Rain was still coming down. Through the lab corridor window, the world outside was nothing but gray and water.
"Why are you here?" Tham Ming's frown deepened as his eyes landed on her. "And don't bring food with that kind of aromatic load anywhere near the lab. Airborne molecules interfere with precision instruments."
The girl wasn't even slightly put off by his expression. She pushed one of the bowls a little closer toward him, smiling.
"Professor Tham, I didn't bring it into the lab — this is your office anteroom. Different room." She gestured at the wall between them and the instruments with complete calm. "You've been staring at that screen for over four hours straight. If the equipment breaks down, that's one thing — but if you pass out from low blood sugar first, that's a different problem entirely." She tilted the bowl in his direction. "Besides, this just got delivered. It smells incredible. Hot noodle soup on a cold day like this — there's genuinely nothing better."
Joey.
The most aggravating — and the most singular — student in this year's graduating cohort.
She had a near-compulsive interest in modern physics, particularly the speculative end of it: quantum superposition, Schrödinger's cat, the many-worlds interpretation. The thought-experiment territory that most serious researchers treated as interesting footnotes rather than active research directions. Joey didn't treat them as footnotes. She lived inside them.
Her thesis outlines had been taken apart by Tham Ming, comprehensively, every single time. She came back every time. Smiling. With counter-arguments. Proposing hypotheses that hadn't been rigorously verified, building cases for positions she had no formal standing to defend — and defending them anyway.
In Tham Ming's assessment, the territory Joey was trying to inhabit overlapped heavily with his own — both of them reaching toward the same abyss, the one labeled macroscopic quantum phenomena. He understood the pull of it completely. He also understood, with the hard-won clarity of someone who had been there, that it was very nearly a bottomless pit. Step wrong and you were in the unverifiable swamp, and not everyone who went in came back with something real.
When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back.
He'd supervised a lot of undergraduates across three years at USM. Joey was the only one who'd ever made him look up from the board and think, involuntarily: that's what I looked like.
Other students wrote thesis papers to graduate, to get grades, to build a resume. Joey was genuinely possessed by the ideas. You could demolish her argument line by line and she'd pick up the wreckage, rebuild it into something slightly different, and be back the next day ready to go again.
Maybe that was what got to him.
He'd agreed, eventually, to supervise her Final Year Project. He gave her one of his experimental propositions, told her to design the apparatus and verification methodology herself, and restricted her to every piece of equipment in the lab except the high-precision monitoring instrument.
"Other supervisors actually help their students design the experiments," he heard regularly, from the hallway, from other students. Never from Joey.
He wanted to see how far she'd go. And — if he was honest with himself — he wanted to give something back to the version of himself who had once moved the same way, driven by the same unreasonable pull, without fully understanding why.
The conditions were brutal on purpose. Part of it was to push her. Part of it was to give her a clean exit if she needed one. And if she still had no direction by the final stretch — he'd step in quietly. He wasn't going to let stubbornness ruin her. But if it came to that, her shot at continuing with him in graduate school was finished.
"Sit down and eat," Tham Ming said finally. He pulled back the chair and dropped into it, voice flat as ever, but he was already reaching for the spoon. "You leave when the bowls are empty."
Joey's face lit up. She sat down next to him without ceremony and picked up her chopsticks.
"That rain today was something," she said, between spoonfuls. "I saw you running through it earlier — really going for it. Did something happen? Your face right now is..." She tilted her head, studying him with the unselfconscious directness she applied to everything. "Not quite right."
His spoon paused midair.
He looked over at her. Something in her expression was running at a different frequency than usual. The brightness was there — she was almost always bright — but underneath it tonight there was something else. An edge. Excitement and unease pressed together in a space that was too small for both of them.
The laksa's smell still hung in the air between them.
He realized, in the same moment, that he'd been at it for nearly five hours.
"Joey." He set the spoon down. "What time did you get here today?"
She tilted her head the other way, smile unchanged, answered without hesitation.
"Around two, I think. I called out to you when I came in, but you were completely gone — just talking to yourself." A beat. "I did hear you say something about positive phase feedback, though." She looked at him. "Can I say what I think about that?"
She didn't wait.
"You said earlier that normal constructive interference doesn't produce enough energy to overload the instrument. What does that mean, exactly?"
"Go home and review your second-year syllabus," he said. "That's a fundamentals question. Don't waste my time."
"Fair enough." She pointed at the screen with her chopstick, tone carrying the particular brand of relaxed irreverence that seemed to be standard issue for final-year students. "What I'm actually trying to ask is: did your expensive toy finally break?"
The professional reflex fired before he could stop it. "The sensors are sourced from HBM in Germany and Mettler in Switzerland — independent sampling channels, EM shielding down to the microvolt level. If you remember anything from third-year Error Theory and Data Processing, you'd know this isn't called 'broken.' It's called operating within a controlled—"
"The data's fake."
Joey said it quietly. No aggression, no drama. Just flat certainty.
He stopped mid-sentence.
In the academic context, telling a physics professor his lab data was fake wasn't just an unusual statement. It was close to fighting words.
"I'm not saying you fabricated anything, Professor." She set her chopsticks down, crossed her arms, leaned back in her chair — and looked at him with the specific fearlessness of someone who hasn't yet been wrong enough times to learn caution. "I'm saying the double-peak data doesn't add up. And I think you big-picture professors always overcomplicate the simple stuff. By your rules, to explain a double-hump waveform you'd have to drag in nonlinear interference, quantum erasure, multi-dimensional spacetime intersection — right?"
Tham Ming leaned forward slightly. Years of accumulated expertise pressing across the table. "So what does this — someone who can't write a coherent thesis outline — call it, then?"
"A continuity error."
She held his eyes. Something in hers had gone bright and a little wild.
"If this computer were a video game running in real time, that data would look like an admin trying to paste a texture directly into the live environment. But they got the parameters wrong — caused a conflict with the current render state — so the system had to force a refresh and scrub the trace." She spread her hands, completely casual, like she was explaining something obvious. "It's not some profound physical phenomenon. The world just lagged. Like USM's registration portal every time course selection opens for a new semester. The whole thing froze for a second."
"Absurd." The word came out with heat — the specific anger of someone whose conceptual borders have just been crossed without permission. "The world is not a programmer's codebase. Physics studies objective material reality. The simulation hypothesis you're describing was fashionable thirty years ago. Outside of third-rate science fiction, it has no evidentiary standing in experimental physics."
"Doesn't it look exactly like the world failed to load for a second?" She was already on her feet, gathering up the empty bowls and packaging, completely unmoved by his tone. "The copy-paste command didn't finish executing. The system stuttered. The admin assumed it hadn't triggered, sent the command again — and then the world suddenly caught up and ran it twice?" She walked out of the office, lobbed the packaging at the trash can at the far end of the corridor — clean shot — and was gone.
The door clicked shut behind her.
The air settled back into cold. The only remnant of the laksa was its ghost — a faint residual heat on the spoon, a trace of fermented shrimp paste still hanging somewhere near the desk.
Tham Ming sat in his chair, expression dark. His first instinct was to reach for a pencil and build out the refutation — systematic, point by point, the way you'd correct a badly written lab report. Dismantle the "continuity error" theory the way it deserved to be dismantled.
His training told him she was talking nonsense.
But something else — something he'd been keeping buried for three years, deliberately, with effort — was pushing back from a place much deeper than training.
What if the data wasn't interfered with?
What if it was overwritten*?*
The double-hump waveform.
Not because Tham Ming's ion trap in Penang had generated a microparticle interaction.
But because another result — an identical one — had been competing for the same physical location in the same time coordinate. Like two different textures being forced into the same coordinate space simultaneously, their misregistration showing up as an overlapping seam at the edge of each.
His breathing shifted.
He turned and stared at the system log on the screen — the line where the local-to-GPS time offset jumped, without recorded cause, from 0.00μs to 0.73μs.
Joey's offhand comment — that throwaway bit of undergraduate irreverence, dressed up as a theory — had come down on the logical framework he'd spent three years reinforcing like a wrecking ball on a load-bearing wall.
A crack in the structure, once it opens, doesn't stop at a crack. It becomes a flood.
Ding.
A single clean notification sound from the laptop.
Tham Ming wiped his hand on his shirt without looking down and opened the email.
Sender: Unknown39Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡJnhGlt3L59
Subject: Unknown
MY FM Community Broadcast Notice
Due to recent increases in background noise levels, certain channels on this station have been experiencing signal instability. The technical department advises listeners to avoid using older-generation receiving equipment and, where possible, to upgrade to a new-generation digital receiver terminal in order to ensure complete information reception. Listeners using digital terminals should set their receiving frequency to 100.27; if you experience difficulty with this setting, please contact our online customer service line for assistance. The customer service department will conclude operations at 5:40 PM.
Programming adjustments are as follows:
Content originally scheduled for the end-of-month time slot will be temporarily postponed, replaced by a special signal-test program: Finding the White Doberman Bathed in Morning Light, with audio provided by an anonymous online music creator. This program will air on a limited basis during stable signal windows.
We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause our listeners. Your warm regard and understanding is the greatest support you can give us.
— MY FM Technical Coordinator: Husky
Tham Ming stared at it for a moment. Another one of those mass-broadcast notifications that piled up in inboxes during the holiday stretch. He read through it quickly, finger already moving toward delete—
White Doberman. Older-generation equipment. Husky.
He went still.
Those three words. Like objects that had been sitting undisturbed at the bottom of the ocean for years, and someone had just reached into the dark and pulled them up into the light.
The last traces of laksa warmth vanished from the air. Something half-buried began, slowly, to surface.
"Ming! Is pizza seriously the only food you know how to order? Do they not make anything else?"
"Pizza is genuinely great — delivery is fast, it's convenient, the Italians knew what they were doing." Tham Ming glanced sideways at Norde, who was staring at the box with the expression of a man being asked to eat something from a gas station.
Somewhere in Tham Ming's subconscious, there had always been a private — and not entirely fair — mental category for a certain type of white American academic. The ones who'd grown up in the lab. Looked the part completely: the bone structure, the easy confidence, the lab coat sitting on them like it had been tailored. But high-maintenance. Always something — an allergy, a sensitivity, a list of dietary restrictions longer than their publication history. The purebred variety. He'd filed Norde under White Doberman from somewhere early in their acquaintance: bred for exactly this environment, constitutionally fragile in ways that would take you by surprise.
"You're exactly the type," Tham Ming said, nodding at the pizza. "Pathologically picky."
"You can't make a person eat pizza every single meal! Have you considered a burger? Once? One time?" Norde's voice climbed. "And stop looking at me like I'm some kind of White Doberman — if we're doing animals, I'm a wolf."
He'd jumped to his feet to make the point and knocked his coffee cup off the desk in the process.
"A wolf," Tham Ming repeated — foot already back, away from the spill, hand already reaching for the paper towels with the automatic fluency of someone who had cleaned up Norde's coffee more times than he could count — "doesn't knock over his own cup." He started mopping. "Husky, maybe. At least a Husky can handle the cold. You put on three layers yesterday when the AC hit seventy-seven degrees. Don't push it, Husky."
"I have a cold-sensitivity! It's the price of refined genetics!" The blood had drained from Norde's face. "And you have absolutely no right to talk — your entire nutritional intake is carbohydrates and cheese. You have no concept of quality of life—"
"Norde," Tham Ming said, setting the paper towels down, voice going very calm and very quiet in the way that was somehow worse than yelling, "this 'old relic' you're describing brings you a cup of hot goji berry tea every single winter morning. Since the thermos made such an impression on you — I can stop. Happy to."
He let that sit for exactly one second, then added: "And don't count on me bringing you goji tea tomorrow either, Mr. Forward-Thinking Husky. You can drink your cold water."
Norde's expression collapsed instantly, the bravado evaporating on contact. His hands went up. "No — Ming — I was wrong. I was completely wrong. You are the most important person in this lab. The goji tea cannot stop. I am cleaning the coffee right now, watch me—"
Tham Ming shifted slightly to give him room, and felt, against all odds, that the long grinding weight of a late-night experiment had become, fractionally, more bearable.
The laksa smell was nearly gone now. Faint, somewhere at the edge of perception.
Tham Ming sat at the desk and found, suddenly, that he couldn't tell what he was smelling — the remnants of the food Joey had brought, or the ghost of coffee spilled across a desk in a Massachusetts basement years ago.
The email was still on the screen.
He reached out slowly and scrolled it back to the top.
MY FM Technical Coordinator: Husky.
He read it through again. Then once more.
And for the first time, he saw it clearly.
Every sentence in this thing read like a routine broadcast notice. Every sentence had the surface texture of scheduling content, administrative language, nothing worth a second look.
But there wasn't a single word in it that was actually filler.
ns216.73.216.66da2
and then Add to home screen.