Artemis

He led me through the entryway and into his lab. The whole place looked different. He’d dedicated the main table to ZAFO analysis and shoved everything else to the walls to make room. Various pieces of equipment (most of it a mystery to me) covered the table.

He bounced from one foot to another. “This is so awesome!”

“Okay, okay,” I said. “What’s got you in such a tizzy?”

He sat on a stool and cracked his knuckles. “First thing I did was visual examination.”

“You looked at it,” I said. “You can just say ‘I looked at it.’?”

“By all accounts it’s a normal, single-mode fiber-optic line. The jacket, buffer, and cladding are all routine. The core fiber is eight microns across—totally normal. But I figured there’d be something special about the core, so I cut up some samples and—”

“You cut it up?” I said. “I didn’t say you could cut it up!”

“Yeah, I don’t care.” He tapped one of the devices on the lab table. “I used this baby to check the core’s index of refraction. That’s a pretty important stat for fiber optic.”

I picked up a five-centimeter snippet of ZAFO from the table. “And you found something weird?”

“Nope,” he said. “It’s 1.458. A little higher than fiber optics usually are, but only by a tiny bit.”

I sighed. “Svoboda, can you skip over the ways it’s normal and just tell me what you found?”

“All right, all right.” He reached over to a handheld device and picked it up. “This baby is how I cracked the mystery.”

“I know you want me to ask what that is, but honestly I don’t—”

“It’s an optical loss test set! OLTS for short. It tells you how much attenuation a fiber-optic cable has. Attenuation is the amount of light that gets lost to heat during transmission.”

“I know what attenuation is,” I said. But it really didn’t matter. Once Svoboda got going there was no stopping him. I’ve never known anyone who loved his work as much as that guy.

He set the OLTS back on the table. “Now, a typical attenuation for a high-end cable is around 0.4 decibels per kilometer. Guess what ZAFO’s attenuation is.”

“No.”

“Go on. Guess.”

“Just tell me.”

“It’s zero. Fucking. Zero!” He formed a circle with his arms. “Zeeeroooo!”

I sat on the stool next to him. “So…no light gets lost in transmission? At all?”

“Right! Well, at least, as far as I can tell. The precision of my OLTS is 0.001 decibels per kilometer.”

I looked at the ZAFO snippet in my hands. “It has to have some attenuation, though, right? I mean, it can’t actually be zero.”

He shrugged. “Superconductors have zero resistance to electrical current. Why can’t there be a material with zero resistance to light?”

“ZAFO…” I rolled the word around in my mouth. “Zero-attenuation fiber optic?”

“Oh!” He smacked his forehead. “Of course!”

“What’s it made of?”

He spun to a wall-mounted machine. “That’s where my spectrometer came in!” He stroked it gently. “I call her Nora.”

“And what did Nora have to say?”

“The core’s mostly glass. No big surprise there, most fiber-optic cores are. But there were also trace amounts of tantalum, lithium, and germanium.”