“Down Cat, Down!” Sarah laughed as she pushed her cat off the table and out of the middle of the stack of papers she had been studying.

“I just can’t figure out the reason for these resonance harmonics!”

She frowned, biting her pencil, as her eyes wandered idly over the table.

She’d been working on this project for the better part of 4 years – ever since her postdoc days at Paragon Tech University. Right out of undergrad she’d been swept up in a join research program funded by Crey Industries to reverse engineer Rikti technology recovered from the war. Her particular background in quamtum physics and nuclear engineering had led her into a project to study Rikti shield generators. They had long since figured out the power source. They understood the controls and general functions of the devices – they had perfectly mapped the energy waves the devices generated – but they couldn’t seem to get a handle on how exactly the darned things worked! The energy waves seemed to twist and turn back on each other in crazy, nonsensical patterns – full of wild harmonics and unpredictable frequency spikes. It just didn’t make sense how such chaos came out of the seemingly ordered electronics, and how the chaotic energy waves somehow added up to such a stable standing field.

The project’s sponsors had been getting restless lately – as despite the rapid initial progress Sarah’s team couldn’t seem to crack this last obstacle to understanding how to design and build shielding devices themselves. Every attempt to even copy the strange machines had led to explosive failures.

She kept turning the problem over in her head, but just couldn’t quite get it to make sense. She needed more data. She needed to see the waves – to hear the harmonic interplay – to be surrounded by the patterns so her mind could fully concentrate on solving them.

“Oh well, looks like another night at the lab.” she told the cat, as she stood up and picked up the pizza box and leftovers from the table. She put a hand-full of catfood in the bowl, gathered up her papers, and bundled up to go out. It was going to be another long night….

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