"Any questions? No? Good. So first on our checklist is... going over the buttons." Xian pulled his long hair back from over his eyes in mild irritation as his free hand gestured loosely at the panel in front of him.. "Green hexagon's the start button. Red circle's the stop button. Everything else you don't touch, intern; leave those to us."

"Ah... right." Rosa stammered, frantically taking notes on a yellow pad as she looked over the vast array of screens and consoles. "Why the shape coding? And what's, uh, this supercomputer- er, which part of the lab is it?"

"It's a dimensional interval analyzer." Xian said as he turned to face the intern, leaning back against the panel. "We won't be using it until we calibrate coordinates, of course. Look. You're here to watch. Don't press anything unless you're told to, and the only two things you'll press are these buttons you can't screw up somehow. This entire operation is very delicate and - oh, right, don't bring any coffee into any of these rooms. Electronics and all, can't have you spilling anything."

"And a dimensional interval analyzer is used how, here?"

Xian sighed, flinging his hands into the air before grimacing and pulling his hair back again. "Of all the days to- Did you not take QPU Physics in undergrad? This measures the effective difference between parallel universes. This is a basic setup, you know."

Rosa scribbled furiously, a slight red tinge appearing on her cheeks. "Ah, uh. I took QPU my first year; my undergrad thesis was on theoretical chrono-dimensional anomalies, Mr. Sheng; my first PhD dissertation was on-"

"Doesn't matter." Xian replied curtly, hands resting lightly on the panel behind him. "We'll get you through this internship and back to your precious time twitches or whatever. Listen. We're busy trying to pull star matter from parallel universes. Theoretical science has no place here, and people who aren't serious about this really don't have any place here. Look, do you even know about parallel universes and the wave function calculations required to even reach another universe, let alone retrieve specific matter from one?" Xian scoffed, his hands palm out toward Rosa. "Let me explain how all this works in terms you'll surely understand. Take good notes, intern, because I'm not repeating a word of this later."

Rosa took a half step back as Xian's hand motions got more exaggerated, his voice shifting into a lecturer's cadence. "The machine in the next room is fed the dimensional coordinates of the target locations beforehand. It goes to the first set of coordinates and replaces whatever's in that location with whatever's in the second set of coordinates, practically jumping across QPUs. Once the transfer is complete, we press the red circle to stop the process. It's just dimensional physics." 

His arms began to make sweeping motions, swinging over the buttons as he continued. "Never mind that we're changing the future here. Never mind that we could solve basically everything! We could fix world hunger, economic scarcity, everything could be fixed - but no, no, no, it's not important that kids study dimens*!*ional physics these days!" His hands swept wide as he smiled ecstatically at Rosa. "That's why this internship is a dream come-"

"That's great, but please don't hit the panel by mistake again." Rosa remarked dryly, noting something on her clipboard. "You just pressed the stop button, so no harm done, but we do need our interns to possess more situational awareness."

"Oh! Right, sorry." Xian scrambed away from the panel, looking back at the red hexagon and the other button on the panel. "I just got really excited seeing this for the first time... My bad."

Rosa followed his gaze for a moment. "The green circle is the start button; fortunately if you had hit that, either, it wouldn'tve worked, since we had the foresight to program, ah, failsafes in. Or I guess I did, while we were working out the temporal components to the coordinate code to stabilize and speed up interval calcuations. We'll review the other consoles as needed. And before you ask, since it made me curious my first day, the shape coding is because one of my supervisors is entirely colorblind." Glancing at her clipboard, she checked something off. "And reviewing the dimensional interval analyzer was the last part of the tour of the lab, it looks like. Any questions?"