Quanta in the Bulk
I have an inkling, that I should feel
despair, though I can feel hope as strongly.
What place is this? Why am I here? What
language do I speak? Who am I? What am I? How come am I able to
think? What should I think? I do not know if I should be enthusiastic,
or bored… Then too, I know those feelings exist. I apparently know some
concepts are supposed to be significant to me. What should I know? What not?
I can sense the placid wall of
confusion looming... somewhere. The pacific sea of the Wisdom of Ages nestles
my existence all the same. I do not have the privilege to a tincture of
explanation to anything.
A presence is felt. I might name it
intuition. It tells me, that had I been me, I would have dismissed all those
questions as banal, infinitely recurring annoyances. Some questions exist only
to remain unanswered for evermore; so it says to me.
Then the thing, pulsating, came
rolling to me. It was a tangible thing, I thought, and it was alive. I do not
know what being alive means, but then, I knew it was. Its kind name themselves
Tucths. Under an all-encompassing dome of inviolable opacity was I, and so was
that bit of sentience.
Is everything supposed to be so
predictable?
Now, that I am able to think them,
let my thoughts flow freely. I am without shape or any definable
attribute—well, of course, this strikes me solely because somehow I can tell
that whatever it all is about, it is not meant to be this way. The Tucth was
still waiting for me to do something. It had a form of its own, yes, it was like
a ball— what is a ball? — like a ball enveloped by a mesh of pentagons
and hexagons. It flickers, hops and shifts randomly, like a fidgeting, restive…
what? Yet it wasn’t that random either, because I could foresee where it
would be next. To be exact, I can foresee every occurrence around here.
I do not know how I might put it down
in my description of this; I can only try. Everything here is made of perfect
geometric shapes. Sometimes, the shapes appear different from different
perspectives. The dome above my frame of reference is scarred all over with ever
changing bubbles, ripples, arching tubes, crevices and peaks and troughs, every
change foreseeable by me. The dome curves back on itself to converge at where I
am. I sense them all, the entirety of this… realm… though I have no idea
what makes me capable.
“Supreme Being,” said the being
before I could tax myself any further. The pair of dots on it was reminiscent
of something, like a relic from a place apart. “I have come to your Perfection,
to seek your aid.” At that, for a spell, I thought if I really was a Supreme
Being worthy of being at the pinnacle of all echelons. I do not know what being
important might mean, but of course, I deduced I might be. “Our rival Set is
out on a Cancellation spree, and mine own Set is their most prized target. Our
Set is the Multiples-Of-Sixty, as you must be knowing, your Perfection.”
My presence here has taught me that
these things—the Tucths—are incarnations of an exotic concept that I, for one, am
supposed to be very familiar with, but am not. “Our life is our Numeral
Essence, Supreme Being. Tucth kind live for eons, but then each eon sees the
height of menace of an ominous Set, when the Dome Above dissolves and chaos
erupts every—”
“Heed my thoughts, Tucth. These eons
are the Grares that I know of”, said I, to which it replied, “Yes. This Grare
is coming to an end, your Perfection, which shall obliterate everything.” This
I had not predicted.
“What is this clan?”
“They are Primes; near invulnerable
to Cancellations. They sweep across parts on this world, draining the Numeral Essence
of Tucths. The victims are annihilated irreversibly. Those with greater
Essences in their Cores withstand longer, but succumb eventually. How large is
your Essence, your Perfection?”
I did not know that. But I knew that
this one’s was small enough to not be meaningful for much long. This Grare’s
end is imminent— is mine too? Yet again, I wondered where I was, and how
long I had been there. There is perhaps a fundamental rate of change of this
world, and with nothing to compare it to, I cannot discern how fast it changes,
or how slow. I am conscious of Existence around me; there is the Dome Above,
the shapes that inter morph into each other by where I perceive them from, the
Tucths that inhabit this World, and then the other being like me, who I thought
I recognized from a different place altog—
“Oh Supreme Being, I ask your
Perfection to keep the Primes at bay”, cut in the Tucth. “Use your arts; you
are omnipotent”, it pleaded with me. I could not respond to it, because I did
not know how to. Subtly, I sensed unusualness creep into the milieu. For the
first time in a long time, apart from cognising the entity called Time, I
sensed that I could scarcely predict anything now. The two dots on the Tucth
were no more. The World Under began to grow stranger. “Supreme Being,
acknowledge the presence of Primes; they are here.”
There were suddenly countless
throbbing, pulsating things forming everywhere. Tucths were never known to me
to be so erratic. All of them seemed to have merged into a uniform being
spreading over swathes of the surface. The shapes were being consumed wherever
they spread to, and up above, the Dome was vigorously altering. The Tucth that
had been before me had popped out of Existence; its Numeral Essence was now
null. In the end, the Primes surrounded me.
“How large is your Essence, Being?”
called out the sea of Primes. Waves emanated from the sea, reaching out to me,
capturing me. “Why are you so hard to be cancelled?” they still asked.
Very unusually, feelings came to me. I felt threatened, angered and in want of help, instantaneously. “Why are you doing this? To what end? Your Set will end everything; the World will take us all with it.”
“We are not driven by motives. Our natural
properties propel us. We are one with the laws. Consciousnesses like you are
free to decide everything; Existence is made unpredictable while you are
extant. What does your Core hold, Being?”
The Dome Above began to destabilise.
The opacity wore away, it grew brighter and brighter. More waves hit my being,
while the sea of rogue Tucths roiled and moved. Suddenly, the Primes erupted in
a furore, and I was aware of what they thought. “The Being has an Undefined
Core! We tried to cancel it ineffectively! The End is here!” In the midst of
this, strange, cryptic thoughts came to me.
Experiment… malfunction… failure…
losses…
All the dimensions in Existence began
to fold up, it seemed. The Primes went steadily vanishing. The surrounding
collapsed in on itself, the World Under and the Dome Above closed in to meet
each other. I was drawn out through the Dome, or perhaps the World Under,
whatever mattered. There were sudden flashes around me, amidst darkness— when
it again became more luminous, more radiant, nothing mattered, I was no one,
just a speck of Consciousness; brighter and brighter still… Then
blackness devoured it all.
From far away, from a universe apart,
I heard a miniscule sound reaching me. The sound was so faint, so small. I was
eager to hear it, somehow glad to have heard it. The sound grew in strength
now. It was a voice, yes, and a woman’s voice in that.
“He’s ba— Look at th— …tor!” The
voice was only half audible, some syllables staying unheard. Ever so slowly, I
felt I was part of a material body, nay, I was the body itself. My body was in
agony. My head ached. “Please, …m back. Please, pl— please. Yes.” Then
the voice got clearer.
“Yes! Yes! I knew you would!” I felt
the joy in that voice. I felt the tips of my fingers, and the tips of my toes
way down below. I tried to twitch my big toe, and then let the crack break
across my eyelids. It was painful at first, when the light invaded, making me
close my eyes again. Then I opened them, and it was obscure before me; two
individuals stood, I heard words of encouragement. No, three were there. Two? I
shut my eyes and squeezed the lids together, and blinked twice.
I lay on my back, on a comfortable
bed. The air smelled sterile, artificially tangy, like in a hospital. My hand
was secured in the reassuring grip of a man standing beside my bed. Someone was
running soft, gentle fingers through my hair, stroking my head, comforting me. “Hey,
brother dear”, said the woman’s voice. I turned my head to the other side, and
the pretty lady sitting on the chair beside my bed was my younger sister,
Nivedita. The man was Stephen, my closest friend and my sister’s fiancé. The
third individual was a doctor, who was recording things down on a clipboard. He
moved closer to me, held my eye open with his fingers and peered in. “Welcome
back, pal”, he said. “Talk to him. He’s going to be fine.” Before leaving me to
them, he said to me, “Your colleague would be on her way now”, gave me a
lukewarm smile and disappeared behind the closing door.
I am here—but where? “Wait… What…” I uttered.
“What’s happening? Please, tell me. Where am I?”
A moment passed. “Jit.” My friend
spoke. The word hung in the air, persisting for a while. Nivedita still drew
her hand over my head. “You have had been in a coma for three days now.”
That came as a jolt. I closed my eyes
and digested the fact. I— a comatose? I could not remember what brought
me here. Experiment… malfunction… failure… losses… I am Dr. Satyajit
Chatterjee, researcher and particle physicist by profession. What put me in a
coma, then?
Immediately, memories came back in pieces.
There was an instrument newly built
at CERN, a novel particle collider to smash hadrons to spherically converge and
focus them at a point, unlike the several countries-spanning, stupendous coils
of the Large Hadron Collider. I too was there, with my colleagues both from my
country and from others, though largely international ones. Everything was
calculated, everything was planned. We were taking readings in the Observation
Hall, adjacent to the Experimentation Hall, the humongous structure visible on
the other side of the glass window. The situation had degraded thenceforth.
“What about the others? How is
everybody?” I asked as soon as I remembered. Nivedita replied, “One of them
passed away. You are one of the three who were knocked out.” I listened to that
in disbelief. God, somebody died! Stephen said, “D’you know what the
strange part is? Your brain had next to nothing of any damage severe enough to
have put you in coma. You just were—unresponsive, out cold, peaceful and every part
of your body that could function involuntarily, did so”, and he smiled.
When the situation was going out of
hand, I remembered, we had anomalous readings. Tachyons— faster-than-light
things from the stuff of fiction; even microscopic singularities surviving for
longer than expectations, were there inside the arrangement. The singularities
leaked through the arrangement walls, perhaps. Then the explosion that ripped
through everything. Then, nothing. Nothing?
Then what was that place where I had
been? The strange world was inscribed in my memory down to every detail. Wait.
It wasn’t. I don’t remember seeing anything, nor hearing or feeling. It was not
like a dream; I could not conjure images of it in my mind, I just knew I had
been there; it was a queer sense of being aware. Was it a dream, though? Do
comatose dream? The anomalies, could they have been real, after all? That place
was very much there; it did exist—or does. In a split second, I imagined if I
had been in a different universe, or a dimension curled up so small that it is
not physically readable with worldly gadgets. But I couldn’t have bodily been
there!
“How do you feel, Jit?” asked Stephen,
to break the quiet.”Does your head hurt?”
“What makes each of us so sure of our
existence, Steve? Which part of our brain makes us sentient?” asked I.
Stephen’s face looked very funny to me, like cold omelette. I tried to get up,
felt weak, yet managed to lift myself on my elbow, helped by the both of them.
“Jit, you should rest”, insisted Steve.
The door opened then, drawing all of
our attentions. Who came inside was a heavily built woman, and I recognized her.
The awkward silence begged to be broken, so I did; “Wie geht’s, Dr. Krause?”
Her smile came as a short pulse on her face. “Toll! Und wie geht es dir, Dr.
Chatterjee?”
I introduced to her my friend and my
sister. She took her seat beside my bed, on a stool. I asked her about our casualty,
and learned it was the jolly old Goodman. The man wasn’t old enough to die, I
thought with pity. And then I remembered the strange world again. Had Goodman
too been there? The thought was so eerie
that I felt goose bumps form on my skin. I could have sworn there was something
there that reminded me of someone I know.
I was not sure if the dream was worth
racking my imaginations with, whether at all it was a dream. I could be well on
the edge of the precipice before madness. I brushed the prospect of it aside
and thought more. The new idea that was coming to me was absurd, although I
succumbed to its strength. Could I have been in the quantum world? The
atoms comprising me can never be shrunken so small, or I would make black hole
material; neither could my atoms be removed keeping every proportion same, for
fear of adverse health effects—besides, say, a house cannot be built from five
regular bricks.
“Tell me, Dr. Krause; what part of
myself is my Self? It all belongs to me; my brain, my heart, my
thoughts, emotions and feelings. What am I, then? Might I say, what is the
I?” The single-bed ward was silent. Dr. Krause bit her lip, Stephen frowned.
“What does it matter, Dada”, said Nivedita, “We can never know.” Then I
began, “What if—”
I froze. What am I thinking? I have
lost my mind. Yet, I couldn’t contain it. “Is consciousness quantized?” More
silence, now accompanied by disbelief. “The jungle of organic wires in one’s brain
does not collectively give rise to the illusory concept called consciousness,
perhaps? What is it that makes us special? What makes dead matter conscious; an
ancient copycat molecule, with sheer force of coincidence, to be the basis for
all thinking, respiring, feeling beings that are?”
“We aren’t special”, opined Dr. Krause, “The
said jungle does in fact make us conscious.”
“That’s too simple an explanation for
something so unexplained, don’t you think? What if there really is something
else?”
“What do you mean by quantized consciousness?”
Stephen asked.
“Like mass, or charge, consciousness might be
a fundamental, atomic aspect of the universe. It could be made of discrete
packets, follow its own conservation laws, have its own unit, and interact with
objects in its own way.”
The idea was too far-fetched, I suspected. Dr.
Krause’s face showed blatant, uncomfortable disapproval. But what of my knowing
of Goodman being there with me? That was before I had any idea about what had become
of him. What of my sojourn in the strange dimension? It was too difficult for
me to disregard it as a lazy dream rooted in my meagre subconscious. God, am I
crazy!
Nivedita said, “You need some rest, Dada.
At best, you don’t know what you’re talking about. At worst—”
“Little Sister, you’re wrong. I need a piece of
paper, and a pen to write on it with. I hope to take the first steps to putting
forth the quantum theory of gravity, to unify the domain of the classical and
the quantum…”
“Jit, listen. You are too weak, you shouldn’t—”
“There was no damage to my brain, remember?”
Dr. Krause, though, had kept silent, brooding.
Finally, she spoke. “Our experiment has apparently revealed an otherwise
fictional particle. Tachyons could be real, regardless of how unbelievable that
might sound. Dr. Chatterjee,” she addressed me, “your delirious words have
strangely made me give them some importance. In the very least, it sounds very
interesting, admittedly. Where did you get it?”
I couldn’t help grinning. “A dead man’s
spirit told me”, I said. “A sheet of paper and a pen, please”, I stretched out
my hand.
Check out the sequel at Sapience's Dark Side
