and it’s creating edge effects because I gave it a fractional angstrom flex and then linked it to the C-398 magnet that I sort of pulled out of the RC-NCI back end over there, it’s fine, I’ll buy a new one, and in the aqueous matrix, the electrons display independent choice behaviour and they start to generate their own topographical material, which isn’t real—”
“What?”
“—under the Yerofeyev definition anyway, but it’s so close to the border between the definition and the quantum definition that from their desire to return to their original state, because they immediately regret their choice, right, they discharge energy, and bam!”
“Bam?” I said weakly.
“That’s the loop. The choice and the second choice. A renewable electron source. Electricity. Anyway, I calibrated it to the house draw, but if my calculations are correct there’s kind of no upper limit to production,” she said, absently tightening the clamps holding the box to the table.
“Wait. Stop. Drink this.” I forced the bottle on her, as much to shut her up for a second as to get some water in her. “Are you telling me this shoebox is... powering the house? And could power... anything?”
“Uh, yeah, does that sound okay? Is that too insane?” She choked on the first sip, water trickling down her neck. “Yeah. It’s running on a little bit of Perrier because I can’t use the sink right now, I sort of welded a—”
“Johnny! You made a powerplant in a shoebox!”
“It’s not a shoebox, thank you very much, it’s a shielding setup that—”
“Is this going to cook my sperms?”
“I don’t think so, but maybe don’t hump it all the same, the shielding isn’t really necessary, I don’t think, but it does seem to dampen down the harmonics, and maybe it’ll be quieter when it’s not on a metal surface, I don’t know.”
“Harmonics? Is that what we’re calling that incredibly annoying noise? I feel like I’m chewing on tin foil. What’s causing that?”
“Beats me. I’m guessing the impurities in the silver.”
“Not the artificial lemon flavouring?”
“No, I don’t think so. It’s just an electron source, after all. Man, Dr. Yerofeyev is going to freak out when he hears about this, you remember him, he was at my Darwin Day party last year dressed as a trilobite—”
“Stop stop stop stop stop. Please stop.” I was getting lightheaded, I assumed from the heat, dehydration, exhaustion, and... whatever she was trying to tell me, which seemed to be that she had put a quantum in a box and plugged an extension cord into it.
She’s done it again. The headlines lined themselves up. Child prodigy changes world. Child prodigy... makes a million things obsolete.
Coal-fired power plants first to go. Nuclear next. No one liked those anyway. Gas, crude. Except what we needed for the plastic that could not be replaced by her vat-grown spider-silk substitute, which everyone had been using for years. Even her solar panels, her wind turbines unneeded. We could have electric cars, like in sci-fi movies. Electric... planes? Electric submarines. Electric everything, the whole world humming to her tune. No more wars over oil. The entire world looking at each other and thinking: We could get along now. We might not have to be friends, but we could be neighbours.
She had changed everything. And I could always make more sperm.
I dimly realized I had sunk to my heels next to the table. Sweat was running down my arms amd dripping from my fingertips.
“Put your head between your knees,” she said from far away.
“Hang on,” I said, and then everything went black.
I SWAM BACK up an unknown amount of time later, to find Johnny soaking blue shop towels in warm Perrier and dropping them on the back of my neck. “Let’s get out of here,” she said. “Can you walk?”
“How l-long... was...” My tongue felt thick and dry.
“Fifteen, maybe twenty seconds. Didn’t land on your head or anything.”
The walk to the main kitchen was a nightmare marathon through shivering black ghosts reaching for me from the edges of my peripheral vision. Johnny, hovering around me, was a silver moth fluttering in and out of my blind spot. The air crackled around me, as if not wind but feathers brushed against my face. I lifted my feet occasionally at dark spots on the tile; the house had a resident population of genetically modified dung beetles that didn’t want poop any more but still desperately needed to roll things, so you’d sometimes see them contentedly going along with a stolen satsuma or pingpong ball. They