Then, the humming stopped. The tachyon fog settled into a steady, predictable glow. "Manifold stabilized at 99.8%," the computer chimed.
"And burn out the processors in six seconds?" Sarah countered, finally looking up. Her eyes reflected the shifting violet light of the engine core. "We can't brute-force the universe into staying still. We need to go the other way. Weak measurements. We gather just enough data to nudge the probability toward stability without fully collapsing it." Quantum Physics for Scientists and Technologist...
The station groaned—not with the sound of metal stressing, but with the sound of a thousand whispered conversations happening at once. The floor beneath them turned transparent, then solid, then liquid, as the weak-measurement pulse rippled through the quantum core. For a terrifying heartbeat, Aris felt himself exist as a child, an old man, and a puff of hydrogen. Then, the humming stopped
Aris sighed, adjusting his glasses. This was the paradox of the 22nd century. They had built a station capable of folding space-time using Non-Abelian anyons, but they were still limited by the fundamental stubbornness of subatomic particles. "And burn out the processors in six seconds