The Muse is here
Crying Over Spilt Light is now available on Amazon! Go to the book page for purchase links.
This one has been a long time coming. Inspired a few years ago by a sci-fi short story, this idea was rolling around my head for quite a while.
The basic premise is that of an android muse, helping a scientist figure out the thing that he was working on.
Many ideas came and went about the scientist’s actual project, but something clicked in place when I read about Maxwell’s light knots. I already wanted to have something to do with lasers (lasers are cool) and I needed a theory that would be Nobel prize worthy, possibly with unlimited potential. This idea, that light could be formed into lattices to be contained on a special-made computer chip, turning light into a quantum computer was too amazing to give up.
And alas, there was a really cool problem to go along with it!
Crystallized light had two inherent problems, one being leaking and two, due to quantum effects, being destroyed by the very act of observation. I don’t know of course if the real problem is at all solvable, but for my novella, it is. Yanni, the physicist is working on a solution to keep the light contained on its lattice.
Years pass with no end in sight, until he is dealt an ultimatum by the review board of his funding (Deimokritos is the National Centre of Scientific Research) and he needs to figure out the solution to his proof fast. Yanni is only 30 years old, but he has convinced himself that unless he manages to make a breakthrough before his birthday, he will never do so. 30 years old might seem too young but in academic age it borders on going senile. The mind simply cannot work at the same capacity it did, especially regarding theoretical physics and advanced mathematics. It is well known that academic brilliance takes a downturn after 25. Yanni, living in this institution used to be one of the young brilliant minds to mock the elders and is frightened by seeing himself turn into one.
His idea is that it is possible to use Maxwell’s light knots to solve the leaking light problem from light crystals, enabling quantum computing with previously unimaginable computing speeds. It is all years ahead of course, but it is easy to imagine a tech company willing to kill for such a breakthrough.
Where does the Muse fit into all of this?
Well, the muse is an android specially created to aid the inspiration of her charge. I don’t want to spoil anything so I’ll just explain this with broad strokes: She is an android, a fantasy come true, the Muse and the wife and the companion who knows what to say, when to say it, who lets you work uninterrupted, who tends to your needs and eliminates all distractions.
Her form was dictated by common sci-fi imagery of gynoids, but her pose (and this is something I am quite happy discovering) comes from the following classic painting:
It is simply amazing to realize that every concept, every combination, every single slice of life you can possibly think of has already been visualized in classic art.
It is hard to discuss about anything more without spoiling the book, so I’ll just leave it at that and hope it piques your interest. It is available on Amazon.
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