ADHD Made Me Do It

It was Viktor’s favorite smell. A promise of progress — or at least, interesting failure.

Across the room, Jayce was half-sitting, half-slouching in a chair that had lost a wheel sometime last month. He had one foot braced against a steel table leg for balance as he hunched over a hexgate prototype, magnification lens clipped to his glasses. His sleeves were rolled up, a soldering iron twitching between his fingers like a nervous tic.

"You’re going to bridge those pads if you’re not careful," Viktor said without looking up from his own station. He was debugging the power management subsystem for the seventh time in two days, because the hex-crystal interface kept generating unpredictable voltage spikes.

Jayce grunted. "Bridging builds character."

"And shorts the supply rail," Viktor replied dryly. "Again."

Jayce leaned back just long enough to toss the iron into its cradle and scowl. "If you'd finished the isolation circuit yesterday, I wouldn’t have to be hand-soldering a hundred-micron pitch connector at midnight."

"I did finish it," Viktor said, flipping a page of schematics with a sharp motion. "You simply neglected to install the proper capacitive damping."

Jayce mimicked him under his breath. 'Capacitive damping' — as if Viktor didn’t just invent new electrical terms when it suited him.

Still, he dragged a finger across the datasheet and double-checked the pad assignments. It wasn’t like he wanted another repeat of Monday, when the entire prototype board spontaneously arced and left a neat black scorch mark in the table — shaped, ironically, exactly like his signature.

In fairness, they were attempting something no one had ever done: physically linking an active crystalline matrix (the hexcore) to conventional electrical systems.

It didn’t obey ordinary field equations. Charge separation and conduction behaved... differently. At least when it wasn't just exploding.

Viktor leaned closer to his own monitor, tapping a waveform analyzer rhythmically with a pen.

"The charge accumulation rates are still asymmetrical," he muttered. "There’s a hysteresis curve forming in the gate threshold voltage. Look — here —"

Jayce shoved his chair over with a squeal of metal on concrete. He peered over Viktor’s shoulder, blinking blearily at the graph.

"Holy hell," Jayce said, tone almost admiring. "That’s worse than my last attempt at a bandgap reference."

"You tried to build a bandgap reference?" Viktor asked, turning.

Jayce shrugged. "Once. It caught fire."

Viktor gave a small nod, like this was deeply unsurprising.

"It’s unstable," Viktor continued, pointing to the curve. "Every time the crystal tries to align its internal energy wells to the applied gate bias, it overshoots. Then collapses. Then overshoots again. We’re getting oscillation, but not in any frequency domain we can model."

Jayce rubbed a hand over his face. His fingers came away smudged with solder paste. "Okay. So what you're saying is: normal semiconductor physics just gave up."

"Correct," Viktor said with grim satisfaction. "We must define new boundary conditions."

Jayce made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a groan.

"New boundary conditions. Great. That’s easy. I'll just... pop open the Standard Model and scribble some notes in the margins."

Or, Arthur from the future is trying to make everything right this time with some help (probably from the Triple Goddess and later from Merlin) and pretending to be oblivious to Merlin's magic and protecting him

(to be continued...)