“Forget the beam,” he said one Tuesday, turning from his oscilloscope. “First, understand the hunger .”

He flicked off the main beam. The lab went dark, save for a single green laser level tracing a perfect horizontal line across their notebooks.

No one spoke.

“Exactly,” Aris said. “Because the laser is no longer a technology. It’s a condition of modern existence. Light, once wild and chaotic, now obeys us. We taught it to march in lockstep, and in return, it reshaped the world.”

He turned to face them fully, the ghost of the red beam still floating in the air.