From a comment on the IRC that triggered a flash of inspiration. An unnamed and thus far unknown Fen scientist working on some random project, notices a rather strange side-effect. Tagged Infinities because of what that effect is.
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
Quote:She was tired… so very tired. She reached for a cup of coffee and took a mouthful before she recalled that it’d been made at least two hours ago.________________________________
“ugh, cold,” she groaned, forcing it down. She’d have to make up a new pot.
It could wait until this job was done. Just finish the magneto-compression coil, test it, and with any luck be in bed just in time to get up again the next morning. Goddammit was this frustrating. With no ceremony at all, she pushed the little white button on the keypad. Somewhere under the device… itself little more than a tangle of shielded cables and copper tubing around some sort of toroidal core… a relay clicked on.
And that was it.
“Well, at least it didn’t fail with prejudice,” she said with ill humour. That was always a relief. She’d be around projects that had done that before. That was why her right arm was now made of metal. She’d been half asleep for the last three hours herself, and didn’t trust her own wiring to be up to scratch.
She checked it to be sure. None of the cables seemed to be heating up or unduly smoking. There were no leaks. Everything seemed to be running just tickety-boo. Next, she checked the output from the coil.
“Eureka.” She smiled. Not quite on the money, but the benefits of the alternating field on output collimation were already being shown. It was just a matter of adjusting it that little bit, and bingo, a twenty-percent efficiency increase, all for the simple addition of a few electronic controls. A yawn reminded her that all the fine adjustments could wait until the morning. It was working, and at 5am local time, that was the main thing.
She moved her hand to turn the coil off. Not thinking, she moved her hand over the top of the device and felt something. She was quite sure what. It was enough to make her thing twice about turning it off. She swept her natural hand over the top of the device once more…
There it was again… a sensation of some sort. From the magnetic fields? She tried it with her mechanical arm. Same effect. A piece of software noted that the effort on one of her actuators decreased by a noticeable amount, right when it was over the coil. Not a lot, but still something measurable. It might be magnetic, but it’d take one hell of a field to affect even her arm… and that lessening of effort. It almost reminded her of what happened when she went swimming.
Was the coil quirked?
That was her first bitter thought. A quirked coil was a failed coil, was all that work thrown in the goddam bin. But unless somebody’d sneaked in while her back was turned and liberally slathered it with goop, the coil was entirely 100% all natural hardtech. It can’t have quirked.
She grabbed a piece of paper… just an ordinary A4 sheet. This one had a few scribbles on it, a doodle of giant robot, and some quick scratch calculations that had stopped making sense without their individual context.
She held up by one of the long edges, and watched it droop. If there was some there above the coil, then it had to affect the paper. Just to be certain, she double checked that the ventilation in the room was off. Moving it slowly towards the still running compression coil, she observed the end closest to the coil seem to lift… ever… so… slightly.
What the?
Again, from a different direction. Same effect. Magnetic fields don’t affect paper, do they? So what else could it be? On a spark of inspiration, she grabbed a weighing scales she’d normally use to weigh out her coffee grounds before brewing up a pot. She loaded it with her favourite blend, measuring out about 50 grams of it sitting on the bench furthest from the coil.
Noting the mass down in her mind, she then set up a simple platform over the top of the coil. Somewhere she could rest the scale, and take the shaking of her arms out of the equation. She placed the loaded scale on top of the coil.
It read 35.53
A drop of about 15 grams.
It was then that she said the famous phrase which accompanies all great scientific achievements.
“Hmmm…. That’s funny.”
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?