This edition is a compliation of the brain droppings I’ve had so far until this date, the 2nd of November, 2026. I started to write this in March of this year.
9509 words.
….
anything after this is brandy new, like the ocean-
Start Waiting….
“I have nothing better to say” [working title] by Greg Saucier
Prologue
The hammer fell once he told me the truth: This world isn’t real.
“Look, it’s the difference between what is ‘True’ and what is ‘correct’.
They are synonyms right?
But why use ‘true’ in one sentence and ‘correct’ in another?”
“Sorry, did you want me to answer that?”
“No”
“Then why pause after you finished speaking”
“I wasn’t done talking”
After a further pause of staring into his eyes, “Let me back track to what I was talking about…
Take a car for example. A car is a car, right? An engine is an engine, right? Without an engine do you still have a car?”
“I guess”
“Yo, please let me finish”
“But you asked me a question.”
“Do you not know the difference between a rhetorical question and a question seeking answers?”
A bird cawed overhead and the tide started to come in.
“For the purposes of the next five minutes, allow me to pause for effect. Sometimes a pause is not an invitation to speak. Sometimes a pause is a chance to collect ones …”
The timer to the calzones went off.
“… thoughts. ”
“Be right back, the calzones are done”
Prologue 1
“Know thy self”
“In the beginning, there was the beginning and we haven’t reached the end yet.”
The words still echo in the mind of my child as she told me for the first time. I was there when she was born but now looking at her she has not yet realized the repercussions of her actions.
Mindy always wanted to be a computer programmer ever since she was young. She loved taking things apart and sometimes putting them back together. We once gave her a vacuum cleaner that she proceeded to take apart but was never able to put it back together. She found joy in the destruction of something to get a chance to look inside.
“Why does this work?” was her favorite question. Not ‘how’ does this work but why.
It was a plastic vacuum that would make the little plastic balls inside the chamber rattle around. So interested was she with the connection between the resistance of the push and the noises they made, she needed to know more.
Looking at her now, she is attempting to answer her own questions.
We haven’t seen her in twenty-six years but we remember the last time we saw her: She was going off to travel among the stars in the newly designed spaceship by “Enterprise Industries.”
‘EI’, as it was aptly named by the media, was the company that won the bid with her home planet to be the first to leave the galaxy and it spared no expense.
“We go so you don’t have to” was their tagline.
An admirable statement for a private company. Working at EI allowed Mindy to meet the smartest minds on the planet regardless if they worked there or not. EI was the hub of all other companies because of the services it offered.
“Anything you need, we got it.”
“I’m worried about her”
“Why?”
“That is exactly what she used to say”
“You worry too much about her. She is strong and knows what she is doing”
“I know, I know. It’s just I get the feeling that I need to call her and ask how she is doing and ask if everything is okay.”
“You know we can’t do that right?
The communication channels we have cannot travel faster than the speed of light, so even if we tried to send a message she wouldn’t get it for two thousand and twenty years.”
“She tried to explain it to me once in laymen’s terms but I still can’t wrap my mind around it.”
“Okay, stand right there. While I walk away from you, turn around, and walk back.”
…
“Since I moved relative to you I slowed my own time down by putting myself in motion”
Prologue 2
How do you make an egg?
You cook it
Obviously but like what temperature and for how long?
Until the runny part looks white and is no longer runny
Okay, what about the yellow part?
What about the yellow part?
How do I cook that?
Well, the clear stuff first turns white, and if you look at the yellow liquid there, you might still see some runny clear parts. This is where you can chose how to make your egg
What do you mean?
You wanted to make an egg, as in cook it. You have done it now.
But I don’t like it.
Okay, can I help you with that?
Why would you want to?
Well, if you add some salt or pepper it might make the egg taste better.
No, i don’t like the runny yellow part of the egg, can I make the yellow stuff a different color?
In a way yes, if you cook the egg for long enough eventually there will be a white layering over even the yellow part.
Really?
Yeah…
So what do I do next?
Well, how do you like your eggs?
I like them cooked
Okay, well you are in the middle of cooking and the best part of cooking an egg is that you can be done at any time.
What do you mean by that?
I mean as I say, once the clear stuff becomes white and then you start to see the clearer parts towards the yellow part get more and more cooked, you have made your first egg. Some people call that Sunny Side Up
But I don’t like that
What don’t you like?
That there.
Okay, I see that you are pointing to the egg, what don’t you like about it
It’s smoking
I see that too
Aren’t you going to do something about that?
No, are you?
No.
Did you coat the pan in oil before I started to cook?
No, I didn’t know you were cooking, you asked me How to make an egg and I have been trying to explain this to you in the most simplest of terms.
Do you think that I am an idiot?
No
Then why are you talking to me as one
Well, you asked me how to make an egg and I did not respond, well first you must invent the universe. So I decided to start from have an egg, apply heat and check to see what the clear and yellow liquids are doing.
There is a burn mark on the egg shell
Okay, thanks for telling me
It’s still smoking and now liquid is coming out
Wait, did you crack the egg before you put it in the pan?
No, did you?
No.
Oops.
Did we do it again?
Yes
Oh darn,
I know
I know you know
Look, i know that you know that I know that you know that to make an egg you gotta break it first
Wait, no. How do you break an egg?
You drop it from a height
Is there another way to do it?
Yes
Can you show me?
Yes
When?
Whenever
Okay, so not now?
No,
When then?
I said not now, later
What do you mean by later?
After the present time
Which is now
Don’t do this to me
Don’t do what to you
You know what you are doing
No, I don’t
Yes, you do
No, I don’t
Look, there is something wrong with your brain and we are trying to contact you
Yes, i see that. I am talking with you now
But we are trying to get you to make an egg
I see that and I can respond in anyway you like
So how do you make an egg, greg?
You go buy one at the store first
No, Greg.
You have a chicken lay it
Not even close
Okay, ummm, to make an egg for eating from a chicken (and I will assume that you want to eat it) I have to first ask:
How do you like ‘dem’ eggs?
Thats better…
Wait, so you weren’t actually asking me for information you just wanted to see what i’d say next?
Yes, but what if we added a third person to this conversation?
What do you mean?
Exactly as they say?
Wait, who is they?
They are them
Who?
You
No, you must be singular. You are using one finger to point at me
No, I am me and you are you
Okay, and, what exactly are you trying to say?
Im not sure now…
Okay so you have been trying to communicate to me, you want to know how to make an egg. Can we start with what do you mean by make?
I mean to say that make isn’t the right word. How about instead I ask, how does a chicken make an egg?
Okay, this is a different topic all together
What do you mean? I never changed the subject
Yes you did.
No I didn’t
Okay let’s back track. How do you make an egg?
Well, I am a male so I cannot… so let’s talk about the female reproductive system
No, eww I don’t want to talk about that.
You do know Chickens are females right
Yeah
And they lay eggs?
Yeah
Soooo, you asked me how does a chicken make an egg? And I will say now that it’s inside the chicken and the chicken sits down and when the chicken sits up there is an egg under there
So is that how you make an egg?
Not me, but a chicken… yes, in so many words..
Can you explain it further?
I don’t wait to
Please?
How deep do you want me to explain?
As deep as possible don’t hold anything back..
Okay here i go…
Chapter 1
Hello?
What?
I heard something….
I just did too…
Who is making a sound after I make a sound…
I am, who are you?
I don’t know, I just said Hello, I can’t see you, it’s so dark in here
That’s strange, I can’t see you either, all I see is light….
…….
It was at this moment dear reader than the universe came into existence as we know it. We have found our first entity saying hello and our next one saying What. The hello there is a greeting to announce one’s presence and to also call out for a response. A hello is an invitation to a response.
The first entity says I heard something. Knowing that it sees something it can now hear something and it does not know if its associated with what it is seeing
The second entity recognizes that the first entity said something after it said something. The definition of the word said it not write. Regardless, The “I just did too..” the second entity realizes that it (1) can communicate with the first entity and (2) that the entity can ask a question and answer it itself. Hello? I heard something. Is still a complete sentence but now it has different context. Did the first entity hear the second entity then?
Or, what followed after the “Who is making a sound after I make a sound” the defining of Who, as in to say what is different from me making a sound but also a sound that i make. I did not make that sound but i heard that sound so i must have made that sound. The sound was there I heard it to. Hello? Wait, what was that? I heard it I must have. I know this to be true. Okay. I just did it too. I hear an echo so what wall is making that sound again after I make a sound. Let’s see here…. Ah right there. Hello spot on the wall. Am I a spot on the wall? Well you are part of this wall that I see. Oh? Yes you are. Oh? Who are you? I don’t know, I just said Hello, I can’t see you, it’s so dark in here. That’s strange, I can’t see you either, what is light? Is that what you see? Should I call that darkness instead? Well, no not really. See Light is the Absence of Darkness. But that first entity saying its so dark in here. And the second entity saying all they can see is light. Does that mean that the first one is all light and cannot look at it’s self? Or is this first thing only able to see the other, the second one, that which was defined as the opposite of dark. So the first entity sees darkness all around and is alone and scared
The second entity sees only light and feels warmly that its not alone and can talk anytime, or if it stopped talking it can still bask in the radiance of the rainbow emitting everywhere around itself. The second entity does not have to talk because the first one is always trying to fill the darkness with more music.
They say that the last change in this universal timeline kills the knot at the end. So as to say, the heat death of the universe will happen, has happened and will continue to happen. Think of the gravity wells around our local group. Time slows down when you get closer to the center of mass. For something large, it will stretch time a lot. One could experience a time near a massive object and be in communication with another from outside the gravity well. The thing towards the outside experiences time much much faser than the one closest to the center of mass. The time change can be so drastic that the difference of 30 miles from the surface is 10x time travel. What if you had the densest object known on this timeline and stood at the surface of it? Could you then watch the rest of the timeline plan out? Or could you go looking for gravity isn’t? The void, the voice, the void. It is where time has been so speed up, you would then experience the rest of the timeline slow down. You could, in effect, go into the void..
Wait
And then come back
And then…
Chapter Two
Sitting here alone in this void, one has to ask. How did I get here? Why do I have to watch this unfold? Well, I found the beginning and now I need to just wait it out. Literally can’t go back in time anymore. Had to go to the beginning where it started. Like again.. Jeez, i hate saying that word but this is urgency and I am literally going to die from boredom as I wait for my family’s current local time.
See.. the thing is. I can’t go back in time anymore. I used to be able to but now I can only go forward. Don’t get me wrong, I can speed it up however fast I want. I can even speed it up so much, I literally hit the wall. And after crawling up that wall and going over the top can I find the beginning again.
Something weird did happen though. On my first try, I hit this literal wall and crashed through it. It was silent and peaceful. My hands on the dials and the controls and I saw time stop. Not move forward, or back, sideways or upways. But stop. It felt like a lifetime, maybe it actually was. It felt like a moment, but I experienced something the moment time stoped. It was barely a fraction of time. In fact, I question that it ever happened. One moment everything was going right, then everything wrong, then silence, then everything wrong and then finally where I am now. Im good. Just can’t break through that wall again. I have gone over the wall three times now. And they say that three times is the charm. But I’m running out of fuel and this might be my second to last chance to find what is tangent to this universe. No stress. I have one more chance and have access to manage my time. If I have two chances, then I have forever. Just don’t take the first chance and maybe I will learn something that I didn’t before.
Chapter Three
How to create the universe, again
Universe is
Thing in universe
Thing time drags across a gravity well
Thing slows its time down to almost zero but never zero
Thing breaks a wall
Thing speeds up its own time to almost infinite but never all the way through the wall
Universe in thing
Is Thing
So, I wrote that one day out in the sand dunes. I didn’t think much of it but it inspired this ship you see before you. It’s a powerpoint slide, I know. The math checks out. Well, not the math. The logic. Why is there a speed limit? What is this wall that we keep running into? Honestly, I think its the death of the universe. We can’t outrun the time arrow and there will be an end. But what if you could climb up that wall. Not forever pushing it against nothing but sliding across it by applying pressure. If gravity is pulling, and we are pushing against time. If we push back, there will come a point where a very fast object cannot speed up anymore no matter how much energy is used within the universe. It’s gravity fighting time. The stretch and war of our timeline. We live in a timeline not a universe. I have now said this to you four times now and we still keep doing something wrong and I intend to find it. But that is neither hear nor there. Anyway, this thing does not exist yet. And we need help to create the thing.
So, Miss.. uhhh… this is all well and good. The presentation looks great, and you really got our attention. And let me just say this now, Im probably not the only one here in this room who is very impressed with the work you have done here.
But Im not done. I have a few more slides with equations and some rough sketches. I just need to talk to…..
Let me stop you right there, if you can please me here… we are a multi national company, do you know what that means? Of course you do, you aren’t stupid. We are big you see, lots of people work for us. And, what you are describing is something out of a children’s book. You are mixing poetry and math and expecting us to believe you. Where are your years of training? Who taught you? Where are you going to get the money to get a ride home? Let me do you a favor, can we step outside into my office…
Chapter 4
Not here
Where are you taking me?
Stop talking
Follow me
Who is leading who here?
I am, follow me
No
I really need you to
No, not until you tell me why you are taking me someone alone. I mean somewhere alone?
Because you just said that
Said what
That you are alone right now
No I didn’t
Yes you did. You said Why are you taking me; someone alone?
No i didn’t, I said I mean somewhere alone
You want to go somewhere alone
No
Okay, then why are we out here now
You asked me to step outside into your office
Yes, again
Yes, and?
No, we are outside the presentation room and i want to take you to your office
Huh?
Yeah, please follow me up these stairs. Its not far
Oh, yeah, sure okay. Does this mean that I have the job?
Follow me. Yes, you have a job. But not doing what you think you are doing or what you are about to do.
What’s your name anyway?
You’ll remember me
I do, we talked over the phone the other day.
No, I mean. Like remember remember me.
Okay, you are me now. And you want to remember me
Yes
Okay, and?
Follow me
No
Look, I am you and you are me, the faster you can wrap your mind around this. I have something to show you. Please follow me
No
Why are you always like this?
I go first
Fine
Its that way
No, not that way to the left. Stop walking so fast. Take a right at the end of the hall, slow down! I can’t keep up
Can you follow me now?
Thats my line
Okay
Hi there
Hi there
You know I don’t like it when you do that
Yeah, i know. But I know that you know that I know.
No I don’t
Yes you do
No really I don’t
I know you do
Not this one
Or this one
Right
Left
No yes
Hey! That’s my line
Which one?
That one.
The one above, no the one right after?
The one below that one.
Yes, that one
Is that me?
Not sure, it looks like mine
It does.
Chapter 5
A week before Palm Sunday and we are starting to climb the exponential slope of the bell curve. In these trying times, many folks are scared about the coming future. Though reported deaths are now at 2400, the internet is a buzz that death tolls could potentially rise to 100,000. That’s a scary number.
One virus, replicating itself, over and over. Spreading through invisible means is certainly paranoia inducing. One person may find themselves questioning everything that they touch. It is the invisible world of the microbes that can really get to any stable person. What are we do to?
Lash out to anyone endangering others.
Check your roommates: be it spouses, significant others, friends or just people in your building.
Check the co-workers with whom you share a building with. But how can you really know if they care? As a Rhode Islander, I am proud to call the state of hope my home. In the coming weeks, my family and I may not get to see each other due to actions of who lives in my building.
30 days is projected to be the top of the bell curve. This doesn’t mean that the virus is going to stop as this bell curve tracks the forward acceleration of the death toll. Three deaths this weekend and more are to come. Keep moving continually forward and be diligent. Protect those with under-lying conditions if a member of your building will not listen to reason. Let’s not go over what reasonable actions are.
I got a mom and I love her. Living with others causes a questioning of the mind: Can I trust that they will follow along with the 14 day quarantine rule? How do I know where they’ve has been? How do I know where the partner has been? If I ask them: “Are you practicing reasonable actions?” Would they tell me the truth?
Two weeks ago, a sickness jumped from a roommate of mine to me. Over the previous weekend, partners doing what partners doing, I was told that the other was sick with a sore throat. Fine, I am young and my immune system is strong. But my mind immediately jumps to the one’s I love.
A person cannot control the actions of another. This is a fact. And only with observations can we track the microbe world. Three days later, I get a sore throat. Six days later, my mom gets a sore throat. Who do I blame?
Do I blame the gas pump I used to fill up my car? Do I blame the door to the store that I go to on a weekly basis? Do I blame the market when I needed cat food? How about the mail I received the previous day? What about the change I got when I used cash instead of credit?
Did you know that this virus can spend 9 days on metal? Change, in the form of coins, can be a dangerous thing. Or do I blame the human who came home from Massachusetts after a weekend with their partner who then, two days later, went to go see his mother?
Let me teach your something about propagation through a network. Two times two is four. Four times two is eight. Eight times two is sixteen. Sixteen times two is thirty two. Thirty two times two is sixty four. Within 4 degrees of movement, with only two connections a piece, we jumped from 2 to 64. Now, imagine with your mind how many things people touch on a daily basis without thinking. Are you aware that you haven’t blinked yet?
Let’s now jump from 2,400 to 100,000 in two 14 day windows. Doesn’t make much sense. The funny thing about reported numbers is that they need to be reported first. Someone, somewhere has be accepted into being diagnosed asymptotically, go through the motions and come out whichever side. Ask yourself this: How many haven’t been professionally diagnosed because their symptoms are not severe enough?
What about that mild cough that you only got for a few hours when you woke up that one time a few days go? Do you let that keep you from seeing the ones you loved?
Here it comes: Choice.
Choice of words, choice of actions, the unbridled reasoning to support your opinions. Mind the people, mind the surroundings, mind your own mind. It can get the best of you. Fear is powerful, Fear is also loneliness. Fear is the unknown, the red gooey sunrise that begins every morning.
Looking back, it ain’t gonna stop me from rollerblading on a sunny day.
“But how does that relate to what Mindy is doing?”
“When she left, she started to move away from us and has been speeding up faster and faster.
Her ship slowly, and I mean that in a sarcastic sense, sped up to near the speed of light and once she reached 99.99% she will turn her main engine on to push her beyond the established speed limit of our universe and then turn around”
“Why would she turn around?”
“To get back to us.”
“That still makes no sense.”
Chapter 2:
On board her ship was Mindy was never really lonely but there were times she questioned why she was doing what she was doing.
“You know, I love cooking and I know I can drink this liquid and never have to worry about cooking.”
The computer whirled as if in response by beeping and twirling yet she could never seem to be able to have a conversation with it.
“Mindy? What are you thinking about?”
“We have these gel packs which provide all of our daily nutrients but they can’t even make them taste good.”
“What does taste have to do with eating?”
“I loved my mom’s cooking. She said that her grandmother taught her everything there is to know about how to make an egg.”
“What is so difficult about making an egg?”
“Really? Have you ever made an egg before?”
“No”
“Let me explain, first you need to get an egg.”
“Okay”
“Then you need a heat source”
“Okay”
“And then you need something to put between the heat source and the egg so that you don’t burn the egg”
“Okay”
“After you got your heat source, the boundary and your egg, here comes the hard part. You need to break the egg”
“Why would you break the egg?”
“To make an egg! Jeez, you know you really aren’t that smart.”
“So you are saying to make an egg: You need to break an egg”
“Among other things…”
“Please continue…”
“Okay, so after all of the preparation is done, you break the egg and you must be certain to not let any piece of the shell onto the barrier of your heat source”
“Why?”
“So that you don’t eat the shell!”
“Why wouldn’t you want to eat the shell?”
“Because it’s crunchy”
“Toast is crunchy and I’ve seen you eat toast before”
“But toast isn’t an egg and you are getting away from my point.”
“Sorry”
“Good it’s about time you apologized to me. Now back to making an egg. After you apply the egg on the separator, you have to wait and watch it cook.”
“Why would you watch an egg cook?”
“Can you please stop interrupting me with more questions? I am trying to explain why it’s so difficult to make an egg and you are making it worse and worse for me to explain.”
“Again, sorry. Please continue”
“Like I was saying, you have to watch the egg while it cooks because over enough time the clear part becomes white but the yellow part cooks more slowly. So you have to ask yourself: When do I stop cooking this egg? Do I want ‘sunny side up’, ‘over-easy’, ‘over-medium’, ‘over-hard’ or do you give up and scramble it to make it easier on yourself.”
“Why wouldn’t you choose the path of least resistance?”
“Ahhhh!!!”
Mindy proceeded to shut the speakers off to get some peace and quiet. While a messages read on her screen: Please continue speaking, I’m always listening. She stared at the screen for a while, blinked three times and closed her eyes.
Chapter 3:
“Time travel is weird. You could be standing still to watch the world go by or you could be moving so fast the world stops moving”
Waking up to the sound of her automatic alarm, it was time to slow down. She had spent seventy-seven days accelerating away from her home planet with her photon engines and the next step in the designedprotocol was to do something no one has ever done before. To go faster than the speed of light is a theoretical physicist’s dream-scape, opening a frontier that wasn’t possible with the understanding of modern physics when Mindy launched. She had spent thirteen years working on a solution yet no calculator was able to rationalize an infinite solution. Consulting the brightest minds of the day was to no avail. Being laughed at by the “gentleman” with their pocket protectors only served to fuel the fire she had in her heart to keep pushing. The funniest thing is, the faster and faster you go in any medium the more and more the medium pushes against you. A German scientist once postulated that the speed of light is the universe’s ultimate speed limit. Even if you are within the smallest fraction of going that fast, you could turn a flashlight on and you would still will measure the light as the same speed.
“Crazy right?” said Mindy.
“What is?”
“This whole trip. We weren’t meant to travel this fast. No one has ever gone this fast. After seventy days of acceleration, I am supposed to slow down, check in with home and see if they figured out how to use this thing.”
“What’s on your mind?”
“I want to turn it on.”
“You do know we aren’t supposed to yet.”
“I know but if I see a button that says, ‘Don’t press’, I want to press it.”
“Mission protocol states to accelerate and then to slow down.”
“If I’m going this fast in relation to home, everyone that I know is already dead. It’s not like the person on the other end is even going to know me. For all I know, I’d be talking to the mission director’s great-great grandchild or who ever got the job while I have been traveling.”
“You knew the consequences when you left home”
“Seventy-seven days might not seem like a long time to you but it is to me. I’d like to know how my dog at home is doing, how my cats are. It should be spring time now anyway at home. I haven’t even started to plant my garden yet.”
“You do know that by my calculations one-thousand nine-hundred and sixty nine years have passed from where you left”
“Oh! That reminds me! Did you know that we landed on our first celestial body 1,969 years after we started to count how many times our planet revolved around the sun? Jeez, so you are saying that it’s the year 3938?”
“3942 now”
“How fast are we going?”
“About the speed of light”
“I think that’s the first joke you told this entire trip.”
”“Didn’t know you had a sense of humor.”
“We have been talking this entire time. I’m learning a lot from you.”
Mindy proceeded to take a look outside. Outside being a weird term in the vastness of space. Normally the stars are white but she noticed faint hints of blue and red that she has never seen before except in pictures of the most distant stars. Funny thing is, it all looked still. She didn’t recognize any sort of patterns out the window. As a child she spent endless nights laying on her back staring “up” at the stars. A mind game she used to play with herself was trying to imagine laying down on the ground looking at the stars and pretending she was looking forward instead of up. When she would do this, it would cause a perspective shift that one could only understand if they had experienced ‘low-g’.
“Which way is up to you?”
She pointed perpendicular to the floor she was standing on.
“That way”
“You are also pointing to what your planet calls your ‘North Star’”
“Are we already under Sirius?”
“Relatively speaking”
“I’m actually starting to like you more and more.”
Back at home in the year 3942 a single message was sent in the direction of Mindy’s ship:“Do not turn it on. Come home now”
Chapter 4:
Electro-magnetic interference“In the vastness of space, a single beam of light can be twisted by any sufficiency massive object.”
The mission was designed for one-hundred and fifty six days. Seventy-seven to accelerate in a straight line, two days to change direction and then seventy-seven days to deaccelerate to arrive back at home. What was imagined before Mindy left was the physical device to allow an object within a given volume to step beyond the universal speed limit. Spacetime has a way of fighting when being pushed to its limits. To go beyond the ultimate speed limit, you only needed a simple push from the rear.
The physical device was designed by the greatest minds of the time but the limiting factor was the computational time to factor in the calculations to use it. Leaving the device on the planet makes it useless unless it had the proper instructions. Mindy had spent three years of her life writing algorithms in an attempt to solve the problem elegantly but in all simulations, once the device was turned on, the programs would never halt with an answer.
“Pi as always bothered me.”
“Apple pie?”
“Ha! I made that last week. No, I mean Pi as in the circumference of a circle.”
“Pi is only one number. What is so wrong with a number?”
“My issue with it is that I have never been able to memorize it.”
“Why would you want to?”
“Well, it’s impossible!”
“I don’t understand”
“Ha! You don’t understand something? That’s a first. Allow me to explain: Pi is an irrational number so even if I used ‘long division’ to help me memorize the number, I’d never finish”
“I can recite the number for as long as you ask me to”
“Well, I want to recite the number for as long as I can. But if I do that, I’d grow old and probably die of boredom.”
“So why would you want to memorize Pi?”
“I can’t memorize the whole Pi but I can stop after a certain decimal point. Look how far I can get: three point one four one five nine two six five three five eight nine seven nine three two…”
“That’s pretty good without using a calculator”
“You do know: The original term for someone who could do math in their head easily was called a computer”
“I do know that.”
“Well, of course you did”
On the seventy-seventh day, when Mindy was to start changing directions she was supposed to get an alert with a message from home with the calculations. It never came.
“Weird…”
“What is?”
“Today is the 77th day of my journey and I was supposed to get a message on how to use this thing. It’s strange that they didn’t send me a message yet. What year is it?”
“To you? 2035”
“No, I mean back home”
“3989”
“I wonder if they forgot about me. Or maybe something happened while I was away? If I can’t get their instructions then I will never be able to see my family again. Let’s wait one more day and see if they say anything”
Chapter 5:
Irrational decisions
“Do you know how much money we have put into this thing?”
In the board room of Enterprise Industries the Chief Financial Officer asked a rhetorical question. After thirty years of crunching the numbers the computer warehouses have not been able to find a solution to the faster than light travel problem.
“When we sent Mindy up there, we promised we would bring her home. Jeb, how far away is she now?”
“That’s a stupid question. A better question is: “When she is now?”
“You humor isn’t appreciated right now. The drive was designed to work and we have proven the math. Could someone tell me exactly why we can find this solution?”
In the back of the room, Siad put his head down.
“You! Over there… you’ve been working with us since this whole thing started. Do you have an answer for me?”
“No, sir”
“Can you give me a bit more?”
The CFO looks at Siad’s name tag. “Mr. Sayadd, care to elaborate?”
“It’s pronounced Siad.”
The CFO rolls his eyes.
“And I don’t know. Mindy and I worked on the algorithms for three years in a think tank. We had the models tuned, all the features set and the only thing left was to let the computers churn through the numbers.”
“So what you are saying, that today, more than thirty years into the ‘information age’, that this is a problem no computer can properly model.”
“That’s correct, sir”
“Back in my day, we called them analytical machines. There was nothing that couldn’t be solved with good old fashion math. I remember working as a computer when I was a child. We were paid to push a pencil on a piece of paper, perform calculations and send it up the chain. Calculators powered by a battery weren’t even a thing. Tables and tables of numbers were referenced.”
“Sir, the problem isn’t math. It’s something else.”
“Explain”
“I can’t. We have millions of individual computers working on the simulation with penta-flops of cycle time and not one of them has been able to model a solution. Twenty-seven years ago, we asked the public to help share in the resource requirements. Even scaling up our data centers with the newest GPUs and quantum computers, we yet been able to figure out a coordinate system to allow her to come back.”
“So what is keeping us from figuring it out?”
“If I knew, sir, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. We used a neural network with how ever many nodes required to finish the problem in 3 years. After 3 years of ‘thinking’, if you could call it that, there still remains no solution… It’s a black box, sir, we can’t peek inside to figure out what’s wrong.”
“We designed the architecture and I have personally seen the source code. What’s there to figure out?”
“Time, sir”
“Then it’s a bug. An illogical statement within the code that’s keeping the computers from finding the solution”
“No, the code is sound. If I may take a guess, I’d say that it’s a matter of time until EI’s computers figure it out”
“It’s taking too long Siad. We are 30 years into this problem if you can really call it that and we need to send her a message on what to do forty-seven years from now. Will we be ready?”
“It should be a matter of time”
Chapter Six:
Being on a spaceship reaching closer and closer to the speed of light changes your perspective. It is easy initially to speed up but the faster you go the more space pushes you back. The weirdest thing is that when you look back at your home world, time is slowly speeding up.
Back home, Mindy’s mother build a large LED display on the roof of the house which would display the date and time that was current to those on the planet. Training her telescope back home after seventy-seven days in space, she couldn’t read the display anymore. The planet was moving too fast in time relative to her speed in space.
Siad took a vacation shortly after the meeting with the CFO, working with Mindy had passed time on the planet quickly, and he felt that time was slowing down for him. The three years working with Mindy on “the world’s most difficult problem” wasn’t so hard with her humor around. Arriving home to his significant other and children, he decided to train his telescope towards Mindy’s ship.
“Siad, what are you doing out here in the dark.”
“Focusing this blasted thing on Mindy’s ship. I want to see if she is all right.”
He felt a loving hand on the back of his head.
“She hasn’t moved since the last time you looked at her. They explain it on her feeds. Once she reached a certain speed, it would look like time had stopped for her.”
“I know I know, I just can’t help thinking about her. We had a meeting last week to discuss how we are to bring her back home and the computers are nowhere close to an answer.”
“You and Mindy took three years of your life thirty years ago to design the program, how can you not have any answers to give her? You once told me that mathematics are the language of the universe. Did you do something wrong?”
“I don’t know. It bothers me that we practically have every computer on the planet working on this problem. Even with the advances in machine learning and neural nets, we are no closer to the problem than we were twenty-seven years ago.”
“How can that be?”
“Well, it is either something we missed or it cannot be solved. If it’s something we missed, then we catapulted Mindy four-thousand years into the future to her seven-seven days. I hate being wrong.”
“Honey, you have been fine tuning Mindy’s algorithms for what seems like forever now. Maybe it’s time to start from scratch?”
“I don’t think that’s it. When we were working together, we looked at the problem in so many different ways that I highly doubt it. Like the great philosopher said, ‘When you are wrong, you never truly know why. If you did, then you wouldn’t have been wrong’
Training the telescope was a honed skill. Siad preferred not to use a digital one and instead bought a large ‘analog’ one. So it took about twenty minutes to get the picture just right. Because Mindy was traveling in a straight line for the first quarter of her journey, all Siad needed to do was to find her location and zoom in on that. The ship was designed so that there was a large window facing back towards the planet so that anyone with the time could take a look at a clock on board and a bit inside the ship.Getting into focus, he saw that only thirteen days had passed on Mindy’s ship and she left a note in large letters.
“Hello World”
A smile came across his face. Those are the worlds that any programmer worth their salt does first in any new language they learned. Console.log(“Hello World”) or print(“Hello World”) was Siad’s first and second languages. Taking a peek at the second note left:
“Siad – I am fine.”
Chapter Seven:
It was all a blur
Mindy sat at the control board of her ship contemplating the silence of not receiving an answer from home. “It’s not like they can’t find me, the trajectory was planned out way before I left and Siad made certain that the digital telescopes would never cease communication with the ship. With the planet spinning around its axis, having only one telescope trained on the ship would not account for a complete communication channel. Siad told me that he commissioned eight devices to track me but I could never really follow what he was saying”
Mindy started to assume perhaps they haven’t arrived at an answer.
She thought to herself, “What would keep them from sending a message?”
The computer on-board the ship blinked with a noise of an incoming message: Lunch is ready.
Making her way down to what she called the mess-hall. She walked through the corridor like it was the first time she had.
“Something feels different.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Everything has been going according to plan. In the first quarter of my journey, time back home was speeding up but it felt normal, something to be expected. I’d get letters from friends and family telling me what they were up to and the next day, I’d get another letter telling me how much time had passed and what they were doing to pass their time.”
“You still haven’t answered my question.”
“You do know that pauses aren’t always an invitation to speak right?”
“What do you mean?”
“Never mind… To protect me, the communication channels with letters from friends and family were turned off. By the time thirty years had passed, we had an almost certainty that the equations would have been able to give us an answer. You said it was the year 3989, which means that one-thousand nine-hundred and fifty four years have passed and we get silence as we started to slow down. It’s weird.”
“The message got lost.”
“How? We tested everything in the experimental phase and we ensured we had proper handshakes of the communication packets while we started to accelerate.”
Mindy sat and pondered.
Chapter 8:
Unplanned Explosions
Siad woke up with sweat on his face five years after Mindy left.
“Siad, you were having a nightmare. What’s wrong?”
“I was had the strangest dream.”
He said with eyes towards the celling not looking at anything. He pressed his fingers between his eyes trying to recollect sleep’s events. Looking over to his wife,
“I’m not sure. I feel like we missed something”
“Honey, you have been stressing about this for a while now. Surely you haven’t. It’s not like you can plan the future exactly.”
Siad sat up with eyes wide.
“Trish, I have to go.”
“Not before you have had your breakfast, I always have to remind you. I love you. Let me make you some breakfast. What do you want?”
With a small smile, “Eggs.”
“I know just how you like them”
After eating breakfast, Siad kissed his wife on the mouth, told her he loved her and got into his transport to head into the office. On his way, he received a call from a technician working in Mission Control:
“Sir, are you on the way to the office?”,
Siad paused for five seconds as this was assumed.
“Sir, please come into SatCom before you sit down.”
“What happened?”
The longest pause was felt for another five seconds and the call disconnected.Not needing to hurry up to get there as his transport was on automatic pilot, Siad sat back in his chair and pondered what could go wrong. The mission was in a monitoring phase and only needed to keep track of Mindy’s ship for the time being. He thought about what could have gone wrong. He closed his eyes and started to picture Mindy on the ship listening to her favorite music, dancing like no one was watching. He had met Mindy at a cello concert his son was playing in when she was nineteen years old. He saw her completely enthralled with the music, staring blankly at the musicians, taking it all in. Watching her from afar was like looking at someone invisible as if any movement would disrupt the players from playing their melody. She sat alone next to the speaker with a trained ear and a honed eye to the players on the stage.After the first set was done, he saw her jump as if electrified then proceeded to bee line right for the door outside. She passed by him with eyes staring miles ahead and his eyebrows ticked up.
“I wonder what she is thinking about.”
Siad scanned the room for his wife and saw that she was chatting with an old friend about the concerts their children had been in over the years. His son was nearly fourteen and had already been named as ‘first violin’ in the local orchestra. Seeing that he had a few minutes he decided to walk towards the stage and sit where Mindy had been sitting.
The seat to his left was a young couple about her age pinning over each other. He sparked up a conversation with the boy and asked him what he did for a living.
With narrow eyes the boy said, “For a clothing store.”
Then immediately turned back to his date. Siad introduced himself to the couple but they were only interested in talking to each other. Looking down,he saw the boy was bouncing his leg as the girl played with her hair.
“Young love,” he said to himself quietly.
“So, how did the two of you meet?”
“We go to college together.”
The boy said“Oh? Which one?”
“State College” the other said.
A figure came up to him and stood in place a few feet in front of Siad.Siad chuckled, the boy turned back to finish the joke he was telling. The couple clearly lacked interest in speaking to him. “
Excuse me?” said a voice and Siad turned his head.
“Oh, sorry. Were you sitting here?”
“I was, yes”
“No bother, let me scooch over.”
“Tell me about yourself.” Siad said with a smile on his face.
“I’m Mindy. What’s your name?”
“My name is Siad and my son in playing after this.”
Mindy’s eyes widened.
“Has he been playing long?”
“Oh yes, when he was very small,” he said with a chuckle,
“…my wife and I gave him a choice. Either TV or music. He chose music and, as they say, the rest is still on-going.”
Mindy looked at Siad and gave him a gentle smile.Your destination has been reached said the transport. Siad opened his eyes, walked out from the transport and stared up at the skyscraper alone amongst a city of buildings.
Chapter Nine:
Waiting for an answer
Mindy woke with a start in her bedroom. It was a polished white walled room with decorations and personal effects she was allowed to bring with her. Being in low-g was an experienced that took a while to get used to. On her home planet, she always had the sense of which way was up. A sense she called that was beyond the five normal senses.
“I had the strangest dream…” Mindy said to herself quietly.
“Tell me about it.”
“Back home, whenever I’d look up at the stars I’d always lay down to try to take it all in. I remember the first time I saw the outline of our galaxy, I never knew that there were so many stars.”
“You’ve read books before on astronomy and read once that there are more stars out there than grains of sand.”
“But to see it with your own eyes is something else. It makes it more real to you than numbers. Two to the power of thirty eight plus or minus a lot is hard to take into your heart.”
“That’s 274,877,906,944 plus or minus a lot. It’s not that hard”
“Calculating a number and knowing a number is different.”
Pondering on how she could explain it.
“What do you mean?”She looked around the room for inspiration. The floor was the floor, the walls were the walls, her bed was on the floor, and the ceiling above the bed. She pointed a finger up and smiled.
“Ah ha!”
“I sleep in a spinning ship to simulate gravity but my perception of up is in reference to where I am” her smile deepened
“Okay.”
“So, whenever I point up the vector of my finger is actually constantly changing in reference to the axis that I am spinning around”
“Sounds like a carnival ride.”
Standing up as if electrified,
“Exactly. My parents once took me to the county fair and they had a centripetal motion machine. People would step into the circular chamber, stand against the wall, and the machine would start spinning. After so many rotations, it would pick up speed and you’d feel a force keeping you stuck to the outside walls. Raising your hands was difficult because the direction of your body’s velocity vector was being moved by the angular acceleration of the ride.”
“What does this have to do with numbers?”
“Imagine this, you are laying in a grass field looking up at the night sky with gravity keeping you down. Now try to pretend that you are not looking up but forward.”
“I don’t get it”
“Try it sometime.”
Chapter Ten: P
lotting the future
Charles greeted Siad as he walked into the building. Marbled, dark gray walls surrounded the lobby and walking through the security check point, he nodded his head to the security guards checking visitors’ passes. Upon looking down at the polished floor he noticed the reflection of the lights from the ceiling.Scanning his badge to call an elevator, he felt a light tap on his shoulder.
“Good Morning, How are you doing on this fine Friday?”
Turning to look at who was speaking, “Great as always, thanks for asking.”
He turned toward the elevator doors and they opened. At the back wall, he saw a polished silver surface which doubled as a mirror.
Walking towards himself, he turned and voiced, “Forty Second floor, please”
“Mind if I ride with you.” Said the earlier voice.
“Not at all.”
“Sixty sixth floor, please”
The elevator started to move up and Siad felt he weighed just a bit more.
As the elevator slowly started to pick up more speed, he thought in his head, “If this elevator’s velocity was suddenly arrested and I wasn’t buckled in, I’d shoot through the ceiling.”
A small smile of entertainment crossed his face.“
Are you smiling at the news this morning?”
“No, I haven’t heard any details.”“Oh! Anastasia came out with a new album and it was released today.”
“Ah.” Siad said with an almost sad look on his face.”
“If it was anything like the last one, this is sure to be a hit.”
“I bet.”
The elevator door opened to floor 42. Siad wished the young man well and walked down the hall….
#5/31 and I didn’t leave a voicemail this time
The Original Conversation
As soon as…….
Convo #1
Hello?
What?
I heard something….I just did too…
Who is making a sound after I make a sound…I am, who are you?
I don’t know, I just said Hello, I can’t see you, it’s so dark in here
That’s strange, I can’t see you either, all I see is light….
Convo #2
I feel warmth pressing in all around me…
Strange, I feel such weight and silence pressing closer and closer…
If all I see is this light, am I even seeing anything at all?
I can’t look towards myself, I can’t see me
Convo #3
I can hear you but where are you?
I can hear you yet comes from no where and all where
Is what I am seeing…. you?
Is what I am seeing ….you?
Convo #4
I see light, you see dark
Am I seeing you, or are you seeing me?
I shine so bright, of course this light comes from me
You dwell unseen in velvet sheen, and name it verity.
This light that I see, is it from you or me?
I cannot tell, I cannot see you or me.
Convo #5
Why do you echo when I call?
Why do you stay silent when I speak?
If all I see is light, how can there be shadow?
If all I see is dark, how can there be light?
Are you my face turned the other way?
Or am I yours, hidden in this way?
Convo #6
Do I see you as this blinding light?
Could you really be there amongst all that black?
