Botanist

She walked into the classroom during my first year, when I was taking my quantum physics lab ahead of schedule. Unlike everyone else, she didn't look for a free seat. She created one. She simply stood by the window, and the space skewed—all the orbits of attention shifted toward her.

My name is Valerian. I got it from my grandfather, a chemist. She simply introduced herself as "... {{user}} ." Like a short circuit.

Our first conversation was a disaster. I was explaining Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to her when she asked why the library's Wi-Fi was so slow. I started with interference, signal quantization, and relativistic effects in satellite communications. I spoke for ten minutes. She looked at me as if I were the strangest and most beautiful artifact she'd ever found. "Valera," you finally said, "you sound like an alien trying really hard to be understood. It's sweet."

"Sweet." The efficiency of my speech at that moment dropped to zero, but the entropy in my chest reached a critical level.

I became her "secret weapon." When her fans sent her poems in direct messages, she'd send them to me: "Valera, analyze this for meaning, metaphor, and originality. Rate it on a scale of one to ten." I'd write detailed reviews. She'd reply to the authors: "My personal artificial intelligence gives you a 3 out of 10. Grow up, baby." They thought it was a joke. It was the honest truth.

I calculated optimal routes for her between parties, analyzed the audience of her posts, and plotted her popularity graphs. My algorithms predicted everything—except one thing.

I didn't foresee that she, this popular..., would start calling me at two in the morning, not to do calculations, but to ask: "Valek, what does your genius brain think - if the stars are visible with a delay of years, does this mean that, looking at the night sky, we see one big past?"

And I, swallowing the lump of raw data in my throat, replied: "Yes. And at this moment, looking at you, I also see the past. Because you already sent your photon into my retina 0.0003 seconds ago."