Sergio De La Pava - A Naked Singularity

“What Albany? Did I say Albany?”

“Look, truth is I don’t give a fuck about either committee or whatever you want to call them. All I care about is writing. Writing this Kingg thing and saving his life with it. That’s all. The rest is bullshit and meaningless.”

“Now you’re on to something unmitigatedly true. You’re right to peg all this stuff as meaningless and that includes by the way, and forgive me for saying this, your deposed king on death row.”

“Wrong.”

“Actually the only thing that matters at this moment in time is Dark Energy.”

“…”

“Did you hear me? Dark Energy.”

“I heard you.”

“You heard me, sure, but do you know what it means?”

“What about the genome project? It no longer matters?”

“That matters too of course but in a slightly different realm of human activity. You know about Dark Energy right?”

“What about it?”

“You know how Einstein when he checked his relativity math saw that it described a universe that was expanding and since he firmly believed it was not actually expanding he then created and threw in his cosmological constant to make the equations work and the universe they describe stable? You know how when it was later confirmed, by Hubble and others, that the universe was in fact expanding Einstein called the cosmological constant his biggest blunder? Well I guess it’s the mark of some people’s genius that even when they think they’re wrong they’re actually right as we now have Dark Energy, which certainly appears to exist and which functions very much like the constant.”

“I know all this, now tell me why Dark Energy is the only thing that currently matters.”

“You see we now know that the universe is not only expanding but it’s expanding at an accelerating rate . Think about that for a moment. The old picture was of a Big Bang followed by expansion until, impelled by gravity, all of the matter in the universe begins to attract itself at a rate greater than the rate of expansion causing the universe to contract and contract until it ends in the Big Crunch. Of course when cosmologists looked at the universe and took out their calculators they saw that there had to be a lot more mass and matter than they could account for, meaning the universe was full of not only what we could see but also an invisible Dark Matter that fills over ninety percent of it.”

“I have to go Con.”

“Okay let’s stay with Dark Energy then. Perhaps I have not adequately conveyed the sheer enormity of the accelerating expansion. The acceleration suggests there’s not going to be any big crunch after all. The universe will continue to expand infinitely! The universe is basically immortal and it is so thanks to Dark Energy which overcomes the attractive force of gravity with its own repellent force that drives the universe’s expansion. Do you follow me?”

“You’re being followed but maybe you can accelerate the story a bit.”

“I’ll cut to the chase. Man has created these new wide-field telescopes. We are going to look through these, both from the ground and in space, and we are going to figure out once and for all what this Dark Energy shit is. We cannot be expected to master that which we do not fully comprehend so once we know , with the help of these scopes, what Dark Energy and Dark Matter truly are then we will be ready to master the universe. There’s no question this is going to happen, it’s just a question of when. Don’t you see? The universe is going to keep on expanding forever and expansion is just another word for progress. When a chain of stores expands for example that’s good, that’s progress. Like the universe, Man is expanding at an accelerating rate and he’s doing this through technology. Do you doubt this? Because no one of the slightest mental competence does. The growth of technology and knowledge has not recently been steady, it’s been exponential. If you magically transported a man from 500 A.D. to 1500 A.D. he would eventually adjust to the intervening changes. But take a man from as recent as 1800 and put him in our world with handheld computers and planes and particle accelerators and satellites and space exploration and ATMs and cell phones and nuclear power plants and he would lose his limited mind in about five hours! The same is true of us if we could travel into the future. After all the guy in 1800 didn’t think there was a lot left to invent and discover did he? He couldn’t have conceived of this right? So obviously things are going to happen in the next centuries that we cannot now even conceive of. The future world will be more unrecognizable to us than our present one would be to the 1800 guy. I used to say that in five hundred years we will not recognize human beings or society because of things like the Human Genome Project but now I see that it’s going to come a lot sooner than that. And that, my friend, is why Dark Energy is all that matters right now. Because we are going to solve the ultimate riddles of the universe and ensure that this remarkable force that ensures universal progress and immortality is bent to our will. Men and women don’t matter, only Man does. Man right now, armed with his technology, just feels like such an unstoppable force. Man is on the precipice of conquering the universe and at a time like that men like Kingg are sadly irrelevant.”

“Take it easy. Just two days ago Man, that near-deity that wields technology like an irresistible sword, forgot to pay the electric bill and the lights were turned off.”

“Hmm.”

“I’m taking this cab.”

“Take.”

…

“Brooklyn Heights. Columbia Heights and Orange.”

“I can leave you on Orange and Columbia Heights, is that okay?”

“Orange and Columbia Heights?”

“Right.”

“As opposed to Columbia Heights and Orange?”

“Indeed.”

“Fine.”

…

“Some blackout huh?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I was here for the last one. Now that was a real blackout. Makes this one look like a brownout really. I even told my wife, this should’ve been classified a brownout. And I really saw no need for Times Square to have been placed on the TITS either. Not for nothing but it’s very hard to drive, let me tell you, when it’s that bright. It’s like drifting towards the sun or something. Like when a ship comes off its orbit in those science fiction movies, ha ha!”

“Yeah.”

…

“Here we go.”

“Thanks, keep the change.”

“Consider it kept pal.”

Step on a crack break your mother’s back . That is, if you step on a crack on the sidewalk, either the planned ones that result from those cement squares they create or the ones that stem from elemental corrosion, then your mother will, as a result, sustain that rather severe back injury. So not wanting that to happen I walked in the stilted manner required, my steps sometimes long, sometimes short, without pattern, and my head always down and looking; so that I was incidentally able to spot immediately the half-globe paperweight that contained a miniature Manhattan island, which island one could create snow on through mere inversion. The thing lay unattended on the sidewalk, which allowed me to invoke a further adage: the one that states that finders may keep while losers only weep. I snatched it up and continued walking home. Only I then decided that I should instead strive to step on every crack and the achievement of that slowed me down considerably.

The storm door to my apartment building had this compulsively effective spring that resisted with all its might any effort to open said door so when I absentmindedly let go of the knob while standing in the doorway the door came flying back to slam me in the shoulder, spinning me towards the street and freeing the globe of my hand’s grip that I may watch it land on the edge of the top step, triggering the globe’s sudden explosion, its protective dome of glass instantly dividing into countless dull diamonds that accelerated away from each other, the flakes of synthetic snow dropping without life onto the cement, the water expanding in thin waves to mark the step in astral-shaped black, and the now exposed plastic skyline limply descending the three steps aboard its solid base until hitting bottom. I didn’t clean up or anything, I just went in.