Prompt of the Week - Week 44

TAGS: HYPER SCIENCE, Universe Macro, Implied Hyper, Spacetime Distortions

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In many respects, he was quite happy with the way things had turned out, even if the latest roadblock had been nothing short of unendingly frustrating to him. Everything up until then, however, had been one long series of personal victories and even some external ones sprinkled in for good measure, to the point where he successfully managed to leverage his reputation in order to get an extension on his thesis. For Karl had a problem, and one that he wasn’t sure how exactly to fix, which was only made worse by the fact that, no matter how many times he ran the equations, the numbers added up, making it outright impossible for the machine to stop working the way that it did; it felt like the millionth time he’d gone back to the drawing board, combing through the piles of research he conducted over the past several years in the hopes of maybe finding something that would help him have a breakthrough. Granted, it was difficult to do so when most of those papers were his to begin with; such was the plight of visionaries.

The serval decision to enroll in that course some eight or so years prior had led down a strange path. The field itself, studying the physical properties and the inherent impossibilities of universe-scale hypers, was incredibly new, being younger than those few lucky ones whose bodies had expanded to go beyond the boundaries of observable reality, thus requiring compressors on a level that had never before been even dreamed of outside the high-end theoretical realms of half-insane mathematicians. Somehow, through the combination of ridiculous amounts of funds being funelled into the handful of corporations that produced dimensional distorters and an uncomfortably large amount of near-misses and ad hoc solutions, the planet was still in one piece, as was the rest of the universe… but as the number of hyper ascension events slowly began to rise, and the amount of individuals whose blessings began to surpass the boundaries of what was physically possible, it was clear to everyone alive that further research into the subject matter was required, because clearly the hyper gene had far more to it than initially thought. For Karl, this was a no-brainer; coming from a family with several hyper-sized individuals in it and possessed of an almost unhealthy amount of enthusiasm for physics, the cat’s only concern when enrolling into the course was whether or not he’d be able to find the time to do anything else with his life. As he correctly deduced, not a month went by before he found himself buried in side projects, most of which he was actively discouraged from by lecturers and professors who themselves had to conduct their own incredibly experimental research in their own free time. Karl, however, was adamant that if he was going to be successful in this new field, then he wasn’t going to do things by half-measures; if it meant running himself ragged and practically unable to sleep properly as the numbers were burned into his eyelids and his brain became unable to rest without immediately starting to run equations on background processing, then that’s just what he’d have to do. And despite initial hiccups, and a few run-ins with the local supermarkets over the amount of coffee he was purchasing for himself, Karl managed to find a rhythm for himself, one that he maintained over the several years required to finish the degree… and the others that he had since dedicated to expanding the field itself by performing even more research on his own, without the need for a supervisor who was half-motivated to take credit for something he had done.

Through careful maneuvering, copious amounts of backroom deals and a few necessary bus-throwings here and there, Karl had secured his position and was granted a position at his own university: funding would be provided, and in exchange, he was expected to teach a few classes, just like everyone else. It was a good enough deal that he couldn’t afford to pass it up; Karl knew for a fact that he’d have access to the best research materials around if he stayed in familiar ground, and that was a certainty that vanished the moment he looked outward at other job opportunities. Plus, with an office and a team of his own, no one could tell him what to do and how to go around doing it, which was precisely why the first thing he tried to do, the first big project that involved the creation of something as opposed to simple analysis, was a machine that many had declared to be impossible to create, a system that would detect something that just about everyone in the field had outright stated was undetectable: the hyper ascension events themselves. Those blessed with the gene had once been small enough that they could fit inside houses; the first hypers appeared some fifty or so years prior, and the whole thing manifested as just above-averages, before continuously skewing beyond and above the reasonable and straight into the realms of the fantastical. Over the course of the five decades since the first confirmed case, the average hyper individual had gone from merely thrice as big compared to those without the gene to at least twenty times as large, and as time went on, the number of hypers whose sizes were heavily above that benchmark began to increase at a pace that made it very clear that the average would have to be recalculated every few months. This inevitably led to a boom in the production of compressor gear, itself previously a fringe scientific field that took center stage as the demand for any method that could shrink those sizes down skyrocketed; there were only a handful of companies with the technical know-how to produce compressors, and they were so intimately linked with the kind of work that Karl did that he was personally on a first-name basis with most of the high-ranking members of their respective boards of directors. There were always lucrative opportunities for him and other similar researchers to exploit, be it in improving current designs, offering insights on how to create a brand new line of distortion equipment, or, in Karl’s case, the mythical early warning system.

Up until relatively recently, hyperfication events had been relatively contained and easy to keep under control, even with the biggest of hyper individuals. Occasionally there would be an outlier event with a few injuries, but with better building codes and safety measures, it was relatively easy to keep a sudden growth spurt from doing any serious damage to its environs; however, as sizes continued to rise and the explosiveness of their emergence increased with them, a brand new class of hypers had to be created: universal. These were people whose sizes were so immense, so unfathomably huge, that projections for its true dimensions regularly went beyond the width of the observable universe, and in many cases even further still, to the point where even the theoretical “full” size of the cosmos wouldn’t be enough to hold them. There were two saving graces to such an obvious problem: one, there weren’t many of them, with the number being somewhere around three or so hundred the last time anyone checked, and two, their “ascension events”, as they were called, were incredibly easy to detect thanks to both to the seismic shockwaves and serious spacetime distortions that were created in preparation for the growth spurt to end all growth spurts. As a result, full universal destruction had been avoided so far, but only at great material and personal cost to the whole of civilization, as compressor tech simply hadn’t advanced to the point where one could slap on a pair of underwear on someone like that and call it a day; entire cities had to be evacuated as a compression field was built around them, stacked layers that relied entirely on exponential mathematics in order to contain someone that should be, by definition, impossible to contain. While there hadn’t been any deaths yet, and miraculously so, whole metropolitan areas had been wiped clean from the surface of the Earth, with all of the economic impact this entailed; add to that the fact that genetic screening couldn’t discern between a “regular” hyper and a universal one, and everyone knew that the whole of reality was on borrowed time, until such a point as someone ascended without anyone to hold them back, thus dooming the planet, local star system, galaxy and quite literally everything else to a very quick death by smothering. Thus, the proverbial Holy Grail for the field of hyper studies would be some sort of early-warning system, something that could not only detect that someone had the hyper gene, but that it would manifest itself in sizes that quite literally were impossible to comprehend without one’s head imploding into a black hole from the overload of information. Years of failure, however, had led to very few people holding out hope that the technology for this sort of system even existed at all… a mentality that Karl not only did not share, but actively fought against.

If they had the tech to create compressors, then they had the tech to find out whether someone was going to have universe-sized nuts, or so he kept telling to anyone that would listen. He refused to believe that it was a lost cause, doubly so considering that he’d already accomplished plenty of things on his own that others had proclaimed were impossible, such as detecting minute differences in genetic expression and linking them to future growth spurts with a degree of accuracy that raised eyebrows and accusations of falsifying data. The serval had no delusions about the fact that he was very much hated by the scientific establishment thanks to his penchant for proving it wrong, an attitude that he made sure to temper by regularly reminding himself that the only reason he ever accomplished half the things he did was precisely because he didn’t know what in the fuck he was doing. Spitballing, throwing things at the wall to see what stuck, at times making things up and seeing where they went, these methods were his bread and butter, and somehow, against all odds, they had worked… which made his latest impasse all the more confusing, because he hadn’t changed anything about the way he went about his research. All the math itself checked out, he’d seen to that himself several times already; the equations were properly written, there were no mistakes in the calculations, even the possibility of a smudge changing a number on a dozen different whiteboards was considered and then promptly discarded following inspection of humidity patterns. By all means, the machine they developed, a prototype designed to detect the presence of a post-ascension universal hyper, should be able to do so flawlessly… and yet, for some reason, it kept going off in Karl’s presence, even if no one else was around.

Now, the answer to this was as obvious as it was impossible, because clearly he wasn’t a universe-sized hyper, and the scanning system was only supposed to give a positive if the blood sample it analyzed belonged to someone who had already gone through the transformation into someone that could literally smother the entirety of known existence using their bodies alone… and Karl was quite certain that he hadn’t accidentally created something that already had predictive powers, considering that hadn’t been his intention and he did not, indeed, have the technology for it (yet, at least). That much was still far in the future, at least five to ten years at the absolute best; for the time being, he’d be happy with a machine that could tell the difference between who was universe-sized and who wasn’t; this was made slightly more complicated by the fact that the damned scanner wasn’t supposed to even signal a positive until after a blood sample was provided, and even worse by how it actually didn’t most of the time. It was truly baffling, in that the couch-sized analyzer remained perfectly still, motionless and inert whenever Karl wasn’t anywhere near it, and as long as someone else in his team (or hell, even volunteers) used it, then it worked exactly as required. However, the moment the serval walked within a few yards from it, the system would start printing out labels indicating that the “test subject” was indeed a universe-sized hyper even if Karl himself didn’t even touch it at all. This raised a number of uncomfortable questions that no one in his team wanted to answer, mostly because the only way this could make sense was if they had somehow created a completely different machine than the one they had intended, and that Karl was at risk of becoming so big that he’d need to vacate a large portion of the countryside just to avoid billions in damages. Thus, they as a group resolved not to accept this explanation, and instead try and justify how this could be happening by any alternative means necessary, no matter how much they had to strangle their equations in order to force things to make sense. This… obviously didn’t work, something that was obvious from the get-go, but the alternative was not something anyone wanted to consider, so for days on end after the first few rounds of tests, the team toiled away, trying to come up with an explanation, while Karl himself paced around in his office in a vain attempt at cooking up an excuse as to why his doctoral thesis had suddenly broken causality. He couldn’t be a hyper, that just wasn’t possible; approaching thirty and never having had any signs of abnormal growth left him firmly as an outlier even in those trying, excessive times of theirs, even more so for the possibility of universe-scale growth. It was far more likely that he accidentally did something to the machine that caused it to react the way that it did, but what, and most importantly, how? He barely had any input in the actual creative process, most of it having been contracted to a specialized company who were provided with the schematics, and as far as he knew, growth hadn’t yet reached the realm of the metaphysical… and yet, whenever he walked into the room where they kept the analyzer and turned it on, there were the string of papers alerting him that the “test subject” was a universe-sized hyper. He had a collection of those things in a drawer back in his office, an endless series of paper strips with a single phrase on them:

TEST SUBJECT POSITIVE FOR ASCENSION EVENT

Six words, repeated ad nauseum, until they were all that he could see whenever he closed his eyes. Six words that appeared whenever someone who did undergo such an event had a blood sample analyzed, six words that did not appear whenever anyone else provided their own sample, six words that were instantly printed out en masse whenever he was near the bloody thing even when it was only supposed to produce one slip per operation. Six words that shouldn’t be, yet were, six words that haunted his every waking moment, even when he didn’t close himself in the room with the analyzer and stared at it in an attempt at forcing it to tell him what was wrong with it; he couldn’t exactly commune with the machine, but it was either that or completely give up, and he wasn’t a quitter. Like so many days lately, he found himself unable to remain inside his office, inevitably drawn to the storage room where he’d placed his hopes for a good doctoral thesis; he would sit down in front of it, elbows on his knees and hands holding up his head, hoping that his brain would magically give him some kind of answer, some kind of explanation for why this was happening… or at least one that wasn’t the obvious. Because there was a simple solution to the problem, that being that he was due for an ascension event; after all, those were always preceded by distortions in spacetime, and theoretically those could be powerful enough to start affecting causality on a very local scale. But, at the same, every single case so far had these distortions take place over an extremely small period of time, usually two to three weeks before the event was due to trigger, whereas Karl had been struggling with the machine for the better part of three months without any kind of positive results. If there were distortions, they would have to be both on an unprecedented level and simultaneously a very localized and limited one, because nothing else happened around him that would qualify as even remotely out of the ordinary… but, at the same time, what other explanation was there? That he’d accidentally connected himself to the machine in a way that defied what passed for conventional scientific understanding? That was preposterous.

Another afternoon spent looking at a machine that refused to give him questions, ending with yet another resigned sigh and Karl forcing himself to stand up after sitting for so long in one position that his muscles began to cramp. All he could hope for at that point was that some sort of magical insight would show up from nowhere and suddenly bless him with the knowledge he needed to find the missing piece of the puzzle… or that maybe one of his team members would come to him with something similar, because he was frankly running out of ideas. For the time being though, he needed to get some coffee in him, because he was tired; so tired, in fact, that he failed to notice that the bench he got up from ceased existing the moment that he turned his back to it, replaced by a pile of splintered wood that would once again reform the next time he walked into the room. He failed to notice the radial cracks on the wall that only widened whenever he walked through the doorway. And above all, he failed to notice the deep imprints he left on the ground near the machine whenever he walked in and out of the storage room.

Three months.

It was going to take a while still.