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Only one person could possibly be responsible for the loud, non-stop knocking on Hinoko's dormitory door. "Yuuta, it's open!" she called out, and almost before she was done, he'd come in and shut the door. Not for the first time, her boyfriend was clothed in sweaty training gear, had a giant grin plastered across his face, and was spinning a DVD on his finger.
"Hinoko, I've got it. This is fabulous, you won't believe it! I have to show you... can I use your computer?"
"Breathe, honey." He stopped talking, but the huge smile wasn't going away any time soon, and from the look of his cheeks he'd run all the way from somewhere. Farther than from his own dorm, certainly, since he could run that distance without breaking a sweat. With a shake of her head, she stacked the papers full of calculations she'd finished and saved the problem models open on her computer. Inui-sensei wouldn't need those until next Monday. "Go ahead, show me."
The stream of speech started again as he loaded the DVD into her disc drive and started playing the video. "I can't believe the answer has been in front of me the whole time, since I was a kid! Grinning like a madman..." She watched him patiently, somewhat amused. Yuuta was always so cute when he had breakthroughs. He turned to look her in the eyes, all seriousness for a split second. "And meowing like a cat, actually..." He broke into his usual ebullient Eureka Laugh when she giggled. "Oh, look... here it goes..."
The video display showed one of Yuuta's many friends who played tennis professionally -- Kikumaru-san, his older brother's former teammate -- playing tennis against an unseen opponent -- opponents, probably, since it looked like they were playing with two tennis balls -- in the large lab room Yuuta had been setting up and calibrating for over a month with his 'Lab Asses' -- the first and second year students he'd tapped to assist on the project. There were four camera angles, a pressure distribution graphic for Kikumaru-san's location on the court area, a velocity read-out, among other numbers, and a computer motion capture display. Kikumaru seemed to be playing a normal game of high-level tennis when he suddenly--
Well, she wasn't quite sure what to call it.
"There? Did you see that?" her boyfriend crowed. "He just blipped!" Hinoko blinked at the displays while Yuuta paused the video, rewound, and played it again on one-sixteenth speed. It had looked like Kikumaru-san had teleported from one side of the court to the other, a phenomenon that she'd heard comments about on sports telecasts, although networks rarely tried to show it anymore after all the complaints they'd gotten about how the footage must have been edited to look more sensational than it was. Kikumaru Eiji, all the announcers said, was capable of such incredible bursts of speed, he appeared to be in two places at once... but that wasn't speed. She may not have studied quantum superpositioning for four years like Yuuta had, but she knew the difference between movement and what looked like teleportation. Even if she hadn't, there wasn't a single indication on the pressure display that he'd run through the intervening space. He'd just... been in one place, and blipped into another, as Yuuta so eloquently put it.
The slow motion playback showed the same blip. There were no blurs from one position to the other. On just one frame, he seemed to be in both positions, a blurry ghost of a figure on both sides of the court. Pointing at the two ghosts, Yuuta said, "That's because he was on the left for the first part of the frame and on the right for the second part, I think. I want a faster camera, but I bet that still happens. The visual effect on the recording has got to be instantaneous--"
"But how did he get there? Don't tell me he can actually teleport."
Yuuta's grin was so wide, you would have thought he was a five year old seeing a candy store for the first time. "He was there the whole time." Leaving the video paused on the two Kikumarus, Yuuta mimed a tennis game in the middle of the floor. "It looked like he was in both spots while we were playing... once I correlate the data from the Lab Asses who were tracking the individual instances, this could be enough to crack the theory of macro level superpositioning and uncertainty and-- but I just had to show you now. Only one of him shows up! Only the one who hits the ball! And when the one that's there on the tape can't be the one hitting the ball, then he's the other him!" He laughed out loud, setting the video to play at 1/4 speed. Hinoko watched another shift in slow motion, still not sure if she could believe her eyes. Kikumaru-san's body popped into existence, perfectly set to hit the ball, as he popped out of existence at his previous location. There was no similarity in body positioning. It looked as if two tapes of the same player had been perfectly spliced, except for that one frame of blur where both positions were recorded. A movie studio could do something like that with a month or two of work, but Yuuta had timestamps on his recording that showed it'd been taken within the hour -- not that her boyfriend would ever fake lab footage for an experiment!
"One of him! In two places!"
"Okay, but... What does that mean?" Anyone with eyes and half a brain could tell this was something, but she wasn't going to try and guess at the ramifications without the benefit of the specialized physics classes Yuuta had been taking.
His face was glowing with an infectious smile as he came to a stop. "Maybe interstellar communications with no time delay? Faster than light travel? Global navigation without satellites? I have no idea where it ends!" Pulling her up off her chair, Yuuta caught her by the waist and pulled her close. Girls whose genius physicist boyfriends didn't come back from the lab wearing sweaty tennis clothes couldn't possibly know what they were missing. "But I'm going to find out," he whispered, "and it's going to be the biggest thing since Heisenberg met Born..." With a kiss on her forehead, he said, "I know I'll want a brilliant chemist on my team, too..."
She met his bright grin with a bit of confusion, "What for?" It was true, she hadn't decided which of the three chemical engineering sites who'd recruited her she wanted to work with, and if there was something she and Yuuta could collaborate on, it was sure to be interesting enough to tempt her (assuming Yuuta's footage did better with the funding grant approval boards than sports networks did with convincing tennis fans that Kikumaru-san was a real life miracle), but nothing she'd studied had ever come up in his lab stories.
"Well..." He blinked at her, biting his lip in that way that made him look adorably perplexed. "To be my wife. And, you know, talk to about things after work and have ideas with." Then he had a look of realization. It must have been the shock in her eyes that tipped him off. "Crap. I haven't asked you yet, have I?"
Even saying, No, you haven't, was a bit much to consider just then.
Yuuta grabbed his head between both hands. "I forgot! I was going to do it next week at the park, I'm sorry! I mean, I'm not sorry... I just thought... I mean, I hoped... I mean..."
Words were still failing her. Hinoko was a little afraid that if she opened her mouth the only thing that would come out would be an indistinct high-pitched noise. Yuuta took a deep breath to calm himself down, kneeling down with an expression that was at once thrilled and terrified, taking one of her hands in his right and reaching for his pocket with his left.
"Watanabe Hinoko..." Then his mouth froze as the blood drained from his face and he patted the empty pocket, looking down in horror. "Oh no..." He stood up abruptly, turning towards the door and then back in a flash. "I came straight from the lab, it's still in my room... I'll..."
As he started to back away, he held out one arm to her, motioning to stay put. Her hands flew up to her mouth with a laugh. "Don't... move... okay?" He stopped his exit just once more to run back and kiss her, then dashed back to the door. "Just... stay right there. I'll be back in five minutes."
She could hear his footsteps halfway down the hall almost as soon as the door closed, and thundering down the stairs not long after. Hands shaking, Hinoko pulled out her cell phone. Texting absolutely all her friends and family in the next four minutes and fifty seconds in no way counted as moving.