"Okay." 

"...I mean, if that's all right with you." Shrug.

"I mean, people have asked questions, but there is a lot going on right now to blame it on. I can do that."

"Thanks."

Kefin comes back over and adds Mars-magic-simulation features and explains how he's doing that and practices his classical Greek.

"So, uh, Miranda says that you helped with the warp engine prototype, which was in your basement."

"Oh! So Father's the one who figured out the warp equations, and what they probably meant, but at that time we were unclear on whether a warp field could actually be sustained for longer than a microsecond in a particle accelerator or something, and, well, they're not dangerous on their own -"

"For that you'd need the antimatter?"

"Yeah. So he took it to me and he's like 'I don't want to publish yet, I feel like it'd be morally obligatory to publish what we've got if we can't figure it all out within a couple months but I think we get a couple months, that's fair, right' - I think that's what he said, I was kind of just staring at them - 

- and then we got to work. In the basement."

"You did have some contingency for if a meteor fell on your house or something, right -"

"Since, uh, Evalee, he's had all his notes stored offsite to be published if he died or was arrested. We talked about whether 'dump it on the internet' was the best backup plan but we figured that under most circumstances where we suddenly died we didn't want Anitam in particular having it."

"I guess that makes sense. Since Evalee what?"

"You would've been really young - when they first started their transition, they tried making the reds wear cameras and teaching their replacements from the cameras. But someone tipped off the reds, and someone deleted all the footage from all of the cameras and broke streaming video across the whole internet for a while."

"Yeah, I think I wasn't even one yet then."

"I was three. He just explained that he was going to start keeping his notes backed up because Evalee taught us you should always have offsite backups."

"Makes sense."

"Anyway we survived to break the news to everybody at a dinner party. He said "I have FTL!' and Isel said "what?" and he said "maybe they don't cover this in blue school, but scientists have thought for a long time that it was impossible for anything to go faster than the speed of light..."

"Oh dear."

"I have never seen anyone so torn between punching someone in the face and hugging them. And then Aitim asked about security and he was like 'oh, it's in the basement!'"

Snicker.

"In defense of doing it in the basement once everything's a military project it's slower getting things done.  They try, but still, you can't just run out and run an equation by your old roommate who went into math."

"Because your roommate may be a spy?"

"I was like 'I'm not telling him it's FTL, just asking him to solve the equation, he wouldn't notice an equation had practical applications if they were painted in 12-foot-tall letters on the side of his house' and they were like 'does he have a security clearance, sir'."

"But on the other hand they have so much money."

"Yeah. And we weren't going to procure antimatter in the basement. And they're actually better than I feared about research projects being, well, research projects - I was worried they'd be very 'do what you're told or it's treason' and my father does not work well under those conditions. Maybe Aitim just hired carefully. But they stuck to trying to enable us to get it launched without leaking anything."