LF Friends, Will Travel

Innovation is Impartial - Chapter 4

Jonathan was suffering from success.

He had everything any academic in the world would have wanted: A limitless purview to study and research whatever he desired, the resources to try any experiment his mind could come up with, and near infinite time to accomplish it in. If you'd have asked him less than 6 months ago what his dream position would be, he would have described this job.

But now, now that he was here, the full freedom was trapping the scientist within the paralysis of choice. The sheer magnitude of the station he found himself in was suffocating, the feeling of wasting an opportunity, the desire, no, the need to take full advantage of such a privilege, was in of itself stopping him from doing so.

It had been five months, five months and Dr Johnathan Fletcher had nothing to show for his time here, not even the true start of a project outside of some vague notes and half started calculations, all for ideas nowhere near good enough. There was even a tray of blueberry muffins made in a fit of desperation and eaten long ago; they were... ok. Not war winning.

The worst part was, nobody seemed to care. Aside from the occasional request for materials for whatever initial idea had struck his fancy, Jonathan only spoke with Susan during the monthly progress reports. Each of them stating functionally nothing had been accomplished, each one taken without complaint or issue, no sign of disappointment or suggestions of him not belonging here.

Of course, the fact of the matter was Johnathan was nothing special in this regard, and absolutely nobody in charge of Research Location 9 cared about his performance. Practically every scientist here had several months to find their new perfect project, most of them going through the same internal struggles and worries.

Unfortunately, that didn't stop the self perception of Dr. Fletcher's abject failure, surrounded by brilliant people who were all working on cutting edge science straight out of the imaginations of magicians. That he, Dr Fletcher alone, was the single person failing and falling behind. This idea of isolated incompetence was, ironically, a very common feeling here.

So Johnathan continued to bash their head against the infinitely sized wall of trying to discover something incredible to work on, hoping each set of small experiments or tests would lead to something great.

He felt a little hope regarding his latest idea, as it had one he'd tinkered with on and off over the last 70 years. Out of all the known fundamental forces in the universe, XK waves were the least studied by humanity as a whole: the ability to influence electromagnetic forces at range wasn't something that appeared on Earth naturally. In fact, having a species with a specialized organ in order to influence such forces was a rare trait amongst the universe as a whole.

In extreme cases, it allowed organisms to directly "puppeteer" organisms using their nervous system, read brain waves directly, and provide a level of supposed 'clairvoyance' and short term prediction through instinct. Unfortunately for the Terran Alliance, one of the main species of the Estorian empires were the Uhae, who were considered such an 'extreme case'. Humans being susceptible to being mind controlled was a military 'issue' on the battlefield.

Dr Fletcher was currently running simulations and calculations regarding the viability of a unique method of reversing such XK waves, nullifying them in all circumstances. The lab was mostly silent as Johnathan and Lena worked on this new theory, although internally Lena was facing an entirely different problem: What counts as ten percent?

That was the rule the Scythens had. They could, if they so chose, have dropped technology and scientific advancement upon their Terran allies to the extent that the war would have been quickly over. However from personal experience, they knew that just dropping information onto the less technologically advanced led to despair and ruin. The lessons learned from building and researching a technology were important, especially to avoid the pitfalls of usage.