abheirrant | ❧ i n b o x

[ Qubit barely manages to keep from laughing at the way Carlisle immediately books it under the table, only to emerge peering over the edge like a smaller-nosed Kilroy. He does not manage to keep from grinning, however. ]

Sorry, sorry...! It's called a hologram. A three-dimensional soft-light projection. Totally harmless.

[ To demonstrate, he runs his hand through it, with no effect other than disrupting the beams such that chunks of the planet briefly disappear. ]

You all right down there?

[Oh, so it is harmless, as promised. Carlisle stares at it, wide-eyed, for another moment, his gaze flicking to Qubit and back again.]

O- oh. It's— it's not magic, I know, and you're going to tell me it's not magic, but- but it looks like it. Some- some sort of an apparition or illusion.

[ He glances up at it and shrugs. ] I suppose. Are you that surprised, after the teakettle? "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Arthur C. Clarke, I think.

[ Similar effects, produced by different mechanisms. And Carlisle's not at all unusual for drawing parallels to things he does understand - Qubit was doing the same thing when he tried to explain magic. BUT ANYWAY back to the story. ]

Where was I? Right - so here's the Earth. [ He gives it a spin with a gesture. Damn, that is a sweet Earth, you might say. ROUND,, ]

Let's say you want to mathematically represent a point on its surface. Say, this one. [ He pokes a spot on the east coast of North America, and it lights up orange. ] How do you think you'd go about doing that?

[Sliding out from behind the table as though the hologram might bite him were he to move too quickly, Carlisle studies the glowing, translucent orb.]

You... would have to divide the world into specific segments, like squares on a map. And where they intersect would be the point's designation?

Close! Very close. [ So he's familiar with something like Cartesian coordinates, that's a good start. ] Of course they won't be squares, since the surface is curved, but -

[ Qubit taps a couple of keys on his watch, and the globe redraws itself more abstractly, a plain blue sphere with the continents outlined in green, and a few more elements that get drawn in as he mentions them, sometimes poking the globe and sometimes his watch. ]

Rotational axis, north pole to south. Equator - an orthogonal plane bisecting the axis. They intersect at the center of the planet, we'll make that the origin. [ Represented by another orange dot. ] Lines of latitude - indicating the angle of deflection north or south of the equator. So here's thirty degrees, sixty, and the poles at ninety. Lines of longitude - the angle east or west of an arbitrary Prime Meridian, here. Thirty, sixty, ninety, and they meet at one-eighty. And I should clarify, these are just the conventions in use on my world, yours may be different.

[ Which is a long and excessively pedantic way of saying "yeah, you divide it into segments." They've got a very nice wire-frame Earth now. Good job. ]

However - [ he holds up two fingers. ] - that still only gives us two-dimensional coordinates. What about elevation?

[Though he flinches as the globe redraws itself, Carlisle doesn't nearly jump out of his skin this time. Small steps. He squints as he examines it, tentatively giving the image a prod with his finger.]

Yes, ours are quite different, I believe. I am no cartographer, unfortunately, nor do I know a proper way to measure elevation. For the mountains near my home, we kept such measurements to how long it would take to traverse them on foot, were one foolhardy enough to attempt it.

[ Baby steps! The image, of course, does not bite. Or respond in any way. See, not all technology is out to get you! ]

Hm. "Dead reckoning" in more ways than one. [ Cause... cause if you get it wrong, you're dead. It's mildly amusing, okay. ]

Not quite the level of precision I'm looking for, though. You'd need a proper survey - manual, or via satellite, or a barometric altimeter, properly calibrated, of course. But let's say that's been done, you have that data. Now you can express any position on the planet as a vector in a spherical coordinate system.

[ With his finger, he draws a line connecting the center with the dot on the surface. The surface end has an arrow. ]

The components being, of course, latitude, longitude, and magnitude - your absolute distance from the center of the Earth. Which is preferable to mean sea level, since technically the planet is an oblate spheroid, not a perfect sphere.

[ Still following? Good, cause he's moving right along. ]

So now, let's say you want to be somewhere else. [ He looks up the target coordinates on his watch, and does the math in his head while he's talking. ] All you need to solve for is the transform between this vector and the new one, and that's basic linear algebra.

[ Plugs in his answer, and voila - the vector swings over to a point in central Europe. Qubit smiles, self-satisifed. ]

Child's play.

[Annnnnnd Qubit lost him somewhere, probably right around the time he started talking about barometric altimeters and something about vectors.]

And... what did this Hermann fellow do with such equations, again?

[ ... Okay, yeah, maybe he did get bogged down in the details a bit there. Whatever, it's fine, we'll fix it in post. He was making his way toward the point, though: ]

Oh, he teleported himself to Germany.

To the Oktoberfest?

[He's lucky he can recall that word with how fuzzy the lights in his eyes are. That is some good tea.]

[ A short laugh. ] Not quite. He actually ended up further south, in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. His hometown.

[ Or Earth-β's version, anyway. But homesickness does not make such distinctions. ]

He was still figuring out his power at the time. I believe at this point he'd only worked out teleportation in theory - it was the first time he'd actually done it, and he hadn't meant to. And then he didn't have enough energy to make the return trip, so he asked me to come pick him up.

How utterly terrifying that must be, to accidentally discover the reach of your abilities.

[HE WOULD KNOW.]

The ability to simply go home at will would be quite a boon in this place, though if one wanted to return, it wouldn't be as easy as asking a friend.

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