Short Story: Cosmic Strings
Okay, it’s more than one page. I came up with an idea and ran with it not knowing where it would lead me. That’s the best kind of writing. It’s also the kind of writing that you just pull straight out of your ass. This is serious some of the best shit I could come up with. I did manage to check the spelling and most of the grammar before I decided to upload this. I should put my best foot forward, but I tend to just put it in my mouth. Enjoy the story. If not the language, the essence of it.
“Cosmic Strings”
So this tree fell in the woods… It fell on a rabbit running from a fox, and subsequently rolled over the fox — and tumbled down the hill. Ants made their hill too close and the metropolis of mud, larva, and royalty amongst the insects of the world was wiped clear of the forest floor by the tumbling log. A million tiny screams sounded at once, but only a stray bird could hear the likes of the billionth extinction of ants, and then it flew away. Standing trees caught the massive rolling log before it could inflict further damage upon the natural world. You think anyone heard that?
What caused the commotion? A hair. Really, a fraction of a hair’s width wire had fallen from the heavens and bolted through the tree that caused so much devastation. The animals that survived the ensuing mayhem accepted the presence of the newly invisible wire as if it were always there and went about their daily business hiding and preying upon one another.
Here’s an interesting story about the wire: Spiders that strolled by the wire on their nightly hunts climbed the razor thin thread and built webs across the base of it. One adventurous spider climbed the thread up and up. It figured, in only the simple way a spider could, that it would find the end of the line and build a web there. The night passed, and soon days did too, and the spider didn’t find the end of the thread, he just kept climbing. If spiders weren’t loners and kept history books instead, they would have written that this spider had gone the furthest that any spider has gone. He was the first one to reach the top of the troposphere before giving up from the extreme cold and lack of breathable air and falling eighteen kilometers to his death.
Man did not yet realize the coming of the wire. Not until the day the forest land the wire had fallen in was being torn down to make way for a brand new MegaMart. Toby, upon his bulldozer, was sliced clean in twain by the transparent and hard-to-see wire. It caused a ruckus. The foreman found the two halves of Toby and the pile of insides that spilt out. The bulldozer itself was split down the middle but only to the back of the driver’s seat. Toby’s blood lead to the discovery of the interstellar dental floss buried deep in the dirt. The red glistened in the midday sun and the foreman squinted his eyes and made out a length of the wire. Curiously, he did what men usually do when they first come face to face with new things. He poked it.
Twang! Like a guitar string the wire vibrated and shimmered as the pulse of his poke went along the thin line. The foreman tilted his bemused head to the sky. The wire was hooked to nothing that he could see. They had torn down all the trees around it. He asked his workers where the wire was tethered too, but the lunch bell rang and the workers weren’t being paid to be bemused by a piece of string as narrow as a line of atoms and instead, went off to eat. The foreman decided for himself that the wire went off into the blue sky — it was a cloudless day and not a weather balloon or other unidentified flying object could be seem anchoring the other side of the line.
Twang! Twang! The foreman strummed the line. He threw his hands up. Whatever it was, the tethered, infinitely indistinguishable line leading to the heavens was holding up construction on the new MegaMart super store. “Cut it down boys!” He barked after the lunch session.
One man took a pair of office scissors to the taut fishing line. Snip! The scissor blades were parted from the handle. The line stayed in one piece. Another construction worker grabbed gardening shears he had bought at the MegaMart three blocks away because they were on sale and put the blades around the defiant thread and clamped the blades. These blades too were removed from their handle with not a hair shaved from the line. Rotary saw blades were placed on the heavenward string but the metal was peeled off the discus and shrapnel hurt the men more than the cosmic string. A katana was dueled against the thread; the master of the blade claimed that nothing could withstand the carbon steel of his blade, and the katana too was made shorter by eight inches.
Plan B. Men with shovels at the base of the stubborn wire heaved dirt away night and day. Twelve feet down the thread was still anchored further down. Twenty feet more and they couldn’t find the end of the line. Forty-one feet and eight inches later the men gave up and threatened to strike for doing the laboriously stupid task. MegaMart decided the best way to handle the situation was to fire everyone and start again. The foreman on the site was told to do something about the wire, and to do it goddamned fast if he didn’t want to find himself unemployed.
“I reckon,” the foreman responded in kind. “We need ourselves some scientists.”
MegaMart hired the best scientists money could buy. They brought them in from M.I.T., Caltech, Stanford, and all the other smart sounding Ivy League schools. Just to be fair and meet their labor employment quotas MegaMart also brought in some minorities and urban kids as interns.
Experiment #1. A clever physicist came up with this. Vibrations on a string would eventually bounce back once they hit the other end. They could use it to determine the length of the cord and make a guess as to where exactly the other end of the line was. He tried this: A sensor was put around the wire and hooked to a computer. On a small LCD screen the vibrations of the wire were visible as a sinusoidal read out. The noise was filtered out. He deftly strummed a pattern of vibrations on the cable that showed as major pulses on the monitor. Then they waited. A day passed by with no return. A week and still nothing. The physicist left the task of watching up to his dutiful grad students and went off to attend a String Theory summit in Geneva, Switzerland. He returned and still more nothing. Another week later, the physicist received a frantic and jubilant phone call from his students. The pattern had come back, diminished, distorted by noise, but recognizable by the computer software.
What did they learn? The end of the wire was some ten light years in space. They knew the exact direction in which the wire was pointing and using some more computer software they were able to plot the trajectory of the wire out ten light years. A star was at the other end and months ago a planet had been discovered. Could this be? The MegaMart scientists blew a collective gasket. Someone on that planet sent this string to Earth and it meant that life existed there.
Experiment #2. Another physicist revealed this simple childhood invention that fascinated him as a six year old and eventually led him to study science in college and graduate with a Ph.D. in theoretical physics. He demonstrated. Using two grad students, he took two plain Dixie cups and popped a piece of twine into the bottoms of each cup and secured the twine with a knot on each end. He commanded his grad students to go further apart until the string was tight and straight and had them speak to one another using the primitive telephone. There was general applause; most people were just trying to be nice.
Back to the cosmic thread. He tied a Dixie cup to the heavebound cord with a short length of fishing line from a tackle box he brought with him. He pulled the Dixie cup until the wire was taut and exclaimed, “Greetings. We are men from Earth! And we bid you welcome! We mean you no harm and seek your reply!” The pulses from his voice translated into vibrations on the string that disappeared into the sky and through the heavens.
Weeks later the scientists got their reply. To their astonishment it was in English. “Please stop yelling. We can hear you just fine!”
The scientists tried to open communications with the aliens on the other side of the line but their communiques were met with silence. MegaMart Coroporation grew tired of waiting for the extraterrestrials to phone back and set to work completing the superstore. The area around the wire was turned into a small amusement park filled with fast food vendors and the park housed an alien themed carousel and Ferris wheel. The scientists were outraged. MegaMart fired them and installed a Dixie cup and a fishing line as a permanent feature of the newly christened “Cosmic String” and charged ten dollars to anyone who wanted to speak to aliens. Most people were disappointed since the replies weren’t instant.
The aliens though were baffled. Costumers were irate. The scientists were up in arms over being fired and restricted from entering the premises. Lawsuits were filed every which way. Tabloids ran stories that MegaMart duped the public with a story about aliens that speak English to loosen coffers and contended that the so-called “Cosmic String” was a hoax. String theorists didn’t take MegaMart’s marketing spin lying down either. Calling the wire the “Cosmic String” cheapened the study of String theory they proclaimed. MegaMart’s marketing team rebuked them: “At least we have a string, what do you got?” With mounting costs, MegaMart’s board of directors decided that the controversial site should be shut down.
As with all simple solutions there are complex problems. When the CEO issued the order to the regional MegaMart manager over a conference call he received this back: “I would love too, but something just came down the Cosmic String.”
“What is it?” The CEO asked.
“It appears to be an elevator cart.”
The scientists were rehired and readmitted onto the premises under armed escort to study this new marvel. This time reporters tagged along and they documented the first honest-to-god alien craft that wasn’t a blurry Frisbee wafting around in the sky. The military tagged along too to ensure that no honest-to-god aliens would come out of the first honest-to-god alien craft that wasn’t a blurry Frisbee in the sky. The first sign of trouble, they would nuke the entire state to avoid alien invasion.
The scientists stepped up to the door. There was one button to push and it was pushed. The doors opened. No smoke poured out. No busy flashing lights emitted from the elevator car. No honest-to-god aliens stepped out and greeted men with honest-to-god alien one-liners like “we come in peace and you go in pieces,” or “live long and prosper.”
Nothing happened in fact except the doors of the elevator car opening to reveal…the inside of the elevator car. The car itself was about three times the size of an elevator car you might find in any skyscraper, except it has a porthole as well. It was insulated with various layers of metals to keep the emptiness of space out and to keep the goodness of breathable air in. There appeared to be a small lavatory, a sink, and some other provisions to ensure the safety of any traveler brave enough to travel on the elevator over the interstellar track. The scientists knew what this meant: they would have to draw straws as to who would go. The military assigned their best sharpshooter to the team — it was two-man operation, one way, on an elevator. Rations were provided, communications equipment, weapons, and video cameras.
The new space men entered the elevator. On the inside there was a panel with ten buttons. Each button was labeled by a number. Each man resisted the childhood urge to poke every button and picked the first destination labeled “2207.” The doors closed. The two man operation team waved goodbye and up they went. Each man had enough room to sit, move around a little and wait. As they passed into the ionosphere the men floated, but the elevator picked up speed planting their feet firm to the ground and sped up. They couldn’t tell which way they were going; it wasn’t up, so they agreed that it should be forward.
The velocity of the elevator picked up again when they escaped the Earth and Moon. Mars was up next. They had reached it in a mere couple of days and kept zooming into the great beyond. They whizzed by Jupiter at twice the speed of Mars; Saturn darted by the window at four times the speed, Neptune even faster on their exponential increase in acceleration. Pluto was just a blur along with all of the other planets that scientists were still trying to determine if they should label planets or just big rocks that could potentially hit Earth.
The scientist spent his time plotting velocity graphs and going over Einstein’s equations of relativity. They were approaching the speed of light, and one should at least make an attempt to be prepared in that case. The soldier did pushups, because who knew what was on the other end of the elevator track, and if it should be hostile, well, one should at least make an attempt to be prepared in that case.
One morning, the soldier woke the scientist up. “What’s that?” He pointed out the window. There were surrounded by whiteness.
“My god,” the scientist said. “We must now be going at the speed of light. We’re going so fast that we can see photons standing still all around us.”
Then ten minutes after that the blackness of space returned. They looked like they were going backwards.
“What’s this?” the soldier asked.
“I think what we just experienced was like a sonic boom. The light we saw around us was a barrier of light and we’ve just gone past it. If I’m right, we’re going backwards in time, but forward in space!” This made it difficult to account for time, but both of them continued to count time as moving forward, despite the fact that it was moving backwards.
The elevator slowed down. They could tell this because the light barrier returned and then vanished again. After a while both men floated and to their astonishment they were in orbit of an Earth-like planet.
“Uh,” the soldier said looking out the window. “Does that look like Italy to you?” He was correct, it was Italy. They were able to point out other notable features that defined the Earth-like planet as Earth. This baffled them even more, but before any rousing discussions could be made the impact into the upper atmosphere knocked them back. They free fell inside of the elevator car. The velocity decreased and they were again moving slowly through the lower atmosphere until they touched down on the ground.
Ding! The elevator doors opened once again without any smoke or fanfare. The two-man team stepped out. Crowds of people were gathered around them and cheered. There were no aliens, just regular everyday Earth people. The surroundings looked familiar too — in fact it was the MegaMart super store that they had left behind except now there were more buildings around them. The cars were sleeker looking. There were more things in the air flying to and fro.
A man ran up to the elevator wearing a slick business suit and a MegaMart cap. He extended his hand and smiled brightly. “Welcome to the future!” He announced.
“Future?” The scientist asked.
The man turned to face the crowds of reporters and gawkers and spread his arms apart. “Ladies and Gentlemen of the press, you have just witnessed MegaMart Global Corps’ inaugural time traveling flight of fancy! These gentlemen are from two-hundred years in the past! Think of the possibilities! Now you can go back and visit your great-great-great-grandparents. They can visit you! With more Cosmic Strings being launched through time everyday, you’ll be able to travel to any year, any part of history! See D-Day as it happened. Travel around Athens in the time of the Greeks! Meet Jesus! And don’t forget to stop at your local MegaMart when you do! Not only is MegaMart Global in every country around the world, but now throughout the history of all mankind! We truly are the greatest place to shop for all your needs for all time!”
