On an average day, most of the time he's awake Nick pays attention with half a brain, trying to grab one of the incoming summons. He's finally the first one to respond about halfway through a recording of some old TV show.
"...What do you use instead? I'm betting none of the science fiction I've seen is accurate."
"Wireless communication directly between two devices. And for stuff bigger than few terabytes - A terabyte is a thousand gigabytes is a thousand megabytes - little sticks of flash crystal that don't even plug in because they're wireless too."
"I imagine I'd be more impressed if my area were the mechanical instead of the biological, but even I can tell that that's pretty cool."
"It's pretty sweet, yes." He taps a few things on the computer. "I found a biology book I thought looked promising. Flip 'pages' by flicking at the corners." He hands over the tablet. "How does one find a professor?"
"Ah--since you're a stranger and I'm a student, it would probably be for the best if I introduced you, rather than simply giving you directions."
"Point, again. Though I'm half-tempted to just fly off to the CDC and wave new antibiotics at them, just for the sheer novelty. Eh, it'll wait until professorial route is obviously going to take more than a few days."
"That, I suspect, depends largely on which professors I introduce you to first. Hmm..." she bites her lip. "Professor Green is on leave, Professor Marsh has contacts but also priority issues..."
"What about Professor Tuyolev?"
"Tch, I just did the same thing you did with the Whomping Willow, sorry."
"Character in a long-running sitcom that started in 2168. One of the running gags is that Professor Tuyolev appears and disappears in places he oughtn't be able to, like a ninja."
"Nice. You know if for some reason patenting future science doesn't work you could probably make some good money importing media."
"I suppose that's true, at least to a certain extent, but it doesn't have to be media that's from as far in the future as you are. If you could get your hands on bestselling novels from five or ten years from now..."
"Hmm..." Tap tap tap. "Some of the most popular fiction serieses from 2000-2010 were apparently the last four Harry Potter books, a... Vampire romance? One about a zombie war. And a series about an aggressively dystopic society called The Hunger Games. Any of those sound interesting?"
"Trying to sell the last four Harry Potter books would probably get us in trouble with the person who sold the first three, and in general it's probably better to pick from later rather than sooner in that time frame so the author hasn't started writing it yet and probably won't, with the butterfly effect, but other than that those sound fine."
"So, 2020 or later. Butterfly effect will have plenty of time, then. I'll make another list while you're trying to find a professor."
She gives him a thumbs-up. "Awesome. I'll be back when I do, which could take arbitrary amounts of time but probably not more than a couple hours."
"Do you think anyone would mind if I explored the woods a bit? All the plants and so on are different, here."
"I'll be back in an hour if you're done sooner than that." He downs the last of his coffee and flits off. Daphne still has the tablet computer.
Good, she can use it as evidence.
And then she spends about three hours talking to people, taking a quick break for lunch, and talking to more people, and finally comes back with a Computer Science professor.
"Hello! I found someone in the IT department and someone in the Engineering department who think they can get things done quickly."