"So, these 'next projects' that rewrite the future," Jenna said, her voice a calm counterpoint to Elian's barely contained excitement, yet carrying an unmistakable edge. "The fusion, the neural interfaces, terraforming... you're telling me you have all that in your head, courtesy of your cosmic vending machine, and your first thought was not to tell me?"
Elian adjusted his lab coat like it might help with the heat rising in his face. He leaned against the doorframe of Jenna's office, which was rapidly turning into their war room. "It's not that I didn't want to. I just… you know, had to triple-check it wasn't a hallucination brought on by sleep deprivation and caffeine poisoning."
She reached him, her expression a mix of exasperation and something akin to a frustrated affection. Without a word, she flicked his forehead lightly, but with enough force to make him wince.
"Fine," she said, though her voice still held a warning tone. "I forgive you. But don't ever lie or hide things from me again. Understand?"
Elian, rubbing his forehead, managed a weak smile. "Yes, ma'am."
Jenna pinched the bridge of her nose, a familiar gesture. "Okay. Fine. We're here now. But you realize what this means, right? Beyond the Nobel Prize and rewriting the future?"
"Global energy disruption? New materials revolution? Electric vehicles that don't need charging for days? A Nobel prize, maybe?" Elian offered, a hopeful glint in his eye.
She gave him a flat look. "Paperwork, Elian. It means mountains of paperwork. And lawyers. Lots and lots of lawyers."
He groaned, leaning back in his chair with a dramatic sigh that almost upset a precarious stack of theoretical physics journals. "Of course it does."
"Two patents, minimum," she said, tapping a pen rhythmically against the desk. "Maybe more, depending on how we structure the claims. We'll need international coverage, IP lawyers who understand bleeding-edge physics, probably a holding entity for legal protection, and—God help us—filing fees that will make your 'forty-three euros and seventeen cents' look like pocket change for a chewing gum."
"Can't we just… like, science our way out of bureaucracy?" he pleaded, looking genuinely pained.
"Only if your next invention is a time machine specifically designed to skip the patent office line. Which, honestly, wouldn't surprise me at this point."
The Application Gauntlet
They spent the next week navigating the hellscape of technical documentation. Time became a blur of legal jargon, scientific precision, and lukewarm coffee.
Jenna handled the legal logistics like a seasoned war general marshalling troops. She fired off emails to every university legal contact she knew, scheduled late-night calls with hesitant intellectual property attorneys, and cross-referenced filing systems between the USPTO, WIPO, and the EUIPO until her eyes blurred. Her AI training made her frighteningly efficient at navigating complex, poorly designed digital interfaces.
Elian, meanwhile, was relegated to assembling the technical diagrams and writing up the theoretical background. This was his comfort zone, but even he found it challenging. The system-optimized schematics were so elegant, so fundamentally right, that translating them into human-readable, legally defensible "proprietary modeling algorithms" felt like trying to draw a hypercube with a crayon.
"Your capacitor diagram looks like alien runes," Jenna muttered at one point, peering over his shoulder.
"Then I'm doing it right," Elian replied, adjusting a particularly intricate connection.
They argued over everything: the precise phrasing for the claims, the infuriatingly specific diagram formats required by each patent office, and whether it was pretentious or accurately descriptive to call a certain lattice configuration "quantum-sculpted."
Jenna won that one. It was now "phase-aligned electron lattice." "Sounds less like you're trying to sell crystals at a spiritual retreat," she'd explained.
Sleep Is for the Weak
By the fourth night, Elian had stopped sleeping entirely and started muttering complex formulas in his dreams, sometimes waking himself up with a sudden, muttered correction. Jenna kept a thermos of espresso on permanent standby and had officially declared a personal war on two government portals that crashed without fail every time they tried to upload supporting documents exceeding 50 MB.
They submitted the patent applications just before dawn on a Thursday, the digital confirmations blinking triumphantly on their screens.
Elian stared at the "Submission Complete" screen like it was the face of God, or perhaps a particularly enticing cup of coffee. "I feel like I just wrote a thesis," he mumbled, his voice hoarse.
"You did," Jenna said, standing and stretching her back with a series of satisfying cracks. "Two of them, practically. For a hostile audience that doesn't speak physics, or sanity."
They high-fived weakly, the kind of tired slap that sounded like wet paper hitting a desk.
Aftermath
"So… what now?" Elian asked, blinking blearily at the first rays of sunrise painting the lab windows.
"Now we wait," Jenna said, already digging through her inbox for new fires to put out. "And while we wait, we prep the academic papers. You know the drill: citations, peer review, graphs that make our colleagues so jealous they'll spontaneously combust."
Elian groaned again and buried his head in his arms on the desk. "More paperwork."
"Welcome to science," Jenna added, patting his shoulder with a surprising gentleness.
He peeked up at her, one eye open. "You're enjoying this way too much."
"I am," she said with zero shame, a wide, genuine smile spreading across her face. "Watching you suffer through bureaucracy is the highlight of my academic career. Almost as good as watching you try to model string theory on a napkin."
System Notification (Private)
[Patent Submitted. Innovation Verified.]
[+6 System Points Earned.]
[Unlock Available: Tech Tree Branch – Energy Infrastructure.]
[Suggestion: Commercial Pathways Recommended. Explore Funding Options.]
Elian smiled faintly as the words flickered behind his eyes. He'd handled the impossible science. Survived the soul-crushing bureaucracy. And now… the world was about to change.
One form at a time.