The Scientist

It was a cold and dark evening and the scientist was once again at his work station, drinking his cooling cup of coffee and working later into the evening, as he would often do, because that for him was mostly his form of entertainment.

He was a hard working scientist, and actually made it to a respectable position in the scientific research branch of the US army. It was these times at night when he could focus on the more ‘interesting’ elements of his job. He had much at his disposal, something which the greatest of computer geeks around the world could only froth at their mouths for. But he was hard working, he dedicated his life to his profession, and therefore he deserved it.

Now he was toying around with this new technology that came in recently. He was a top researcher and often had access to equipment which would hit the public market only ten years later. This was a new super focusing devise, kind of like a big microscope, but one which was all digital and didn’t require lenses.

He had already been toying with this new technology for a week, but now he was getting some interesting results. He started focusing on some branch of ions which would form and explode near the electrons spinning around neutrons, the core part of the molecule, which for example makes up our own bodies.

The advantage to this new equipment was that, not only could it focus on very minute areas through the use of fibre optic pyramidation, but it could store the recorded data on a hard drive. He certainly had enough of that.

He began focusing on these special ions because they had an interesting characteristic. They would almost appear from nothing, only to eventually collapse in on themselves and disappear, to perhaps reappear somewhere else. Kind of like little big bang universes in a way. But this was all only theory of course, something he could afford to fantasise about, seeing he was on the super cutting edge of technology and all that.

He began focusing on these forming and disappearing ions, but it was tricky because they naturally formed and disappeared so quickly, this while spinning around the electrons in their unusual and seemingly unpredictable manner.

It was a trial and error process he had been toying with for the last couple of days. The trick was to take these brief-like video shots at various points of the ion’s life and to try and focus in on a random part of the ion he had happened to capture in that super small micro second of time.

It required a bit of experimentation, but it was a skill he had been developing a knack for. After all, he was a top scientist wasn’t he?

After many attempts, he finally managed to capture something which seemed to have shape. The problem was that he did not know exactly which speed to slow down to within the ions’ life process. Although he had a billion Gigobytes of hard drive space available for his own personal use, this space was quickly used up because the video collection process was able to draw data at incredible speeds and in incredible detail. Taking a video snapshot of this ion’s life, he started to peruse it at various details, and was shocked to see that it actually did look like a little universe. One which had formed from a big bang, expanded to its limits, and then eventually collapsed in on itself to oblivion. All within, for him, the time span of a few nanoseconds. The evolutionary process of a universe which in his time frame could take trillions of years, seemed to be happening all around him on incredibly minute levels, each within a flicker of a thought. Countless universes living out their existence, and here he managed to capture one meaningless instance of one of these countless and meaningless universes.

Because the detail was so great and the instrument so sensitive, he thought he’d zoom in to a random level and a random time frame of this video clip he had taken of this little universe.

On zooming, he seemed to have stumbled on some shape. Because the equipment was very sensitive, he moved the instrumentation very slowly with the directional focus modulator.

The scientist was carefully guiding his view along what looked like a gently curved rim, a white curve, kind of like the rim of a porcelain coffee cup. He continued panning leftward only to be clouded from view by a sea of white. This though seemed somewhat out of focus. The scientist slowly began adjusting the focus to see if he could make more sense of his new discovery. Ah, that’s it. Very interesting, looks somewhat fibrous. Strands of white fibre, although very close up. The entire surface would shift from side to side every once in a while. “Maybe I should pull the view back a bit so that I could see the greater picture”, he though. It was hard to play with the panning because, if you pulled back or in too quickly, you could easily lose track of what you had focused on.

He tried giving just the slightest nudge out and managed, what it seemed, to stay within a relative area of where he had been before.

“What is this?” he asked himself. It looked like someone wearing a white coat hunched over and examining something. The white laboratory coat, the coffee cup to the right, the dark wavy hair on the back of his head, and the fancy instruments he was perched over. It all looked rather frighteningly familiar, and this is when the figure he was examining spun around and looked upwards. A look of horror and shock, mouth gaping open as the figure stared upwards directly at him from below. The figure was in shock, but now so was he, because he was staring at himself? How could this be? What nonsense was this? How could he zoom in on this random short-lived ion, capture a moment and location of its evolving and extinguishing universe, and stumble on what appeared to be him at that very moment? Which is when one other horrifying thought occurred to him. His mouth gaping open, he turned around, looked upwards, andÉ

Like two mirrors facing each other, or a video camera filming a television broadcast of itself, with a frame within a frame an infinite number of times, the scientist had inadvertently caught himself in a multi-dimension array, his present time frame and existence caught in a time existence worm and connected to an infinite number of other dimensions, the worm looping back on itself to form a never ending closed loop.

The higher forces of the universe, overseeing all the dimensions and managing the stability of the infinite existences, noticed the little quirk in the system – something that happens occasionally with all the variables that exist and the interplay between them.

The next day the lab assistant showed up for work at the usual 7am, let himself into the quarters, and winding his way to his boss’s work station, he found lying on the floor the scientist’s laboratory coat together with the rest of his clothes, a half a cup of cold coffee on the table, what looked like a severe short circuit in the apparently fried new equipment, and a burn mark in the wooden stool on which his boss would usually work. As if a big bolt of lightning had whisked him away or something.