| "Most people will accept the truth only in the form of a lie." | |
| -- Ouspenski |
Everything in this story is a lie.
The previous statement was the first lie.
There are some accounts that can only be fictional. Many are simply not plausible, but in other cases the story itself is plausible but the fact that it is being reported is not.
For example, in Sunset Boulevard the voice over narration throughout turns out to be the dead man seen floating in the swimming pool at the beginning of the movie.
Some things are unknowable, such as the color of unexposed photographic film, or what Marie Antionette was thinking after she was decapitated but before she died.
Or consider for example the story of David Passel, PhD candidate in astrophysics at the University of Hawaii.
He is entirely fictional. U of H doesn't even have an astrophysics program. But he is important nevertheless.
David was born on September 9, 1959, at the tail end of the Baby Boom, a Virgo. He died on September 9, 1999, a forty-year-old virgin.
David lived in his parents' refurbished garage in Studio City, California, overlooking Ventura Blvd., until he was well past thirty. He graduated from high school, then nearby Cal State Northridge with a physics degree. For years he supported himself modestly as a junior engineer at a series of aerospace companies in the Los Angeles area, some as far away as Hughes Advanced Research Center in Malibu and Rockwell Space Systems Division in Downey, commuting to each job in a '69 Beetle from the same Studio City garage. He never stayed at any of the jobs long enough to advance through the seniority-based promotion systems of these companies.
In the early 1990s he made a sizable sum of money selling Star Trek and Star Wars collectibles, first by mail order and later over the Internet. But you'd never guess to look at him. When at the age of eighteen, in 1977, his mother let him begin picking out his own clothes, he favored paisley prints and pastels. He never re-examined this fashion choice in later life, and seldom bought new clothes, so he was still seen mostly in threadbare '70s attire even after he attained his wealth. He also kept the full brown beard and "Beatle" haircut he'd had in 1977. (The beard often was flecked with Cheetos crumbs.)
Eventually David took the money and moved to Hawaii, buying a new Suzuki Samurai 4WD in the process. But he was too shy, pale and spindly to be a good beach bum, and he quickly got "island fever," and felt trapped. Most of all he missed going to Sci Fi conventions with his college buddies. He missed how they all dressed like Northern Klingons (the costumes and makeup being less expensive and elaborate than the later Southern Klingons) and wisecracked incessantly at the conventions. Waiting for an elevator at the Anaheim Marriott or the LAX Hilton, one of them would exclaim, "Damn this Organian Peace Treaty! In more glorious times a Klingon warrior would fight his way to the front of the line!" And so, seeking to recapture the lost youth of his student days, he ended up enrolling in the graduate program University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy.
University life once again suited him, especially the high-speed Internet connection, and the proximity of people who knew -- as he did -- that there were actually two different women with green skin who appeared in separate episodes of the original Star Trek series, or that C3PO was originally intended to have a Brooklyn accent.
David started out in the astronomy program, which included a lot of telescope time. The Institute for Astronomy operated the Haleakala High Altitude Observatory Site on Maui and the Mauna Kea Science Reserve on the big island of Hawaii, both on the tops of steep cinder cone volcano craters. David quickly discovered that he had overwhelming symptoms of headaches, dizziness and nausea at the high altitudes. Luckily he was able to switch his PhD program to astrophysics, which was all theoretical work done on chalkboards and computers, at the University of Hawaii campus in Honolulu.
He fell back on his physics background, and a lot of stuff he had learned about computational fluid dynamics at the aerospace companies. Fascinated by a Larry Niven short story, The Hole Man, in which a quantum black hole is released on Mars and eventually swallows the planet, he worked on a mathematical model of a small black hole slowly swallowing a planet, and ultimately its star system. He wanted to know how fast each stage would happen, and what kind of radiation it would emit. His adviser suggested he start trying to find a thesis topic, as this obviously wouldn't do.
The most significant emotional event at this time of David's life was when he fell in love with -- or, to be more precise, became infatuated with -- Dr. Dorothy Klein. She was the manager of the Keck Telescope facility, also on top of the Mauna Kea cinder cone, but more connected with UCLA and CalTech than U of H. Of course he didn't meet her up there. He was introduced to her at an art opening at the East/West Center on the Honolulu campus, an event at which the astronomers would traditionally all cluster together like a small galaxy, being pretty well baffled by the art itself and the humanities majors fawning over it.
Most likely David fell for Dorothy because she reminded him of the character of "Number One" in the second original Star Trek pilot. Majel Barret -- later more famous for playing Nurse Chapel on the Starship Enterprise as well as for marrying the show's producer -- performed the part in a black wig with bangs, similar to Dorothy Klein's choice of hair do, and with an authoritarian air that David was reminded of in Dorothy's cool manner. In an uncharacteristic respite from his shyness he managed to corner her on a small patio and regale her with an account of his research on the black-hole-swallowing-a-planet problem. "Right now," he said, "I'm modeling a gas giant because it is easier than a rocky planet, and that my preliminary computer simulations are suggesting a characteristic X-ray spectrum with a steeply rising amplitude, as the entire planet is swallowed quickly, as opposed to the steadier emissions one sees from a black hole in orbital equilibrium with a companion stars, with a stable accretion disk slowly fed mass into the black hole," before she managed to extricate herself from the situation.
"Now I know what it feels like to be a companion of a singularity with a steeply rising output," she retorted, and ducking through a hedge. He thought she was utterly charming, when in fact she had tried to be insulting to ward him off. He mistook it for the affectionate sarcastic wit his buddies always displayed to only their closest associates.
That night he fantasized about her with green skin.
The next day he composed his first e-mail love letter to her:
From dpassel@ifa.hawaii.edu Tue Mar 29 10:22:21 1998
From: dpassel@ifa.hawaii.edu
Date: Tue Mar 29 1998 10:22:21 Hawaiian Standard Time
Reply-To: dpassel@ifa.hawaii.edu
To: klein@keck.ucla.edu
Subject: It was good to meet you last night
X-UIDL: 50a5ae30052edfc80f912f30f9a9c30a
Dear Dr. Klein,
or should I say "Dear Dorothy," instead? After all I did call
you Dorothy all last night. I mean last evening. Damn!
This isn't working out like I planned. I'm all flustered,
even emailing you. I think I love you. There, I've said it.
But I can't send this now. Maybe if I am patient you can learn
to love me too, and later I could show you this email, and we'd
both laugh about it.
---------------------------------------------------------------
David Passel, PhD candidate in astrophysics
Institute for Astronomy (IfA)
The University of Hawaii "I'm from Iowa, I only work in
dpassel@afi.hawaii.edu outer space." -- James T. Kirk
---------------------------------------------------------------
Of course, he didn't send the mail. The above shows what it would've looked like if he had. That alternate universe leads to a restraining order. But shy David saved the file in his "Unfinished Mail" folder, and put it out of his mind. Lord knows why he didn't use the DELETE key right after typing "I think I love you.".
The next day he happened to spot her among the stacks at the U of H main library. He tailed her for a while, spying on her through the shelves of books, unnoticed, until she got into one of the library building's slow, cranky elevators. As the doors were shutting he slid up and pushed the "call" button to re-open them, and then hopped in beside her.
He immediately began talking as if the conversation at the East/West center the previous evening were never interrupted. Only this time he told her about the alien dreams, something he'd never shared with anyone before. Somehow after writing the email he hadn't sent he felt closer to her, as if he trusted her more.
"For months I have been dreaming of aliens who live in a gas giant planet. As far as I can tell they are vortex creatures, made of high-speed convection currents twisting through the gas. Over eons of evolution, competing for access to solar energy at the surface, and flow energy in the planet's "jet stream," they have learned to weave their flows into surfaces which constrained the gasses, manipulating pressures and controlling chemical reactions, until a full metabolism has resulted. Cascading triggers of gas pressure from compartment to compartment, directing flows, make a sort of 'nervous' system. The creatures communicate with some kind of waves, possibly sound waves or telepathy. They make fluid loops with sound waves going in circular paths to create memory mechanisms which store vibrational data. The have evolved a civilization of sorts, by accessing stored knowledge in the fluid loops as their 'written' language.
"The've also developed a knowledge of physics, appropriate to their environment. They can experiment at will, creating a wide variety of conditions. For example they've detected the 4 degree background radiation and surmised the conditions of the early universe shortly after the Big Bang.
"Recently they've reached a point where they thought they can recreate some of these early conditions. One of their number wants to do the experiment, but the others are afarid it might create a gravitational singularity and destroy their planet."
David paused to breathe, and as the elevator doors opened Dr. Klein said, "My dream is that you fall into a black hole and have the atoms in your body broken down into their component quarks," and she dived out the open doors and into the nearest women's restroom.
That night he composed another email to her that he didn't send, pouring out his heart about his love of physics, astronomy, sci fi, and her. He even wrote about his fantasy her with green skin. He saved it as well in his "Unfinished Mail" folder.
The day after that David got this email, an International Astronomical Union Circular (IAUC) from the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams, sent to astronomers around the world. (The Bureau's name is an anachronism left over from the days when they were telegrams, but of course they are all now sent over the Internet.)
From dsmith@mit.edu Thu Apr 1 08:12:11 1998
From: dsmith@mit.edu
Date: Thu Apr 1 1998 08:12:11 Eastern Standard Time
Reply-To: dsmith@mit.edu
To: list@nelson.greewich.org
Subject: IAUC 6855
X-UIDL: 80f912f30f9a9c30a50a5ae30052edfc80f912f30
April 1, 1998 - IAUC 6855
XTE J0421+560
D. Smith and R. Remillard, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology; and J. Swank,
T. Takeshima, and E. Smith, Goddard Space
Flight Center, NASA, report: "The RXTE
All-Sky Monitor has detected a bright
and rapidly rising x-ray transient, which
we designate XTE J0421+560. The best-fit
position is R.A. = 4h21m.01, Decl. = +56o03'.5
(equinox 2000.0), with an error radius
(90-percent confidence) of 4'. The ASM
countrate (2-12 keV) was below 40
mCrab (at 3 sigma) on Mar. 31.36 UT,
rising rapidly thereafter to 139 (Mar.
31.64), 504 (31.77), and 1880 mCrab (Apr. 1.04).
An RXTE PCA observation, which began on
Apr. 1.08, confirms the presence of a new
source with a flux near 2 Crab. The ASM
spectrum appears very hard, but the PCA light curve
shows no obvious pulsations at periods longer
than 0.25 s. Observations at other
wavelengths are urgently needed."
What this meant was that a spacecraft of NASA's, the RXTE, which the scans the whole sky for new X-ray sources, had detected a source with a very rapidly rising energy output of X-rays. Usually these things took weeks to build up; this one was taking hours. Other telescopes were urgently asked to track the object in all frequencies.
He was certain at once that it was a prank played by Dr. Klein. It was just the kind of "hack" one of his Sci Fi buddies would have engineered, and it showed a high degree of regard for the victim, to go to all the trouble. But David wasn't fooled. She'd made it too obvious. He'd actually used the expression, "rapidly rising x-ray transient" when he was talking to her, and here it was in the IAUC. He knew that as manager of the Keck facility she had root passwords to a number of nodes on the Internet, and it would be easy for her to forge an email source.
In his excitement he thought about driving over to see her at her campus office and congratulating her on the hack, but then he remembered that today she was working on top of the volcano. (He'd gotten her schedule off the Keck web site.) By the time she was back in Honolulu he'd calmed down, and realized that it would be funnier to say nothing and wait for her to come to him out of suspense.
But she didn't seek him out. In the next few days the astronomical community was buzzing about the new X-ray source. It was optically correlated with CI Camelopardalis, a known variable star in the constellation Camelopardalis the Giraffe about 3000 light years from Earth. Optical, radio frequency, and X-ray telescopes all observed dramatically increasing energy output from the star system over the next two days following the initial report. Studying preliminary data posted on the Web, David saw frequency spectra which closely matched his computer simulations of a gas giant being swallowed by a newly-created black hole.
At first he was gripped by paranoia -- his thesis advisor must be in on the prank, since he was the only one with access to David's results. Someone at each reporting observatory must be in on it as well. He admired the far-reaching efforts of Dr. Klein to mess with his mind so thoroughly. But finally when he looked through a student's amateur telescope and saw CI Camelopardalis visibly brighter than the night before he realized it was a true event. There was no practical joke. It was instead a coincidence. And Dr. Klein had no reason to seek him out.
Now that he knew Dorothy wasn't trying to communicate to him through pranks, he didn't know what his next move with her should be. So he procrastinated. His only nod to his infatuation was to continue to compose her heartfelt emails he didn't send, which were becoming an emotional diary of sorts.
He didn't run into her again for a while. Actually, she was actively avoiding him on the U of H campus, and he had no legitimate reason to visit her on top of Mauna Kea, where he hated to go anyway.
So he concentrated on his computer simulation. The alien dreams had unaccountably stopped, but they had given him an idea. If he understood correctly, the gas aliens did physical simulations by building and configuring ad-hoc computers that were digital-analog hybrids. They performed finite difference methods using spatial lattices, or grids. This was reminded him of the Computational Fluid Dynamics codes he had worked on at Rockwell, to calculate the air flow over a re-entering space shuttle. There it had taken months of painstaking interactive work on a computer with a 3D CAD package to create the grids, and then just days to run the actual simulation. The aliens had a way to re-generate the grid quickly, adaptively, at each time step. David tried to duplicate their efforts somehow.
One new thing he was learning was that the original creation of the Black Hole would create a local explosion (a few dozen miles in diameter) followed by a quiet period when the Black Hole orbited inside the planet. Only when its snowballing mass reached a certain threshold would it suddenly seem to swallow the planet, creating the characteristic steeply rising X-ray curve. If they didn't understand the implication of the first explosion, they'd never know what hit 'em when the Black Hole finally struck.
He also managed to convince his thesis advisor to allow him to make CI Camelopardalis his thesis topic, though he kept a low profile about the alien stuff, and the idea that the black hole might had been created artificially.
The astronomical community was reaching a tentative consensus that the calamity did involve a high-density object as a companion to the visible star, and some instability in the accretion disk. The equations showed a stable disk created by matter being sucked into the singularity spiralling in as it conserved angular momentum. Nobody knew exactly what an unstable disk would be like, or what caused it. It was all hand-waving. So David's project, which was giving approximately correct numerical results, gained some credibility.
A year managed to pass. One day during that year he met an undergraduate named Rosie Riderman in the U of H mailroom, where she worked handling mail problems. He was retrieving his weekly oversized shipment of wholesale Star Wars memorabilia. He still maintained his web site, and did all the work himself including buying the items, writing the advertising "copy" for the web, processing the credit cards, and fulfilling and shipping the orders. Business had really picked up since Phantom Menace came out.
On this day he noticed Rosie had a picture of herself on her desk, posed someplace next to an antique loom. He asked her if she was a weaver, and ending up having coffee with her at the student union. He told her a little about his research, and the idea of vortexes being "woven" together in a gas giant to make structures. He didn't actually mention aliens. She suggested that perhaps crocheting would be a better metaphor than traditional warp-and-woof weaving, which required the ability to raise and lower alternating threads for a shuttlecock to pass through. A crochet project just had the yarn winding its way in and out without much external tension. He was intrigued, and got a book on the craft out of the library. Next thing he knew he was working on his first project, a beret.
When he finished it, he boxed it up sent it to Dr. Klein along with a note saying he missed their conversations about black holes.
She added a photocopy of UCLA's policy on accepting gifts from associates (not allowed if over $25 in value, must be promotional in nature, etc., etc.) and marked the box "RETURN TO SENDER."
But David had used an Institute for Astronomy sticker for the return address and it didn't have his name on it. Rosie in the mail room ended up opening the box to see who it was from. She read everything nosily when she discovered the note and beret were from David to Dr. Klein. She thought it was very sad that Dr. Klein brushed him off so coldly. To protect his feelings, she threw the package away.
Perhaps this is a good point to mention that Rosie probably would've been a great girlfriend for David. They shared an interest in science fiction, and she might've been able to draw him out by taking him along on hikes to fern-filled canyons having spectacular waterfalls, got him into late-night groups playing role playing games, and even pushing him into some kind of participation in the U of H drama program, which she was quite involved with. This fleeting thought actually occurred to her, before she intercepted the returned beret. It certainly never occurred to him.
In the summer of 1999 David had his re-gridding simulator working well, and was doing extensive simulations of a black hole being created a short distance beneath the surface of a gas giant. His predicted radiation curves continued to match the data received from CI Camelopardalis. He gleefully pointed this much out to his advisor. He also believed he was gaining a better understanding of how the aliens might have created the black hole in the first place. It required that they have energies and pressures capable of creating so-called "strange quarks," which could combine together to form a type of matter called "strangelets" normally not seen on earth, or anywhere in the last 20 billion years or so. This he shared with no-one, except his continuing unsent emails to Dr. Klein.
Also during that summer he ran across a news report, from the London Times of all places, that Brookhaven National Laboratories in Long Island was finishing an eight year project to build its Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), which was expected to come on-line in the fall. The lab's director had actually formed a committee to investigate the possibility that the new collider might create "strangelets," and lead to the creation of a black hole which would destroy the earth.
David knew he had to stop this project, or at least inform them of his research, but he wasn't sure how to proceed. He wished he'd made more progress in his relationship with Dr. Klein, because he thought she might be able to help him, to guide him. Well, he had a few months still to figure it out.
Approaching his fortieth birthday, David began to grow depressed. He felt he hadn't done enough with his life. Sure, he made a bit of money and was well-educated, but he had few friends, had never really had a girlfriend, and was still a virgin for Pete's sake.
He resolved to do something bold and courageous. He would tell her he loved her, on or before his fortieth birthday. Then together they would save the world.
Again he procrastinated, but on the last possible day he resolved to take action. It turned out she was on top of the volcano that day. He didn't care -- love knows no bounds. He took the ocean-going ferry to the big island, which took three and a half hours, and then drove his 4WD up the precarious road the led to the telescopes which sprouted like mushrooms from the top of the cinder cone. He didn't even stop half way up for an hour to acclimate to the altitude as he was always warned to do.
Meanwhile Dr. Klein was having a bad day. The radio-telescopes of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory near Socorro, New Mexico and Llano de Chajnantor, Chile had recently discovered that the red giant star Betelgeuse, the shoulder of Orion the Hunter, was "boiling" with convection in its massive interior. They'd asked Keck for some simultaneous optical sightings. The two facilities synchronized off the same atomic clock, and recorded "time stamped" digital data for comparison. Somehow Keck had lost their data file. Twice. Dr. Klein was determined to find the second lost file before they had to tell NRAO that they'd screwed up again. She was leaning over a computer screen surrounded by people who worked for her when David burst in, panting from the altitude.
"I love you," he blurted to the shocked scientist. "I've loved you since the day we met."
Dr. Dorothy Klein (her friends called her "Dotty") looked at him for a while. She thought this day might come, and she'd dreaded it for a long time, but she'd given some thought to what she might say. She certainly wasn't going to tell him in front of her employees that she was gay, and involved with a woman half her age who she'd picked up hitchhiking in Hilo, a woman who she spent 90% of her time berating for having no ambitions and little integrity, and 10% of her time consoling for being such a bitch. David would get none of this information, now or ever.
"Mr. Passel," she said finally, "you obviously have no clue how inappropriate, rude, unprofessional, and pathetic you are being. You also apparently have no clue how unattractive, uninteresting, juvenile and repulsive I find you. Now that you know your attentions are unwanted, may I remind you that if you persist it will be illegal sexual harassment. So if you have no legitimate business with the Keck Observatory, please leave this facility now."
Of course he was crushed. But he couldn't stop thinking how beautiful she was when she was angry. She was breathing heavily, and her breasts fairly heaved. He imagined her with green skin, and began to swoon. Then he barfed on her.
Driving back down the mountain, tears welling in his eyes, he thought his life was over. He was so humiliated he'd have to drop out of the school, and leave Hawaii. He felt like he wanted to die. But he knew he couldn't kill himself; it would upset his parents too much.
He held his breath. He began to feel faint. The drive up the mountain had been harrowing on the steep, twisty, ungraded one-lane road. Now it was dusk and descending was even more treacherous. He continued holding his breath. Finally he blacked out. His last conscious thought was, "It will look like an accident." He never knew what hit him. The 4WD practically rolled down the mountain, easily snapping his neck.
Dotty was upset, but not overly. Rosie was fairly crushed. His parents flew his body back to Studio City and buried it.
On the U of H computers David's files were purged. Some remnants remained on the hard drive for a long time, because operating systems don't usually delete files for real. Eventually all the sectors get overwritten by new data. Also, copies persisted on back-up tapes for many months, but nobody ever looked at them.
In January of 2001, after many delays, Brookhaven got their Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider fully operational. They did the experiment to recreate conditions from the Big Bang. The committee decided the risk of creating a Black Hole was infinitesimal. They blew up half of Long Island. The FBI blamed terrorists. A few months later the black hole orbiting inside the earth grew large enough to swallow the planet. It happened so quickly that none of the inhabitants of Earth knew what hit them.
And now for the final lie:
This story is completely fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons,
institutions or celestial objects is entirely coincidental.