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  Then she tucked the folded page inside her blue dress, right next to her heart. Effortlessly.

  And then she dragged the heavy man by his leg all the way down the hall. Effortlessly.

  Chapter i

  Yanni went upstairs to his office/lab. He fired up the laser and turned on the computer attached to it. He closed the blinds to darken the room, wore his protective glasses, took out his e-cig and vaped in the path of the blue laser beam pointing to the ceiling.

  The fake cigarette smoke made the laser visible, but it was still going up straight as an arrow.

  Yanni was annoyed by that silly adherence to the laws of nature.

  He puffed a few more breaths and punched different variables in Matlab.

  The blue light beam simply flickered a bit, but kept on straight.

  Yanni grunted and then stared at the blue dot on the ceiling, thinking about equations.

  He worked hard like that for seven hours straight.

  Thalia came up and brought him a sandwich. “Were you sitting in the dark all day?” she asked.

  “I can’t see the laser with a ten thousand lumen light source flooding the place,” he said.

  She forced a smile, clearly not getting the concept and she told him, “I need you to look after the kids, need to shop a few things.”

  “Yeah, coming right down,” said Yanni to her as she was closing the door.

  She left him downstairs, sitting on the couch, with the baby in his arms and Georgie throwing flour on his toy truck. Cartoons were playing on the TV, loud to near cochleus-bursting levels and the baby was crying for her mother. He picked her up in his arms and gave her a pacifier. Then he grabbed the tablet to message his friends on Facebook. He started tapping then realized the screen was dirty with chocolate, so he wiped it hastily. He added all his friends to a group chat on Facebook and told them about the party Thalia was making preparations for.

  Then he needed to text Niko. His friend was the only one not on Facebook, he was old-fashioned that way. He knew about it of course, but he always insisted on never accepting Facebook addresses from girls, only their phone numbers (if they didn’t hop on his ride right away). He thought of anonymously checking out a girl’s photos as perverted, and they sent him their nude pictures by themselves anyway as soon as they found out he was an architect.

  Nikos called him back, “Yasou, did you think I would forget man? September the second, the night we burn the house down, every year, fifteen years on now!”

  Yanni felt slightly ashamed and said, “Yeah, I’m afraid the party will be a bit calmer this year.”

  Nikos said, “Like the one last year and the one before that. Getting married does that to you. Yeah, no problem man, I just want to hang out with you guys, I never get to see you anymore.”

  “About that, it might help if you bring along a more suitable date. Last time, our wives nearly tore our eyes out, man. You fueled the fire for decades of nagging,” said Yanni.

  “Haha, yes, that was priceless!” said Nikos laughing. “No, don’t worry, I have no date. I’ll come solo.”

  Yanni frowned at the unusual statement and asked, “Solo? You? How come?”

  “I found my Muse,” Nikos replied. “Let’s go for a drink and I’ll tell you all about her.”

  “You sound serious. I need to know more,” said Yanni.

  They arranged a time and place and then Yanni checked out the tablet, which was now covered in flour and drool. Georgie was sitting on his truck pretending to steer a freight of precious flour. The other married friends had all replied to the group chat, had liked and sent smilies and started talking about bringing that fine bottle of wine everyone had liked so much last time.

  Yanni sat on the couch, held his baby and waited for his wife to return. All he really wanted was for his Muse to come back.

  Chapter i^2

  “You’re not that old. We’re the same age. Are you saying I’m old too?” Thalia asked with a mind-your-words look on her face.

  Yanni opened his arms in an apologetic gesture and replied, “No, of course not. I’m talking about academic age. About ideas. I just don’t feel that snappy anymore.”

  Thalia thought about the situation seriously, cradling the baby who was asleep; the very image of cuteness. “Yanni, just take it as far as you can carry it. Maybe it needs to be passed on to the next torchbearer. Whom you will teach and bring to the finish line. Is that such a bad thing?”

  “Ugh. It’s my idea, honey. I’ve worked so many years on it, I would hate to see it in someone else’s hands,” Yanni said, not really talking to anyone but himself.

  Thalia walked in front of him demanding attention and said, “Yanni. If you establish a considerable part of your proof, they have no other choice but to credit you. Think of your family, do a good job, pass it on and let someone else finish the race.” She passed the baby on to him so that she should do the house chores.

  He tended to the baby and then put her in the cradle. He turned the jingly tune on and she laughed at him, her eyes never really focusing anywhere but watching everything around her.

  He spent the day working in his home lab. At least he remembered to turn the laser on this time.

  He looked at it. It looked at him back, unflinching.

  He wore his protective glasses and increased the intensity. “All I need is a Eureka moment. A bit of luck,” he thought. He knew of course that the eureka moment was a myth. Real science was slow and steady, or not so steady and full of dead-ends. At most, you would have a Huh-that’s-funny moment that would lead somewhere.

  It wouldn’t hurt to try his luck though.

  He began inputting random values to the variables he was working with, testing the laser after each one. The apodicticity of his proof was dependent on Maxwell’s equations, which, in their simplicity, had infinite permutations. He had a better chance of scoring with Kate Upton than randomly typing the variable that would validate his demonstration.

  Type. Enter. No change.

  Type again. Enter. Same.

  Then he tried their anniversary, no use holding back on superstition now.

  Nada.

  Georgie’s birthday?

  Then the phone rang. Thankfully.

  The text from Nikos said: "A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so. Albert Einstein."

  Yanni started texting back something along the lines of, “Gee, thanks for twisting the knife,” but a car honked from the street below and it was obviously Nikos.

  He rushed outside, eager for a change of scenery and closed the door on Thalia’s “No drinking” comment. He felt bad and peeked back inside the house and told her, “Ok honey, no drinking. Promise.”

  Nikos was waiting in his convertible, laid back with eased hands as if sitting on a sofa. He was smiling at some girls crossing the street and they were smiling back.

  “That was your chick maneuver, sending the text and then honking a few seconds later while I was replying. Don’t do that again to me,” said Yanni with spite, not getting in the car.

  “Hey, you invented it, man. I simply honed it to perfection!” said Nikos and they both laughed loudly.

  “Yeah, that seems to be the pattern lately,” said Yanni with a sad and worried look on his face.

  Chapter i^3

  “What’s done is done,” she replied for the tenth time, while folding the curtains from his office/lab. She had taken out anything untouched by the fire so that it would not absorb the smell. Then her face showed legitimate worry and she asked quietly, “Will Demokritos replace the laser?”

  Yanni sat down and puffed a few long breaths of air, as if the answer was to be found in the molecules around him. “Nai. Yes, they have to. But it will take forever to do the paperwork and get it approved. It can’t be done in time for the funding review.”

  Thalia tucked the corners of the curtains as perfectly as she could. This was something she could control and she calmed herself
by doing the work flawlessly. “I know the laser is expensive, can’t we get that money from somewhere in the meantime? From Nikos, for example?”

  Yanni searched for spite in her voice but found none. Her suggestion was cold and logical, not vindictive. And she was right. “We can. Yes. But the problem is not the cost, it’s the availability. The parts are both expensive and not available to private individuals. Having the money is not enough, you also need to be a research centre to even obtain something like it. Or a big corporation’s R&D department, something like that.”

  “Can’t you explain the setback to the review committee?”

  Yanni thought about the call earlier, an associate warning him about the new administrator who was determined to cut off his funding. He decided not to tell that to his wife, to leave a shred of hope hanging. She was calm, but she might need nothing more than this new piece of information to tip her over. “Yeah, sure. They are not unapproachable, I’ll call them first thing tomorrow morning.”

  He forced a smile, kissed her and went upstairs to his office/lab. He sat on his chair as he always did and inspected the damage. It wasn’t much but it could be a lot worse. The laser had a big burn on the top of its case, obviously from overheating. The wiring was burnt and smelling bad, plastic always does that. The edge of the desk was singed, one corner of his chair also, the carpet too. Mr. Andreas really did try to avoid spraying the laser, he managed to foam a circle around and choked off the flame’s oxygen. Practical man, his thinking might had saved tens of thousands of euros in repairs. The carpet was destroyed though. It’s OK. Yanni even entertained the thought of debating his wife and leaving the room exactly like that.

  Scars of a failure.

  He thought about turning the laser back on. Maybe that was his lucky accident. Maybe this was to be his Eureka moment, the part where an accident in the lab leads to a new world-changing discovery. It was foolish of him, but the temptation to try was too much.

  He argued that the laser was already damaged, so he couldn’t make it worse. He brought an old blanket just in case, claiming to Thalia that he was keeping the window open and it was chilly. It was already dark, so that wasn’t far from the truth.

  He held the blanket in hand in case of another fire and turned the laser on, hoping for the life-altering Eureka moment of his dreams.

  Chapter i^4

  When the laser arrived, it was like Christmas. His eyes lit up while unraveling the extreme protective packaging.

  “Is the effect visible to the naked eye?” asked Ourania.

  Yanni blew away some leftover Styrofoam balls. “No, I use the polarized glasses to see the moiré pattern. The math predicts that when the equations align, that particular wavelength will produce a moiré effect when seen through glasses.”

  And then he added with a hint of pride, “I came up with that.”

  “That’s brilliant, Yanni!” she said. “That way, you don’t need a quantum computer chip to actually test the theory.”

  “Correct. It’s part of the reason I managed to keep my funding all this time, because the test was relatively cheap.”

  He held the laser like a kid would hold a shiny toy train and ran upstairs to hook it up.

  Chapter 2i

  Yanni paced up and down the empty room and he was furious.

  What was Hermes doing with these kids? Were they using them for some sort of human interaction experiment? Was it safe? If it wasn’t safe, would anyone ever know? What morals were they teaching those kids? If one of them hurt another, what would their adoptive mother do about it?

  All reason left him and all he wanted was to yell at the cameras for putting them up to this, for putting Alex up to this, and take the little boy back home, where he would be safe, where he would grow up in a real home, with a real mom.

  The reasonable part of his brain took over and had him think that they engineered that. The toy was exactly the same as his son’s, the kid could pass off as Georgie’s brother if he had to. They had set the whole thing up for this response, this was a test. Even if he could take the kid and adopt him and give him a loving family, what could he do about the rest of them? And who was to say that they weren’t better off this way? Most probably, the best colleges lied in their future, them being true corporate offspring and loyal to the bone. Who was he to decide to take this away?

  He couldn’t save them. Especially not now. Maybe in the future, when he had finished his proof. When he had the same pull with this company as Niko had. Maybe then he could do something for this. Threaten telling the media. Anything.

  But he had to win this battle. For him, for his family, for science, for everyone. This sadistic battle, built as if it was meant to torment him.

  He calmed himself and sat down. He hoped he hadn’t scared the kid off, but if Alex was startled, he didn’t show it.

  “Alex,” he said with the sweetest voice he could muster. “I’m here to teach you something. Would you like that?”

  Alex smiled and bobbed his cute head up and down in assent.

  “Okay. Here it goes. You know about computers, right? They must give you tablets and things like that to play games, right?” he asked with an anticipation matching the one after his marriage proposal.

  Alex nodded positively.

  “Great. Those computers have a machine brain inside them. We call that a processor. Are you with me?”

  “Yes. Pro-scissor.”

  “Let’s call it that, it doesn’t matter. The pro-scissor needs to be fast for games to play fast. We hate it when games go slow, right? Great. So we make faster and faster pro-scissors, but the stuff we put in there cannot go too fast. They are lazy and say ‘Oh! Don’t push us so hard’ and they sit around, not doing the job.”

  Alex giggled and nodded.

  “Great. So, we need to put faster stuff in there, thingies that are not lazy. And you know what the fastest thing in the whole world is?”

  Alex shook his head and his eyes demanded to know the answer.

  “Light. Light from the sun is the fastest thing in the whole world. It’s not lazy at all. But sunlight is so fast, that you need something clever to keep it in,” said Yanni and cupped air with both his hands. He shook his palms, still closed together as if he was holding a wasp. That seemed to entertain Alex a lot.

  “When I tell Mr. Sunlight to do a job, I need to see if he did it or not, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So I take a peek,” he said taking a peek between his cupped hands and Alex leaning close to see as well, “but Mr. Sunlight finds the hole and spills out!” He opened his hands and let the imaginary Mr. Sunlight free.

  “Heehee! Like. Like the flour.”

  “Just like the flour.”

  “Then mommy is mad at the mess we made!”

  “Yes! So, we need to find a way to make the sunlight roll around in circles. So when we take a peek, most of the sunlight will stay inside. A man named Maxwell, who had a great big bushy beard, thought of tricking the sunlight into knots. Just like my shoelace, here see? I made a knot, so it won’t go anywhere.”

  “I can’t tie my shoelaces yet and that’s why I have scratch shoes.”

  “I know, I couldn’t tie my shoelaces either when I was little. But now I can, I learned the trick. And I am also trying to learn to tie sunlight into knots, so it stays there and does not spill out. I just need to find the trick.”

  “And then you can throw away the scratch shoes for sneakers with shoelaces, which are faster and then you can be faster.”

  “And?”

  “And then you can be fast enough to do the tricks to Mr. Sunlight to plup-plup around in little… in little knots, like the shoelaces and you can take a peek fast enough to close your hands again,” said Alex, peeking between his tiny hands.

  So this was how a Eureka moment looked like.

  “And then?”

  “And then the pro-scissor won’t be lazy and do the job fast and I won’t have to wait for the slow game!” />
  Someone clapped. A slow, full clap. Yanni turned around and saw the smart-dressed woman from before. “Excellent Dr. Tsafantakis. Come with me. Don’t worry, they will come pick up the child in a moment.”

  Yanni waved goodbye to Alex. The child looked up and asked, “Are you allowed to bring Georgie to play with me?”

  “That is the first thing I am going to ask this nice lady. Goodbye, Alex,” he said.

  “Goodbye, Mister,” said Alex and went back to playing with his toy truck.

  Yanni followed the smart-dressed woman into the next room. At this point, he was prepared for anything.

  Chapter 2i^2

  The sun was going down, but it was still bright. Yanni enjoyed the wind on his face and the sound of old music on the radio. Nikos was taking the scenic route, going up to Parnitha Mountain. It got noticeably chilly as they went higher but it was invigorating.

  The casino was Niko’s idea, all of their old haunts had closed down anyway, and all of their new ones were kid-friendly, so Yanni wouldn’t even dare suggest them. Nikos brought the cabrio to the entrance, the valet greeted him by name and parked the car next to other expensive two-seaters.

  Nikos showed him in with open arms as if he was selling the place. “Now, isn’t this more manly? Look at the view,” he said and they sat down on luxurious leather.

  Yanni looked at the city below as Nikos ordered whiskey. The northern suburbs were pretty much the same as always, a place of relative safety and costly big houses with gardens or cozy three-bedroom apartment buildings for families. Athens extended in the south too, but faded out in the horizon, which was seemingly brought closer by the humid air and the gray smog. Peeking through the lowest level of the atmosphere were the new skyscrapers at the city centre, tall beasts of glass and steel getting erected with impossible speed, seemingly forming like crystals out of thin air. He thought of his light crystals, imagined how they looked in reality. Would they seem as beautiful, formed into lattices out of the foundation of a computer chip? Were these skyscrapers as ephemeral as his light crystals, or were they here to stay?