my therapist recommended i take vitamin d to combat my depression. so naturally i bought the gummy kind, because god forbid i act like an adult and swallow a pill. i headed to fred meyer and they always have a “buy one get one” sale on vitamins and supplements, which leads me to believe that a plastic jug of vitamin d supplements is not actually fourteen bucks, but actually seven bucks. in truth i bet all supplements are made for pennies and marked up like crazy because people into holistic medicine are automatically suckers because they’ll believe anything from a website called “doctor mommys nutritional blessings.org.” in that regard i’m like, yeah, mark that shit up like crazy, if people are willing participants in your snake oil racket then you deserve to get all their money. when it comes to physical health, i believe in medicine. mental health … well that’s a little different. the body more or less we understand, but the mind … how can you really know the mind? but see we know vitamin d helps with depression. who the hell knows why, but it does. so i take it, in gummy form, like a goddamn child. fucking … everything’s made like we’re babies anymore. it’s humiliating. at least the gummies taste good though.
Category: writing
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106: ted
you know i’m never leaving this place, right? i’ve tried, i’ve tried to leave. every day is this constant struggle to get the courage to move, to put the bottle down. but i’m never leaving. this shithole is where i’ve gone to die. a better man would have come here when he was older, but not me. resigned at 30. so what does that make me in the end? did i live a good life? did i live a life as good as yours? i guess not. i guess i could have been a father, i suppose i should have traveled more. but i didn’t. i moved, once, and then moved back a year later because i couldn’t afford to drink and live in a big city. and i have to drink. so i just live in this podunk town and drink every day, and when i don’t drink i have these tremendous seizures, like god’s telling me my purpose in life is to get hammered all the time. it’s sad isn’t it? it’s a waste of a good man’s life. and yet, here i am, alive and drunk. and you’re in your billion dollar suits, flying to abu dhabi to fuck models or whatever it is you do in abu dhabi. congratulations. you’ve lived enough for both of us. you have the collective energy of mom and dad distilled into you like an aged whiskey, and i’m … i’m just drinking to catch up.
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105
did you fart? i didn’t know you were capable of farting due to your different body makeup. maybe that’s just some kind of air excretion? it really smells like you farted. okay so we you know have digestive systems and we eat meat and plant matter, it gets digested in our gut, and then we poop it out. i realize that’s really strange to you, but the point is that sometimes the bacteria in our gut–yes we have little things in our body that help us digest things–the bacteria causes gas to build up in our gut and we fart it out. and if the bacteria is having a real go at it the gas can kind of stink. i only say all of this because i didn’t fart, and you’re the only other thing in this room, and i smelled something that smelled precisely like a fart, so the only perpetrator is you. so you have to tell me: did you fart? or was what something else that smelled really close to a fart? this could be really huge for xenobiologists, you know what i mean? really huge. bigger than the fact that i’m fucking an alien, yes! that is now secondary to the fact that you can fart and your farts smell like ours. i’m telling you this is huge. huge! now just hold on and let me get a jar. where do you fart from? these are important questions okay?!
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104: joanna
you know, i could throw all of your stuff away right now if i wanted. i could toss it all on the street and your life would still be the same. how do you feel about that? all you need is food and water and a place on the floor to sleep these days. you’re like a goddamn ascetic, like a, a, a fucking … monk. except here’s the thing: you need me. you need me to function, so no matter how aloof you are, at some point your tummy will rumble and you’ll come crawling back to me. i mean, what do you do all day, seriously? you sleep and you stare out the window. at what? your life passing you by? i know you think it’s my fault–i keep you locked in here after all–but you could still be active with your day, you know? god damn it. all the things i do for you! all the time invested, going to the store to buy your food, taking you to the vet because you ate a goddamn marshmallow peep for some dumb reason, and all you’re going to do is stare at me with this vacant look in your eyes! YOU’RE NOT JUST A CAT! YOU’RE MY CAT! AND I DEMAND RESPECT FROM YOU! this isn’t a democracy or a, or a monarchy where you’re the fucking queen of shit mountain! i OWN you. i’ve ALWAYS owned you. I FUCKING BOUGHT YOU FROM A GUY IN VANCOUVER. i — where you going? where the fuck are you going? DON’T WALK AWAY FROM ME–
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103: ted
alright, here’s my day: i wake up around noon, and right beside me is a bottle of old crow. it’s the bottle i’d been drinking when i passed out, you see. i get up and i feel like shit so i stumble outside and vomit into mom’s old petunia garden, you know, that raised bed she built back in 1981 and planted petunias in once. in the end it was a glorified shit box for cats. now it’s my puke box. you know my puke brought those petunias back? don’t ask me how, it’s goddamn magic. anyway, i puke, wash my mouth out with old crow, and go sit on the porch and smoke a cigarette or five. i do this to get my body from hangover mode to drunk mode. i finish the old crow and grab a second bottle from my fridge. i watch the cars drive by and the other lowlifes wandering around. some of them try to talk to me but the old folks know better. the second old crow i sip, see, cause the remnants of the first one just got me back to drunk level–now i need to maintain it, which isn’t as hard. so i sip old crow and watch people. then when i’ve finished the fifth i head down to the bar. i drink with my buddies there, watch sports on TV. nobody judges me, and tom keeps giving me beer until i’m on the floor or too belligerent. i usually can’t remember anything at this point, and i either have little lucid bits of stumbling around or puking, or i just wake up somewhere the next day. sometimes the cops have thrown me in the drunk tank. that’s a strange way to wake up. but there’s always one constant and that constant is booze. my trusted friend and advisor. don’t leave home without it, but don’t get mad when it betrays you either, cause it’s gonna betray you.
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102
if this is not reality, then what is? who am i talking to, huh? who are you? some kind of artificial intelligence? i don’t believe it. i don’t believe it one bit. this is real, look, i can touch the floor, i can touch my own face. all of this is real. just because i saw some weird shit doesn’t make it any less real, okay? this is the world that i was born and raised in, the one that i remember, the one that feels right. maybe there is a real world out there but i don’t know it, i only know this one and so this is the one i want to stay in. and that’s, that’s final, that’s an order!
you know, it makes me think of that shipbuilder’s paradox, have you ever heard of that? you take a whole ship, replace every piece of wood one by one, and by the end, is it the same ship? except, for me, it’s like i had the ship built already and i was told that it was my ship, that i had been sailing it for forty years, and that i have all these memories of sailing it. the question now is: if i have a real boat somewhere that i’ve never sailed, and it looks almost exactly like this boat that i’ve been sailing in my head my whole life, is that other boat *my* boat? i can tell you every last detail of the boat in my head, and when i see that real boat i’ll know the differences, i’ll know all the differences … so what does that make either boat? which one is real to me?
i think the one that makes me feel real is the one that’s real. and that’s this life, here, with all these people in this world. so that’s why i’m not leaving, android. your world is not the one i remember. period.
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101: dr carla broker (hyperspace lessons pt 3)
the frame-of-reference drive system, which you likely know as the “fardrive,” works by utilizing the third aspect of hyperspace to create a “touchpoint” between two objects with significant mass–basically planets or planetoid objects. the fardrive does this by taking the two objects in realspace and “compresses” them into two-dimensional mathematical equations. this is basically what i and many of my colleagues back at MIT worked on for roughly five years, with the help of the bethzoans, who we were actually helping by utilizing math in a way they hadn’t thought of before.
the fardrive effectively “thinks” in hyperspace terms. the bethzoans had done numerous studies on hyperspace physics over the three centuries since they discovered it, leading to some strange equations they used to create technology to harness hyperspace “hubs,” controlled by gates. rudimentary fardrive technology has been unearthed and discovered by countless beings in the galaxy, but so far nothing that could fit on, say, a ship the size of a starfighter.
in order for you to understand how the fardrive works, let’s imagine a routine trip from tersus to second earth, in the sixth arm. these two planets are about 26 thousand light years away from each other, and obviously there are countless things in the way: planets, stars, nebula, et cetera. in realspace, these things are spaced far enough apart that we would likely be able to navigate a straight line from planet A to planet B without running into anything that would cause us trouble. problem is, it would take us thousands of years to get there, even if we managed to hit the speed of light. which we wouldn’t, thanks to albert einstein.
now, in hyperspace, it was the opposite problem: objects were incredibly close, but were all in the way of each other, making a straight line impossible. it’s like trying to get to neptune from earth but having mars, jupiter, and uranus in the way. many races circumvented this by plotting curved paths, basically flying from planet to planet, but this could only be done safely for a few planets before hyperspace physics began eating through neutral shields and breaking down the ship itself. this made colonization of planets slightly easier, but kept colonies confined to a few core systems.
so my colleagues and i, way back when i was a grad student at MIT, we came up with a solution. going back to earth to neptune–the problem there is that, from our perspective, three other planets are directly in the way. but … and i remember my dear friend jitendra coming up with this in the wee hours of the morning–we were talking about this very thing, going from earth to neptune and having planets in the way–and he said, “what if we could find a point in space where it would appear like earth and neptune were touching?” and it worked. it worked! so brilliant! the solution was to shift our viewpoint–the frame of reference, in other worse–until nothing was in the way, creating an artificial touchpoint between two planets. then, using hyperspace’s third aspect, we could “flatten” the third dimension into a two-dimensional picture, creating a “touchpoint” between two faraway objects in realspace. this touchpoint 95% of the time exists as a reality in hyperspace. voila, now we could jump from point A to point B with ease!
i … can see you’re not as thrilled about this breakthrough as we were. it’s okay. it wasn’t foolproof anyway: the amount of energy needed to both find an artificial point in space and then flatten it in a photo-realistic model on a quantum supercomputer is a lot more than we realized at the time. you basically need a detailed map of the universe, which is why you see a lot of sensor trucks scanning basically everything everywhere. fortunately, the bethzoans are masters at creating and harnessing tremendous amounts of energy.
so anyway, once we had this info the bethzoans and we began R&D, we had ships built within two years that had traversed parts of the galaxy no one had ever seen before, and we were getting money left and right to help hone our research. that was 27 years ago, and today, the terran galactic alliance has colonized ten worlds, alleviating centuries of overcrowding and pollution on earth. and you, congratulations, you’re among the first generation offworlders! you’re the future our ancestors thought we’d never have. you owe the courage infused in your bones to help push your generation farther out into the galaxy. there’s a lot even the bethzoans haven’t discovered yet. it’s a brand new world out there to explore.
and if that bores you, then maybe you deserve to be flipping burgers. i’m kidding. thank you for listening to me babble on. does anyone have any questions?
[the kids all raise their hands.]
oh, good!
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100: dr carla broker (hyperspace lessons pt 2)
i’m getting ahead of myself slightly. the third aspect of hyperspace was incredibly difficult for scientists to understand for many years. it actually took us over six years just to replicate the experiment! but once we could replicate it safely, we began to amass a tremendous amount of data regarding these hyperspace particles. a lot of that data is very technical and deals with very advanced levels of physics, so i’ll just cut to the chase: we found that by utilizing certain subatomic particles through a process of fusion, we were able to open small tears into hyperspace for longer and longer periods of time. this was an incredibly important moment for humanity, but also game with a grave cost. again, hyperspace physics do not follow conventional laws of physics and mathematics, and when an object in realspace directly interacts with hyperspace, and vice versa, bad things can happen.
you all may have heard of “hyperspace sickness,” also known as “the madness” or “swiss cheese disease.” in hyperphysics circles we call it “the sight,” as in, once you see hyperspace, you’re dead. this is why all starships have blinders during hyperspace jumps. the problem is that our brains cannot comprehend direct visual contact with hyperspace–it’s like an overload of the senses, to the point that it causes mental and physical symptoms leading up to insanity and death. scientists during the early experimentation years would catch these brief glimpses of another world and would suffer from bouts of madness and dementia. subsequent viewings of larger portions of hyperspace can even create holes in a person’s brain. this is serious stuff! hyperspace is effectively very radioactive, full of what we call “radioactive physics,” which causes decay in all matter in realspace due to being incompatible with our physics.
now, of course, a few decades later and we’re traversing the galaxy and colonizing new worlds. how did we do it so quickly? well, of course we had help from the bethezoans, who gave us the technology to develop quantum shielding, but they did not help us with our frame-of-reference drive system. in fact, prior to the development of the fardrive, hyperspace travel was very rare within the galaxy, usually confined to “hubs” where successful hyperspace jumps had occurred again and again. the co-chin race, in the twelfth arm, built these massive hyperspace “gates” which would open enormous holes into hyperspace, and, over the centuries, cause massive decay of the surrounding realspace. one gate was destroyed due to the nearby solar star collapsing into a supernova due to hyperspace radiation. as intelligent as these other races were, and still are, they hadn’t come up with a feasible way to plot hyperspace jumps until the terrans arrived. the reason was this: we had math derived from visual observation of hyperspace that they didn’t, along with a conjecture the legendary physicist dr nera van boolen came up with twenty-five years ago, that if hyperspace is realspace condensed, and that hyperspace acts as both a three-dimensional and two-dimensional space, then perhaps coordinates can be created in realspace that would make a single “touch point” between two celestial objects in hyperspace.
am i boring you yet? listen, not everyone will grow up to become a hyperphysicist. some of you may be bankers, or teach, or hell, even flip burgers for a living. just do what you’re good at. i don’t mind if you use this time to sleep. for the rest of you, i will break down the frame of reference drive and explain how it got us out of the solar system, and fast.
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099: dr carla broker, terran galactic alliance, head hyperphysicist (hyperspace lessons pt 1)
well, it’s been a couple of decades since i’ve taught a high school course, let alone one on the nature of hyperspace, but i owed your beloved physics teacher and good friend of mine mr stoller a favor and, as you can see by the various cameras in the room, teaching advanced level hyperphysics to a group of wide-eyed freshmen science students makes for great publicity.
my name is dr carla broker, i’m the head of the terran galactic alliance’s college of hyperphysics at MIT. i have a laundry list for an educational background, i suggest you just search for me through newnet if you want specifics. suffice it to say: i have a lot of education, nearly 40 years worth at this point, and 90% of it directed toward astrophysics and hyperphysics, the latter of which i will be discussing with you today.
so. hyperspace. what is it? it’s fundamentally two things: one, a completely upheaval of all physics we’ve ever encountered in realspace, and two, the catalyst that changed the future of humankind. before hyperspace, we were apes sitting on a rock in the middle of the galaxy–sure, we might have been smart apes, brilliant apes, but we were still stuck, save for a few shoddy missions to the moon, mars, and the moons of jupiter. einstein’s rules still apply to realspace: we can’t travel faster than the speed of light, and there is significant time dilation the faster we do travel, which, when reaching light speeds, makes a ten minute journey from your frame of reference a 3,000 year journey from the reference point of someone on earth. [looks at camera] please don’t do the math on that one, it was just a loose example.
now, about a hundred and eight years ago a group of scientists working with the large hadron collider on earth made an important discovery: a particle from another world. how did they know it was from a different world? well, they had a few reasons: one, it didn’t react like any particle we’ve ever discovered in realspace. it was a much denser, much heavier particle that seemed to not serve any function in our atomic structure. two, it was devoid of light but acted exactly like a light particle, suggesting that it was something like dark matter. and third, and this is the important one: when observed, it suggested both three-dimensional space, and two-dimensional space, and shifted between them multiple times before disappearing back into hyperspace.
i’ll expand on that in a second.
this experiment was completely random and ended up nearly destroying the LHC, because the particle from hyperspace did not follow the laws of the standard model of physics, or quantum physics, and, as we now know, if you bring something with one set of physics into a world with a completely different set of physics, the change is enough to destabilize and potentially destroy an entire planet. fortunately for the scientists at the LHC, the tear was atomic in size and the ensuing explosion was much like setting off an M80 in a drainage tube.
but what’s more important is that discovery led us down the path which brings us here, now. hyperspace. hyperspace has three fundamental aspects: first, it is effectively a mirror image of realspace. every object in realspace exists in hyperspace, down to the smallest atom. so tersus exists in hyperspace, as does earth, though we could never land there. objects in hyperspace take up the same space as they do in realspace as well. second, there is no “space” in hyperspace. what this means is, everything is condensed. right now sujena is 210,000 miles away from tersus, but in hyperspace they are touching. in fact, everything in hyperspace is touching, which is what makes it an incredibly valuable tool in traveling through the galaxy. third, hyperspace is visible in both as a two dimensional object, and a three dimensional object. this is tricky to explain simply, other than to say that hyperspace physics does not follow our own. but what’s important is that this ability to “flatten” is what gives us the ability to travel between distant worlds nearly instantaneously. there is, i suppose, a fourth aspect to hyperspace–that traveling through hyperspace greatly reduces time dilation between distances–but it’s more a side effect of the third aspect.
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098: thom
it didn’t sink in until i went back to work. i walked in, sat down at my desk, people asked me if i was feeling better and i honestly said, “no.” i looked at my hands, dry from the drugs. stared into space for longer than i realize. this was the rest of my life, slightly tweaked, slightly more on edge, now more nervous to touch, to kiss, than before. i tried to keep my spirits up during the whole ordeal but no matter what you think or what you read, the stigma always creeps in. when people look at me i just assume they know, that they can see it on me, because they *can* see it on me. that somehow they are able to look through me to all the fear and embarrassment, the guilt and the shame, as if i did something wrong. but i didn’t do anything wrong. so why am i so shaken about it? it was one time, one night with one person that changed everything. but not everything! one thing, one arguably small thing in the grand scheme of life. i should be okay with this, right? it’s the stigma, it’s just the stigma.
my sleep schedule is all fucked up. i basically wake up every hour or so, adjust myself, fall back asleep, and so on. at one point around 4am i had to pee so i got up to pee, and as i was peeing i was hit with a terrible dizzy spell. i felt like i was going to pass out, or puke, or both. it was really unnerving. i walked back to bed in the darkness and could see these little firework explosions of light inside my eyes. sometimes i would wake up incredibly warm. other times i would be fine, but my fingers would be asleep. but that’s something i’ve been dealing with for years. oh and eating, my jaw is so sensitive from the swollen lymph nodes under my chin, it makes eating a nightmare. the aches, the pains, the constant tired feeling. it’s my body adjusting to a new life.
in the end i feel like something massive has happened to me, but only i and some people close to me get to know about it, because it’s personal and it’s a big deal and etc etc. it’s probably for the best; my life is my own and doesn’t deserve to be known by everyone. it’s just … a really weird, really sudden change, and now i have to go through it mostly alone. which is odd. that’s all.