Reya was unimpressed with her internship. This was the last week of it, and she was looking forward to packing and getting out. Packing didn't require business attire. Packing wasn't social. She was so tired of being social.
The title of the internship was impressive: Research Fellow at the Nuclear Council of Europe Center for Quantum Research. The duties were equally unimpressive. Reya's put in six years of schooling, a nearly-complete master's degree, and two years of internship had given her a badge of status: Chief of the Interns. Trainer to the newbies. Leader of the tours.
Heaven forbid someone actually learn something while working for free.
Today was her last day of being social, and she mused about her upcoming free time while tugging against a pair of too-snugly fitted off-white pants. She wasn't about to change her outfit, so the pants would be going on no matter what.
Such was the way of the physical sciences these days. It took a PhD before you could really even begin to think about quantum gravity wells and annihilative residue. The math was getting endlessly knotted and complex -- a mirror of reality on the smallest scale, where space itself formed knots, with invisible, probabilistic whirlpools and wave energy junctions that expanded into eddies and currents and finally settled into some form of measurable, consistent reality. Rena had come here to get ideas for her dissertation, researching the relative strength of competing massless quantum gravities, an idea based on the NCEU lead researcher's occasional un-erased whiteboard notes. It had turned out that all massless gravities were equally non-potent, which was a fair but predictable result, and enough to earn a degree.
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Her shuttle arrived. The dormitories were only a four minute walk from the main building, but the empty automatic shuttle was cozy in the way a taxi ride with a quiet drive could be cozy, and it had tinted windows, which allowed her eyes some respite from the harsh morning sun. She ran her fingers through her hair pensively. It was an important day for the NCEU. Some politicians were coming to check in to see if they could reclaim some public dollars. Budget questions would be answered by accountants, research questions would be answered by senior researchers, and the tour would take double or triple the usual time, which, when summed up, could take possibly two hours. She didn't particularly mind. It was her last tour. She was excited.