Lokasenna
08-18-2013, 04:54 AM
Hey-ho, I've been at it again - another day, another genre exercise. This is my first attempt at science-fiction, and I've really no idea what to make of it.
The Last Speck
'A man is a very small thing, and the night is very large and full of wonders.' ~Lord Dunsany
The year 20-- was the year that the immortality of the human race was achieved, though the significance of it passed unnoticed even by the instigators of this profound change. Two scientists, luminaries of CERN and anticipators of Nobel prizes, revealed to the world a process of mathematics and physics that was hailed as the most important breakthrough since the Special Theory of Relativity: the Süssmayer-Plunkett Effect.
Dr Edwin Plunkett and Dr Alberich Süssmayer rationalised that if one were able to separate oneself from the universe in every tangible sense, then one would no longer be subject to the law of the relative passage of time. They theorised, furthermore, that the creation of a vehicle that could pass through time and the universe like a bathysphere through the oceans was fundamentally possible: mobile in a mobile environment, but insulated from it. Dr Süssmayer, whose talent for physics was matched by that for engineering, successfully oversaw the creation of such a vehicle, the Süssmayer-Plunkett Perpetual Containment Unit, or the SPeC as it was whimsically termed. A perfect sphere, seemingly made of reflective silver all around its six metre circumference; the greatest feat of engineering the Earth had ever seen, a wonder of civilisation. A perfect artificial bubble in the matter of reality, designed to withstand the crippling pressure of existence pressing in on every side. The press termed Dr Süssmayer the 'modern Leonardo', a title he demurred; his colleagues whispered in secret that such a title was not equal to the marvel he had wrought.
The next part of the project was the purview of Dr Plunkett, the foremost mathematician of his generation and no less celebrated than his colleague. He tasked himself with establishing a set of fundamental mathematical principles that did not require a time-based universe. The bold concept behind these two physical and mathematical achievements was the belief that, once sealed inside the SPeC and thus separated from the laws of the universe, any person who could successfully hold these mathematical principles in their mind would create, as it where, a shadow of a universe within the enclosed space. Removed from the pressure of the rules governing reality, the mathematical concepts held in the mind would expand to fill the vehicle, as particles of gas spread out to fill a vacuum. If time was not permitted to exist, then time would not exist; at least not until the seal was breeched and the universe was able to flood back in.
Dr Plunkett himself was to be the first man to use the SPeC. This was, in part, because the process required a mind capable of understanding and sustaining the elaborate mathematical construct in order to work; who better than the man who had invented it? Dr Plunkett's other, more pressing concern was his own mortality, for despite being a vigorous man in his early sixties his body had, during the development of the SPeC, been ravaged by a fast and aggressive cancer. The knowledge that his span upon this Earth now numbered in weeks, rather than months or years, was a terrible blow to a man who knew that his mind might yet offer years of benefit to his species, and it was with no sense of selfishness that he pursued his own preservation.
The arrangements were made. Dr Plunkett would enter the SPeC, and would remain separate from the world until such time as a cure for his condition had emerged. Communication between universe and non-universe, time and non-time, would be near impossible; a signal word was devised between the two scientists, deconstructed and encoded into the mathematics, the intention being that when spoken it would affect the process in such a way as to collapse the private universe within the SPeC.
The auspicious day arrived, and Dr Plunkett, dressed in much the manner of one who might be catching a train, prepared to undertake his task. The SPeC was housed where it had been built, in a spacious laboratory of the University of Durham, in whose Physics Department Dr Süssmayer was based. The press jostled amongst a crowd of scientific luminaries, cameras flashing as Drs Süssmayer and Plunkett shook hands cordially in front of the ominous silver sphere. A door, invisible once closed, opened in the side of the great contraption. Dr Plunkett climbed inside, not as easily or athletically as he might have done mere weeks before, and with a hiss the opening closed and sealed the sphere.
The long, still seconds drew on in silence as the journalists and scientists regarded the SPeC intently. After a minute, Dr Süssmayer approached a microphone and quietly declared the experiment a success. There was, he said, nothing that could be done now; Dr Plunkett's situation could not be ascertained, save by breaking the seal with the code word, because he now existed in a bubble outside the material universe.
The SPeC remained in situ as the weeks and months rolled on. On a number of occasions Dr Süssmayer considered breaking the seal, but always held on to his covenant with Dr Plunkett. The code word was known only to him, though he had of course made provision for its release in the event of his sudden death or incapacitation, and the knowledge that he alone might break the barrier between one world and another by the simple vocalisation of a single world held a strange resonance for him. He was both guardian and gatekeeper, the one and only man; the sense of responsibility was as crushing as it was alien, a driving desire to both release his friend and to prolong the experiment.
It was twenty seven months later in the material universe that a breakthrough in the field of medicine raised the possibility of a cure for the type of cancer that afflicted the mathematician, and a further thirteen months before it was perfected. When the probability of a successful cure was as high as it could be, Dr Süssmayer declared his intention to open the SPeC, and the same journalists and scientists who had observed the initiation of the experiment gathered to watch its termination.
Taking a deep breath, Dr Süssmayer approached the strange and unsettling sphere and spoke a single word: 'Communio'. Nothing happened, and the physicist repeated the word a second and a third time, with increasing volume. The silence of the crowd broke into a murmur of concern as Dr Süssmayer continued to repeat the word in increasingly desperate tones; the sphere remained utterly, terribly still. Dr Süssmayer was eventually lead away by colleagues, and the look of despair upon his face adorned headlines across the globe.
Other scientists tried speaking the word aloud, no longer secret, to the sphere, varying their pitch and speed but without success. Tools were summoned, but crowbars and blowtorches proved useless; even a diamond tipped drill made no impression upon the surface of the SPeC. Someone suggested the use of explosives, though this was dismissed as too dangerous. After several hours, a junior scientist who worked under Dr Süssmayer came with a message from the physicist, who had retired to his apartment, telling the assembled crowd to desist in their endeavours: something had gone terribly wrong with the mathematics, and the code word had failed. Dr Plunkett was gone, separated forever from the universe; the scientists could no more breach the sphere than they could punch a hole in the fabric of creation itself, which indeed would be what was required.
The next morning Dr Süssmayer was found dead in his bathtub, his wrists slit. A CD of Mozart's Requiem had been placed on repeat, and filled the apartment with its lamentations. Dr Süssmayer's suicide note said the following:
'I do this not out of selfishness, or a desire to somehow atone, but because it is necessary. It is a progressive action, and the only one that I can take. Edwin Plunkett, it may be said, has transcended death - 'transcended' I say, because to call it an escape would be to suggest that it was a change for the better. I take my life because he cannot; I take my life, not in recompense, but in profound sympathy.'
For several months a team of scientists worked to breach the SPeC and rescue Dr Plunkett, but without success. From that point on, it was relegated to merely being overseen by a dwindling and increasingly distant group of scholars who came to see their role not so much as a rescue mission but the curation of a scientific curio. And in time the SPeC was moved from its laboratory, the space needed from some newer project, and was put into storage. There is languished, unmoving and unchanging, as the years and decades passed silently by. In time, those who studied the history of science would, out of reasons of sentiment, look in on the device, before shutting it in darkness once more.
Migration happened, famine happened, war happened, and death happened, and all traces of the city of Durham were effaced from the Earth through conflagration and abandonment. The legacy of the historians, inherited from the scientists, was thus in time passed on to the archaeologists, who spoke in a strange tongue and wore strange clothing. They took the SPeC from the earth in which time had interred it, and placed it in their great museum of curiosity, baffled by its existence and uncertain of its origins.
Over the course of millennia, it became necessary for the human race to leave its home world and journey into the stars, for though the SPeC was the greatest of scientific endeavours ever undertaken in universal history, technology in other fields had moved apace as well. The humans abandoned their world, and whilst it is unknown what became of them it is known that they never again returned to Earth. The museum, abandoned, stood for centuries until the slow passing of the days wore even its foundations away, and the SPeC was returned once more to the earth.
The long, viscous movement of the continental plates drove the SPeC deep into the rock, and as the lands moved and changed over ten million years it reached a great depth, lying many miles under the ground, and that ground under many miles of ocean. With the passing of ages the seas cleared, and the bedrock was slowly thrust up into a great mountain range, where glacial ice and biting wind scoured the stone away particle by particle until eventually light once more shone on the surface of the SPeC.
Strange creatures, whose appearance would have been beyond anything Dr Plunkett could imagine or give credence to, found the great sphere; for some it was a thing of interested curiosity, for others an omen of things to come, and for many a mystery hinting at elder things that time had long since erased.
Species rose and species fell, and countless nights set on countless civilizations. The sun, in time, waxed old and ireful, and its heat grew too violent for the planets that surrounded it. The face of Earth was scorched, and even the meanest and smallest lives returned to dust. The SPeC floated in a sea of molten rock, swept along by burning winds that could never warm its surface.
A billion years hence the sun died, and in the spasms of its death throes it consumed half the solar system, and the tortured remains of Earth were pulled deep into its violent embrace. Propelled by terrible fire, the SPeC raced through the heart of the dying star, all the potent energies of the universe making no impression upon it. The sun's fury eventually dwindled into nothing, passing into oblivion as even the universe itself began to reach its later years, and the SPeC drifted through the void of the cosmos.
Stars blossomed and fell, and lives flourished and burnt, as eons beyond numbering turned over like the sigh of all creation, until in time there were no more new worlds, no more new stars, and the universe began to cool, to sicken, and to die.
It was yet many billions of years before intelligent eyes once more looked upon the SPeC. They were the oldest race in the universe, who had existed from the moment of the coming of matter, and had thought to be the last species who would look upon the ruin of existence and hold wake for it. They were the Storytellers, for they perceived the universe as a great tapestry woven of individual stories, glittering threads completing an eternal and perfect whole. On their planet at the centre of the cosmos, across a billion billion years they had listened to all the stories that the universe had told to them. But now the universe had grown cold and silent, and they knew that it was time for all stories, their own included, to end.
But one story had not ended, a broken thread that had been broken across a thousand generations of their long-lived species. The tapestry was incomplete, and the Storytellers cried out in collective pain. Even their planet became uninhabitable, and the remains of their species climbed into a craft and left their world. Across space they travelled, breeding only so that their kind might continue and fulfil their mission of standing wake over all the universe. The stars had long since been extinguished, and as the last living creatures in all existence they traversed the frigid and desolate void, following the broken thread that lead to all that was wrong, all that was unresolved.
The SPeC had at some point crashed into a few tortured remains of rock that had once been part of a great continent on a thriving world, but now floated through the vacuum as it slowly dissolved into nothing. The Storytellers landed their craft upon this, the last three of their species, and descended on to the tortured stone. Embedded in this was the silvery pearl of the SPeC, and they approached it with an emotion they had never before felt, and did not know as fear.
One lay a hand upon its surface, still the same temperature as it had been in that laboratory in a distant city long ago, and discerned the fleeting shadow of Dr Edwin Plunkett. Words are not sufficient to describe the effect, for the Storytellers had no conception of language accept as a barrier to understanding, but in human terms it was as when one looks into a cheap mirror and sees one's image reflected on both the front and the back of the glass, except in here only the faint back image of Dr Plunkett was visible, a reflection of his absence from the universe.
There was nothing the Storytellers could do, for though they were higher beings they were still a part of this universe. Sitting upon the rock, they could resolve only to lament the impossibility of an ending, and to struggle to survive for as long as they could in the futile hope of change.
The human race had discovered immortality, and in Dr Edwin Plunkett, that good man, it would live on indefinitely, never aging, never changing, never moving, the last speck of life clinging to the face of the universe.
The Last Speck
'A man is a very small thing, and the night is very large and full of wonders.' ~Lord Dunsany
The year 20-- was the year that the immortality of the human race was achieved, though the significance of it passed unnoticed even by the instigators of this profound change. Two scientists, luminaries of CERN and anticipators of Nobel prizes, revealed to the world a process of mathematics and physics that was hailed as the most important breakthrough since the Special Theory of Relativity: the Süssmayer-Plunkett Effect.
Dr Edwin Plunkett and Dr Alberich Süssmayer rationalised that if one were able to separate oneself from the universe in every tangible sense, then one would no longer be subject to the law of the relative passage of time. They theorised, furthermore, that the creation of a vehicle that could pass through time and the universe like a bathysphere through the oceans was fundamentally possible: mobile in a mobile environment, but insulated from it. Dr Süssmayer, whose talent for physics was matched by that for engineering, successfully oversaw the creation of such a vehicle, the Süssmayer-Plunkett Perpetual Containment Unit, or the SPeC as it was whimsically termed. A perfect sphere, seemingly made of reflective silver all around its six metre circumference; the greatest feat of engineering the Earth had ever seen, a wonder of civilisation. A perfect artificial bubble in the matter of reality, designed to withstand the crippling pressure of existence pressing in on every side. The press termed Dr Süssmayer the 'modern Leonardo', a title he demurred; his colleagues whispered in secret that such a title was not equal to the marvel he had wrought.
The next part of the project was the purview of Dr Plunkett, the foremost mathematician of his generation and no less celebrated than his colleague. He tasked himself with establishing a set of fundamental mathematical principles that did not require a time-based universe. The bold concept behind these two physical and mathematical achievements was the belief that, once sealed inside the SPeC and thus separated from the laws of the universe, any person who could successfully hold these mathematical principles in their mind would create, as it where, a shadow of a universe within the enclosed space. Removed from the pressure of the rules governing reality, the mathematical concepts held in the mind would expand to fill the vehicle, as particles of gas spread out to fill a vacuum. If time was not permitted to exist, then time would not exist; at least not until the seal was breeched and the universe was able to flood back in.
Dr Plunkett himself was to be the first man to use the SPeC. This was, in part, because the process required a mind capable of understanding and sustaining the elaborate mathematical construct in order to work; who better than the man who had invented it? Dr Plunkett's other, more pressing concern was his own mortality, for despite being a vigorous man in his early sixties his body had, during the development of the SPeC, been ravaged by a fast and aggressive cancer. The knowledge that his span upon this Earth now numbered in weeks, rather than months or years, was a terrible blow to a man who knew that his mind might yet offer years of benefit to his species, and it was with no sense of selfishness that he pursued his own preservation.
The arrangements were made. Dr Plunkett would enter the SPeC, and would remain separate from the world until such time as a cure for his condition had emerged. Communication between universe and non-universe, time and non-time, would be near impossible; a signal word was devised between the two scientists, deconstructed and encoded into the mathematics, the intention being that when spoken it would affect the process in such a way as to collapse the private universe within the SPeC.
The auspicious day arrived, and Dr Plunkett, dressed in much the manner of one who might be catching a train, prepared to undertake his task. The SPeC was housed where it had been built, in a spacious laboratory of the University of Durham, in whose Physics Department Dr Süssmayer was based. The press jostled amongst a crowd of scientific luminaries, cameras flashing as Drs Süssmayer and Plunkett shook hands cordially in front of the ominous silver sphere. A door, invisible once closed, opened in the side of the great contraption. Dr Plunkett climbed inside, not as easily or athletically as he might have done mere weeks before, and with a hiss the opening closed and sealed the sphere.
The long, still seconds drew on in silence as the journalists and scientists regarded the SPeC intently. After a minute, Dr Süssmayer approached a microphone and quietly declared the experiment a success. There was, he said, nothing that could be done now; Dr Plunkett's situation could not be ascertained, save by breaking the seal with the code word, because he now existed in a bubble outside the material universe.
The SPeC remained in situ as the weeks and months rolled on. On a number of occasions Dr Süssmayer considered breaking the seal, but always held on to his covenant with Dr Plunkett. The code word was known only to him, though he had of course made provision for its release in the event of his sudden death or incapacitation, and the knowledge that he alone might break the barrier between one world and another by the simple vocalisation of a single world held a strange resonance for him. He was both guardian and gatekeeper, the one and only man; the sense of responsibility was as crushing as it was alien, a driving desire to both release his friend and to prolong the experiment.
It was twenty seven months later in the material universe that a breakthrough in the field of medicine raised the possibility of a cure for the type of cancer that afflicted the mathematician, and a further thirteen months before it was perfected. When the probability of a successful cure was as high as it could be, Dr Süssmayer declared his intention to open the SPeC, and the same journalists and scientists who had observed the initiation of the experiment gathered to watch its termination.
Taking a deep breath, Dr Süssmayer approached the strange and unsettling sphere and spoke a single word: 'Communio'. Nothing happened, and the physicist repeated the word a second and a third time, with increasing volume. The silence of the crowd broke into a murmur of concern as Dr Süssmayer continued to repeat the word in increasingly desperate tones; the sphere remained utterly, terribly still. Dr Süssmayer was eventually lead away by colleagues, and the look of despair upon his face adorned headlines across the globe.
Other scientists tried speaking the word aloud, no longer secret, to the sphere, varying their pitch and speed but without success. Tools were summoned, but crowbars and blowtorches proved useless; even a diamond tipped drill made no impression upon the surface of the SPeC. Someone suggested the use of explosives, though this was dismissed as too dangerous. After several hours, a junior scientist who worked under Dr Süssmayer came with a message from the physicist, who had retired to his apartment, telling the assembled crowd to desist in their endeavours: something had gone terribly wrong with the mathematics, and the code word had failed. Dr Plunkett was gone, separated forever from the universe; the scientists could no more breach the sphere than they could punch a hole in the fabric of creation itself, which indeed would be what was required.
The next morning Dr Süssmayer was found dead in his bathtub, his wrists slit. A CD of Mozart's Requiem had been placed on repeat, and filled the apartment with its lamentations. Dr Süssmayer's suicide note said the following:
'I do this not out of selfishness, or a desire to somehow atone, but because it is necessary. It is a progressive action, and the only one that I can take. Edwin Plunkett, it may be said, has transcended death - 'transcended' I say, because to call it an escape would be to suggest that it was a change for the better. I take my life because he cannot; I take my life, not in recompense, but in profound sympathy.'
For several months a team of scientists worked to breach the SPeC and rescue Dr Plunkett, but without success. From that point on, it was relegated to merely being overseen by a dwindling and increasingly distant group of scholars who came to see their role not so much as a rescue mission but the curation of a scientific curio. And in time the SPeC was moved from its laboratory, the space needed from some newer project, and was put into storage. There is languished, unmoving and unchanging, as the years and decades passed silently by. In time, those who studied the history of science would, out of reasons of sentiment, look in on the device, before shutting it in darkness once more.
Migration happened, famine happened, war happened, and death happened, and all traces of the city of Durham were effaced from the Earth through conflagration and abandonment. The legacy of the historians, inherited from the scientists, was thus in time passed on to the archaeologists, who spoke in a strange tongue and wore strange clothing. They took the SPeC from the earth in which time had interred it, and placed it in their great museum of curiosity, baffled by its existence and uncertain of its origins.
Over the course of millennia, it became necessary for the human race to leave its home world and journey into the stars, for though the SPeC was the greatest of scientific endeavours ever undertaken in universal history, technology in other fields had moved apace as well. The humans abandoned their world, and whilst it is unknown what became of them it is known that they never again returned to Earth. The museum, abandoned, stood for centuries until the slow passing of the days wore even its foundations away, and the SPeC was returned once more to the earth.
The long, viscous movement of the continental plates drove the SPeC deep into the rock, and as the lands moved and changed over ten million years it reached a great depth, lying many miles under the ground, and that ground under many miles of ocean. With the passing of ages the seas cleared, and the bedrock was slowly thrust up into a great mountain range, where glacial ice and biting wind scoured the stone away particle by particle until eventually light once more shone on the surface of the SPeC.
Strange creatures, whose appearance would have been beyond anything Dr Plunkett could imagine or give credence to, found the great sphere; for some it was a thing of interested curiosity, for others an omen of things to come, and for many a mystery hinting at elder things that time had long since erased.
Species rose and species fell, and countless nights set on countless civilizations. The sun, in time, waxed old and ireful, and its heat grew too violent for the planets that surrounded it. The face of Earth was scorched, and even the meanest and smallest lives returned to dust. The SPeC floated in a sea of molten rock, swept along by burning winds that could never warm its surface.
A billion years hence the sun died, and in the spasms of its death throes it consumed half the solar system, and the tortured remains of Earth were pulled deep into its violent embrace. Propelled by terrible fire, the SPeC raced through the heart of the dying star, all the potent energies of the universe making no impression upon it. The sun's fury eventually dwindled into nothing, passing into oblivion as even the universe itself began to reach its later years, and the SPeC drifted through the void of the cosmos.
Stars blossomed and fell, and lives flourished and burnt, as eons beyond numbering turned over like the sigh of all creation, until in time there were no more new worlds, no more new stars, and the universe began to cool, to sicken, and to die.
It was yet many billions of years before intelligent eyes once more looked upon the SPeC. They were the oldest race in the universe, who had existed from the moment of the coming of matter, and had thought to be the last species who would look upon the ruin of existence and hold wake for it. They were the Storytellers, for they perceived the universe as a great tapestry woven of individual stories, glittering threads completing an eternal and perfect whole. On their planet at the centre of the cosmos, across a billion billion years they had listened to all the stories that the universe had told to them. But now the universe had grown cold and silent, and they knew that it was time for all stories, their own included, to end.
But one story had not ended, a broken thread that had been broken across a thousand generations of their long-lived species. The tapestry was incomplete, and the Storytellers cried out in collective pain. Even their planet became uninhabitable, and the remains of their species climbed into a craft and left their world. Across space they travelled, breeding only so that their kind might continue and fulfil their mission of standing wake over all the universe. The stars had long since been extinguished, and as the last living creatures in all existence they traversed the frigid and desolate void, following the broken thread that lead to all that was wrong, all that was unresolved.
The SPeC had at some point crashed into a few tortured remains of rock that had once been part of a great continent on a thriving world, but now floated through the vacuum as it slowly dissolved into nothing. The Storytellers landed their craft upon this, the last three of their species, and descended on to the tortured stone. Embedded in this was the silvery pearl of the SPeC, and they approached it with an emotion they had never before felt, and did not know as fear.
One lay a hand upon its surface, still the same temperature as it had been in that laboratory in a distant city long ago, and discerned the fleeting shadow of Dr Edwin Plunkett. Words are not sufficient to describe the effect, for the Storytellers had no conception of language accept as a barrier to understanding, but in human terms it was as when one looks into a cheap mirror and sees one's image reflected on both the front and the back of the glass, except in here only the faint back image of Dr Plunkett was visible, a reflection of his absence from the universe.
There was nothing the Storytellers could do, for though they were higher beings they were still a part of this universe. Sitting upon the rock, they could resolve only to lament the impossibility of an ending, and to struggle to survive for as long as they could in the futile hope of change.
The human race had discovered immortality, and in Dr Edwin Plunkett, that good man, it would live on indefinitely, never aging, never changing, never moving, the last speck of life clinging to the face of the universe.