Plundering Multiversal Technology, Starting from Marvel Chapter 106 105: A Live Audience — Holographic Projection

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The lecture hall was, by every asurable standard, on fire.

"How is it actually him?"

"Our departnt's reputation is unreal. We pulled rcer. Hartwell pulled Ethan rcer. Take that, Grandfield."

"I have a story I am going to tell at every dinner party for the rest of my life."

In the third row, Lucas Bray sat in the kind of contemplative stillness that suggested several layers of his soul were processing in parallel.

The shock of recognition was the surface layer. The realization that he had spent two hundred marks buying a al for Ethan rcer was the next layer down. Beneath that was the slow, deeply unpleasant mory of his exact words from earlier — don't let see this teacher in private, I'll teach him a lesson about respect — replaying in his head with embarrassing clarity.

He had said this. To Ethan rcer. To Ethan rcer's actual face. While Ethan rcer was eating noodles four tables away.

If Ethan decided to make this awkward, the awkwardness would be cosmic.

To his right, Helena Marsh had her hands flat on her desk, her gaze fixed forward, and the specific composed posture of a young woman who had decided to ride out her embarrassnt with as much dignity as the situation allowed. Her face was still slightly red. She was, however, no longer making any sounds, which Lucas regarded as progress.

To Lucas's left, Daria Pierce had her cheeks pink with delighted excitent. She was, of the three of them, having by far the best afternoon. The fact that she had managed to have an actual, friendly, person-to-person conversation with Ethan rcer over noodles — without realizing who he was, without performing for the cara, without any of the social distortion that ca from knowing she was talking to a celebrity — was, in retrospect, an extrely lucky thing.

"Ethan rcer." She said it under her breath, as if testing whether the words could be true.

"Mmm hmm," Helena said.

"He paid for his own noodles. Or didn't. Or whatever. Lucas paid. He was normal. He talked to like a normal person."

"He IS a normal person, Daria."

"He invented Bumblebee."

"Yes."

"He flew at Mach 6."

"Yes."

"He just walked into our atomic physics seminar."

Helena rubbed her temples.

"Daria, sweetheart, you're spiraling."

"I'm not spiraling. I'm processing."

"Process more quietly."

-----

Outside the lecture hall, Professor Greaves and several of the senior faculty had gathered in the hallway, watching through the small window in the door.

The room they were observing was loud. Not in a disrespectful way. In the specific buzzing-with-life way of a hundred and forty undergraduates who had just received the surprise of their academic lives and were collectively trying to recalibrate.

Greaves was experiencing a complicated feeling.

It had been seventeen years since his "Atomic Physics" course had filled this lecture hall. Maybe more. Hartwell undergraduates were intelligent, dedicated, hardworking — and uniformly bored stiff by lectures. He had accepted this as a fact of his profession. Students, no matter how bright, did not respond enthusiastically to two hours of equations and theoretical fraworks. They sat. They took notes. They waited for the bell.

The students inside this lecture hall were not waiting for the bell.

They were vibrating.

The kind of attentive, ready-to-engage energy that Greaves had not seen in an undergraduate audience in his entire career was visibly radiating through the glass.

He watched Ethan tap the microphone, address the room, and watched the noise level drop instantly to silence. Without a word from the dean. Without a request for quiet. The simple act of a young man at the front of the room signaling that he was ready to begin had brought a hundred and forty undergraduates to attention faster than any of Greaves's thirty years of pedagogical authority had ever managed.

The professor next to him cleared his throat.

"Sherman."

"Mm."

"He's good at the room."

Greaves did not respond imdiately.

"That doesn't an he can teach. Engaging an audience is one skill. Conveying technical content is another."

"He hasn't started teaching yet."

"That's exactly my point."

But Greaves's voice was, he could hear, less certain than it had been an hour ago.

-----

Inside the lecture hall, Ethan was working through his opening.

"Students. I know most of you probably already know who I am, but introductions matter, so I'll do this properly."

He took a beat.

"My na is Ethan rcer. Born in Millbrook County, raised in Ashford City. I'm the listed inventor on the patents for the miniaturized fusion reactor, the Frontier-class powered armor series, the super soldier serum, and the Transforr line."

"All of that, you can find online. Let share sothing you can't."

He clicked the lapel mic.

"I am eighteen years old. I am currently single. I am very enthusiastic about eting nice young won, and my preferred type is the kind, intellectually curious, family-oriented sort. If you have any classmates who fit that description, please feel free to forward my contact information."

The lecture hall exploded.

It was the laughing kind of explosion this ti — not the shocked kind. A hundred and forty undergraduates losing their composure simultaneously at the realization that the most accomplished physicist of his generation had just opened his Hartwell teaching career by trying to set up a dating arrangent with the student body.

"Oh my GOD."

"Did he just—"

"He's eighteen. He's a TEACHER. He's a teacher AND he's eighteen AND he's asking us to set him up?"

"Solidarity to all the single guys in this room. Today is a hard day for our prospects."

In the third row, Daria Pierce had clapped both hands over her mouth and was making small, slightly alard sounds. Helena Marsh's posture had not changed, but her ears had gone a shade darker. Lucas Bray, observing this, felt his afternoon deteriorate further.

On the stage, Ethan was grinning.

"Now that we've established that. Welco to atomic physics. My class doesn't have a lot of formal rules. I'll teach at my own pace. If you have questions, raise them whenever they co up. We're going to spend a lot of ti together this term, so I'd rather we develop real conversations than try to maintain a strict lecture format."

Through the small window in the door, Greaves saw the body language of every undergraduate in the room shift forward. The audience had been engaged before. Now they were attentive.

The professor next to Greaves said nothing. He didn't need to. Greaves had seen, very clearly, what had just happened.

The young man at the podium had, in his first ninety seconds, established more rapport with this lecture hall than Greaves had managed to establish with any of his classes in the last decade.

It was annoying.

It was also, Greaves was beginning to admit privately, impressive.

-----

On the stage, Ethan was already taking the first round of questions.

A forest of hands had shot up the mont he'd opened the floor, and he scanned the room trying to figure out where to start. He was about to point to a student in the second row when his peripheral vision caught the three familiar faces from the noodle restaurant.

He smiled.

"If I rember correctly, your na is Daria, isn't it?"

Daria Pierce, who had been sitting with her hands still partially over her mouth, made a tiny, choked sound and stood up so fast she nearly knocked her chair over.

"Yes, Mr. rcer."

"You had a question?"

She had not, actually, had her hand up. But she pulled herself together with admirable speed.

"Yes! Yes, I do. Why did you co to Hartwell to teach?"

It was the kind of question a journalism student would ask. Polite, broad, designed to give the speaker space to reflect. The classroom tilted toward Ethan, expecting one of those pleasant institutional answers about prestige, intellectual heritage, the importance of education.

Ethan composed his expression into sothing solemn.

"Hartwell University is the most prestigious institution of higher learning in the Republic. Its tradition of academic excellence, its contributions to the national scientific landscape, and the quality of its students have made it a destination I have long aspired to. To take a teaching position here is the honor of my career."

He held the solemn expression for exactly one beat.

"All of that, of course, is what you'd put in a press release."

The classroom leaned back in.

"The actual reason is that I went too hard on my research budget over the last year, my company's incorporation paperwork is still in processing, and my personal bank account is in a regrettable state. Hartwell offered a stipend. I took it. I'm here for the als."

The lecture hall howled.

In the third row, Helena Marsh actually laughed — a short, startled laugh that escaped before she could suppress it. She imdiately tried to clamp it down, but the damage was done. Daria, beside her, gave her a delighted, knowing look.

Below the stage, Dean Sutton was massaging his temple with his thumb and forefinger. The expression on his face was the carefully composed expression of a man who knew exactly what was happening and had decided, for reasons of professional dignity, not to laugh.

In the hallway, Greaves watched the lecture hall lose its collective composure and felt the last of his resistance to this appointnt quietly evaporate.

Whatever this teenager was, "boring" was not in the catalog.

-----

Daria sat back down, pink-cheeked and beaming.

A wave of new hands shot up.

"Mr. rcer—"

"Mr. rcer, my question—"

"Please pick , Mr. rcer—"

Ethan held up both hands.

"Easy. Easy. We have ti. But I want to actually start the lecture too — Dean Sutton is sitting right down there, and if I spend the first half of class workshopping my dating profile, he's going to have words for afterward."

In the front row, Sutton lifted one hand in acknowledgnt without changing expression.

"So let's get started. We're going to spend the next two hours on atomic physics, but I want to do it a bit differently from how the textbook handles it."

He bent down and reached into his backpack.

The students leaned forward. He'd been carrying a sleek black backpack with him onto the stage, and they had been quietly speculating, ever since he sat it on the lectern, what was inside it.

Ethan removed five palm-sized devices. Each one was matte black, smoothly contoured, with a single softly-glowing blue indicator on the front face. They looked, to most of the students, like high-end consur electronics.

He walked the periter of the lecture hall and placed them at five precisely-spaced points around the room — corners, plus a fifth at the front of the hall. Then he returned to the podium.

"Could the students nearest the door please get the lights for ?"

A student near the rear flicked the master switch. The lecture hall went dim. Only the projection screen at the front and the faint glow of the five devices remained lit.

Ethan tapped his watch.

"Whenever you're ready, J.A.R.V.I.S."

A confident, deeply pleasant synthetic voice erged from the lecture hall's speakers.

"Of course, sir. Holographic projection initializing now."

The five devices brightened.

A column of soft blue light erged from each unit and reached toward the center of the room, where the five beams t, knotted, and blood.

The bloom was not a screen. It was a space.

The center of the lecture hall — the volu of empty air directly above the desks of the students in the middle rows — filled with an enormous, three-dinsional, photorealistic structure. A model of an atom. But not a textbook diagram of an atom. A real-ti, physically accurate, dinsionally correct representation of an atomic nucleus, suspended in the air, glowing softly, rotating in slow, precise revolutions.

Around the nucleus, electrons traced their orbital probability clouds in shimring blue veils. Each orbital was rendered with the fine-grained accuracy of actual quantum chanical solutions to the Schrödinger equation. The s-orbital. The p-orbitals in their dumbbell pairs. The complex cloverleaves of the d-orbitals.

The model was breathing. It was responsive. As Ethan stepped forward, the holographic atom adjusted its rotation slightly, the way a real object would shift perspective as a viewer moved.

The lecture hall went absolutely silent.

This was not the kind of "3D projection" technology that consur electronics companies had been advertising for the past five years. Those projections required special glasses, dim rooms, and perspectives that only worked from a single seat. They were marketing demos with limited application.

What hung above the lecture hall right now had no glasses, no fixed perspective, no dependence on viewer angle. It was visible from every seat. It looked solid. It moved like a real object.

It was real enough that several students in the front row flinched when one of the orbital probability clouds passed near them.

"Holy—"

"This is — what is this technology? What — how—"

"This is real-ti three-dinsional rendering. With nothing in our line of sight. There's no projection screen. There's nothing in the way. How is the image forming?"

"I'm watching this and my brain refuses to accept that it's actually here."

"I'm coming to every class. I'm dropping every other course. I'm coming to every class."

In the back row, a student fumbled out his phone to record. A second later, three more phones ca out. Then ten. Then a wave.

Ethan, on the stage, glanced at Sutton.

The dean's mouth was slightly open.

In the hallway, Greaves had pressed his nose to the small window in the door and was staring at the holographic atom above his classroom with the helpless, undignified astonishnt of a man who had just realized his entire career's understanding of pedagogical technology had been outdated by a single afternoon.

The professor next to him made a soft, awestruck sound.

"Oh."

"Oh my."

Greaves did not respond.

He didn't need to.

On the stage, Ethan smiled and turned to the levitating atom.

"All right. Let's begin. This is a hydrogen atom. It is the simplest object in the universe. Today, in this classroom, we're going to take it apart down to its most fundantal components."

He raised one hand, and the atom rotated obediently in response, the orbital probability clouds flaring slightly.

"Pay attention. We're starting at the beginning."

The lecture hall, for the first ti in any of its students' mories, did not have to be told to pay attention.

It was already paying attention.