Tag Archives: gravity

Humble Beginnings

Posted by zxvasdf on

Sam perched on the overhang, idly kicking his legs. This spot was an instant favorite of his, and almost everyday he frequented it just before dark. He reached for his beer, feeling approximately five minutes of subjective time pass before his fingers touched the cool condensation on the glass. He took a slug and opened his worn well-thumbed notebook, jotted in a few lines.

He had spent the last year wandering the continent, keeping records, trying to map the Event. It moved east to west like a slow river, he discovered, following the Earth’s rotation, carrying patches with differing properties that drifted like sluggish cumulus clouds through an airspace of relative stability. He felt the current would rotate fully around the planet, and perhaps, if it was constant enough, define a whole new dating system. It was years in the future, and a lot more correlation would need to be done. Meanwhile, he would sit or stand in place for hours and watch, feel the effects, and record his interpretations.

In certain patches subjective experience speeded up and he zipped about in wild acceleration; he generally avoided these after discovering one aged much quicker over lengthy dalliances. Some patches caused his movements to become as if suspended in molasses, and he patiently waited out these instances, gratefully flexing his limbs when it passed. There were patches that decreased the sensation of gravity; he bounded over the trees joyfully, and had leaped out of its field into a patch of zero gravity. He panicked, retching, and after a slow, agonized drifting he managed to snag onto a tree and wait it out. After three days had passed, hunger drove him out. He crawled down its trunk and clutched the blades of grass with his fingers, painfully crawling over the turf, taking extra care to control his momentum lest he flew away into the sun. When he finally passed out the zone’s influence, the crush of gravity was so welcome he sobbed as he foraged in the brush for roots and grubs, having lost his cache of food. Other patches were like walking into a maze of funhouse mirrors.

Some patches had drastic temperature changes that suggested sudden death, and he was careful in his explorations; his left pinky was missing from such a patch where he had felt a numbing sensation and flinched. His finger fell to the ground into black pieces. He buried it out of sheer sentimentality. He was caught by surprise when a normalized climate, the way it was before the Event, all still and quiet, drifted over his camp, and it shocked him so much he had to retreat outside its boundary, into the comfort of everyday psychedelia. He followed it for a few days, testing its climate, until he turned away with distaste towards other endeavors. It was marked on his moving map, and had the shortest description in his journal; he didn’t miss it. He had lost his taste for normalcy.

Sitting on the overhang, Sam decided that he would stay in the area for longer than was his usual, which approximated a month. He enjoyed this city. Los Angeles. It was so used to surreality that it had adapted well to the change. In the twilight, Draco rippled on the horizon and Orion played with his scabbard. Ursa Major pawed at the Twins.

Samuels reached for his beer and watched the city dance languorously in the glittering skyline.

December 21, 2012

Posted by zxvasdf on

A wink, a wrinkling, then a flash of geometry.

In the library, the patrons become like frantic insects on the floors of the vast bookish halls, or find themselves towering over the floorplan, petrified like some fleshly tree lest a step incurs mass murder. A small child cowers in a corner, frightened, as the Halloween picture book he was gleefully perusing grows maliciously, its text into giant marauding alphabets, its pictures filled with witches and goblins gaining an evil life of their own.

The palm trees twist and twirl like mad brown bellows pumping out inert green clouds, their drastic capillary motion owing to the xylem undergoing gigantic magnification as the tensorlens of space-time varies its dimensions. Cars on the road shrink and reel into the distance, their perturbed drivers colliding in a frenzy to decipher their senses, and leave in their wake a cartoonish carnage. “It was like driving a toy car through a highway full of semi-trucks!” remarks a survivor. Another account: “… through a prism where there was a million copies of everything, then I woke up inside the Rexall. I had crashed into the entire storefront…” Rent limbs dangle as long as roads and the droplets of blood drip off to infinitesimal smallness. Air bags lend many of the crushed cars the appearance of beached zeppelins. The burning vehicles wedged in houses, storefronts, snarling the freeways and avenues, fill the city with heat and monstrous smoke. Burst fire hydrants shower the oscillating children that play on its warp and weft with droplets the size of watermelons. Acidheads emerge from their stupor and say, “What the fuck? I lost my high.” The writhing city is like this, filled with pain and death and sudden awe. And it is the same, all over the world.

At ground zero where the effect is much stronger, the scientists and equipment are twisted into fantastic configurations, the very topology and their inability to navigate complex knots and surfaces trapping the technicians in the collider’s cool halls. Their cries become sounds in water, or are distant, far off, as if creeping through a labyrinth. They slowly starve to death before they find their way out. “They didn’t have a ball of thread,” later historians would remark sadly, after expeditions were sent into—to use a term coined by a television personality—the LSD atomizer and found old bones in postures of desperate futility.

Let’s take a couple of terms from graphic design: rasters and vectors. Vector images contain no information loss when its dimensions are modified, as opposed to the raster image which is plagued with distorting information loss when its size is changed. Vectors operate like an picture on a rubber surface: stretch and pull the surface to change the dimensions of the picture, and when you let it snap back, and the picture retains its original dimensions. There is no loss in quality in quantity of change. Space-time is a smooth vector and along its breadth there are small fluctuations—ripples, one could say—in the structure. When we are born, our brains learn to normalize this until this is done effortlessly and unconsciously. Perhaps children do notice, before their brains have integrated this completely, and it might shed some light on the ‘flights of imagination’ for which children are notorious. This might also account for the effect psychedelics have on the human nervous system.

What the LHC has done, is twist the normal properties of space-time and gravity. Keep in mind: No natural laws were violated… it is just our perceptions of space-time that has changed.