Oisin/Introduction

Oisin Cartwright, born to a working class London-Irish family, went to college on a scholarship at the turn of the 21st Century. His dissertation thesis on Computer Science and Physics, which dealt with the complex and absurdly esoteric nature of the blurred domain that occurs at the nanometer die print in circuitry, required him to fundamentally shift his understanding of the workings of the world. It started with him talking to himself about this understanding, in his undergraduate shared lab, in front of the black board. Physics equations, circuit diagrams and eventually he ran afoul of Clarke's second Law. The circuit should not work, "Of course it should", but it violates the laws of physics, the probability wave can't sustain. "Sure it can, you're just looking at it from one order of cardinality too low in the dimensional chain." He began hearing the responses, but of course at the start he rationalised it as just getting into the zone.

Schrodinger, which the voice materialised as, guided him through the process of realising Clarke's third law and he produced a perfectly profane chip that did a fraction of what his understanding allowed. It was only a year after his Undergraduate was finished, when he had an office of his own as a postgraduate researcher, that he realised; actually a floating ball of the raw intersection between physics and computer science probably shouldn't be talking to him and, if normies are right, he shouldn't be talking back. He never thought of it as madness, never as a nervous breakdown. And it wasn't until the faculty advisor, another VA, saw the doodle he'd put on the wall of his office having accidentally run out of space on a white board that he was actually entered into formal tutelage which progressed as his research did.

Having a language as esoteric as computer physics allowed for the conversations to occur in the canteen, when the science is so hard to understand that you need a masters to know the vocabulary let alone the syntax, you know that the difference between "system of magic" and "branch of physics" is arbitrary and moot. So he's been a professional Research Associate for most of his adult life, seldom looking for top billing on a research paper but happy to have his name on the list. And mostly happy to just have access to the univeristy's laboratories and engineering faculties so that he can build his own projects.