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plate was a problem—then the alignment of the thermionic gun. In a way, it felt like we were partners, almost, Satvik and I. And it was a good feeling. After working so long by myself, it was good to be able to talk to someone.
    We traded stories to pass the time. Satvik talked of his problems. They were the problems good men sometimes have when they’ve lived good lives. He talked about helping his daughter with her homework and worrying about paying for her college. He talked of his family Backhome —saying it fast that way, Backhome , so you heard the proper noun. He talked of the fields and the bugs and the monsoon and the ruined crops. “It is going to be a bad year for sugarcane,” he told me, as if we were farmers instead of researchers. And I could imagine it easily, him standing at the edge of a field. Like it had only been an accident that he’d ended up in this place, this life. He talked about his mother’s advancing years. He talked of his brothers and his sisters and his nieces, and I came to understand the weight of responsibility he felt.
    â€œYou never talk of yourself,” he observed at one point.
    â€œThere’s not much to say.”
    He dismissed that with a wave of a hand. “Everyone has things to say,” he said. “But you keep quiet. You are alone here?”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œNo family? You live alone?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œSo there is only this place.” He gestured around him. “Only work. People forget they are going to die someday. There’s more to life than career and paycheck.” Bending over the gate arrays, soldering tool in hand, he changed the subject. “I talk too much; you must be sick of my voice.”
    â€œNot at all.”
    â€œYou have been a big help with my work. How can I ever repay you, my friend?”
    â€œMoney is fine,” I told him. “I prefer large bills.”
    â€œYou see? Paycheck.” He tsked me softly and bent closer to his work.
    I wanted to tell him of my life.
    I wanted to tell him of my work at QSR, and that some things you learn, you wish you could unlearn. I wanted to tell him that memory has gravity and madness a color; that all guns have names, and it is the same name. I wanted to tell him I understood about his tobacco; that I’d been married once, and it hadn’t worked out; that I used to talk softly to my father’s grave; that it was a long time since I’d really been okay.
    But I didn’t tell him any of those things. Instead, I talked about the experiment. That I could do.
    â€œIt started a half century ago as a thought experiment,” I told him. “It was about proving the incompleteness of quantum mechanics. Physicists felt quantum mechanics couldn’t be the whole story because the analytics takes too many liberties with reality. There was still that impossible incongruity: the photoelectric effect showed light to be particulate—an array of discontinuous quanta; Young’s results said waves. But only one could be right. Later, of course, when technology caught up to theory, it turned out the experimental results followed the math. The math says you can either know the position of an electron or the momentum, but never both.”
    â€œI see.”
    â€œYou’ve heard of the tunneling effect?” I asked.
    â€œIn electronic systems, there is something called tunneling leakage.”
    â€œIt rises out of the same principle.”
    â€œAnd relates to this?”
    â€œThe math, it turns out, isn’t metaphor at all. The math is dead serious. It’s not screwing around.”
    Satvik frowned as he went back to his soldering. “One should strive to know the world accurately.” A few minutes later, while making careful adjustments to his field gates, he traded his story for mine.
    â€œThere once was a guru who brought four princes into the forest,” he told me. “They