"I had trapped the atom in the mid-air. Colleagues called my Lutece Field "quantum levitation", but in fact, it was nothing of the sort. Magicians levitate. My atom simply failed to fall. If an atom could be suspended indefinitely, well - why not an apple? If an apple, why not a city?"
Rosalind Lutece replayed the voxophone for what felt like a millionth time while staring into the ocean.
She didn't even know why this was a good place to think about one's personal achievements. After all, the dreadful newfound statue was there, holding its torch and its book, almost as a mockery of explorers. Of course, it should be noted that Rosalind was not an explorer of the traditional sea-faring sort, but rather one employing the scientific method. Though, she was always the one to look into the future and imagine what her discoveries could lead into.
A floating city not unlike New York would truly be a marvelous sight to behold for anyone who was to step into it. Unfortunately, without any sort of sponsor, Rosalind's experiments with the Lutece particle remained confined in her lab, closed behind two pairs of doors so that no intruder could ever reach her secrets. She only ever shared the results, already rigorously processed and written down on actual paper, to be peer reviewed by her colleagues.
With those experiments in mind, Rosalind looked away from the dull copper of the statue and headed back to her home.
The Lutece Laboratory was a rather unusual home, in that it doubled as a shop of scientific equipment. When a visitor opened its doors, they weren't immediately greeted with a recognizable living space, but rather with a counter. The two side doors in this front room were usually closed, but were wide open during business hours, and were covered with various glass containers. It wasn't only scientists who needed them; they also served some people in an everyday kitchen, as a counterpart to the usual boring aluminum tools. Thus, Rosalind Lutece had an additional source of profit to support herself.
However, once she stepped through the other pair of doors, an entirely different life was unveiled. This was Rosalind's actual home, and the objects that were hung there were sure to represent that. A staircase leading to the second floor, which hosted Rosalind's bed. Various chalkboards, noting the discoveries made with the Lutece particle. A library's worth of books, most on the subject of quantum mechanics, but also featuring miscellaneous non-fiction and, extraordinarily rarely, fiction. Pictures of Rosalind's life during her school and university years, the colleagues that she had met during her years and the original barn where she was raised as a lone child and sole heiress.
With all this in mind, Rosalind deeply exhaled and sat down on the backroom, observing the Lutece particle, still afloat at a fixed height. Being sure to discard everything that she thought, she set down the voxophone on one of the chalkboards, not even caring about the fact she dropped the audio recording device onto the floor, and set out to look at the particle, rendered visible by a small object - one of those peculiar "snowglobes" that seemed to make the rounds both on this and the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
That was when she noticed that the Lutece particle had been behaving rather weirdly.
Being shaken out of its still position every now and then, as one could tell by the snow consistently falling and then rising to its original place, the object had been fluctuating between two positions. Rosalind was quick to notice that this fluctuation wasn't regular, either; rather, there seemed to be longer and shorter disturbances, as well as longer and shorter pauses between the agitated states. The young woman picked up the snowglobe and went into the second floor, setting the glass dome back to its original position by her bedside, and instead plugged out an "incandescent light bulb" from the wires that would otherwise give it electricity to run. She then went back downstairs and set the bulb onto the particle. Surely enough, the object continued to float, but was also giving out a very clear signal that the scientist could observe.
Rosalind erased what had been written on the chalkboard, most likely as it was already written down on one of the notebooks, and started noting the pattern of the particle's states. She quickly noted that the "on" states had little variation to them, as there was only a shorter signal (denoted as an "S") and a longer signal (denoted as an "L"). Midway through writing this, though, she had noticed something, and briefly stopped in realization.
Morse code.
Rosalind erased the former writing on the board, instead noting the pattern with dots and dashes. She also noted the longer pauses via forward slashes, and the longest pauses of all, which seemed to last for a good two seconds, as double forward slashes. This was by no means the standard way of noting down Morse code, but it would help in decoding.
After several minutes of writing down the code, though, Rosalind realized that it was repeating, as if the joker who felt it was a good prank to encode the message in the first place really wanted her attention and was sure to make the message clear to her. She noted that the message was in fact a loop via a pair of brackets, then went upstairs again and rummaged through her library to search for the book on telecommunications that she picked up.
Thinking something along the lines of it is the most convenient way to transfer information when all that is available is an "on" and "off" state, Rosalind opened the page where the precise guide to the alphabet was given, and went back downstairs to finally decode the message. The first "letter" that she had written down had translated to a "T", and thus Rosalind erased the dash, replacing it with the letter. The next symbol was a single dot, and thus was an "E"...
The message now stood decoded, before Rosalind. Immediately, she noticed that she had gotten the precise point of the breaking of the loop wrong; indeed, there was a fraction bar symbol in the message that indicated that the message needed to be broken up here. With this correction in mind, Rosalind placed the first four letters and the full stop of the message at the end, and now she was able to try and discern the message's meaning.
Hello, I am Robert Lutece.
Robert Lutece? Rosalind had known no family member who would have this name. Then again, she didn't know many details about her lineage in general; she had been admitted into university due to her performance at school and the support from the school's funds, rather than a more direct financing from any of her relatives, and frankly, no relatives seemed to her as likely candidates for a fate similar to Rosalind's.
And yet, here he was. Robert Lutece was likely observing the particle from another place on the Earth, or - if the rumors had truly been confirmed and there was no Robert Lutece from the Earth - from an alternate Earth. Rosalind was never a huge fan of the multiverse theory, but if her fears were confirmed, maybe now was the time to reconsider it.
Quickly writing down the message to relay to the mysterious Robert fellow, Rosalind went looking for notes that would help her confirm or deny the hypothesis.
Rosalind returned to the Lutece Laboratory, feeling partially satisfied with the answer that she got, partially feeling down. As she had gotten confirmation from the staff of the university, there was no other member of any extended Lutece family studying right now, and therefore it really meant that Robert was indeed from another Earth. Rosalind tried to picture this other Earth in her head: an alternate Paris, an alternate New York and people living in those cities, among whom was some sort of alternate Lutece family that...
The student dropped her notebook in a brief flash of epiphany.
It was a brief episode, while she was back in her family, youthful and curious as ever. She did not quite know what she was thinking, but the matter of fact was that she asked: "If I ever had a brother, what would he be named?"
"Well, Robert sounds like a nice name, doesn't it?" Her father had answered, and her mother had agreed.
Knocked back to the present, Rosalind had finally realized. Robert was indeed some sort of her alternate universe brother, one that she never had, but one that she could and definitely was going to establish contact with.
Rosalind immediately began working on a device that could successfully alter the Lutece particle between the two observed states. She pulled out a wrench from a drawer, almost stepping on the voxophone and putting the chalkboard to the side, where there was only the message, awaiting encoding:
Hello, Robert. I am Rosalind Lutece. Aren't we related?
Author's idiotisms: There you have it. My first actual Lutece story. Are you satisfied with this transfer of fandom?