Amber laughed. “Of course not. The department has a dedicated compute cluster for this kind of thing. I access it remotely.”
“I’ve got to admit, I’ve got tech envy. You have a bigger processor than I do, and your speed is so much faster.”
“Well, you know what they say… Sometimes it’s not about how big and fast something is.”
Peyton snorted. Amber eyed him quizzically.
She doesn’t even know, does she?
He shook his head. “Don’t worry about it. You’re inspirational. Dating you convinces me I need to up my game.”
“Not always a bad thing.”
“Yeah.” Peyton nodded toward the door. “Can you head out to lunch now, or are you still waiting on something?”
Amber clicked her mouse a few times and stood. “No, I’m good. Just been a busy week.” She stretched for a moment. “Lots of projects coming together at the same time. Intriguing, but stressful.”
“Besides trying to solve the energy crisis, what else are you helping with?”
“I’m involved in a big project with a lot of external corporate funding for quantum-proof public-key encryption.”
Peyton stood. “Oh, well, that’d be cool if it were practical. But you know, it's not like the average person is going to be able to beat the quantum computers that the NSA is throwing at stuff. Not heard anything about any companies bringing that sort of thing to market.”
Amber shook her head. “This isn’t some blue-sky thing. They’ve already got a working system.” She chuckled. “To be fair, it does involve a little magic. I don’t know if that’s cheating. They’ve been saying this kind of thing has been close for years, but now it actually is.”
“Should you even be telling me this?” Peyton opened the door for her.
Amber stepped through and shrugged. “Maybe not, but you’re my boyfriend. Don’t want to have too many secrets from my boyfriend, right?”
Peyton smiled, even as a small part of him felt guilty. She shared secrets with him, and he had so many he was keeping from her. Very dangerous ones, at that.
Some inside information about upcoming technology isn’t on the same level as knowing aliens other than Oricerans exist and have been to our planet. Or that Shay used to be a killer. I wish I could tell her, though.
For now, though, Peyton didn’t care. He just wanted to have a good time at lunch with his girlfriend.
Later that afternoon, Peyton sat at his computer skimming several journal articles that concerned the university’s research, along with some journal articles on arXiv, a publicly accessible server covering preprint journal articles.
“Geeze, way to make me feel dumb, Amber,” he muttered, as he pursued the abstract of his fifth article. Peyton wasn’t a physicist, and the amount of direct computer-related material in many of the articles wasn’t as much as he would have liked. Even when he looked up the supplemental information, he was often lost. It was an unfamiliar feeling.
Dating a woman smarter than him was going to take a lot of work if he wanted to keep up. They chatted briefly about the fusion containment project at lunch, and Peyton found himself asking more questions than offering interesting insights.
Hope she doesn’t get bored with me, but she seemed really happy to just be able to talk about it with someone. I can always listen. Easy enough.
Peyton’s gaze locked on a sentence in the latest article.
Beyond the implications for the energy grid, a fusion reactor of this size could easily be used to provide power for vehicles, and with a few small modifications, space probes and spacecraft. Given the continued expense per kilogram of low-earth orbit (LEO) cargo transfer, reductions in propellant mass have implications toward the future of space exploration.
“I’ve heard something like this recently,” Peyton muttered. “Really damn recently. But where?”
He furrowed his brow as he tried to remember where he might have even read something like that. It wasn’t as if he normally spent a lot of time reading academic physics journal articles.
Peyton’s eyes widened. But he did spend a lot of time doing background research on jobs. It had to be that.
He brought up his browser history and started skimming it. It auto deleted at midnight, but he was sure that he’d read something similar to the article’s mention of space exploration earlier that morning.
A few minutes passed as he scrolled, clicked, and frowned after failing to find anything useful. Finally, he found an article from a decade earlier on vimanas and how the ancient Hindu flying machines and occasionally flying palaces might be responsible for many ancient UFO sightings.
Professor Smite-Williams’d had Shay grab a vimana-related artifact, so that settled the question of whether vimanas were real.
Peyton started reading the article.
Many stories about the fanciful technologies purportedly being developed by the Nazi Regime were previously dismissed because of their technological improbability, but with the open acknowledgment of magic, a reevaluation of these stories may be necessary.
He skipped a few background paragraphs discussing the heavy occult influence on many of the high-ranking members of the Nazi regime, along with a history of darker forces on Oriceran.
A few years ago, a previously undiscovered journal of Werhner von Braun was found in Berlin. The controversial German scientist was the father of the guided ballistic missile that was used heavily as a terror weapon against England during World War II, but post-war he was a critical part of NASA’s Apollo program. The Saturn V rocket that took men to the moon was designed with his aid and under his direction.
Although the journal hasn’t been fully authenticated, it details attempts by von Braun to progress in anti-gravity research inspired by Hindu legends of vimanas with the aid of shadowy forces he refers to only as “the Dark Valkyries.”
The journal describes these Dark Valkyries as displaying magical abilities that are fully consistent with what we know of wizards, witches, and Oriceran magical beings. Interestingly enough, the various Earth-based magical beings who did provide aid to the Nazi Regime don’t seem to be associated with the anti-gravity
