“You can take a seat,” she says quickly.
I turn and survey the waiting room, pleased I won’t be sitting in it.
“Have fun,” I say, patting Caz’s shoulder on my way out.
“Now would be the time to give me your number,” he calls after me.
“Nope,” I say, pushing the door open. “I’ll be back.”
I’ve got to tell my brothers we’re going to war.
TWENTY-FIVE
The soft clackof my keyboard fills my office as I finish typing the last sentence of a final exam question. With exams starting in a few weeks, I should have these questions written today. But I can’t seem to stay focused.
Because this exam question about particle-in-a-box energy shifts under boundary deformation isn’t giving my mind the itch it’s craving.
My eyes slide to the corner of my screen, where a Python script is open in another window, just waiting for me. My fingers hover over the trackpad as I eye it, knowing I should finish writing this exam.
But what if the divergence I saw in the last run wasn’t a coding error?
Fuck it.
I click to bring the simulation forward, and my screen floods with stochastic entropy production trajectories under time-asymmetric protocols, visualized as noisy curves across a tight interval. But buried in the noise is something that shouldn’t be there.
My last run had shown something strange—entropy dropping lower than it should under the laws we know. I thought maybe it was a bug in the code, but now I’m not so sure.
I adjust a line of code, narrowing the window for entropy exchange, and rerun. The simulations spool out, each mapping a full stochastic path through an imaginary quantum system undergoing partial erasure.
And there it is again. A cluster of outliers where the work cost dipsbelowLandauer’s bound.
I tweak the coupling strength and feed in a new set of protocol timings. The feedback lag seems toenhancethe deviation, not suppress it. It’s subtle… but it’s there. A tiny window where entropy cost isn’t just minimized… it breaks the rules we thought were unbreakable.
I grab my notebook and scribble a note in the margin:
Non-Markovian feedback as an entropy loophole?
My thoughts race towards control theory, experimental inaccessibility, and whether this could be reframed as an imaginary-time path integral. The numbers don’t lie, and neither does the way something inside me just lit up.
Movement at the door pulls my attention away, and I unsuccessfully suppress a sigh.
Annika steps into my office, smiling as usual.
Of fucking course.
“Hey, Cade,” she chirps, gracefully sliding into a seat opposite my desk. But then her smile immediately falls when her eyes land on my neck, and she stiffens.
I just stare back at her, my fingers still hovering over my keyboard, as I wait for her to get the fuck on with this so I can get back to what actually matters.
“Are you ok?” she asks, shifting forward in her seat. Her eyes quickly dart between my neck and my eyes, like she doesn’tknow where to look. Then her gaze firmly meets mine, and worry seeps out of her. “Cade, what’s going on?”
I exhale and look at my computer screen. “Well, Iwasjust exploring a potential entropy loophole?—”
“No,” she cuts me off with a sharp tone, and my eyes dart back to her. “What’s going on withyou?”
I watch as her gaze drops once again to the red marks on my neck from Alder’s belt last night. Her whole posture has now shifted, and she’s no longer the airy, light presence she usually is. She’s now rigid, fierce, and has a look that demands answers.
“Tied my tie a bit too tight,” I say flatly, staring back at her. “Reminded me why I never wear them.”
