Maya scrolled to the end of the document, her finger tracing the last line about spacetime metric instability. She looked up from her screen, her eyes wide, a universe of questions swirling within them. The library, with its quiet students and rustling pages, suddenly felt profoundly mundane, like a cardboard diorama of a world she no longer inhabited.
Kuro, oblivious, was still typing, refining his 199-word essay on cosmology.
"Kuro," Maya said, her voice barely a whisper. She had to clear her throat and try again. "Kuro."
He finally looked up, his focus shifting from his screen to her face. His internal diagnostics immediately registered an anomaly. *Subject: Maya Williams. Facial expression: Awe, confusion, slight fear. Pupil dilation: 4.8mm. Heart rate (estimated from micro-expressions): 95 bpm. Deviation from baseline: Significant. Cause: Unknown.*
"The document," she said, gesturing to her laptop. "The... DSIMS Collection."
"It is a speculative extrapolation of theoretical physics," he stated, as if describing a weather pattern. "As requested for the visual aid."
"This isn't a visual aid, Kuro. This is... this is a blueprint for playing God." She leaned forward, her voice dropping lower. "The Gravitational-Wave Projector. Using Kugelblitzes to generate coherent spacetime ripples... that's not just theory. That's a direct application of the Wheeler-Thorne equations. And your explanation for the QTM's failure with biologicals—that it's not a complexity issue but a fundamental imprecision dictated by the Uncertainty Principle... who thinks like that?" She paused, her eyes searching his. "This isn't just a brainstorm. This is a complete, contained universe of thought."
She took a deep breath, and asked the question that shattered the fragile peace of his academic life.
"Is this just a thought experiment?" she asked, her voice intense and steady. "Or are you actually building one of these?"
Kuro stared at her. For the first time, someone was looking at him and seeing not the awkward student, but the architect of star-killing weapons. The observer effect was in full force, and he felt the wave function of his quiet, compartmentalized life collapsing all around him.