Nexus (Chapter 7)

SEVEN - JANE SOUTAINE V

DATE   : 4129 A.D.


She felt she was a piece of thin cracked glass. Any breath of air could shatter her into millions of twinkling stars. She shivered from inside out. She had never had this feeling before. Yes, she felt cold as always, but this time of chilling air was different. It came from her blood.

"Here put this on," the Traveller appeared and threw her a thick robe. "Come down to the hall when you are fit enough. We will have a meal and a talk that you have always wished..."

"Wh... what happened?" Jane squeaked. Her voice was like tainted with helium.

"I gassed you out, flushed your blood out, replaced your blood with hypersaline solution and froze you to near-death. Cryogenic, in simpler term, or is it a harder term for you? Hush. Don't say a word, we will meet in good time soon. Now settle yourself."

It took her forever to wash up and get dressed. She looked out of the window, trying to recall her last moments before she slept. Yes, she was driven to the Spire and now here she was. Millions of stars could be seen. She never knew night at Singapore could be that pretty, until -

A spaceship the size of two Spires combined drifted in slow motion in front of her. There were a few ringlet structures dotted around the sky. She saw a ship parked within the ringlet and then its engines flared in fierce blue before ejecting into nothingness.

She nearly fainted.

She caught hold of herself. And raced downstairs to meet the Traveller whom she found he was, too, staring at the window.

"Where the hell am I? Is this some kind of joke?" she questioned.

"Sit down," the Traveller offered a couch. She didn't take it. He sat down and sipped on his tea. "You are now witness the golden age of humanity. We are now high above Earth's orbit and we are initiating a new engine. But never mind that. This year is forty-one twenty-nine, October the second. You have been asleep for over a thousand years."

"What is the meaning of this?" she asked.

"Let's agree on one thing first: I do the talking, you do the listening. You are not allowed to ask until I have finished talking. Are you alright with that?" the Traveller asked.

She breathed in. "I am okay with that."

"Alright, I'll continue. Humanity has occupied a wide volume of the galaxy. You do know that a thousand years ago, we barely make it to a solar system as far as ten light years away? Here's newsflash, technology has enabled us to reach out faster than you can blink. In just a matter of a few centuries, two dozens of star systems have been terraformed and settled in. The people you have known have forgotten about your existence. But now, you are going to witness the downfall of men."

"I thought the flash made everyone a memory loss cake?"

"I said I do the talking, Jane. Yes, the flash did, in fact, erase everyone's memories. But this is what I want to show you or tell you. Humanity is going to end. I don't know how to put it in words correctly but now look at this video and tell me what you think of it." The Traveller passed her a glass tile. It illuminated with many lights, slowly expanding to the edge to display a video.

It was a man with tattoo standing in front of what was left remained of the Eiffel Tower, with the tower snapped in half and with the squatting legs survived. Another man which looked superficiously familiar interviewed the tattooed man, "Did you know what is this place?"

"Maison d'or, or D'or Maison. I don't really remember."
"Does the name 'Paris' means anything to you?" the interviewer asked.
"A name for a ship? It sounds nice."

The video ended. Next video was being played.

"Three hundred thousand kilometres per second, that is," a lady said proudly.
"No more?" a young student was writing down notes, perhaps doing a research survey.
"Nothing beats the speed of light, but we are still finding a way to deal with it," the lady said.
"So, maybe Einstein is wrong," the student said in doubt.
"There is no such thing as Einstein in physics," the lady snapped.
"Einstein is a scientist, ma'am," the student said.
"Yeah, I do believe you," she winked and smiled. "Now, run along and find your Antstain or whoever you call it. I have much things to do."

The video ended.

Jane didn't want to watch the video anymore. "What does this mean?"

"Go to sleep," he said.

Before she could open her mouth, she saw a small needle, thin as hair, flew to her cheek. Blackness clouded her eyes and mind.

*

DATE   : 4984 A.D.

Another video after she woke up. This time, humanity had spread as far as 400 light years away from Earth and the bustling 'city' of spaceships was long gone. The video she watched was even worse:

"Six times of four is?"
"I don't know... I need time..." said a middle-aged man.

Another video:

"Ar... urr....arrg.."

"What is happening?" Jane asked. "Why did you make me sleep throughout the years?"

"Jane..." the Traveller said sadly. "Humanity is ending, with only a few thousands of them left."

"Why? What happened?" she asked.

"I am called the Traveller for nothing. I was a nomad in the African continent. But even I was the nomad, I never belonged to any tribal groups. I was ever alone, going round the dry continent to beg for food and dig for water. Then one day, something fell out of the sky next to me. It was a perfectly reflective mirror as huge as a house. Curiously, I stood upon it and the next thing I knew, I was at another place entirely.

I can't see myself as a human. I can't even see myself, but my thoughts coalesced into a meaningful entity which I might define it as 'myself', the personality of 'I'. It is just how our bodies made up of tiny idiotic cells which combined to create a sense of own. It happened to me and what I saw was beyond imagination. I saw colours within the infra-red and ultraviolet spectra. I can almost smell gamma-ray. I heard how atoms tick and how gravity hums in low-deep voice like a whale. My thoughts are spread thinly across the universe - if universe is the word for it.

I remembered that there was once a scientists in the early twenty-first century who mentioned that all of us are being held by an invisible thread and only occupy a place at one time. Alright, let's make it simple for you. The world itself is like a picnic mat and we sit on the mat. However, we can only sit at one place at a time and cannot both sit at the same place. The mat is weaved with horizontals and verticals, and those make up tiny squares. Or a grid. Within a grid, there is another tinier grid to form up the larger grid. The maginification goes down till at one point, an element can only settle on one grid. To move the element to another grid, energy is either released, absorbed or both. It's like running, you need energy to run from one point to another."

"And your thoughts are the grids?" Jane asked.

"No, wait me finish. Now, that element, it can be energy, atom, subatom or anything that is so small to our eyes that we cannot detect them easily, actually has an entanglement with each other. But not quite like what quantum entanglement describes. Let's take an apple and an orange, for instance," he said as he picked up an apple from a fruit basket. He placed it on one end of the table. He picked an orange and placed it opposite of end of where the apple is. "Now you see a very distinct and discrete fruits. But according to that theory, there is an imaginary line that connects these fruits whereby one behaviour will affect the other." He bounced the apple hard on the table, and she noticed the orange wobbled a little.

"It's because of the vibration..." Jane pointed out.

"It's an analogy. By the way, think it in another way. When the apple jumps, the imaginary line transmit the information of what happened to the apple to the orange. The movement of the orange is the result of the apple's behaviour and the vibration you claimed is actually noting that how the imaginary line vibrates to the orange."

"It's like a toy telephone we used to play when both end of the receivers receive voices from the vibrations of the string," Jane said.

"Yes, precisely. There is a theory claiming that the tiniest thing in the universe is actually a string. String theory they called it. Each string vibrates on its own frequency and manifests itself as a wide variety of what we see today. These strings are tied by these imaginary lines which I called it the chain. As one string vibrates, it sends shocks along the chain that links the particular string to another. But that was only the case of two objects, or two strings," he smiled. He picked up the fruit basket. "Here is a heap of fruits and each fruit is chained to all other fruits except itself. You are a genius, you know how messy the chains are right now, whereby one fruit's behavior will affect all other fruits except itself. But you can't see it sometimes because the effect is further dampened by the fact that the shock is dispersed to a multiple units. Nonetheless, the effect is still there."

"And you are telling me this because...?" Jane raised an eyebrow.

"I want to tell you, at that moment when I smell radiation, see ultraviolet spectrum or taste temperature, I am dispersed within the grids and..." he trailed off.

"Yes, go on," she said. She tried not to gasp.

"Every cell on my body is melded into the world sheet of ever-tangling mess of chains."

"You are assimilated to the world," she felt the gasping sensation was up to her throat now.

"I became the world," the Traveller said softly.

"You became God himself," she still gasped finally.