Strangelets

by Dave McCombs

After twenty years of work by an international staff of physicists, engineers, and technicians, the Large Hadron Collider came on line. 26, 659 meters. 9,300 magnets. 10,080 tons of liquid nitrogen. 60 tons of liquid helium. 11,245 times a second. 99.99 percent the speed of light. Temperatures 100,000 times hotter than the heart of the sun and colder than outer space. Perfectly safe.

Cosmic-ray fluxes, microscopic black holes, strangelets, false vacua, magnetic monopoles  -- something happened. Detectors with accuracies within billionths of a second missed it. It popped into existence and winked out again that fast.

But it was enough.

CLIP #1

The first time Bud had gotten what he’d wished for, he’d been in a nasty mood, and it was the sort of wish that only a God of Irony, in a black humor, might answer.

This was different.

She had the kitty ears and the tail, and they weren’t fake. No, he could watch her ears rotate, flick, even lay flat when, by crikey, she was really pissed off.  Her tail was real; the hair even bristled when, again, she was really pissed off; Bud knew this because he’d given it a good yank, convinced it was part of a costume. She had the uniform, with the skirt, the blouse with the crest, the baggy socks, the round glasses. Behind the glasses, her eyes were oversized and violet. Her hair was white, but she wasn’t old. If she had a fault, it was being cliché, but that only mattered when she had been two-dimensional, constrained to the pages of a comic: once she had become real, it wasn’t cliché anymore, it was being popular. Her name was Patty.

They were sitting on the bed: just a mattress with no frame that technically belonged to Ben’s grandmother. Even in the best of moods Ben had never imagined himself on this bed with a woman. If he had fantasized about it, she wouldn’t have been this nice. He still couldn’t believe it. But he was past that, past the shock -- well, past telling her about it, anyway. And she was past that whole thing with her tail. Her claws had even retracted.

Now he was explaining to her why he wanted to go with her, back into the pages of the comic, before it was too late, before whatever had happened undid itself, before he woke up.

“Well, it’s just that things are so perfect in art.” Bud gazed at his hand, lost for a moment wondering what his arm and hand would look like expressed with proper use of thick and thin lines and monochromatic skin tone. He hoped it was nothing like that “Take On Me” music video.

She put her hand on his. He liked that, how she’d actually touch him. How her hand was warm. She asked, “What do you mean?”

“You know, they’re … perfect.”

Her lowered eyebrows said she didn’t know. “Am I perfect?”

If she’d said that with even the slightest conceit, he didn’t detect it. He had to look over at her. No, she was serious. “Yeah. You’re perfect.”

Had she been any other woman -- and Bud only had a nebulous concept of women -- she might have giggled, or blushed, or otherwise made Bud feel awkward for having said that. But Patty had been drawn with a mechanical pencil behind her ear, as if the pocket protector and glasses weren’t enough of a clue. She said, “That might seem nice, but isn’t that also part of the reason you can’t believe it?”

“Believe what?

“In me.”

“Well, I guess ...” and he felt afraid for an instant, that she’d change into someone less perfect, that if he imagined a monster, suddenly he'd be staring holding hands with someone a hundred very unflattering years older, something so horrific that it had to be real, so he hurried on, “I think it’s hard to believe, it just doesn’t seem right for me to be with you.”

“Because you don’t think you’re perfect?”

“Uh, no.”

“Listen, Bud, art is just an imitation that’s trying to be like the real thing, or a perception of the real thing, but it’s inspired by something that it can’t hope to perfectly capture.”

“Are you sure?” Bud had seen some pretty good artwork. If the poster he had of the barbarian babe riding the armored polar bear wasn’t better than reality, then Bud had wasted his adolescence.

Patty thought about it a moment. “I’m pretty sure.” Bud liked how she looked when she considered something. He liked how she looked all the time. He hated that he liked her so much, because it was everything to lose. If he woke later and this was a dream, he might consider taking up a vice.

“Anyway,” Patty said, “a lot of what people seem to think of as perfect just isn’t as satisfying on a really complex level.”

“Huh?”

“Reality gets more complex.”

“What?”

“Well, take for example … that poster you have there on the door. Now, in that world, there’s apparently no such thing as hypothermia. There is lots of little things like that, don’t you think, that make something like that … well, at least impractical?”

“Like hypothermia?”

“Yes. What sort of metal is light enough that she can hold a war hammer with one hand and still be that skinny?”

“Mithril?”

“Yes, but that’s just dodging the point with another vague detail. It’s all fluffy and your reality is … more substantial. Everything in this universe, your universe, plays by the same rules.”

“You mean the Natural Laws?”

“Yes -- exactly!”

“I think it’s mundane. Wouldn’t you rather live in a world where something like that is possible?”

Patty regarded the poster of the barbarian, the mithril bikini. “No.” She made sure he was looking her steadily in the eyes, and told him, “Bud, I want to play in your world.”

CLIP #2

The first time Logan had seen her it had not been in person, but rather a portrait of her by Vittore Carpaccio, oil on wood, and the painting had dated from the turn of the Sixteenth Century  --  1511, according to the Museo Correr. He had been in Venice. This time he was in New York; this time, if it were possible, she looked even younger. This time he saw her in the flesh.

Among newer vampires such as Logan there was a grim maxim: A vampire over two-hundred is Second Death. He’d more likely survive a sunny afternoon on the beach than an encounter with a vampire nearly five-hundred years old. In the supernatural world, vampires of such great age were demigods. Which is why, when Logan recognized her in the lobby of the Marriot, he froze like a deer staring into the oncoming headlamp of a freight train.

She wore a women’s suit: the jacket single-breasted, two-button, two-pocket; with a skirt instead of slacks; black techno-fabric; very business-like, except the skirt was a little short, the hemline above her knees. She had excellent knees, which she must have developed wearing those five-inch heels: these closed-toe slip-ons, polished black leather, laced in a way that reminded him of the scratch plate on a very expensive guitar.

Logan supposed it must have been his patrician upbringing that made him notice her knees when he should have been pretending not to have noticed any part of her at all. He was approaching her now, drawn to her without thinking, wondering if she could control him merely by looking at him. He introduced himself with: “I like your shoes.”

“To be a real woman -- to cast a truly svelte silhouette -- a woman’s heels must be elevated by no less than four inches.”

“Am I to believe God was within four inches of perfection?”

“Those four inches and the appendix, the coccyx. Excuse me, do we know each other?”

 “I’m sorry -- please excuse me. My name is Logan Bertrand.”

She extended her hand, and instead of shaking, Logan kissed it. If the look of panic, if the way he had paled (which is no slight feat for a vampire) when he first saw her hadn’t given him away, Logan’s treatment of her told her everything. He couldn’t help it. Just seeing her had transported him into another century.

“It’s nice to make your acquaintance, Mr. Bertrand. If you will excuse me, I was about to--”

“Just Logan, Madame.” Logan? Madame? Where had that come from? “Miss -- Ma’am.” Why wasn’t he shutting up? The best he could do at that moment was to remember to let go of her hand.

Her eyes glanced around the lobby before returning to Logan, before catching him checking her out while she was distracted, and then he had to make up for it by looking her in the eyes -- very unsafe, the act of a suicidal maniac. Eyes are just eyes, but staring down a silverback gorilla usually results in limb deprivation. Her eyes were pretty (or maybe it was her lashes), but he had no doubt he was seeing his death in them. She said, “Mr. Bertrand,” and her expression told him: you have the poise of a particularly soppy sponge, “would you like to join me for a drink?”

Logan was going to respond that he was sorry, but he was late for a colonoscopy -- but then why had he approached her in the first place? He ought to be a man (turned vampire) and skip through the various stages right to acceptance: he was going to die again, likely in more permanent way than the last time, but such was Fate.

He said, “Uh ... I don’t know,” and shrugged. “I guess.”

Logan followed her to the elevator, absently rubbing his neck. Once alone in the elevator with her, going up, she said, “Who the hell bit you?”

CLIP #3

The corpse hadn’t decided to get squirrelly since it had been interred in 1855. It wasn't alone in its inclinations. Like cicada larvae all coming up from the ground at the same time, the surrounding plots were shifting. A bony claw that still had a wedding ring on it had just surfaced in the adjacent plot. This first corpse out, one Samuel A. Whitmond, wasn’t really doing much except for sitting there, its spinal column against a tombstone.

“Oh, he’ll move alright,” the groundskeeper, Eduardo, poked at the skeleton with his stick. The corpse of Samuel A. lashed out with a single arm, fast enough, and back to such quiet repose, that Lenny only just caught the motion between blinking, and blinked again to make sure his vision wasn’t going bad.

“Olee shit, Ed!” Lenny owned the graveyard, but since he’d hired a groundskeeper, he'd only come out on Memorial Day -- and today. “I reckon that thing’ll bite your finger off like some snapping turtle, give it half a chance.”

Eduardo turned a little red, proud at knowing his business. “Sure would.”

The men stared a while longer before Lenny said, “You reckon this is a rapture, the graves giving up their dead and all?”

“Don’t see why it could be, not hearing nothing about it on TV.”

“Supposing this feller’s just a tad early?”

“Maybe.” Eduardo gave no second thought to picking his nose in mixed company. Lenny respected him for that.

“Isn’t there supposed to be a trump or something?”

Eduardo looked up, shading his eyes with his hand. It was noon, not a cloud in the sky. “Supposed to be Jesus.”

“Amen. Amen to that, brother, but I’d like to think I could recognize the Lamb when I see him, and I don’t see him.”

They watched the horizon for a while, maybe they’d missed something. Eventually, Lenny said, “Yup. Okay, well, we gotta think about what to do with this feller.”