[TBBT] Ch: 5 [New Neighbor and Leonard] (Patreon)

"This is an earlier draft."

Leonard took the folder carefully.

That probably sounded dramatic considering it was a stack of paper held together with a binder clip, but scientists had a particular way of handling unpublished work. Half curiosity, half respect, and half the barely controlled urge to immediately start pointing out everything they thought was wrong.

Yes, that was three halves.

Scientists were terrible at respecting boundaries.

Leonard flipped open the first page while I sat back down against the wall and reached for my guitar.

He didn't say anything at first.

His eyes moved across the page, paused near one of the diagrams, then went back toward the beginning. After about thirty seconds, whatever polite social obligation had brought him upstairs disappeared completely.

I recognized the transformation.

I'd seen professors do the same thing.

Someone could be discussing weather, family, dinner plans, or the collapse of civilization, then you placed an interesting equation in front of them and suddenly nothing else existed.

Leonard lowered himself onto one of the unopened boxes without asking.

I didn't mind.

At least somebody was finally using them as furniture.

Leonard turned another page before asking, "This isn't the same configuration you used in the published paper, is it?"

"No," I replied. I sat back against the wall beside my guitar case. "The published version was simplified enough that normal people could understand what I was actually trying to do."

Leonard glanced up from the paper. "Normal people?"

"Scientists outside the exact three fields involved."

"That's fair."

He returned to the draft.

The original idea had been one of those projects that started simple and then became increasingly stupid the longer I worked on it. At least stupid in terms of difficulty. And it was also one of my dream projects.

Bioregenerative life-support systems had always fascinated me because they offered one of the few realistic ways humans could eventually stay away from Earth for years without hauling every kilogram of oxygen, food, and waste-processing equipment along with them.

The problem was that biology had a terrible habit of not caring about engineering schedules.

Cells clustered where I didn't want them. Nutrient concentrations changed. Biofilms formed. Light distribution became uneven. Fluid channels clogged. Then the entire system required maintenance, which was exactly what you didn't want inside something meant to operate millions of kilometers away from the nearest replacement part.

My solution had been to combine microfluidic control with dynamically shaped laser fields.

Or, in considerably less impressive language, bully microorganisms with light until they stayed where I wanted them.

Leonard stopped on one of the handwritten pages. "You're coupling the optical force model directly to nutrient transport?"

"I was trying to," I answered.

He rotated the folder slightly and pointed at the equations.

∂C/∂t + u·∇C = D∇²C - R(C,I)

R(C,I) = μmax[C/(Ks + C)][I/(KI + I)]

Fopt ≈ α∇I + βI + ...

Then came the part I hadn't exactly completed.

∂ρ/∂t + ∇·(ρu) = Sbio + Sopt + ???

Leonard stared at the final line for a second before looking at me. "You wrote three question marks in the equation."

I shrugged. "I was eighteen."

"That doesn't explain the question marks."

"It explains the quality of my decision-making."

Leonard laughed quietly and returned to the page. "What is Sopt supposed to contain?"

"The optical redistribution term," I said. "At least that was the idea. The problem was that the biological response wasn't staying independent from the thermal effects, so every time I tried making the model prettier, reality showed up and ruined it."

Leonard nodded slowly.

He understood exactly what I meant. I guess... 

That was probably why I found myself explaining more than I originally intended.

Most people who recognized my name wanted to talk about the two doctorates, my age, NASA, or whichever headline had made me sound like some ridiculous child prodigy who'd been raised entirely inside laboratories.

Leonard was interested in the ugly unfinished equations.

Honestly, I liked that more.

He turned several more pages until he reached one of the old chamber diagrams. It showed a narrow microfluidic network surrounding a larger culture region, with several projected laser paths crossing through it.

Leonard pointed at the central chamber. "You're trying to create temporary biological scaffolding without a physical scaffold."

"Exactly." I nodded.

"Using optical trapping to keep cell density distributed." He looked really excited.

"Partly," I replied. "Continuous trapping uses too much power and causes other problems. The later versions were supposed to use the flow itself for most of the movement, then apply optical corrections only when the distribution started drifting."

Leonard looked interested immediately. "Closed-loop imaging?"

"That was version four," I replied.

He looked up. "Version four?"

"There were nine."

Leonard blinked once.

"Nine versions?"

"Ten, technically, but version zero doesn't exist."

"What happened to version zero?"

"I deleted it."

"Why?"

"Because fourteen-year-old me temporarily forgot viscosity was important."

Leonard stared at me for several seconds. Then he slowly shook his head. "You were working on this when you were fourteen?"

"What can I say... I had weird hobbies," I replied as flashes of those days appeared in my mind. Well, one of the curses of having a photographic memory is that you remember everything and with the system's skill, it's like really vivid. Sometimes, I hate it. Other times, I love it. I can just sit anywhere and rewatch Star Wars in my head.

"Normal fourteen-year-olds play video games," Leonard said.

"I played video games too."

"That somehow makes it worse."

I smiled and reached over to turn another page for him.

The experimental section was rougher than the rest. A few graphs had notes written beside them, and one page still had a coffee stain near the corner.

Leonard studied the first graph. "You actually built a prototype."

"Eventually," I said.

His finger followed one of the density curves.

"How long did you maintain redistribution?" He asked.

"Thirty-seven minutes."

"That's not bad."

"Then the temperature went up, several cells died, one channel started clogging, and the controller began switching between two different correction states until the entire thing became scientifically educational garbage."

Leonard smiled. "Scientifically educational garbage is still data."

"Exactly."

He moved closer to the graph.

"What organism?"

"Chlorella vulgaris."

"Microalgae makes sense," Leonard said. "Easy oxygen production, manageable growth rate, and you can actually see what's happening without making the experiment unnecessarily complicated."

I gave him a look. "You really did read the published paper."

"I told you I did."

"People tell me that all the time. Usually they mean they read the abstract and stared at the pictures."

Leonard gave a small shrug. "Lasers are my field. The optofluidics caught my attention."

That brought the conversation back toward the part he clearly cared about.

He started questioning the beam arrangement, especially how I planned to reduce photothermal damage once the system increased in scale. His first suggestion involved pulsed optical fields instead of continuous trapping, which made me smile because I'd already gone down that road years ago.

Leonard noticed.

"You tried it."

"Version five."

"And?"

"Better power efficiency. Worse control."

"What about waveguides?"

"Fouling."

"Photonic structures?"

"Also fouling."

"Hydrodynamic stabilization between pulses?"

I paused.

Leonard noticed that too.

"That one got closer," I admitted.

He smiled, clearly pleased with himself. "Which version?"

"Six."

"Okay, now I want to see version six."

"No."

Leonard laughed. "Why not?"

"Because it's unpublished, unfinished, and currently stored somewhere considerably safer than a cardboard box," I replied.

"You showed me this." He held the file before me.

"This version is old enough that I'm not worried."

Leonard looked back down at the equations. "You're still planning to finish it?"

I didn't answer immediately. That question was more complicated than it sounded. Two weeks ago, the obvious answer would've been yes. Everything in my life had been built around continuing research as quickly as possible.

Now I had an empty apartment, a guitar sitting beside me, five years to prove something to my father, and approximately fifty different ideas fighting for attention inside my head.

"I stopped working on it for now," I finally said.

Leonard looked surprised. "Why?"

I gestured around the apartment. "Because this happened."

"The apartment?"

"My life."

That made him pause.

I leaned back against the wall again. "I've spent basically my entire childhood moving from one academic milestone to the next. I finished the degrees, rejected the jobs, pissed off my father, moved out, and now I'm trying to figure out what I actually want to build when nobody else is handing me the next objective."

Leonard listened without interrupting.

That was nice.

"I'll come back to it," I continued. "Just not right now. I need money, independence, probably a company eventually, and at minimum I need an actual chair before I start trying to redesign long-duration space habitation."

Leonard glanced at the cardboard box he was sitting on.

"Chair seems reasonable."

"Thank you."

He closed the folder halfway, although he kept one finger between the pages. "But you're definitely going back to this."

I nodded. "Oh, absolutely."

Something in my answer must've sounded different because Leonard looked at me again. I reached over and tapped the folder. "This thing is my baby," I said.

Leonard smiled. "Your baby currently has question marks inside its governing equations."

"Every baby has developmental problems."

He laughed.

I looked down at the old chamber diagram.

Despite everything else happening in my life, the project still bothered me in exactly the same way it always had. I could see what it could become.

A closed biological system capable of continuously reorganizing itself. Something that could regulate oxygen production, nutrient cycling, biomass distribution, and maybe eventually even food production without requiring constant human maintenance.

Get it right and it wouldn't only matter for spacecraft.

Submarines, isolated research stations, disaster shelters, Lunar bases, Mars habitats.

Anywhere humans needed to survive inside a closed environment.

"I'll finish it," I said.

Leonard's smile faded into a more thoughtful expression.

"And once I solve the scaling problem, the optical damage, the control instability, the energy efficiency, and about seventeen other things currently trying to ruin my life, I'm getting a Nobel Prize for this."

Leonard stared at me.

Then he laughed.

"I'm serious."

"I know," Leonard replied, giving me a weary, sympathetic smile born from years of psychological warfare. "I'm not laughing at you. I live with a guy who is also aiming for a Nobel Prize, and he isn't normal, although he says his mother got him tested as a kid. And compared to him, you look like a normal guy. And if you win a Nobel Prize before him, he will kill himself."

He had that weird bittersweet smile on his face. I could tell that he was imagining Sheldon offing himself.

He continued, "Or, the sheer petty rage will cause him to spontaneously combust right there on the couch. On one hand, I’d love to see it. On the other hand, I’m the one who'd have to vacuum his ashes off the couch."

A knock came from the apartment door.

"New neighbour and Leonard."

Then another. 

"New neighbour and Leonard."

Then a third.

"New neighbour and Leonard."

I looked toward it.

"And here he comes," Leonard said with a heavy sigh.