She stepped back. That was it. That was the whole PowerPoint distilled into one human sentence.

And somewhere, in the ionic heaven where theorists go, Lars Onsager tipped his hat. Finally, someone had turned his equation into a story worth staying awake for.

She clicked to Slide 5. A crude animation showed a large, slow-moving sphere dragging a smaller, oppositely charged sphere backward.

“So… the ‘A’ is the salmon getting confused because the little fish haven’t realized it changed direction yet?”