Life of Pi
Part 1
I’ve been experimenting with different forms of writing lately. This post is part of a short story I’ve been working on, which has been both a frustrating and humbling (and fun, at times! lol) experience. I’m not sure if I’ll continue writing them, but it was interesting to try something different. Mad respect to all fiction writers out there, those crazed explorers of the what-ifs that surround us.
In the beginning there was P.
Well, there were others too. Let me explain.
P lived in the singularity alongside other particles within a regime of perfect harmony. They attracted and repulsed one another in equal measure, and any differences between them were negligible and ignored (though P sometimes felt insecure about the frequency of his energy emissions). Overall the particles were happy at this point in spacetime. Questions of existence and meaning never intruded the fray of their timeless paradise.
And then it happened. Dizzying flashes and an explosion of gregarious magnitude. The weight of everything twisting, contorting, expanding. Time unspooling in a single direction like a ball of runaway yarn. P and the particles colliding in a struggle for cosmic stability.
And then everything was nothing. Nothingness gave birth to darkness, as well as the shape of our universe.
The vast quiet of it all consumed P. He was much more accustomed to the frenetics of his tight-knit home. “I suppose this is it,” P mused. “Whoa, I can muse now.” In the chaos of what we later called The Big Bang, P had gained the ability to convert some of his energy emissions into language and musings. I didn’t believe it was possible until long after I discovered P in my lab.
While admiring his newfound abilities, P was suddenly struck by a passing meteor. Everything around him began to move—no, he was moving, somewhere close to the speed of light. Stars, amorphous gases, distant galaxies blazed past him in a blurry haze. The meteor veered in various directions as the gravity of interstellar objects tugged at his vessel.
It wasn’t long, in the grand scheme of things, before P arrived at Earth. The deep blues of the ocean seized him, as did the scale of the mountains that consumed his view. The meteor was losing altitude, and seconds later it made contact with the Earth. There was gravel, stillness, and snowfall.
That’s when I detected the signal.
“Where are we?” P asked.
“Particle collider,” replied a particle.
Confusion radiated from P. “Come again?”
“The humans,” another particle said. “They want to better understand us. And to do that they need to destroy us.”
“They need to? Why can’t they just ask us questions?” P asked.
“When all you got is a hammer, everything is a nail,” another particle replied. “It’s a human phrase.”
P grew puzzled. “And what does that mean?”
“You’ll understand once you’ve traveled the length of human history I have,” the particle said.
Kirin and I extracted the meteor a few hours after we discovered it in the Juras mountains. We were told that this sort of thing happened all the time, anomalous meteor crashes, though their structural integrity was often compromised in the descent through our atmosphere. Any fragments that did make it through were thought to have nothing interesting left to say about the universe. But to me, any object of space that managed to find its way to the surface of our home was a kind of miracle. It was proof that, for all of our collective ingenuity, there were still some things we could not predict with certainty.
I suppose this was what separated me from the others. They were happy to spend their days in the comfort of mathematics, branching out only when the equations suggested they do so. I was content with this too, at least for a while. But I had always wanted to reach beyond the equations themselves. I wanted to look at the universe with my own eyes and let it take me where it would.
The electromagnetic field released its hold again. P buzzed in frustration. “How many times are they going to do this?”
“They think that there is something more fundamental than us,” a particle said. “Smashing us together will reveal the answers. So it goes!”
“Of course there’s something more!” P beamed at the walls. “I mean, it can’t just be us, right?”
Another particle phased into view, one emitting a frequency that suggested wisdom and timelessness. “Depends on what you mean by us. Regardless, you cannot force the answer to reveal itself.”
The elder particle paused before continuing. “Humans aren’t so different from the other advanced civilizations that have risen and fallen throughout the history of the cosmos. Each one was intelligent in their own right and eventually faced the mystery of what constituted their universe. That led many of them to us, and many theories were constructed in their attempts to understand our nature, but they all failed for one simple reason.”
The other particles vibrated along their axis of knowingness, as if they had already heard the message a million times over. P whirred with anticipation. “Why did they fail?”
“They never tried to communicate with us,” said the timeless particle. “All of them were capable of developing machines to measure, manipulate, and probe us, some more advanced than others. The device we currently find ourselves in, this particle collider, is one such tool. But none ever came close to opening a line of communication.”
The timeless particle emitted a sigh. “We have tried of course, many times, from our end. But every civilization has missed the message.”
“What about the particists?” interjected another particle. “And here in this universe, the panpsychists?”
“Every civilization had its subset of intelligent organisms who found issue with the methods and technologies of their time. They intuited that something was amiss in the promises of their advances. But no one listened to them, even the ones that played physics proper to the highest degree.”
“Such hubris is often a consequence of advanced intelligence,” added another particle.
“It must be terrible to feel like an outsider in your own society,” another particle mused.
“Indeed,” replied the elder particle. “In their attempts to resolve their existential loneliness, they end up ignoring it in the pursuit of knowledge. What they forget is that there is more to knowing than knowledge.”
Suddenly the elder particle was seized by the electromagnetic field, along with several other particles. Before P and the remaining particles could protest, his fellow particles were smashed out of existence.
The meteor survived entirely intact, which was unusual. Additionally our scanners had probed it and detected several foreign signals. My peers dismissed it as noise, but I pushed harder for the experiment. We had just finished repairing and upgrading the collider after all—why not test it on new material? There was a part of me that believed the meteor might yield the missing predictions of The Standard Model.
The Standard Model theorized the existence of fundamental particles and how they interact. It was later tested in several experiments, ultimately revealing what was thought to constitute the ‘stuff’ of our universe—well, most of it anyways. The field promptly celebrated and moved on to other topics, but I continued to be compelled by the missing fundamental force.
I tried for decades to understand what it might be, its role in the cosmic scaffolding, only to ever arrive right back where I started. Some theorists posited that it was linked to gravitational forces, but I suspected at the time that it might be something more, something bigger and more conseqeuntial than gravity.
“In all my travels, I’ve never seen anything like this,” a particle mused. “Matter is supposed to be conserved—transformed even—but never destroyed. What they’re doing… it’s not supposed to be possible…”
What troubled P the most was the loss of each individual consciousness. Every particle was something special, irreplaceable. New consciousnesses could be formed and reconfigured as particles interacted with one another throughout the course of a universe’s life, but never erased from the fabric of existence itself. That something so fundamental could cease to exist shook P to his core.
“There has to be a way to communicate with them,” said P. “They don’t understand the implications of their actions.”
“We’ve tried already,” replied another particle. “Distress frequencies, light projections, radiation… nothing has been able to get their attention.”
P orbited around the collider, searching for a structural weakness, the possibility of escape and contact. “Perhaps the only way is to disrupt their operations,” P mused. “Get them to stop their experiments.”
“How?” replied another particle.
“By speaking their language.”