, I thought," the electronics expert added. "Although I was wondering if it was going to keep going until midnight at one point."
Jerry chuckled ruefully. "You get this many doctorates into one room and it does tend to get long-winded," he replied with a mild sigh.
"Bloody right," Christine put in, a small smile on her face. "But Farouk's right. You did very well. I'm impressed, I wasn't sure you had it in you."
"Thanks," he sighed. She grinned at him.
"Honestly, Jerry, you did a good job, and I think this is going to be a group that leaves its mark on history," she added more quietly, for his ears alone. "We're standing on the edge of something… immense. And without your crazy ideas I'm not sure it would have happened. It sure wouldn't have happened here."
He nodded slowly. "I suppose you're right. Well. We'll find out shortly just what we've let ourselves in for." Glancing at her, he asked, "Did you finish Hermione's thesis?"
"Yes." The woman looked at him, her eyes dark with thought. "That girl is… not normal."
"Are any of us?"
Her eyes moved to Farouk, and she smiled a little. "Not as such, no, but you know what I mean. She's so far past anything I've ever seen that frankly I have literally no idea what she might come up with next. Her book is… incredible. It would be incredible if someone my age had written it, never mind someone ten years old. I have trouble even imagining what the inside of her mind must be like."
Christine sighed slightly. "It makes me feel old, in a weird way. But also very, very excited. I can practically hear paradigms crumbling." She snickered as he rolled his eyes. "It's going to be interesting to see what she comes up with next. The implications of what she's written…"
"How much more extraordinary could her discoveries be?" Jerry asked mildly. "She's already shown off telekinesis and come up with a working theory behind the mechanism."
Clapping him on the shoulder, she laughed. "I have no bloody idea at all, but if she doesn't have some other things up her sleeve, I will be very disappointed." Looking at her watch, she went on, "Sorry, got to run, I have some other people to talk to about somewhat less world-shaking work. See you later, you two." She smiled again at them, then left. He looked after her, thinking, before shaking his head and retrieving his notes.
"Better type these up," he stated to Farouk.
"Fair enough. I have a thermal camera to fix. Pub later?"
"Sounds like a decent idea. I'll come and find you when I've finished."
His friend nodded and they left the controlled chaos behind them, splitting up and heading in different directions. Jerry was still thinking about what Christine had said and wondering what exactly young miss Granger might still be sitting on.
He couldn't help a slight sensation of giddy worry deep in his stomach...
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"Are you ready for the trip tomorrow, dear?" Michael asked his daughter, who looked up from the three notebooks and five textbooks she was deeply involved in before blinking a couple of times.
"Oh… Oh, yes, Daddy, I'm all ready. It's very exciting, actually. And a little frightening." Her face showed a certain amount of stress, causing him to walk into her room and sit on her bed. She shuffled around to make room for him. Next door's cat, who was lying on her pillow, yawned widely, made a small sound, and rolled onto his back, which unfortunately destabilized him enough that he slid sideways and vanished over the edge of the bed with a yowl that was followed by a thud and a grunt.
Michael and his daughter exchanged glances then collapsed laughing. Mr Boots climbed back onto the bed, gave the pair of them a disgusted feline glare, and jumped onto his floating platform.
Which he missed.
Again there was a thud and a grunt, causing father and daughter to laugh hard enough that they could hardly breathe. The cat stalked out from under the bed and disappeared into the house with a flick of his tail, trying for a level of dignity he'd long since lost.
"He's so daft sometimes," Hermione exclaimed breathlessly, shaking her head as she lay giggling on the duvet. "What a silly cat."
"He's not quite the epitome of grace he thinks he is, is he?" Michael chuckled, sitting up and wiping his eyes.
"Not at all," she agreed, still intermittently giggling. He noted that the expression of minor worry had gone and was quietly thankful for Mr Boots once again. The cat was a good companion even if technically he belonged next door. He didn't seem to realize that, or care if he did, and he'd certainly given Hermione a lot of amusement.
"Feeling better?" he asked as she recovered. "You looked rather worried when I came in."
"I'm fine, thank you," she assured him as she sat up too. "It's just that sometimes I suddenly think how much everything seems to be changing and it can be a little overwhelming. But it's enormous fun too, of course. And I'm learning so many things! It's wonderful. I wish school was more like this instead of being quite boring most of the time. And full of very annoying and childish…"
"Children?" he finished for her, stroking her hair as she nodded. "Remember, my dear girl, that you are also still a child. A terribly precocious one, I'll admit, and one I'm extremely proud of, but don't dismiss your peers just because of their age."
"I'm not doing that, Daddy!" she protested indignantly. After a moment her lips twitched. "I'm dismissing them because of them being bullies and thick with it."
Unable to help it, he snorted with laughter. "Most people are a little thick compared to you, dear, but that doesn't make them lesser. Never forget that intelligence and knowledge are two different things too, and wisdom is yet another one. You need all of them to be a good well-rounded person, I think. You're growing up faster than most of the others are, but they'll get there eventually. Being a bully is also something most of them will probably grow out of. I'm sure you'll find someone your age who can keep up with you sooner or later, and I think that would be good for you."
Hermione sighed a little, studying her hands as she folded the fingers together. "I understand, Daddy. I know I'm a bit strange. But it's so irritating when they call me names just because I ask questions. Don't they have any curiosity? There are so many things to learn. But most of them just want to hit each other and run around like idiots, and insult me and anyone else who doesn't do that."
"They're not even teenagers yet, dear," he chuckled. "They'll get better in most cases. And you like some physical things too, don't you? I know you love swimming, for example. And light-saber fights…" He grinned as she looked up, then nodded with a broad smile.
"That's fun, yes," she agreed, cheering up from the momentary angst, which was rare these days. He was all too aware that she had nothing like as many friends as he'd had at her age, and knew full well that she found school difficult. Young children certainly were all too prone to picking out the unusual and prodding at it mercilessly. He remembered his own childhood and some things that had happened with less than complete fondness…
She did need more friends her age, he mused as he put his arm around her, the girl nestling into his side. But that wasn't something he could force. With luck she'd eventually find a peer group she could be comfortable with. He found it both mildly weird and quite funny that at the moment the nearest thing to that outside their immediate family was a collection of scientists in one of the most prominent universities in the country, if not the world… This wasn't quite what he'd expected when he'd married Helen.
But he wouldn't give it up for anything, so there was that.
"Possibly we should get you a bicycle," he suggested with a grin. "It would be good exercise. Mens sana in corpore sano, after all."
Hermione giggled. "I could make it fly…" she pondered out loud, causing him to sigh fondly.
"Steven Spielberg would want words, I think," he commented with a wry look.
"Hermione phone home," she croaked, sticking out one finger with the others folded back. A bright light shone from the tip as she did, due to the little illumination HOP she created there. He stared, then shook his head in baffled amusement.
"He might want a word regardless," he said, grinning again. "You could do some amazing things in the special effects field…"
"I have too much work to do," she told him brightly. "Maybe when I grow up. In between research projects."
"How is your current one coming? You've been filling notebooks for weeks. Any closer to teleporting to Europe yet?" he asked, looking at the pile of paperwork she'd pushed to the side when he sat.
"Um… In a way, yes, but in another way, no," she replied, frowning as she also examined the documentation. "I'm a lot closer to having a teleportation HOP array that won't kill anyone, but there are still quite a few things I need to solve before I can build one and test it. The basic principle is easy enough, as it turns out, if you look at it in the right manner, but the details are ever so fiddly. There are a lot of things to keep track of."
"Perhaps this explains the complexity and inefficiency you're always complaining about with the hidden people," he suggested thoughtfully. "It might be all those details."
She shook her head slightly. "I think a small amount of it can be explained that way, but most of it isn't due to that at all as far as anything I can think of goes." The girl twisted around to lean over and retrieve one of her notebooks, flipping it open and laying it across her knees. He looked at the page, raising an eyebrow at what looked like a rather more complex version of calculus than anything else he could describe it as.
"Your notation scheme is getting a little excessive," he pointed out with good humor. She shrugged a little.
"I keep having to come up with new symbology for the HOP equations," she explained. "Because there isn't anything suitable once you leave the pure electronics equivalency. Most of it does map very nicely to existing electronic theory but this is starting to edge into different areas of physics. I'm going to have to show this to Professor Hawking. I think he can probably suggest areas where I might be misinterpreting things. A lot of this is based on his writings, actually, and I'm still not completely certain I fully understand various aspects of them. Since I don't have a degree in particle physics, you see."
"Yet," he chuckled.
"I'd quite like to learn that," she admitted, smiling.
"And everything else."
His daughter giggled, nodding. Then she pointed at various lines of symbols, some of which he was familiar with from her earlier explanations of her HOP system, and many of which he'd never seen before. "This is essentially creating a short-lived wormhole between two points in space," she began, taking on the lecturing air he knew so well from when she was in what he privately thought of as her teaching mode. "The tool users do something similar in function, but via a completely different mechanism. Their method works, I have ample proof of that, but it's definitely not at all safe. If you go wrong, which I suspect is quite easy to do if you're careless, the ramifications are quite shocking. And even if you don't go wrong, I can conceive of a number of methods of externally interfering with the entire process which could cause a catastrophic failure."
"Which would be bad."
"Which would be very bad," she nodded. "I think that losing a body part would be the best outcome in that case. I prefer not to think about the worst outcome…" She paused, her finger tapping on the page, as a worried expression crossed her face for a moment, before she determinedly shook her head and resumed explaining.
"That aside, the inefficiency I see in their designs is partly down to the sheer amount of what appears to me to be wasted energy," she went on, glancing at him to see if he was following. He nodded. "Perhaps they have a good reason for it. If I ever meet one I can ask, I suppose. But from my analysis of their effects, their pseudoHOPs seem to pull far more energy from the H-Field than I think they should require, and most of it simply gets re-radiated. It's not even pushed back into the H-Field in a sensible manner, it's just… thrown away. It's as if you were trying to heat a kettle and decided that the best way to do that was to… well, poke a hole in a blast furnace running at full power and hold the kettle in front of it. Most of the energy just goes up the chimney and doesn't do anything useful as far as your need goes. It works, I agree, but it seems wasteful from an engineering viewpoint."
"If you're right that the H-Field is essentially infinite, does that even matter?" he queried curiously. "Maximum possible efficiency isn't always the main goal of a job, after all. If you have more than enough energy, surely wasting a lot of it isn't really going to cause you a problem?"
"It's messy," she frowned. "I don't like messy solutions to problems."
"Messy to you isn't necessarily messy to everyone," he pointed out with a small chuckle. "Some people aren't quite as strict."
His daughter giggled for a moment. "I suppose so," she agreed. "But there are other problems. For example, their SEP. It works very well, but only if you don't have an energy sense. As soon as you do it stands out like a lighthouse. It's like trying to hide in a dark room while waving a flare. Which means…" She trailed off, her eyes narrowing as she stared at her notebook.
"Which probably means they don't have an energy sense," he finished for her, having realized what she had at nearly the same moment.
"Yes," she replied quietly. "How interesting. That might explain so many things I've been puzzling over for ever so long. They don't even realize they're wasting energy because they can't see it at all."
"Assuming that's true, how did they manage to make these HOPlike things to begin with?" he asked curiously. "You only worked out how to do that because you developed your energy sense in the process of teaching yourself telekinesis."
Hermione shook her head slowly. "I have absolutely no idea at the moment. It's very intriguing." Floating a different notebook over from the pile, she opened it to a new page and spent a few minutes writing furiously as he watched with amusement. When she finished, she stared at the page for a while, clearly thinking. "How does this connect to their odd modular HOP construction, I wonder?" she murmured, writing a few more lines. "Perhaps they aren't even aware how obvious the joins are? They just push subassemblies together until they work… That could be very dangerous if you made a mistake. And where do the subassemblies come from to begin with? They don't really look like they were properly designed from first principles… Possibly it really is simply empirical experimentation? But that would imply…" She shook her head as she flipped back a page, added a final line, and closed the notebook.
"I think I may well have to ask one of them one day," she said, looking up at him watching her fondly. "I can't make heads or tails out of it at the moment. I keep finding contradictory bits of information."
"I still think it's aliens," he teased. "Or wizards. Or alien wizards."
She thumped his leg with her fist, smiling. "Stop that, Daddy. Alien wizards indeed."
"It could be worse. Alien lizards!"
His daughter started giggling furiously. "Now you're just being silly. Sillier, in fact. You've read too many fantasy books."
"You've read them all too," he pointed out, smiling.
"I can distinguish fantasy from reality, you know."
He looked at the pen she'd put down in mid air and raised an eyebrow, glancing back at her. She grinned. "I will admit that reality has become much more fantastic than it used to be," she added cheerfully. "But I'll need more evidence of alien wizards before I can find it plausible. It's probably perfectly scientific psionics from a different starting point or something of that nature."
"Or the government is experimenting on the alien lizard wizards."
"Stop it," she instructed firmly, her lips twitching. "We will gather data, not jump to conclusions. It's unscientific to do otherwise. And that particular issue isn't currently the most important one. I'm sure it can wait for now. I have other work to do first."
"Such as designing a safe way to teleport," Michael said, grinning. "Which is not something I ever thought I'd say to my ten year old daughter."
Picking up her original notebook, she smiled as she went back to explaining something he honestly wasn't equipped to properly understand, although he still found it interesting. "Anyway, as I was saying before we got sidetracked, this system creates a wormhole that links two points in space. Once it's established you should simply be able to step through, bypassing the intervening distance entirely. It's much safer than Star Trek's transporter, for an example from fiction. It doesn't take you to pieces and put you back together again, you just move past all the space in between where you are and where you want to be."
"It sounds like a warp drive," he noted, fascinated.
"In a way it is, yes," she nodded. "It shouldn't take any real time to cover an arbitrary distance, since the distance through the wormhole is essentially zero." Tearing a page out of the back of her notebook, she drew two dots on it, then folded the paper so they were on opposite sides. "You've read about this sort of thing in fiction," she went on, poking the pen through the first dot and making it come out the other one. Holding the pen up, she showed him the result. "Basically this, but to space itself. It's a common concept in both science fiction and fantasy. And Professor Hawking and other scientists have theorized that it is a plausible real phenomenon but science doesn't know how to do it, merely that under some models of spacetime it should be possible."
Michael nodded slowly. "I'm familiar with the concept, yes. And you've worked out how to pull that off?"
"I think I have, yes," she replied, pulling her pen out of the paper, then dropping the latter to the bed. "That's what this part here does. You give it the relevant data for both ends of the wormhole and turn it on and it should do what's needed." She indicated most of a page of complex symbols. "But to do it without breaking a lot of things, I need all the rest of this," she sighed, turning the page and showing him the next two. "Some of this is to prevent the wormhole collapsing mid transit, which is a remote possibility but one that would be unpleasant, some is to make sure it's not too small, some is to make sure it can't open inside something else, some is to make sure it can't open where there's no air, or too much heat, or a whole series of other conditional situations. I keep thinking of new ones. I'm sure there's a better way to perform some of these operations rather than explicitly listing every single hazardous state individually, and I'll work it out in the end, but listing them like this at least lets me be sure I've thought of all of them. I want this to be properly safe, after all."
"I'd prefer that myself I have to admit," he agreed. Both of them glanced at the ceiling for a moment.
"Quite," she smiled ruefully. "However, on the positive side, once I do work out all the parameters, actually making the HOP is quite straightforward. And it's like the force field ones, or the heater, once it's made you can just use it over and over. You wouldn't need to keep recreating it." Casting her gaze over the lines of cryptic symbols, she sighed a little once more. "I really hoped it would be easier than this," she complained mildly. "But I underestimated all the error checking needed. Making things safe is such a lot of work."
"You'll get there in the end, I have no doubt," he smiled, ruffling her hair. "I'm looking forward to it."
"So am I," she replied happily. "It will be brilliant. Telekinesis and teleportation are two of the most important things in psionics, after all." She bit her lip, then added, "Although…"
"Although?"
"While I was working out the mechanism for this, it did make me think… There are some implications of how the wormhole idea functions that lead to some rather odd places, and I'm not sure if I'm right or if I'm imagining it. If I am right, and I can work out how to make it work, I might have managed to come up with something very strange indeed."
He stared suspiciously at her. "Stranger than infinite free electricity?" he queried.
"Oh, much more so, yes," she replied with a tiny smile. "I need to think about it some more. I'm possibly going entirely down the wrong path."
"At least give me a hint," he commented, disentangling himself from his daughter and standing up. She beamed at him.
"Think of police boxes," she replied mysteriously. Then she sniffed. "Ooh, I can smell roast chicken!" Hopping to her feet and tossing her notebook onto her desk, she ran out of the room as he stared after her. His mind had immediately jumped to something very familiar, but he honestly wasn't sure if she was joking or not.
After a few seconds, he heard his wife call, so he headed downstairs as well, whistling the theme to a popular television show under his breath and wondering what the next surprise would be.
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