Traveller: From the files of Max Adler

The laboratory was in shambles. Max just stood there, perplexed. His papers were all over the place. His set-ups lay on the ground, shattered. Geiger-counters were ticking like mad. He didn't have to look to know that it would be gone. The object of his research, the thing he affectionately called his "marble of wonder". And sure enough, the container lay on the ground, taken from the freezer. It had been opened, and both the marble and the protective box it came in were gone. Years of research... all in vain. He had been so close to unlocking it's secret. Who could have stolen it? Who even knew it existed, besides a few members of the university? It had disappeared just as mysteriously as he had received it.



Isis
Isis was her name, a beautifull black physicist working on the university, who he had never spoken to before. They had a brief relationship, and she asked him to take a look at an object with strange magnetic properties. She had received it from a friend, she said, and apparently someone had been murdered for it. It wasn't the only victim the object would claim. Isis had not been careful enough during her first contact with the quicksilver-like liquid, shaped like small sphere. She contracted strange radiation sickness and died two months after Max had met her. He had retained the object and examined it ever since.

Max spotted something on the container the marble and the box had been in. Some sod had taken the thing from the freezer with his bare hands! These must have been dumb ruffians, working for somebody else, who had no idea the container would be extremely cold. Small patches of skin stuck to the metallic cylinder. At least he had some DNA to go on...



From the files of Max Adler:
"Topological states with non-Abelian anyons describe a new phase of matter. When there are excitations in the topological quantum liquids, there are gaps between the excitations and the ground state. The topological origin and the gap protect the anyons from environmental decoherence." ~Max Adler


Love, Max