The traveler was unable to return to sleep for dread of rolling off into the floor should the bus make a sudden lurking stop. Instead, he recalled with bleakness his discarded snack wrapper back at the terminal, and what remained of the uneaten pastry residing in the bottom of a trash receptacle. His sense was one of a conduit that opened up at precise times, where angels of every allegiance slipped through unaware. Though there was nothing transparently momentous in a tossed candy wrapper, this was only because one did not inspect its involved lineage carefully.
Yet one must be careful. Dots connect like breeding rabbits; and the more dots are added, no matter how tenuous their relation at the outset, the more inevitable the plot appears as it mushrooms and fits together too agreeably. In wanting to find design, design is found; and where events overtake one, the more likely one becomes a child in search of a parent with a prepared explanation.
Still… uncanniness had its appeal. It was pure coincidence that, almost to the hour when asteroid DA14 passed within the geosynchronous satellite ring of Earth, a meteorite exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia; and, coming at the end of The Mayan Lunar Calendar, both events stoked revelation.
Physicist John Wheeler’s theory “It from Bit” states that only one parameter at a time may be learned from a quantum measurement: The answer one receives depends on the question asked.
A bullet point of information leaks out… It is pushed through the tinniest hole that can be machined by technology—and by tiny fingers of a secretive sentient being. We endeavor to craft an even smaller hole to eliminate this anomaly. Here again, an even tinnier finger pushes another syllable through the opening. To our horror we realize that words are being written within the flyleaf of a better known book, as if to supply a commentary.
The next bus stop was in Franklin, Kentucky. It was neither a terminal nor an official stop. The bus driver took an extended break in a McDonald’s parking lot, and left the engine running to keep his passengers warm. A few people disembarked to smoke during this interlude while others continued to sleep.
Liam did not recall losing consciousness, although an African-American woman in a nearby seat made a special project of him while gathering several Kroger bags of belongings. This was apparently the end of the line for her, but she paused in the middle of the aisle to exclaimed, “The man in the recliner—did you see him? He was smoking in that recliner, as pretty as you please, not two hours before. How did they let him on with that big-ass chair? How did he get it through the doors? The seat you chose was cold because he brought his own seat.”
With this, she stepped to the front of the bus and got off, crossing the pavement and into a twenty-four hour Walgreens.
It was not challenging to find colorful conversation on low-fare buses, and especially on long grueling treks that left respondents too exhausted to supply appropriate answers.
Franklin, Kentucky, such that it was, was soon behind the remaining passengers; and like Paducah in the hour before, it shrank to become a luminous nebula in the center of the rear window.
CHAPTER
The Bible, Lucien insisted, was prone to conflation—not out of heedless error but where facts, as they recede into history, become entangled like paired atomic particles: No distance or time separating its plot points counted as separation. This was not to paper-over factual accuracy but to make the emotive component better comprehended.
According to the brother, this effect could be likened to an interactive scientific website where a sliding lever gives the viewer a sense of scales of magnitude. As demonstrated, one paradigm of reality is incapable of transitioning smoothly into the next, so breaks with it completely as a model to start afresh:
A story begins with theoretical measurements too small to visualize, as with a Plank length. Line segments are presented in surrogate, with only numbers, decimal points, and symbology to translate the inconceivably small into notions. From here, theoretical objects are added, as with an artist’s creative rendering of a quark or gluon. Distances between these objects are analogous to those between the North Star and other stars in its asterism, though the viewer, even at this early stage, has reached a dead end: a universe too vast and empty to offer hope of understanding.
Another journey starts.
Beginning with a hydrogen molecule, one travels a tremendous distance to reach the first unambiguous single cell organism. Mammals, dinosaurs, and radio wavelengths larger than a house, are thrown in ad hoc. Here one fudges in making transitions. An observer is postulated, and scales of familiarity bring one slowly into the world one inhabits.
A third story commences, and a composite of photographs comes to mind where the space probe Juno flies by Earth: In sight, a tiny white dot (the moon) circles a slightly larger blue dot (the Earth). What is remarkable is how far apart they seem where the craft threads the needle between them, yet their apparent sizes as points of light do not significantly change. The distance between them, after a short while, appears uncomfortably smaller, much like what is presented in a mechanical model of The Solar System used in middle school science instruction.
We are quickly back at our problem of scales and relationships, though in passing through the sphere that includes ourselves, a dimension of reflection is added: How is it possible that objects so small should have any regard for one another in an unfathomable sea? Gravity and momentum were indeed holy constructs to establish these ties and maintain them, so to keep track of every piece of flotsam and jetsam in an ocean of seeming impersonality.
The receding road (the point of view) remains constant, and what was visualized previously as encompassing a conventional Earth and sun passes out of all thought; and with it, all plausible comparison. One can only regard this part of the demonstration as an intermission, where vast space is no longer anything that can be related to as meaningful.
The curtains open on a new play and, briefly, the sun is recalled in an encore so to introduce celestial bodies of staggering size. Here one compares spheres to spheres, with each quadrupling the size of the preceding sphere. Our sun, which was never properly named, is not even a dot alongside Antares. This exercise of one-upmanship is abandoned long before reaching quasars, as fatigue and unreality set in.
The candle set in the twelve-story building—let alone the gooey pastry wrapper—have been compressed into a single point of demarcation of latitude and longitude (should one still regard these designations as relevant). The Great Attractor lurks unseen behind dust clouds of The Milky Way, to which our galaxy and others within The Local Group are drawn. This is only one of innumerable neighborhoods of colossal star formations; and again the space between these groupings must be passed over in haste. One speeds toward the edge of The Observable Universe and confronts, jarringly, its striking lack of features. It is now too large for stray photons to causally connect from any direction.
Space and time, having reached the limits of comparison, are now abandoned as fictions. Even causality, or the speed of light, falls into doubt in holding forth the promise of material reality. In viewing The Cosmic Microwave Background, we see light from celestial features too far apart to see each other in the timeline allowed for the natural evolution of an observable universe. A Theory of Inflation is needed to redeem causality, even though this rapid expansion could only take place within fixed parameters, so to allow other fine-tuned parameters, such as gravity, to provide the universe with its raw materials. Where physics and cosmology confront these inscrutable parameters—any of which are deal breakers were they not in place for the formation of our universe—, one must be resourceful in engineering around their uncomfortable implications.
There is still some ways yet to go, where Jesus looked into the tomb past the reach of despair, where Paradise jealously guarded those liberated from notions of emptiness and death. When revived brain-dead victims speak of oceanic joy, they are somewhere further down in this chain of memory—not into a grave of no recourse, but gazing back through cathedral glass. No sadness precedes one into this world where no sadness is left behind in the other.
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