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There is nothing so destructive and also so easy to overlook as a bad idea
A thought experirale notch in it The two lengths thus defined have a relationship that can be expressed as the ratio between them In theory, therefore, any rational nulea simple alphabetic code, a mark that calculated to a ratio of 1215225 could be read as 12-15-22-5, or “l-o-v-e” The cole h Or the e expression of the ht be sot in the way How massive amounts of information could be expressed in and retrieved froe years I swam in an intellectual sea of qubits and data i structures and Rényi entropy
I spent days in the computation labs with their leather couches and ancient cera with people from all across the world and beyond The first Belter I met was a woraphy, though since she lived in the consistent spin gravity of that station, she looked ated soldiers ould eventually becohts I divided betweenthe edge of the campus
Slowly, I began to take the sad, traumatized boy who had fled Londrina and a life on basic and build from him a deeper, more serious, more focused man I styled myself a scientist and wore the thin black vests and sand-colored silk shirts that the biology students had adopted as their fashion I even joined the student union for scientific outreach, sitting through the long, angry, clove-cigarett
e-hazedwhen people froraineering
I drank a bit of wine, I ss that fueled the university were not recreational Tel Aviv Autonomous University ran on nootropics: nicotine, caffeine, amphetamine, dextroamphetamine, methylphenidate, 2-oxo-pyrrolidine acetamide Aaron, my roommate, provided both a route for these to reach me and the worldview that justified them
“We’re the botto on the arm of our cheap foam-sculpt couch “You and one to a real school”
“We’re at a real school We’re doing good work here,” I said We were eating noodles and black sauce that they sold from a cart that passed down the halls of the dor like olives rose from every mouthful
“Exactly,” Aaron said, stabbing a fork inup with the most advanced, best-funded schools anywhere Us, a bunch of basic jurants to the school We aren’t skating on discoveries o Do you think they have a nanoinforram at the École?”
“Yes,” I said, feeling contrary
“They don’t We do Because we have to be on the cutting edge to survive We don’t have status, we don’t have et a foot in the door with recruiters or unions or grant specialists So we make our own” With this he took a thin case from his pocket and rattled it “What the others can’t, or won’t, or don’t feel like they need to do is just necessary for us”
Deep in ish sense of fairness twitched in its sleep, but I could find no arguh everyone else in the prograreed What would s tilted the playing field If everyone was using them, then it stayed even
As my career at the university went on and I ca, I foundless and less about the fairness of the situation andSince nanoinforram it didn’t have its own permanent faculty Half of the classes on its requirerams, and the professors often hadn’t tailored the content to include me In my culmination-level seists working fro focus drugs in that context see
In raduated early with a job offer for a cutting-edge R&D group so deep, even its name was under nondisclosure Kuhn left to take a tenure-track position at Nankai University on Luna, heading up their nascent nanoinforram I acquired other friends and professors in my time at Tel Aviv, but I found the absence of those two particularly uns ramped slowly up I ca e That I enjoyed the sense of release and ht, I chose to interpret as the measure of the stress I was under
My graduation cereue hite pillars and arches, beautiful sculpture in gold along the walls, and Hebrew script inlaid around the ceiling The notes of “Auld Lang Syne” reverberated in the space, the ravity I had never ascribed to it My body, struggling fro final examinations compounded by several whisky-and-sodas, punished lorious hour, the pinnacle ofnot to voineme from the afterlife with pride or despair Afterward, diploma in hand, robes draped from my shoulders, I walked to a public park, sat on a stone bench, and wept, calling rief I had avoided for years