by Morgan Landry 10/29/2014, 3:23 pm
The white marble slab next to Victoria's bunk bed popped open quietly and the blonde girl climbed out. She was dressed in a blue shirt from the CERN and a pair of white shorts showing her athletic, tanned legs, her lab coat over her shoulders and her computer and hoverboard under her arms. As usual, her clothes were scribbled with calculations, formulas, questions, theorems, possible experiments, etc. It was a habit she had picked up from her father.
Victoria took her lab goggles off and put them on her night table before sitting down on her bed, putting her board next to her. It was the 4.0 version of it. She remembered what the very first version, the prototype, had looked like: all metal, the underside coated with diamagnets. It had weighed a ton, and it couldn't even go everywhere. Now, it was made out of sleek carbon fibre enhanced with special aircraft ceramics, hovering with the help of room-temperature superconductors, absorbing the sunlight through two screens at each end of the board which got stored into the graphene-sheathed batteries once it had gone through a complex circuit of artificial photosynthesis. Her shoes adhered to the surface by a sheet of metal directly under the carbon fibre coating, making sure she didn't fall off by the inverted wind force when she flew. Everything was coded, from her anticrash vest to her flight control gloves, so they'd obey vocal and physical commands accordingly to the flight interface panel inside of the board.
Just as she was shrugging out of her lab coat, Victoria caught sight of the new girl, Liza. She looked at her, sitting against her wall and typing fast. Victoria gazed at her fingers, their movements and the keys she tapped connecting into a pattern in her mind: Liza was coding, and coding well. Victoria had realized that from experience: if somebody was drawing something, she just needed to observe the movements of the pencil to know what it was, as a picture of it formed in her mind. Same went with writing, lip reading, computer typing, etc.
"Exactly how many communication devices are you planning to hack with that algorithm?" she asked once its pattern had clearly appeared into her mind. From creating algorithms almost every day, she knew at the first glance what that one was about.