Ra

by qntm

Edward Hatt's alarm clock drives him out of bed like a lightning bolt. He hits it within the space of one beep, fast enough that his wife doesn't even twitch. He's a ludicrous man, one of those individuals with the ability to live without obvious sleep, with more interest in getting to work and making things happen than in honest human things like staying in bed and hibernating until noon. Elapsed time until he's out of the house is in the ten-minute range. He'll shower and change once he's cycled to work and he'll have breakfast after a few hours of work, if he actually remembers to eat. At this time of year his journey coincides with dawn. Even with gear, his fingers and ears are brittle with cold by the time he gets to the site. He's at work before there's anybody on reception. He eschews coffee. He gets the whole organisation to himself for a little while. He enjoys this.

Anil Devi is one of the fastest-moving minds Ed Hatt has ever worked with. Devi treats conversations as optimisation problems. He assumes everybody involved possesses all the knowledge he does and thinks as fast as he does, and then proceeds to skip two out of every three sentences because the rest is so obvious that it doesn't need to be said.

No science had ever exploded into being in the same way that magic did. Never before had something so radically new and totally unexplored been stumbled upon by a human civilisation so primed with experience and technology to go to work on it. It was like discovering a brand new empty Earth. You can't even imagine those glory days. Everything worked. Every line of research struck solid gold. There were no dead ends to find if you tried. Every year, what we knew doubled and what we didn't know tripled.