Jack spent an afternoon with his mom in Germany, and then she had to fly to America the next day to negotiate the takeover of some company or something. Jack never paid much attention to any of that boring financial stuff.
He stayed behind to meet professor Erlson at the university. He was already feeling fed up with traveling, but tried to focus on his paper. It was almost done, but he had no idea what to do with all the info. He supposed he could send it for publishing, but what would that do for him? He had no idea how that worked, and honestly, no desire to find out.
He took a taxi that left him near the engineering faculty, but he would have to find the lab on his own.
Looking at the faculty building, and seeing all the students coming in and out of the classrooms made him nervous. He had only gone to school until he was nine, and had been homeschooled until he was twelve. He had already learned everything up to highschool by then, and classes only served to bore him. The whole idea of even going there to visit was now looking like the worst idea ever. Yes, he did like the professor's research, and had used many of his discoveries in his own robots; but working with him seemed useless and completely unnecessary. He could complete anything on his own given enough time, so why bother going to some stupid lab?
Papers in hand, he made his way through the students and checked the numbers on the doors until he found the one. He stood outside for a moment, thinking that he could still back away now and just tell the professor that he was simply not interested, when someone opened the door from the other side and hit him in the face making him drop his papers.
"Oh, I'm sorry!" said some blonde guy with the ugliest glasses Jack had ever seen. They made his eyes look like they took half of his face.
"What the hell, man?! Be careful dammit!"
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry!", he kept saying, and kneeled down to help Jack pick up everything.
Professor Erlson appeared on the doorway. "What is going on? Oh, Jacob, hi. I expected you a little later. Come on in, I'd like you to meet everybody".
Jack almost growled. Meeting people was very low on his scale of Things He Liked To Do.
The professor took him to the center of the lab. There were about ten people working on different things. Jack recognized the professor's equilibrium test robot that had been aclaimed because it could do ballet poses. If only the professor could see Jack's balance chip that made all movements flow like a dream.
"Alright everybody. Remember how I told you about a few changes we were going to make to our research? Well, this is Jacob Spicer. He has some very interesting tests results with the information from our latest discoveries on the latency booster chip".
"Uhm, Hi... Everyone", on the back, a dark haired woman lifted her eyebrows at him. On the opposite corner, a man and a woman whispered to themselves while looking at his hair, his makeup, his boots...Jack had been there for a full minute, and he already wanted to burn down the whole place. He passed a hand through his hair, trying to calm himself down.
"Please Jack, do you think you could outline - very broadkly, of course-, the things we talked about the other day? Here, have a marker if you want to use the whiteboard".
Jack nodded, pointedly avoiding the stares of everyone around. He left his papers on the table next to him. They were merely a sort of gift for the professor, to be honest. All the information was already on his mind. And so, he took a deep breath, and tried to decide on the best part to start with.
"Alright, so...I started trying the latency booster chip on one of my robots in order to increase the reaction time to stimuli between the movement and the AI data processing," he started writing the starting reaction times. As he wrote numbers, formulas, and test results on the whiteboard, he felt lighter, calmer. He could put order in the world, if only he could understand it.
He talked, explained, detailed the broader aspects of his theories; putting enfasis on all the things that had given him the most trouble.
By the time he got thirsty, sunset light came filtering through the lab windows.
They ordered pizza.
He kept talking.