Elian Rho was many things: physicist, professor, sleep-deprived caffeine addict, proud owner of an aggressively antisocial cat named Schrödy.
He was not, however, mentally prepared to debug the fabric of reality during a faculty meeting.
Yet here he was.
The Morning After
Elian sat at his desk, staring at his untouched coffee as if it might give him answers. The events from the day before replayed like a glitchy simulation.
Blue light. Electric arc. System voice in his head. Floating UI prompt.
He'd gotten exactly four hours of sleep, most of it spent arguing with the system like a deranged sleepwalker.
"Define: Type I Technology."
[Type I: Foundational technology—limited to civilizations utilizing basic atomic and quantum principles without external dimensional manipulation.]
"So… like, nanotech? AI? Clean energy?"
[Affirmative.]
"Cool, cool. So how do I unlock something?"
[Understand theory. Develop technology. Earn points. Exchange. Repeat.]
"Sounds like a sci-fi RPG written by an academic with tenure and control issues."
[Your sarcasm is noted. System response: unbothered.]
By 5 AM, he'd learned the system had a cold, dry personality and zero interest in hand-holding. Just cold facts, unlockable theories, and a shop of blueprints he couldn't afford yet.
He did what any responsible adult would do.
He told no one.
Acting Normal (Elian is a bad actor).
Back at the lab the next day, Elian tried to "act normal." Which, for him, meant muttering to himself, pacing in circles, and looking like a man solving quantum crimes in his head.
Jenna noticed instantly.
"You didn't sleep," she said, eyeing him like a hawk. "You've got that twitchy genius vibe. Again."
He blinked. "That's… just how I think."
"No. This is new. You're even worse than when you tried to model string theory on a napkin."
"I'm fine," he said quickly. Too quickly.
She frowned. "Elian, what's going on with you?"
"Nothing. I just… got distracted last night. That's all."
She stared at him. He avoided eye contact like it was radioactive.
After a long silence, she exhaled sharply and crossed her arms. "You always shut down like this when something's wrong. I'm not going to play twenty questions."
He opened his mouth, hesitated, then gave a weak shrug. "It's fine. Really."
Jenna scoffed. "Whatever. Keep your secrets."
And with that, she turned and walked away.
He watched her leave, guilt gnawing at his stomach. But what was he supposed to say?
"Hey Jenna, I accidentally bonded with a cosmic vending machine that rewards me for solving quantum puzzles ?"
Yeah. Not yet.
Elian sat cross-legged on the floor of his lab, his laptop closed, his coffee forgotten. The faint hum from the servers had returned, but his mind wasn't on the usual startup diagnostics or bug reports.
It was on the translucent prompt hovering in his vision:
[System: Cognitive Integration Online]
Available Tech Tier: Type I
1. Theory Package: T1–001 – Room-Temperature Superconductors
2. Theory Package: T1–002 – Nano-Layered Graphene Capacitors
3. Optimized blueprint Package: T1–001.1 – Room-Temperature Superconductors - Locked
4.Optimized blueprint Package: T1–002.1 – Nano-Layered Graphene Capacitors - Locked
5. ************************* - Locked
…See More
Theory Injection: Ready. Confirm download?
"Download?" Elian whispered. "Wait, like, into my brain?"
[Confirmed. Uploading Theory Package: T1–034 – Room-Temperature Superconductors]
His body snapped upright.
Not from pain — but from overload.
Suddenly, his thoughts weren't his own. Concepts crystallized in his mind: Cooper pair stabilization in high-Tc cuprates, phonon-mediated coupling adjustments, interface engineering using graphene bilayers, pressure-induced phase tuning — it was like an entire PhD compressed into his brain in a heartbeat.
He didn't just memorize the equations. He understood the material structure down to the atomic lattice.
He saw the flaw in the conventional models. The vibrational mismatch in the YBCO lattice? Correctable. The instability in layered Bi-based compounds? Fixable through substrate modulation. The energy gap anomalies? Predictable through electron-boson interaction modeling.
He wasn't just learning — he was improving the theory given to him. His brain was special to begin with.
It was like receiving twenty years of education in twenty seconds.
Elian exhaled sharply, blinking back into the real world.
Elian scrambled up. He prepped the materials: yttrium, barium, copper, oxygen. Then added a graphene-based substrate stack, refined using the system's atomic alignment schematic.
His hands moved instinctively.
He deposited the films using pulsed laser deposition, adjusted the chamber pressure and temperature gradients exactly as suggested by the new internalized phase diagrams.
He layered the thin films with nanometer precision. He cooled it. Slowly. Monitored the lattice changes with the old spectrometer.
The result?
When he ran current through the sample—at room temperature—it flowed with zero resistance.
No heat. No loss. No error.
His heart skipped.
This wasn't a fluke.
This was real.
[Congratulations. Room-Temperature Superconductor Synthesized. +3 System Points Earned.] [Reward Unlocked: Optimized Blueprint - RTS Type I - Elian Stack.]
A holographic model appeared: the stack he'd built, now cleaned, simplified, and labeled. Patent-ready.
He nearly fell out of his chair.
"Okay," he muttered, pacing, then laughing, then almost crying. "Okay, this is happening. This is really happening."
Just then—
Knock knock.
One hour ago
Jenna stalked away from Elian's lab door, her thermos clutched tight enough to dent. "Keep your secrets," she'd said, but the words tasted like ash. Elian Rho, her maddening, brilliant, infuriatingly private colleague, was a closed book even on his best days. But today? Today he was a locked vault buried under a cement mixer.
She went to her own small office, trying to focus on the endless stream of data from her latest AI behavioral models. Her bots were still stuck in their pizza-worshipping phase, which was concerning for the future of sentient code, but at least predictable. Elian, on the other hand, was anything but.
Her mind kept replaying his forced cheerfulness, his ridiculous excuses. He was hiding something. From her. That stung more than she wanted to admit. They'd been through a lot of late nights, shared enough terrible coffee, and brainstormed enough impossible theories that she thought they had a baseline of honesty. Well, her honesty. Elian's was always conditional.
A fresh wave of paranoia hit her. What if he'd actually broken something vital? What if he'd discovered a new kind of, god forbid, sentient mold? Or worse, what if he'd finally cracked under the pressure of his own genius and was spiraling into some deep existential crisis she couldn't reach?
No. He wasn't crying, wasn't yelling about the futility of existence. He was… humming. She'd caught a faint, off-key tune coming from his lab earlier. Elian only hummed when he was intensely focused, usually on a new equation, sometimes on debugging a particularly stubborn line of code.
Focused. And secretive. The two rarely mixed well with him.
She pushed away from her desk. She wasn't going to let him wallow in whatever genius-induced madness he'd conjured. He was her friend, even if he was an exasperating one. And if he was about to blow up the lab with another one of his "brilliant" mishaps, she wanted to be there to mock him for it. Or, you know, save him. Whichever came first.
Taking a deep breath, she walked back down the humming corridor, the faint smell of burnt ozone still lingering. She reached his door, hesitated for a second, then rapped her knuckles sharply against the wood.
"Elian? You in there?"
Jenna.
He froze. The system dimmed its display, vanishing from view.
"Yeah?" he called, voice cracking.
"You've been acting weird all day. What's going on?"
He cracked the door open. "Weird? Pfft. This is just my... focused face."
She peered in suspiciously.
"Why are the windows covered?"
"Solar flares."
"There aren't any solar flares."
"Exactly! You can never be too careful."
She narrowed her eyes. "You're up to something."
He gave the best innocent shrug he could manage. "Up to... science?"
She exhaled, clearly not buying it. "Fine. Whatever. But if you blow up the lab, I'm not cleaning it up."
"Fair."
"Also you know you can talk to me right."
"I know, i will let you know when am ready."
"You know where to find me." She tided his hair and walked away.
He shut the door.
He knew he had to tell her, but he also didn't want her to think he was going crazy, so he needed some proofs.
Then turned to the invisible interface only he could see.
"System," he whispered, "what's next?"
[Next Recommended Field: Energy Storage. Suggested Technology: Nano-Layered Graphene Capacitors.]
Elian grinned like a madman.
"Now this is science."