Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Future Lovecraft

By Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas

Nelly Geraldine García-Rosasis a Mexican writer and a freelance copy editor. Her stories have been published in independent magazines and anthologies. Some years ago, she struggled with the decision to become a writer instead of a physicist; she has no regrets, but she loves to read, write and discuss about physics, cosmology, astronomy, and weird science. She can be found online at: www.nellygeraldine.com.

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

THEY BUILT AN underground temple. A well of Babel sinking into the gloomy ground at 175 metres of depth. They wanted, like the Biblical architects, to know the unknowable, to discover the origin, reproduce Creation.

The desire to unravel the nature of the Everything floated permanently in the controlled environment of the laboratory. Hundreds of fans and machines emitted a constant buzzing, which the investigators called the “silence of the abyss”. This, combined with the smell of burnt iron, gave the ominous sensation of finding oneself in space. Doctor Migdal lay upon a nest made of coloured cables and, with eyes closed, fantasised that his body, weightless, floated, pushed by the breeze of the ventilation.

Sometimes, he would imagine that he was being attracted by a very narrow tube, a cafeteria straw, the ink container of a pen, or a bleeding artery. His feet, near the edge of the conduit, would feel a titanic weight that would pull him and make him push through the small space. Migdal could see how he would turn into a thick strand of subatomic particles that would extend forever.

Most of the time, he saw himself arriving slowly at the union of the circular tunnel that formed the particle accelerator. Before the accelerator, Migdal was tiny. The machinery attracted him softly, although with such an acceleration that he lost no time in approaching the speed of light. He knew that, the faster he travelled through space, the slower he would through time, so that, if he looked forward, he could see the rays of particles that preceded him—sent during the morning, the previous day, or the month before—and if he looked behind, he could see what would come—tomorrow, the next day, or the next month. As he advanced into the confines of the accelerator, the scientist felt eternal, for he was capable of appreciating the complete history of that point in time and space: from the Big Bang to the most distant future.

Migdal left his daydream, trembling and sweaty. He distanced himself from the other scientists and spoke to no one about his fantasy because, each time he imagined himself floating in the particle accelerator, he knew He was there, shining, in all the instants and all the places.

I dreamt I was in a penetrating darkness, without limits, without time. One could hear a sinister music of pipes, whose interpreters adored a gigantic, amorphous, inert mass in the middle of nothing, the primordial chaos. From all the confines of darkness there surged a conglomerate of iridescent bubbles and one of the terrible musicians announced the arrival of the door, the key and the guardian.

It is impossible to describe with words how He filled the space, was omnipresent, he knew everything and could see everything. With a movement that reverberated in the infinite, he gave matter to the darkness. A blinding explosion surrounded the drooling chaos.

I do not remember more.

They say an accident occurred in the underground laboratory where the particle accelerator is found. The say that is why we cannot connect to the Internet; that is why the electricity comes and goes. Estela, my neighbour, thinks these are government lies. “Come on, my child, how can a problem in Europe make the lights go out here in Mexico? That’s very far away. I think this is politicians trying to rob the people again. Accident, my ass!”

“What did Migdal and the other scientists seek in their well of Babel?”

“The elemental particle of the Standard Model of particle physics.”

“…”

“…”

“They would have to reinvent the Universe.”

“They did. Well, in a way.”

“They would have to make a universe. Any universe. Make apple pie.”

Estela knocked on the door as though she wanted to tear it down. Her hair was uncombed; she sweated. I offered her coffee, which she swallowed in gulps as I watched in silence her trembling hands. At last, she confided in me that she had had a horrible dream: Monsters with the heads of snakes walked towards the house of Doña Iluminada, her friend; they played flutes that looked like phalluses, but moved like the tentacles of a squid.

I tried to calm her down. I told her that it was just a dream, that she need not worry, that we were all uneasy, due to the electrical failures and the telephone grid, which was now inaccessible. But Estela interrupted me and said, “No, my child, it’s not that. It’s just that, this morning, I went to visit my friend, Iluminada, since there’s no phone. When I was about to turn the corner at Donceles and República de Argentina, I heard a music that gave me goosebumps and I remembered the dream. I approached slowly, to see where it came from, but the ones playing were not monsters, no. They were my friend, Jacinto, and his children. Imagine: My godson walked as if possessed, as if he could see something that was not there. I ran to my friend’s house to see what was happening and I found her very calm, making tamales. She told me they were for the Tloque Nahuaque, because he supposedly came to our world, thanks to the scientists in Europe that had found his nature . She also told me other insanities, like, she wanted to go to the pyramid of the Templo Mayor to adore the spheres of the beginning , or something weird like that. How can I not be afraid? She is my friend and she is going insane, my child. Who will look after my godson if Jacinto is also wrong in the head?”

Doña Iluminada had lived for more than thirty years just a few metres from Templo Mayor in the centre of the city, but she had never visited it; Estela assures me that her friend had not heard of the experiments made inside the particle accelerator until there was talk of an accident, and that this might have caused the electricity and communication problems. Nevertheless, she prepared tamales and thanked the subterranean discoveries, for she believed that what had happened in Europe was not a tragedy but a wonderful encounter with what had been long sought after.

“One time, I asked Migdal if there existed the possibility that, following the theory of the multiverse, we were always in a branch where the Higgs does not exist. He asked me to take out my gun and find out.

“Migdal did not believe that the probabilities would ramify to create many worlds. He would say particles exist in all their possible states at the same time, but that, when we interacted with them, they would be forced to choose one possibility, the one we would finally observe.

“What would happen if one particle would not respond to either of the two theories? What would happen if it would exist in all its possible states and, like this, we observed it? What if, also, it multiplied to be in infinite universes?

“You’d have to make apple pie.”

Estela explained to me that Tloque Nahuaque, the Lord of the Near and the Nigh, had been to the Aztecs the Master of the Near and the Far, for they believed he is near all things and all things are near him. They had given him many names and representations, such as ‘Tezcatlipoca’ or ‘Ométeotl’; however, his greatness was such that there is no single word that will contain him, for he is in everything.