Maya scrolled to the end of the document, her finger tracing the last line about a galactic energy grid. 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 Penrose Process, Adiabatic Demagnetization on a macroscopic scale, Quantum Tomography... these aren't just buzzwords. The math behind this... it's sound. Terrifyingly sound. Did you... did you write this?"
Kuro felt a prickle of something unfamiliar. It wasn't fear. It was the social equivalent of a critical system error. His carefully constructed wall between his real life and his "other" life had just been breached by a simple file transfer. He had no protocol for this.
"It was a brief thought experiment," he said, the words feeling inadequate.
"A 'thought experiment'?" she challenged, her awe turning into sharp-edged curiosity. "The section on the Ultra Relativistic Ray, the Graphene-TiO₂ composite for the synchrotron... the level of material science detail alone would require a dozen PhDs. And the ethical protocols... you've thought about the restrictions, the intergalactic accords..." 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.