She stopped. Because the man had written something on the page that made her entire lecture irrelevant.
She approached. Slowly. Her thick body moved across the room, her skirt brushing against the floating objects. She leaned over his shoulder. Her glasses slid down her nose. She pushed them up. She leaned closer.
The formula on the page was hers. Not copied — reconstructed. The man had independently derived the formula she'd been working on for three years. The same variables. The same structure. The same dead end — the point where the soul substrate failed to maintain coherence, where the dead couldn't be truly resurrected, only animated.
But he hadn't stopped there.
