A prequel story: Quanta in the Bulk

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