Disclaimer:
All characters are 18 years of age or older while actively engaging in sexual activity. This story is a prequel/sequel (sprequel?) to my other work, Alex & Alexa. Reviews are welcome; flames will be snickered at and deleted with extreme prejudice. Enjoy!
Please Note:
There are some incest themes with a secondary couple in this story. Just a forewarning.
Chapter 5 -- What Inspires You
1986. A dark, quiet computer lab ...
Mike sat staring at the screen, his fingers rubbing against his temple wearily. He'd been looking at the problem for hours now, and the numbers were just not coalescing. He squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed them. The schedule he was on was tight. The damn sequence kept coming up Hodge, and he was decidedly
not
working on a Kahler Manifold.
This was Calabi-Yao. Get your fundamental numbers right, universe!
He pinched the skin between his eyes and sighed, muttering to himself as formulas stumbled through his head.
"The Ricci Metric on a torus is a flat metric ... the supersymmetry is unbroken if the holonomy is full SU-Three ... supercharges need to remain Type One through the 26-N ..."
He put his forearms on the desk and rested his face on them, trying to not sink into the depths of despair-sleep. He'd been given this assignment, because even the professors were unable to crack the math. Explaining superstrings on a flat plane was entirely predicated on this formula.
When he came up again, the wayward numbers were still staring back at him, as if laughing defiantly. He clenched his hands, trying to get the feeling back in his fingers. His eyes were raw.
"It's the line bundle ... I can't match up the line bundle with the Ricci Metric ..."
He groaned loudly and put his head on his forearms again, just as a silhouette floated by outside the dark lab. The comely shape paused upon hearing the noise, and the head turned to look into the lab. Mike lifted his head and stared wearily at the screen, completely flummoxed. Without a sound, the shadow walked up behind him, still observing intently, holding several textbooks to its chest.
Karen leaned over him, pondering the endless lines of equations. And the oversized nerd was right; the numbers were decidedly
not
coalescing as required. Mike blinked and looked sideways for a moment, finally sensing her presence. He drew in a breath, hoping she wouldn't notice that he was inhaling her scent in that stuffy lab.
Karen leaned down some more, over his shoulder, her books pressing into the massive deltoid. Neither of them said anything, just looking at the screen, with its endless green numbers glinting insufferably in the dark.
Her dainty hand reached out and began tapping rapidly on the keyboard. Within thirty seconds, the screen shifted its dynamic, displaying a new, much more attractive numeric cosmology. Mike's eyes widened as Karen stood back up and nodded to herself in satisfaction. She patted him on the shoulder, turned on her heel, and exited the lab silently.
Mike stared at the screen silently for several more seconds, before a wide grin spread across his face. There it was, plain as day.
Superstring lived on.
***
"Well, here we go," Alexa said as she walked along with her sister, her brother-in-law, and her husband and nephew, Alex. "The school season is finally upon us. Gonna be weird to be taking classes instead of just dinking around in some stuffy old offices, sorting endless language files."
"I'm kinda looking forward to it," Alex replied, looking around. "I wanna see and hear if all that work we did made any difference to how the courses run."
"Your professors are ecstatic," Karen remarked, smiling and giving her son's shoulder a gentle pat. "Apparently the files haven't been this organized in a decade. They'll give you all the one-on-one time you could possibly need, and I suggest you take it. You'll both jump ahead rapidly, so apply yourselves, and you could have you at least your BA's a full year early, or begin working on your Master's."
Alexa sighed happily. "I love languages. There's a flowing art to them like nothing else, you know? So malleable, so organic, and always endless exceptions to the rules they set up for themselves."
"Just about the most millennial thing I've ever heard," Mike mused, making his wife snicker and Alexa stick her tongue out at him. Seconds later, someone called to the little group, and they were joined by Freja and Jeanie, who trotted up and greeted them cheerfully.
"Well, well, if it isn't Laverne and Shirley," Karen mused as the couple approached, holding hands. "And how are you two?"
"I am loving this campus," the honey-blonde Danish girl said, gesturing wide with her arms. "There is space, and trees, and so many interesting buildings! Some old, some new ..."
"I'm glad you like it, darling," Karen said agreeably. "But being a foreign student is one thing; how are you doing with your resident status and learning to be Canadian?"
"She's getting there," Jeanie answered, putting her arm around her Danish wife's shoulder. "Slowly but surely."
"Hey! I am becoming Canadian quicksome!" Freja protested, looking slightly offended. "I put the tree sauce on my breakfast foods, I watch the skatey-punchy with you and your father, and my new favourite animal is the ... the antler-cow!"
"She means a moose," Jeanie whispered to the others.
