"The decoherence rate is climbing," Aris said, tapping a holographic terminal. "If we don’t stabilize the manifold, the entire facility becomes a superposition. We’ll be everywhere and nowhere by dinner."
Aris exhaled a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. He looked at his hands, relieved to find them opaque and singular. "You traded certainty for a suggestion."
Then, the humming stopped. The tachyon fog settled into a steady, predictable glow. "Manifold stabilized at 99.8%," the computer chimed.
"We need a Zeno-effect lock," Aris proposed. "If we increase the frequency of observation to a near-infinite constant, we can freeze the system in its current state. We stop the decay by never looking away."
The theory that the act of measuring a particle changes its state.
Aris sighed, adjusting his glasses. This was the paradox of the 22nd century. They had built a station capable of folding space-time using Non-Abelian anyons, but they were still limited by the fundamental stubbornness of subatomic particles.
"And burn out the processors in six seconds?" Sarah countered, finally looking up. Her eyes reflected the shifting violet light of the engine core. "We can't brute-force the universe into staying still. We need to go the other way. Weak measurements. We gather just enough data to nudge the probability toward stability without fully collapsing it."
"It’s a gamble," Aris whispered. "If the nudge is too soft, the entropy takes us. If it’s too hard, the station shatters into a billion localized timelines."
