Free Warp Speed by Travis S. Taylor

invent the warp drive. It was interesting how the writers of that book closely paralleled the work that we'd done in Breakthrough Physics.
    "Cheers!" she exclaimed as she finished reading the passage.
    Like I said, I'm proud of myself for finding these two. "Cheers," I said as I raised my cup. I had to cover the tears of joy so the others didn't see them.
    "Cheers!" cried Tabitha.
    "I know we have to verify all of this better and do some optimization. But, seriously, what next?" Jim shrugged his shoulders.
    I started to respond. To my surprise, Tabitha jumped in before I could get the first word out.
    "First thing we have to do is get you guys more funds! And I'm going to see about getting moved down here, if that's okay. You'll need some help if we're gonna do a flight experiment."
    "Whoa there, Tex!" I interrupted her. "First things first. The chocolate starfish is my man Fred Durst!"
    "Limp Bizkit?" Tabitha asked.
    "Yeah, good." I nodded at her approvingly. Then I realized how old I was. Who would've ever thought I would be listening to Limp Bizkit on classic rock radio?
    "Anyway," I got back to my original thought, "we go about our job and you go about yours. We would love to have you here, of course. But before you do that, somebody is going to do some lobbying and maybe even make a visit to the White House. However, let's keep this completely under wraps until we're damned sure we got it right. Okay?" If my calculations turned out to be wrong and we didn't warp space, this could be a much bigger fiasco than cold fusion ever was.

    We had gone through several months of rigorous experimentation and simulation. Everything turned out to be repeatable. We even found a way to quantify the strength, stresses, and projected speed of the warp bubble, provided we turned off the electric field holding it in place and let go of it. Jim and Rebecca finished the design on the Casimir type energy collection system and they were in the process of building a tenth scale of that required to power a manned-size, warp-capable spacecraft. The largest problem proved to be funding.
    On top of all that, Jim was able to complete his dissertation and graduated. I guess that is Dr. Jim Daniels now. I think I'll still call him Jim. 'Becca wasn't quite so lucky. She had trouble getting her dissertation finished before the deadline and although she finished, it wasn't in time to walk in this year's ceremony. She is supposed to pick up her diploma sometime in August at the records office. She can walk next year if she wants, but by then the new will be worn off of her diploma--it just won't be the same. What if she took a job out of town? Would it be worth it to fly back in town just for the ceremony? Graduation ought to be every semester even if there are only two students walking. I've complained about this problem at the local university for more than a decade. It always falls on deaf ears. Bureaucrats never understand human needs. I started introducing her to people as Dr. Rebecca Jean Townes.
    Tabitha finally came through for us in early June. She found about a million dollars in DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) money, a few hundred thousand from DOE (Department of Energy), and we squeezed NASA BPP for the following half-funded year now. NASA In Space Transportation Program threw in about a million and a half and NASA Office of Space Science claimed if we could prove the energy collection system they'd throw in ten million dollars for a prototype. I found a few private investors locally and it looked like we had just enough to put together a warp drive flight demonstrator experiment. Provided that the Casimir energy collector scaled prototype worked, we would then be in the business of building a faster-than-light spacecraft.
    We hired two cooperative education students, one graduate and one undergraduate. The plan was that the two students would work full-time one semester while attending classes part-time and vice versa the