Real Genius/WMG: Difference between revisions
→It was a straightforward Happy Ending.
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== It was a straightforward [[Happy Ending]]. ==
People saw the laser fire, and one of those people was a congressman. The news media would have been attracted to a story about a house cracking open after being filled with popcorn, and eventually more facts will emerge. Thanks to this the use of a laser will be subjected to public scrutiny. Congress will hold hearings on the ethical ramifications of the usage of such devices, and at worst the project will be buried under red tape. And thanks to [[The Great Politics Mess-Up]], the laser project won't see the light of day thanks to the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Soviet communism.
As for Chris, Mitch, and company: at worst they get a slap on the wrist for breaking into Hathaway's house. Kent becomes a more spiritual person and mellows out, thanks to his encounter with "Jesus." Chris graduates with Dr. Meredith's blessing and gets the Darlington job; Mitch graduates a few years later.
Hathaway is just about the only person who doesn't get a happy ending. He doesn't have a house, and the government audits him for the money that was spent on the laser project (which, if you recall, he instead embezzled to fix up his house). He probably will also be brought before a board at Pacific Tech, and will lose his tenure and his job.
* Caveat: the accident investigation team taking the laser apart to try and find out why it fired off-course and then melted will find the traces of grease on the lens, which will tell them why it melted. They likely ''won't'' find the cause of the firing off-course, but since there is no hardware fault for them ''to'' find (as it was a deliberate software error introduced by the chip switching), the most probable conclusion for them to reach is the true one; that the targeting failure was a programming error. Whether or not they suspect deliberate sabotage or merely the black swan event of a thumb-fingered mechanic who didn't clean the lens after installing it happening on the same day as a major software bug, either way they will rationally conclude that there is nothing inherently unstable about the laser principle itself and that given that it clearly ''does'' work in one significant aspect (the laser beam actually is as powerful as advertised), its worth the money to put into future testing to try and work out the bugs.
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