Amazing Ida Proves Existence of God!

Amazingly Unlikely Fossil Proves God's Existence!

Let’s be honest.  Ida just sounds too good to be true. Even practical scientists are having a hard to trying to temper their enthusiasm

I mean,what are the chances that the best preserved fossil specimen in history also happens to be the vital missing transitional link between apes and humans, and that this discovery would occur just at the time when the Young Earth Creationists were gearing up for their next major battle. (Okay, I don’t know that the YECs are gearing up for their next major battle, but odds are pretty good, as they ALWAYS seem to be gearing up for their next major battle.)

Bone marrow? From a 47 million year old fossil? Particularly one of such spectacular importance? Fur samples? Actually being able to tell what the darn thing had to eat last?

Well, what can one say? It’s a freakin’ miracle !

It is such an amazingly unlikely miracle that it more or less goes to PROVE that God exists. I mean, what are the odds? Millions of fossil finds, and the best also happens to be the most important.

Well, extra-ordinary claims require extra-ordinary proofs. It certainly SOUNDS from the initial talk that this thing was examined for skulduggery for two years within an inch of it’s former life. I want to wait for a while before I start jumping up and down about the thing, because it SOUNDS too good to be true. My initial reaction is to believe it, however. If it’s a hoax, it’s going to get too much scrutiny for too long a time for it to survive as a hoax for long. I’ll let the scientists fight it out.

But, seriously, if true, the odds against such a perfect specimen have got to be astronomical. For it to exist, one is almost tempted to say that God preserved it for us. “Here, you morons. You want a transitional species? Here it is! Creationists and IDiots, forget your silly fight. I created the Universe, and life evolves through natural selection. Get a brain already people! This is HOW I WORK!!!”

Of course, Creationists and IDiots are doing nothing of the kind. This fossil find is no big deal to them. Certainly nothing that shows transitions between “Kinds”. Of course, they never give a clear, scientific definition of just what the hell a “kind” is, so it’s an impossible target to hit, as it can be moved at will.

So, provided this fossil does not turn out to be an incredibly elaborate hoax (which I kinda doubt), we finally have a nice link in our evolutionary family tree that seems to act as common ancestor to both humans and apes. It not only is an excellent transitional species, but an excellent example evolutionary process. Not only that, our finding proves that God exists.

(I say this tongue in cheek, of course. But, seriously! Damn! What are the odds!?)

The Storyteller, Part II

Well, I decided to put out another request for topics.  People have seen my writing style now, and should have a reasonable idea of what they might expect.  I hope to break this expectation by being totally weird, but if your expecting weird, I’m not sure what I can do.  I just can’t really “do” normal.  It’s not in me.  Everything I wrote last time had some science fiction or fantasy element to it.  I like playing “what if” games, and that’s just the way the stories come out.  Maybe I’ll try writing straight fiction as a challenge to myself.  Maybe I won’t.

So, bring on the topics.  Outlandish and impossible topics are my specialty.  I’m not sure what order I will deliver the finished writing products, or how long delivery will take.  But deliver I will.  I really enjoyed the challenge that some of the topics brought me last time.

So, give me a hand and give me some ideas.  I thank you for your support.

Alphonsus / Steve

Feline Blue – Part 4 of 3

Click HERE to download Feline Blue as a PDF

I find publishing the story Feline Blue to be somewhat frightening to me, not so much because I dare to come up with a solution to a problem that some of the best minds of our time have tried to tackle, but that I came up with a solution that is so freaking simple and obvious that there HAS to be something wrong with it.  I dislike putting something out into the world that makes me look like an idiot unless I deliberately CHOOSE to look like an idiot.  Quantum theory is loaded with paradoxes that people love to talk about.  Who am I, a librarian, to come along and say that the paradoxes don’t exist because the zero button on their calculator is sticking?

Still, to me, the logic behind my argument is inescapable.  It’s the simple concept expressed in computer science (in which I have my undergraduate degree) as GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

In this case, the fundamental supposition behind Schrödinger’s cat simply hasn’t been explored.  It really isn’t possible to build a proper box to put the cat in.

From what I’ve been able to find, Schrödinger never referred to the box that he wanted to put the cat in as a “black box,” as I refer to it in the story.  According to Wikipedia, a black box is a technical term for a device, system or object when it is viewed in terms of its input, output and transfer characteristics without any knowledge required of its internal workings.  Looking at it from this perspective, Schrödinger’s box isn’t a true black box, as we know exactly how it works.  It’s just the result of the internal workings that is kept from our view.  I still think the basic idea behind the black box is sufficient to get my point across.

And my point ultimately boils down to Chaos Theory and the Butterfly Effect.  More specifically, it has to do with the idea that virtually everything in the universe is in some way connected to or linked to virtually everything else in some way.

The Butterfly Effect basically says that dynamic systems (something I think our universe as a whole could be described as) are very sensitive to a changes in the initial conditions.  Thus, the tiny puff of breeze caused by the batting of a butterfly’s wings can cause a change in the dynamic system of weather in such a way as to cause hurricanes in areas of the world that are prone to them.  For Schrödinger’s cat, I take the Butterfly Effect to its most extreme, reasonably assuming that a cat being either dead or alive would have a profound effect on initial conditions, and that certainly no simple box could be manifested to prevent the state of the cat from affecting the world around it.

The cat’s condition could certainly be derived from x-rays or infrared on a simple box.  More importantly, the cat possesses a gravitational field, and, while this gravitational field is incredibly minute, it is still an initial condition that is going to affect the position of molecules outside of the box.  There is no known way to block a gravitational field.  Thus, there is no known way to keep the cat’s state from affecting the world around it in some way.  And, so long as the cat’s state is affecting the world around it in some way, then its state could, in theory, be deduced without having to open the box.  My contention is that so long as the cat can not be completely cut off from the rest of the universe, that it cannot be in a state of quantum indeterminacy.  The universe as a whole (minus the cat) could only be as it is BECAUSE of the cat and because of the cat’s state.

Okay, if we accept that last sentence, MUST we accept that the cat can’t still be in a dead/alive state?  After all, we can’t detect that quadrillionth of a centimeter fluctuations in the air molecules around the box because of the cat’s gravitational field.  We can’t see gravity waves.  We, as sense limited humans, have no way of detecting if we’ve just murdered a cat for no really good reason.

Here we have to look at our definition of the word, “observer.”  In quantum physics, the lay person traditionally thinks of observer as some dude or dudette looking at the cat.  In reality, no such definition is clarified. (See this article.)  I define observer, as I said in the story, as an affectee, that is, ANYTHING that is affected by the cat’s state.  To me, this makes the most sense, as the human mind is only a small part of universe of other things affected by the cat’s state.  I see no particular reason why a cognizant mind is necessary to bring the cat out of its undetermined state.  This is debatable, however, as it is only my definition.  My definition, however, leads to a rational conclusion, whereas competing definitions lead to paradoxes.  You make the choice.

So, since this is my article, and since I dislike paradoxes in my physics, let’s take a further look at the concept of affectee.

Obviously, a cat is not the only thing that affects the rest of the universe (although he might like to think so).  By my previous arguments, anything large enough to possess a gravitational field, that is, possessing mass, does so as well.

So, what DOESN’T necessarily affect the rest of the universe?  Well, only things which possess no mass.  In other words, particles small enough only to exist on the quantum scale.

What can we say about a massless particles which are absolutely not affecting anything else in the universe?

Well, we can say that they must exist, and we can say this because every time we’ve bashed particle A into particle B, we’ve always gotten particles C and Not C before.  So we know that these particles are out there somewhere.

AND, if by using a clever trap we know that exactly one of the particles must be in our pickle jar, we know that we have trapped is either particle C or Not C.

But we don’t know anything else.

The particle is affecting NOTHING in the universe.  From the universe’s perspective, it might as well not exist.  In fact, if we assume that the universe doesn’t really give a shit, we can say that, from the universe’s perspective, the particle is not even part of the universe.

The ONLY way the particle has been defined is mathematically.  And how, mathematically, would one define a particle that effectively is not even part of the universe but MUST be C or Not C.

Well, pure mathematics is great at determining probabilities, but I’m not sure that it is really equipped for defining the undefinable.  Given a particle that is both not part of the universe and could only be one of two things, I can easily imagine mathematics coming out and saying that the particle is both at once.

A computer programmer or logician wouldn’t define it that way, but mathematics doesn’t use the same symbol sets.  And particle physics is definitely a favorite area for mathematicians.

So, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the paradoxical state of the quantum particle being two things at once is a mathematical illusion.  I know that this idea has been suggested before, and I know that numerous physicists have said that it is indeed in both states, but I also know that stating that the particle is either C OR Not C (not a paradox) or stating that the particle is both C AND Not C (paradox) makes absolutely no difference as far as the universe is concerned.  The universe doesn’t care about the particle until the particle somehow interacts with it and defines itself.  Until that happens, I prefer to define the unknown state in a way that doesn’t lead to a paradox, thank you very much.

Voldemort in the story is based on a real cat, whose current state I don’t know because we gave him away, hoping that he would be less of a pain in the ass to people who would pay more attention to him.

The institution of South Indiana State University is entirely fictional.  I am of Finnish ancestry, and I used to wear a sweat shirt with the word SISU on it.  Sisu is a Finnish word meaning, roughly, gumption, or, as I used to like to describe it, “courage, guts, and a little bit nuts.”  People would ask me all the time what sisu stood for, and I would always say South Indiana State University.  Call it a rather lame inside joke.

The fact that my wife is dead in the story means nothing.  The only reason there is no wife is that she wasn’t necessary for the plot.  The real wife is in a definitely alive state, and I love her dearly.

Feline Blue – Part 3 of 3

Here is the final installment of the Feline Blue series.  Part 1 and Part 2 have set up the problem and suggested a solution.  Part 3 merely finishes out the story.  I would like to thank the person from whom I stole this blue cat image.  I would, indeed, thank them directly if I had any idea who they were.

May all of your cats remain the color of their choice.

———————————————

Feline Blue – Part 3 of 3

Finally, the day of the great experiment came along. The first and most difficult chore was getting the cat into the cat carrier.

Voldemort was an indoor cat, and when he saw that green carrier with the cage in the front, he knew that something was about to happen that he wouldn’t like at all.

So he hid. He has a LOT of hiding places, and he’s smart enough to create a new one the moment we find one of his old ones.

But the point is we always find him. Every time. He has never once failed to get into that carrier once we determined to put him into it. So, why does he keep trying?

I wore a leather coat and gloves. The last time I tried to put him into the carrier he managed to draw blood–quite a feat for an animal without any claws.

We found him behind a fish tank that hadn’t had any fish in it for the past five years. The tank had a cupboard underneath it, and the cupboard didn’t have a backing. To Voldemort, this looked like a perfect hiding spot. To us, this made it easier than usual. All we had to do was open the cupboard doors and nab him. He was so surprised that those doors actually opened that he didn’t think quickly enough to try to run away again.

Getting him into the carrier was a different matter. He had a tail and what seemed like about eight paws that combined forces to keep himself from getting in there. Sally and I likewise combined forces against him. While he hissed and yowled, I held the dangerous end with the teeth, and she stuffed in the tail and the hind legs. He went in easily after that–the front legs alone just didn’t have the movement or the strength to stop the inevitable.

So we lugged the black box contraption, the obligatory three-panel storyboard, and the cat out to the van, respectively. We remembered the Kool-Aid at the last minute. Bubba had said earlier that he wanted to see how everything was going to work, but he said that he’d meet us there.

The school administration decided to hold the Science Fair in the school cafeteria this year. Apparently, a particularly enthusiastic volcano had flowed its simulated molten contents all over the gymnasium floor last year and the gym teacher threw a fit. It was decided that the floor of the school cafeteria was far better suited for dealing with unidentifiable and possibly toxic substances.

Once we got to the school, we pulled out the black box contraption, the obligatory three-panel storyboard, the Kool-Aid, and the cat. We found our table, set up our display and then had to tackle the job of getting the cat OUT of the carrier. Voldy had apparently decided that, as much as he hated the carrier, at least it was something familiar to him. There were a lot of strange sounds and the smell of volcanic sulfur was in the air, and Voldy had decided that maybe the carrier wasn’t such a bad place after all.

Gravity ultimately won. We took the carrier and turned it sideways over the black box. We shook it a little, and Voldy, having no claws to speak of and not a lot to hold on to, eventually slid out with an ungraceful thump.

The black box was also a safe place that Voldy was familiar with, but he hadn’t liked a thing that had happened to him in the last half hour, and I don’t think he liked the idea of being locked up again. He looked up at us with pleading eyes and gave out a plaintive, “mew,” deciding on a far more passive tactic then any he had ever tried before. I felt my scar ache, and quickly slammed the lid down over him, suppressing the urge to laugh diabolically after I did so.

Once we had everything set up, I looked around and started to feel a little worried. Everyone else’s experiments we colorful. Ours was a misshapen black box. The box didn’t even have any exciting projections or knobs to twist and turn, just a single hole. All the exciting mechanisms were inside, hidden from view.

Just before the judging was to begin, Bubba showed up. Someone was with him.

“This is Dr. John Mazur, from South Indiana State University,” he explained. “He used to be my physics instructor there. I never went for my doctorate, of course, but he also teaches in the doctoral physics program.”

I gazed at him with a look of dumb incredulity.

“Hello,” he said, tipping his cap. “How are you?”

“I’m Evan,” I replied. “Bubba, can I have a word with you?”

I grabbed Bubba by his arm without waiting for an answer and walked out of earshot of the scientist.

“Bubba, what the hell is he doing here?”

“I invited him. I told him about the black box problem and he got interested.”

“But this is just a fifth grade science fair experiment. We’re just going to dump Kool-Aid on a cat. And that’s only if we’re lucky.”

“Look, he’s here. He’s quiet. He doesn’t eat much. What the hell is your problem?”

I stopped. I felt a rock in the pit of my stomach.

“I don’t know. It’s just the quantum physics part of it. I don’t like the idea of going against a bunch of PhDs and trying to prove that they’re all wrong because of a guy in blue tights and a cape.”

“Just relax, will you? Sally hasn’t proved anything. And even if she did, it wasn’t something that everyone else hasn’t already suspected. All she’s done is maybe come up with a new angle on it. Now come on, it looks like the judging is starting.”

# # # #

After going back and greeting Dr. Mazur more humanly, we watched the other experiments in action. They weren’t all volcanoes, of course. In reality, there were only two volcanoes in the whole room. There was one experiment where a student had turned a plant on its side to make it grow upwards. There was another one that used a prism and a flashlight.

One of the more interesting experiments tested the effects of coffee on teeth. The kid used six real teeth (his dad was a dentist). He placed two in regular coffee, two in decaf, and two in water as a control. The result could have been used as an advertisement for one of those toothpastes with, “extra whitening.” It also could have been effectively used by the anti-coffee lobby, should anyone choose to form one.

When the judges got to us, Sally went into her spiel. The judges, who were in fact just all of the fifth grade teachers in the school, seemed a little mystified by the whole thing. I doubted that most elementary school teachers delved too deeply into quantum physics as they earned their education degrees.

Sally explained the concept pretty well though, and the teachers seemed to know what she was talking about when she finished her preliminary presentation.

With a dramatic pause, Sally dropped the ball bearing into the tube.

Nothing happened, which was exactly what was supposed to happen.

Sally turned back to her audience, and was about to talk some more when suddenly, a muffled yowl emitted from the box. The box abruptly jumped almost an inch to the left, and a hissing sound (also distinctly muffled) could be heard.

The audience laughed. Little Sally looked mortified and ready to burst into tears. But then she shook herself, took one big sniffle, and boldly went on.

“The effect described in the Schrödinger’s Cat experiment can not happen in reality, because it is impossible to build a black box for real.”

Sally turned to look at us with venom in her eyes. “Although I think my dad and Mr. Bubba could have done a little better job than this.” The audience again laughed.

She looked again at the judges. “Anyway, the cat is not in a state of quantum flux, because if an alien existed who could see into the box, they would always be able to tell if the cat were blue or not without opening it.”

Then, she suddenly smiled. “In fact, in this case we don’t even need an alien. We know that the cat is blue because, even though we cannot see him, we heard him when the Kool-Aid was poured on him. Our sense of hearing tells us that the cat is blue, even though we can’t see it. We could also guess the cat’s color when the black box moved, and I think that just comes from our sense of knowing that cats don’t like having Kool-Aid poured on them.”

The audience laughed appreciably and applauded.

The physicist from the university did not applaud, but he smiled at her and nodded.

Sally opened the front of the box, and we could indeed see a blue cat–a very angry and scared looking blue cat–staring back at us from behind the cage. We closed the box again to let the cat suffer in peace.

When all of the teachers and parents moved on to mold experiment at the next table, I approached the physics professor.

“So, Dr. Mazur, what do you think of Sally’s interpretation of quantum theory?”

Still smiling, Dr. Mazur shrugged. “I don’t know. I really don’t have the math for it.”

I closed my eyes, exasperated.

“But,” the scientist continued, “I think the kid may have a point.”

Dr. Mazur tipped his cap at me, then at Bubba. With Sally, he removed his cap entirely and bowed to her. He then turned on his heals and walked from the room.

# # # #

We managed to get the now blue and white cat out of the box and home again with a minimum of bloodshed. Sally got an A on the project, with several positive comments that proved conclusively that her teacher didn’t really have a clue as to what the experiment was at all about.

Harvard University failed to call us to tell us that Sally’s experiment had set the world of quantum physics on its ear. I never heard from Dr. Mazur again. So life went back to almost normal in our humble abode.

I say almost, because we also leaned that blue Kool-Aid acts as an excellent hair die, and Voldy went around stained for several months before he managed to lick all the blue hairs off and upchuck them in blue hairballs for me to step in.

Damn, I hate that cat.

Feline Blue – Part 2 of 3

This is part two of my answer to the Schrödinger’s Cat experiment.  Part 1 can be found here. This part phrases my explanation for the phenomenon as bast as I can.  If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, don’t worry.  I probably don’t either. 

*************

Feline Blue – Part 2 of 3

Sally and I worked on the box for the next week, and Bubba came in to kibitz and suggest from time to time.  I cut the boards to the best of my ability, then Sally and I used some glue, nails, and paint, and before long we had something that looked quite definitely like a black box designed by a ten-year old and drunken orangutan.  It was reasonably solid though, so then we got to work on the more complicated, mechanical part.

Fortunately, when Sally was a little girl, I bought her this marble racetrack thing.  You could set up a bunch of tracks and tubes and windmills and you could drop the marbles from the top of the contraption and watch them as they took all kinds of exciting twists and turns before they hit the floor and rolled under the sofa.  Both Sally and I thought it was really cool when we first started playing with it.  The trouble was that Sally only thought it was really cool for about three minutes, so I was forced to play with it by myself after that, which wasn’t nearly as much fun.

Still, the racetrack thing had all of the tubes and gears necessary to make a ball bearing take one of two paths in a reasonably random manner.  (We decided that a marble wouldn’t be heavy enough.)  Bubba helped a lot here.  After a lot of Mouse Trap like gizmos, we got is so that if the bearing took one of the paths it would flip over a half cup of blue Kool-Aid.  It was actually a lot of fun.

Then we padded the box with good, thick foam, put in one of the cat’s “special blankies,” and plopped in Voldemort.

And Voldemort, surprisingly, was fine with this.  Cats have some kind of natural affinity toward boxes, and this one was particularly warm and cozy.  He popped himself in and out of the box for a couple of hours, and then finally stayed inside for long nap.

“We’ll let him get comfortable with it for a while, so he doesn’t freak out when we do the actual experiment.”

So everything was proceeding along just swimmingly until Bubba stopped in after school to see Sally and me the next day.

“Can’t be done.”

“What can’t be done?” I asked.

“I mean that a true ‘black box’ is a theoretical impossibility.”

“You mean you don’t know how to make one?” asked Sally.

“No, I mean that one can’t be made.  It’s impossible.”

I asked incredulously.  “You mean even a million mile wall thick wall of lead…”

“…would still let neutrinos through like the wall was barely there.  The only thing that could act as a perfect barrier to information would be a black hole.”

Sally brightened.  “Well, I can just use that, then.”

“No, you couldn’t, because a black hole is a one-way trip.  You would never be able to find out if the cat was blue or not.  Effectively, the cat would not exist at all, because its existence would have no effect on anything else.  To all intents and purposes, it wouldn’t even be part of our universe anymore.  Only its mass would remain.”

Sally looked at Bubba without comprehension for a few moments.

“Then how can I do my experiment?”

“It doesn’t affect the experiment.  You just have to say that the black box is just a theoretical formulation used to illustrate a quantum concept.”

Sally stared at Bubba as if he had just spoken to her in Finnish.  Bubba was used to teaching college level physics.  He certainly had students who no more understood what he was talking about than Sally did, but at college, he could just flunk them.  He wasn’t used to trying to simplify his explanations.

I interpreted for him.

“He means you can say that the black box is just a pretend idea so that scientists can use it to show something cool about physics.”

“But if the box is pretend, then the fluxing is just pretend, too.”

“No, the flux can still happen,” Bubba replied, but he paused doubtfully for a moment.  Then he continued, “We just can’t build a real black box.  There isn’t anything that can be built that would stop all information.  Maybe it would just be gravity waves or neutrinos, but if you have an alien that can see those, then the black box still doesn’t work.”

Sally frowned, and then frowned deeper, and then took on an expression that looked about as dangerously angry as a ten-year old girl wearing a pink and white “Princess” tee shirt can look.

“Then the whole experiment doesn’t work.”

“Sally, the experiment is fine…”

“NO!” she shouted.  “The cat can’t be fluxing.  If some super powerful alien can come along and see the cat, the alien could always tell if the cat were blue or not.”

“Sally, it’s just a thought experiment in quantum physics.  It’s not based on reality.  It’s just something pretend…”

She interrupted angrily, “So I have to pretend that the cat is fluxing when he isn’t?  I think the whole quantium thing is pretend, too!  I should have done a volcano.  At least I don’t have to pretend whether there are real volcanoes.”

“Sally…”

“No!  Forget it!  I don’t want to do my blue cat experiment anymore.  This quantium stuff is stupid!”

Sally turned and ran to her bedroom, slamming the door.

I had just spent a week building a black box–a magnificent mess–and I wasn’t about to give up on the idea very easily.  I turned to my scientist friend, who was looking a little overwhelmed at the moment.  “Look Bubba.  I’m going to go and try to reason with her.  Just help yourself to a drink.  I’ll be right back.”

And I raced to Sally’s room and knocked.

“Sally, can I come in?”

I could hear a muffled sobbing on the other end.  “No.”

“Sally, I really think you need to hear what I have to say.”

I heard a quiet shuffling on the other side of the door.  Sally opened it, her eyes streaked with tears.  She left it open and ran back to her bed and buried back her face into the sheets.

“Sally, I want you to understand something.”

I went over and sat next to her on the bed.

“You’ve taken on a really great experiment.  I’d hate to see you give it up.  It’s just that you are trying to show something that most people don’t even know about until college.  This is really complicated stuff.  I can’t even begin to understand it myself, and even Mr. Bubba doesn’t understand it completely.”

Sally turned to look at me and started to say something, but I held up my hand to stop her.

“But there other people out there who do understand it, and these people are very, very smart.  If they say that that’s the way it is, I think we have to take their word for it.”

“I don’t care.  It doesn’t make sense and I think it’s just stupid.”

“Sally, do you think there are still a lot of things that don’t seem to make sense, but are true anyway.  Think about the world being round.”

“What about it?  I know that the world is round.”

“But for a long time, people thought the world was flat.  Then some very smart people were able to figure out that the world was round.  If you look outside, does it look round to you?  Or does it look flat?”

Sally sniffled.  “It looks flat.”

“Yes it does, doesn’t it?  Would you know how to prove that the world is round?”

“I could build a rocket and go into space.”

“Can you build a rocket, Sally.”

She sniffed again.  “No”

“But other people can build rockets, just like other people understand why the cat would be fluxing.  Does that make sense?”

“I guess.”

“Okay, Sally.  Just think about it for a while.  Just because you don’t understand something doesn’t mean that it isn’t true.  Mr. Bubba says that it’s true.  I think we should take his word for it.”

Sally sniffed.  “I don’t want to.”

I talked to her for another ten minutes or so.  She finally agreed, reluctantly, to go one with the experiment.

“Thanks Sally.  I’d really appreciate it.”

She buried her face in the bed sheets again as I left he and I walked back out to the living room.

Bubba was still sitting on the sofa, but now, there was bottle of whisky in front of him.

The bottle was about four-fifths empty.

I was sure that the bottle had been full when I bought it for the party a little over a week earlier, and I was also sure that it had never been opened since then.

Nevertheless, just a few swallows of the liquid remained.

I couldn’t see a glass around.  He must have been drinking right out of the bottle.

“Bubba, you didn’t need to help yourself to a drink quite that enthusiastically.”

Bubba turned to look at me–or rather, I should say that he turned to look in my general direction.  His eyes were not currently capable of pinpoint accuracy.

“I think the kid may be right.”

“Right about what?”

“Schroeder’s cat.  The whole conception may just fall apart if a black box isn’t theoreckticly possible.”

“What are you talking about?  I just spent fifteen minutes convincing her that she was wrong.  You can’t do this to me Bubba.”

“But she may be right.”

“She can’t be right.  She’s ten-years old.”

Bubba thought about this.  He thought about it for quite a while.

“I think she can be both, I think,” he finally replied.

“But I thought this was one of the founding tenants of quantum physics.”

“It is an illustrative point of quantum physics that no one has ever really firmly decided on.  I’m worried this fifth-grade science experiment may have just put a nail in its coffin.  That’s why I’m getting drunk.”

“But…”

“…but,” he interrupted, “the black box was always just theory.  Just a concept.  No one ever really thought of making a real one.  But it turns out that a real black box is impossible, and that means that she may be right, and that the entire Schrody thing may not be possible.

“And, while I can’t say that I’m thinking really clearly at the moment, I have the feeling that somehow that chops at the foundations of quantum physics.  At the very least, I think that it means something important.  But I don’t have the math for it at the best of times, and certainly not right now.  So I decided not to think about it, and I thought about whiskey instead.  I’m pretty sure I made the right decision.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Whiskey.  It’s helping me a lot right now.”

“No, quantum physics.  This is a fifth grade science fair project.  It has nothing to do with quantum physics.”

“The experiment is based on quantum physics.”

“But it uses marbles and a wooden box.”

“Just as good as anything else, if she’s right.”

“But…the experiment…if the Schrödinger effect can’t exist, what are we supposed to do now?”

“We?  I don’t know what you’re going to do, but I’ve decided to get very drunk!  I’ve already explained that in detail.  I can see that you don’t want to take this approach, so here, look at this.”

He took a coin from his pocket (with some difficulty) and threw it into my bedroom.  At least, that’s what I think he was trying to do.  The coin instead ricocheted off a wall a good four feet from the bedroom’s entrance and bounced, I suspected, into the kitchen.

“Okay, now tell me about the coin.”

“Well, I think it may have nicked the paint on the wall in the hallway, and it’s probably rolled under the refrigerator by now.”

He seemed to think about this with interest.  You could almost see his great but inebriated brain at work, like two balloons trying to make love during a windstorm.  As time went on, I could see that the rapidly ingested alcohol was taking more and more control of all that which was Bubba.

Then he smiled at me with a monumentally stupid grin.

“No, you’re funny.”  He laughed a kind of choking laugh and tilted dangerously to one side.  He caught himself, and sat back up again.  He wasn’t exactly straight, but he was not a quite so precarious an angle.

“No, tell me the state of the coin.  Did it land heads or tails?”

“I don’t know,” I said firmly.  I was quite sure that this was exactly what he wanted me to say.

“Right!”  The balloons in his head were hit by a good gust again, and it took him a few moments to continue.  “Now, what if we were in a position where we could never determine its state?”

“We may be in such a position.  If the coin rolled under the refrigerator, I have no intention of trying to get it from out from there.”

His grin achieved a state of even greater stupidity.  “Perfect!” he affirmed.  “And its state isn’t effecting anything else in the world.  So now, if I had to declare its state mathemacal… mathmomatical…  using math, and since I’d have no way to determine which state it was in, I’d have to say that the coin’s stated was indeterdminable, that it was both heads AND tails.

“So…” He paused, his balloons doing their erotic dance again for a while.

“So, the moment the coin’s state affects the universe in any way whatsoever, the state of the coin IS ALWAYS deterdimnable, because of Superman.  Since the math is describing an impossible state, the math gives us a meaningless answer.”  He paused in drunken triumph.  “So therefore the Schrodininger effect is just a mathefactical fantasy, because it isn’t based on reality at all.”  And then, with a victorious and still monumentally stupid grin, he flopped over on the sofa and passed out.

I found a large Tupperware bowl and left it by his head, hoping against hope that if his body felt the need to exorcise itself of some of its excess alcohol, and if he couldn’t stagger to the bathroom, that at least he might have enough sense to aim for the bowl.

And then I drained the rest of the bottle and went to bed myself.

# # # #

Bubba was gone by the time I awoke in the morning, which suited me fine.  The bowl remained unused, and there were no bad smells to be detected, so overall, I was rather pleased by the way the thing turned out.

I didn’t see Bubba for the next couple of days.  When he returned, he was as geeky and as chipper as ever.

“It’s all mathematics, Evan,” he said without preamble.  “I did some more digging into the origins of the Schrödinger Cat experiment.  Did you know that Schrödinger himself did not really believe that the cat would be in a dead-alive state?  What he was trying to do to show how preposterous the whole thing would be–reducto ad absurdum–and that therefore quantum theory must be incomplete.  If it’s ridiculous to assume that the cat is in a dead-alive state, then you would have to say the same thing about the nucleus–it’s either decayed or not decayed.

“But that was the problem.  All he was ever able to say was that ’something’ was wrong about the concept–he never said what it could be.

“There have been some rather complex explanations of the phenomena–nothing universally agreed upon.  The main theory is something called the Copenhagen interpretation, which I studied for about three hours but I still don’t understand fully.  This interpretation has some growing competition involving parallel universes, which I didn’t even bother to read about because it is just a stretch to far for me.  What I can say is that a lot of people objected to the Copenhagen interpretation on the grounds that it is non-deterministic and that it includes an undefined measurement process that converts probability functions into non-probabilistic measurements.”

I grimaced here.  “Listen Bubba, this is me: Evan.  I’ve got a business degree.  Try to use words with no more than three syllables and throw in the words “profit margin” from time to time if you want me to have a clue as to what you’re talking about.”

“Sorry.  What I’m really saying is that, while most physicists agree that the cat isn’t “fluxing,” as Sally likes to put it, no one is really sure what the heck is going on.”

Bubba took a deep breath, and went on.

“When I was just studying this stuff, I came across some experiment that was supposed to prove the random state of decay.  The scientist set up his experiment so that he would not observe the particle directly, but he would rather deduce the condition of the particle from the behavior of another particle.

“But that’s where it went wrong, I think.  All he really did was redefine the word, ‘observer.’  An observer becomes, not a conscious entity, but rather an effectee:  something whose behavior is in some way modified by the behavior of, or even the existence of, the particle in question.

“What Sally is basically saying is that so long as the decay of the radioactive particle affects the universe in any way whatsoever, the Schrödinger effect cannot occur.  And since it’s impossible to build a true black box, virtually everything larger than a subatomic particle should in theory affect the rest of the universe in some way.  So therefore, there is no Schrödinger effect.”

“I’m pretty sure that Sally would disagree that that is what she is saying.  I’m pretty sure that if Sally were to say that, she would have no idea what she was talking about.”

“Whatever.  And, if the Schrödinger effect can’t exist, well, it means something.  Maybe it says that, unless something is affecting something else in the universe in some way, it literally can’t be said to exist in our universe, at least mathematically.  Maybe what we’re really describing in quantum physics is if the state of something is indeterminable, then, ipso facto, its state can’t be determined and could be in any state.  A tautology.”

“So you’re saying that a kid’s fifth grade science fair project is going to debunk quantum physics?”

“No, I don’t think so.  I don’t have the math for stuff at this level.  I’m just a physics teacher at a community college, after all.  All I’m saying is that I think it means something–I’m just not sure what.”

“Well, what are you planning to do about it?  And don’t mention anything about whisky this time.”

“I’m going to ask my old physics teacher at State and see what he has to say about it.  Maybe he can explain it to me in a way that makes sense.”

After Bubba left and I put Sally to bed, I sat in the living room, wondering about how a ten-year old kid, a ball bearing, some Kool-Aid, a plywood box, and a psychotic cat were going to combine forces to turn quantum physics on its ear.

I looked at Voldemort, sitting on the couch in the living room.  He was oblivious to all the fuss he was causing.  He just sat there, grooming himself; licking his fur so that he could toss it up into a hairball that I would step in at two in the morning.

Damn, I hated that cat.

Feline Blue – Part 1 of 3

I wrote this story as kind of an experiment.  I saw (and still see) a fundamental problem with a basic tenant in quantum physics, that being that a particle remains in an indeterminate state until observed.  It violates the rules of common sense, and I came up with a simple explanation for it.  Being a librarian rather than a physicist makes it singularly unlikely that my explanation would ever get published in any reputable science journals, so I decided to write a short story about it instead.

The fact that my short story remains unpublished means that my simple explanation will never be revealed, unless someone with some physics credentials actually reads and and either tells me that I have a point or tells me why I’m full of shit.  I’d be good either way.  I just want my idea to get a fair hearing.

It’s a 7000+ word story, and the actual dilemma is only hinted at in part 1 here.  Part 2 will hold the actual dilemma and my proposed solution.  The world will have to wait another day.

**************************

Feline Blue – Part 1 of 3

“Dad?  Can you build me a black box?”

The last of the guests had gone home from the party, and it was well past my daughter’s bedtime.  I felt like it was well past mine as well.  I’ve always been kind of a lightweight when it comes to drinking, and two glasses of wine left me feeling pretty swell.  After four glasses, however, I find that a comfortable chair the safest place for my surroundings and me, and the chair I was sitting in was very comfortable.

Still, the words had been simple enough, and the question had little difficulty navigating my brain until it found a section still capable of reasoning.

“Sure, honey,” I smiled.  “What do you need one for?”

“I need it for my science fair project.”  She paused a little nervously.  “I think I’m going to need to borrow the cat, too.”

Something about the use of the words “cat” and “science project” in the same paragraph has an instantly sobering effect.

“Um, the cat?  You want to borrow the cat?”

“It’ll be okay.  I’ll just need him for one day,” she said, suddenly shifting to earnest pleading that precocious ten-year-old little girls do so well.  Obviously, she had anticipated that she might have some difficulty persuading me on this aspect of her project.  “I decided that I wanted to do the Schroeder’s cat experiment thing.”

I stared at her with a blank look for a long moment.  Something tugged at my memory, something disquieting.  I had visions of a physics class that talked a little about quantum particles.  I had memories of complete confusion.  And then, I remembered.

“Do you mean Schrödinger’s Cat?”

“Yeah, maybe.”

I didn’t remember a lot of details of the experiment, but one thing in particular about Schrödinger’s Cat did seem to stand out in my memory as being important.

“I’m sorry; isn’t that the experiment where the cat kind of, like, dies?”

Now I’ll admit that I’ve never had the greatest affection for that cat.  There had been an ‘incident’ from the past–an incident that had not only placed it on the top of my shit list, but had also earned it his name.

Still, as much as I disliked him, I didn’t like the idea of having the ASPCA getting on me for the sake of a fifth grade science project.

Sally, however, was quick to reassure me.

“No, I couldn’t kill Voldy.  I just want to paint him blue.”

“Ah!  Now I understand.  Since when have they started teaching quantum physics in fifth grade?”

Sally looked at me blankly.

“What’s quantium physics?”

“Sally, where did you hear about Schrödinger’s cat?”

“Kasey was talking about it tonight.  It sounded cool.”

That explained a lot.  Kasey was the kid of Bubba, the physicist who lived next door.  Bubba must have talked about it at some point or another, and Kasey picked up on it.

“That’s good, Sally.  It’s time for bed.”

“But can I borrow the cat?”

“We’ll talk about it tomorrow, dear.”

# # # #

The cat in question is an almost pure white domestic shorthair whose name is Voldemort.  I get a lot of questions as to why I would name a white cat Voldemort.  I just say it came to me one night.

My wife had rescued it from a parking lot in which it had been abandoned.  Voldemort was weaned from his mother far too early, and he has a personality that is very characteristic of this.  He climbs on counters.  He steels chicken off our plates.  He snarls and snaps for no good reason.  He tries to eat the buttons off my shirts.  He tries to crawl into my mouth when I’m sleeping.  He never paid any attention to the rules, never responded to discipline, and he is unbelievably nasty when he’s not being unbearably affectionate.

All of this just makes him annoying.  There was the time, however, when Voldemort was still a kitten and I was getting ready to take a shower…I don’t know how he jumped up so high…I guess he saw some fascinating, swinging objects, and…

Well, let’s just say that kittens have very sharp claws.

His one saving grace is that the incident did not require what would have been a VERY embarrassing trip to the hospital. My wife managed to stop laughing long enough to bring me some gauze.  I healed quickly, but the scratch earned me a jagged scar that psychologically aches whenever he enters the room.

And it also earned him an enemy for life.

My wife died a few years later (we don’t need to talk about that) and I now have full responsibility for the animal.  Sally just loves him to death (I wish), so the cat and I have reached an agreement.  I will hate his guts but won’t kill him, and he will continue to make my life a living hell while at the same time thinking I am the best owner in the world, so long as I keep putting food in his dish.

# # # #

Sally and I discussed her idea the next day, after I had taken several headache pills and drank two large glasses of water.  The idea was actually very clever.  She planned to simulate the quantum particle with a marble and a random switching thing (she was a little vague about this part).  If the marble went one way, the cat would be painted blue.  If it went the other way, nothing would happen.  There would be no way to know which way it went.  This would mean, by using Schrödinger’s rules and a little imagination, that the cat would be both blue and not blue simultaneously.

The real Schrödinger’s cat experiment (which I quickly relearned after a Google search) involved a sealed box, a radioactive nucleus and a bottle of cyanide gas.  Things are set up so that there is a 50% chance that the nucleus will decay within one hour.  If it decays, the cyanide is released and the cat dies.  Quantum theory states that the nucleus is in an undetermined state between being decayed and un-decayed.  Ipso facto, the cat enters the same undetermined state, and starts “fluxing,” as Sally liked to describe it.  The cat was therefore both dead and alive at the same time, except that with her variation, the cat would be both blue and not blue at the same time.  He would stay in this state until the box was opened.

I was pretty sure that giving a marble a 50% chance of spilling blue paint on a cat was not really a true re-creation of the experiment, but it was no worse an example than all of those science fair volcanoes were true recreations of real volcanoes.

And, it struck me as a prize-winning idea for a fifth grade science fair.

I debated arguing with her on one point, however.  I wondered if I should say that we didn’t need to use a real cat, and that we could get by with just a toy cat, or even a picture of a cat.

However, using a real cat would definitely make the project stand out.  And even though I was also sure that it would make the building of the box much more difficult, somehow the challenge appealed to me.

Besides, I really liked the idea of putting Voldemort into a black box.  I had no problem making him part of an experiment where he was almost guaranteed to make him uncomfortable.

So I approved of Sally’s experiment wholeheartedly.  Still, I had to make one fundamental change in Sally’s plan.

“First of all, no paint.”

Sally pouted.  “Why not?”

“Because to get the paint off of the cat, I would have to give it a bath, and I do not want to give that cat a bath.”

“Well, what else could we use?”

“I was thinking blue Kool-Aid.  The cat could just lick that off himself.”

Sally thought for a moment.  “Okay.  That’d be cool enough, I guess.”

Now the problem would be the black box.  My initial vision of an old cardboard box with spray paint obviously wasn’t going to cut it.  This thing was probably going to have to be made of wood, and it was going to have to have some kind of a random mechanism in it for dispensing the Kool-Aid onto a cat that probably would not be too happy about being in the box in the first place.

My woodworking skills have never been exemplary.  In school, my wood shop teacher looked at a corner shelf that I had made and laughed for a good two minutes before he gave me a D on it.  (The only way to flunk wood shop was to either not show up at all or to try to put a hand other than your own under a drill press).

So, I was going to need some help.

I could have gone in one of two directions.  First, there was the left neighbor, Milton.  Milton was a big, beefy guy–the kind of guy who likes to tear engines out of cars just for the fun of it.  The cars rarely worked right again after he put the engines back in, but still, for him, building a black box would probably not be a difficult job.  I could have gone over to his house, asked him to build me a black box with a thing that uses a marble to sprinkle blue Kool-Aid on a cat.  He’d have said, “Sure, I’ll have it for you by tomorrow.”  And after only a week, he’d have a contraption that would probably work if it could survive the car trip to the school.

And that would have been the end of it.

My second choice was my other neighbor, Bubba.  Bubba, despite his namesake, was a geeky looking physics teacher at the local community college.  Statistical odds suggest that there have to be some people named Bubba out there who are smart, and our neighbor was the one who beat the odds.  In addition, he was the one who, indirectly, put the idea into my kid’s brain in the first place.  I wasn’t sure how handy he was with tools, but he could certainly help with the presentation part of the experiment; a part which I suspected Milton would have been of no real help.

I chose Bubba.  I decided that I felt more comfortable seeming dumb about quantum physics than I felt about seeming dumb about building things.  Just some dormant machismo genes, I guess.

When I talked to him about it the next day, he was enthusiastic about the project.  We got together with Sally and began to work out the details.

Bubba and I started out by brainstorming.

“What should we make the box out of?”  I asked.

“Well, something reasonably sound resistant, if were going to use a real cat,” replied Bubba.

“I was just thinking plywood.”

“Probably simplest, but the inside of the wood part should be padded.  We’ll need a cage so that we can show what the cat looks like without giving him a chance to escape.”

“That’s fine.”  Cage?  Black box?  Padded cell?  I was beginning to like this idea better and better.  “We’ll use some black spray paint and some plywood, with a little insulating foam.  What about air?  The cat will need to breathe.”

“Look, we’re not exactly trying to build a submarine, here, Evan” he replied.  “Whatever we come up with will be far from airtight.  Besides, he won’t be in there for very long and he’ll be able to breathe through the marble switching mechanism.”

“What about Superman?” asked Sally.

This question came from so far out of the nowhere that Bubba and I just stared at each other for a few moments in dumb confusion.  Finally, I blinked back to reality.

“What about Superman?” I asked.

“I mean, since Superman has x-ray eyes and can see through anything but lead, he could see the cat, and then the cat couldn’t be fluxing.”

I was about to dismiss Superman, as I felt he was not likely to show up for the judging, but Bubba interrupted.

“We can just buy a roll of lead foil to line the inside of the box with.  Not expensive at all.”

“Okay, we’ll put lead foil in the box just for Superman’s sake.”

Sally seemed to think about this.  You could see the cute, pink wheels of her precocious, ten-year-old brain turning.  Something still didn’t seem right to her.  Something still didn’t quite fit.

After a moment, she saw what it was.

“What about an alien that can see through lead?”

I forced myself to smile.  I was getting a little exasperated by this point.

“Sally, how do we know that there are aliens who can see through lead?”

“How do we know that there aren’t?”

Bubba was smiling here.

“The kid has a point, you know, Evan.”

“Listen, Bubba, you’re not helping.  I can afford lead foil, foam, plywood and a can of black spray paint.  I can’t afford to build a sound-proof titanium chamber with an oxygen tank.”

Bubba looked deep in thought for a few moments.  “Titanium wouldn’t necessarily do the job either.  Infrared could still get through.  I wonder…”

He paused for a few more moments.

“What would it take to make a ‘true’ black box?  Interesting question.  I think I’m going to make it a class project, with extra points for anyone who can come up with a good answer.”

“Cool!” said Sally.

“Sally, you’ve got to understand that whatever they come up with is probably going to be too expensive for me to build.”

“I think that’ll be okay.  I can use any old box for the experiment so long as I can say what a real black box would look like on my display panels.  All of those stupid volcanoes don’t spew real lava, after all.”

“Good.  Since we can’t make a true black box in any case, can we leave out the foil?”

“Okay.  Superman’s just pretend, anyway.”

“Fine.  Bubba, this experiment is due in a month.  Do you think you can get an answer by then?”

“I can get it in a week.  A good enough answer for our purposes, anyway.”

“Good.  In the mean time, I get to try out my woodworking skills.  Oh joy.”

The Color – Part 2

His hand took over. His color began to disappear beneath the blue. He added white to the blue for highlights under the lamp. He added black to the blue for the shadowed areas.

He painted mechanically. No thought was necessary–he already had the correct tones worked out from the tones of his perfect color. He just copied them with the wrong color.

Within a short time, the background was done. His color was still present though–hidden in subtle reflections here–melting into subtle shading there.

A few more touches.

Blue reflections on the dime-store unicorn.

Blue mixed with red to show through on the bowl of plastic grapes.

And, just before it was time to clean up, he had finished.

No trace–not the smallest hint–of his color remained.

He didn’t even look at the painting after that. He left it against wall with the others for grading, ensuring that his was left on top because it was still damp.

“I liked the other color better, too,” sympathized one of his classmates.

He smiled at him, and left. His feet moved like heavy blocks of un-sculpted wood. He was nauseous, but hungry. Not much money. He stopped at a vending machine and bought the most disgusting sweet he could find–a chocolate covered, cream-filled cake thing. He didn’t even remember eating it.

A headache began to surface. It rose quickly, like dirty oil rising to the top of a water bucket.

He went home and flopped on his couch. Briefly. The chocolate was having a predictable effect on his stomach acids. His color–his perfect color–flooded his brain. It was all he could see. He opened his eyes. The room glowed sickeningly with the color.

He felt the bile rise in his throat and he rushed to the bathroom. He vomited violently. He took two aspirin and lay back down.

Briefly.

He had taken the aspirin too early. The chocolate was not finished with him.

He got up to vomit again. He stumbled back to the couch, already spent.

Exhausted.

When he closed his eyes, colors–great hued whirlpools–swirled through his head. Not friendly this time. Now they ate into his soul like the acid in his stomach. Colors everywhere. No place to escape from them.

Conscious? Unconscious? He dreamed. He did not sleep. The colors in the pain were too intense. He dreamed of vacuous orange faces. He dreamed of icy blue sounds. He dreamed of callous maroon words. They all drifted in a maelstrom, like leaves and branches and colorful pieces of paper garbage blowing across his inner vision.

The faces were of no one special; no one that he recognized. The faces were not technically even real faces. More like statues. The hue, in itself, was meaningless. The faces were emotion without substance. They existed only to show expression; unpleasant, inane expression. Beneath their outer facade were only clay and more emptiness.

The sounds and the voices blended, neither distinct, neither recognizable–a melted crayon box. The few snatches of words he could catch were nonsense–meaningless–confusing–but somehow menacing. When more distinguishable, the voices would turn into distorted violets, bleeding reds, sickly oranges… The voices mingled with the sounds, and they vibrated collectively with muffled rhythms like an orchestra and a noisy city street thrown together, shaken in a box, and crushed under a lid made of heavy foam.

His throat spasmed. His eyes flew open and he ran to the bathroom to repeat the vomiting routine. Three times. Four. Stomach empty. Bitter bile. Five.

He was hyperventilating. Covered in sweat. He was weak–could barely lift his arms. His hands and feet began to tingle. He felt them becoming numb.

He closed his eyes. Exhausted. But sleep was not possible. Everywhere, clear, distinct, were the colors. His heart pulsed, and with each pulse the pain tore into his head like a great circular blade, and colors would burst across his internal field of vision; hues laced with the pain of the blade and the murmur of the voices.

And through it all, dissonant, uncoordinated with the pulses of rolling pain and boiling intestines, adding to the confusion of his mind, a single black phrase arose like the bile. It repeated itself again and again, louder each time, endlessly.

Is this what it feels like to be insane?

Eyes opened. Perfect compositions filled the room. Composition was easy–child’s play. But what colors would be the right ones?

He didn’t know anymore.

Spasm. Six.

Food poisoning? Salmonella? How long had that noxious piece of chocolate been in that machine?

His brother came home.

“Are you all right?”

“No”

“Can I get you anything?”

Pause. His hands and feet were numb and tingled. He had never felt this way before. He was covered with icy cold sweat. The word salmonella flooded his brain. He was hyperventilating–couldn’t catch his breath–too weak to move.

“I want you to call an ambulance.”

Pause. “Are you serious?”

“Yes.”

Spasm. Seven.

The ambulance came. Still hyperventilating–fear. They checked his vitals. He felt so weak. The lifted him up and strapped him in.

“He’s just scared,” he heard one of the medics say to his brother.

…just scared.

The nausea fell away from him like a silk blanket.

…just scared.

# # #

When he came home from the hospital it was late. He felt weak, embarrassed. He studied his physics for a while, and then fell asleep.

Somehow he managed to get through both tests the next day. He didn’t have art class until two days later.

He looked at the painting.

Dead.

Technically, it was fine, but it was still dead.

A whole corner was vacant of life. It drained the life from the rest of the canvas. It drained the life from his stomach.

He did not let himself become nauseous again.

He got an A as his final grade.

Days later. Finals over. The painting sat again in his portfolio bag. He brought it out.

Maybe he could fix it? Maybe if he could repaint it to the correct color…

…the correct color…

What was the correct color?

What had it been? Brown? Red? Maroon?

Gone.

He could no longer remember it.

It had died of neglect–killed like a firefly left in a jar too long. It had not even received a proper burial. It was now and ever more hidden by the technically correct and exactly incorrect blue.

He packed the painting back into his portfolio case. It would stay there for years. Eventually, he had the strength again to hang it on a wall. Others liked it.

Technically, it was fine.

It had just been Art 101, after all.

The Color – Part 1

I’ve decided to break my longer short stories into two parts.  I’m trying to avoid going longer than 1500 words per post.   This story had no natural break at the halfway point.  Oh well.

The following story is one I semi-consider ready for an attempt at publication.  It is more than based on a true story…it is autobiographical.  The events that happen in the story are very true to an actual event in my life.  I will post part 2 tomorrow.

****************

The Color – Part 1

He slept–a sleep neither restful nor quite peaceful.

No dreams.  No nightmares.

Just a sleep of images: overpowering–irresistible–images.

His mind raced as his body slumbered.  An adrenalin high.  Memories from the previous day floated into his inner vision.  He framed the memories as images–composed them: a stack a magazines next to a basket; a ladies handbag over the edge of a table, almost, but not quite, spilling its secrets.

But it wasn’t the compositions that mattered–it was the colors.  The colors were everything–the only thing.  Subtle changes in shade.  Brighten the pink on the ribbon of the basket and exaggerate the highlights.  Deaden the colors of the handbag and add a bright philosophical contrast–maybe a toy dump truck–maybe a rubber turtle.  The images danced playfully in his mind.

He could find a composition in every memory.

Into the night, for long hours, he played and floated with the colors.

Buzz of an alarm.  He opened his eyes.  He fumbled with the clock and the buzz stopped.  The colors faded, but did not disappear.  The room glowed with them.  He had once heard what an LSD trip felt like.  He did not take drugs–never had–but he felt he knew the feeling.

His sleep had not been restful; his gut was queasy, but not dangerously so.  He got up from his bed and stumbled to the kitchen to find something to settle his stomach.

He did not look into the spare bedroom as he passed it.

He found crackers, and ate them carefully at first.  He sipped tentatively at ginger ale.  His stomach did not express dissent, and he ate and drank with more confidence.  The queasiness passed.  He leaned back in his chair.

The colors were still there, swirling through his mind.  Everywhere he looked, he could see a composition–the cereal box slanted against the potted plant; the spill of sugar against the tablecloth; the wallet and the keys next to the television…

He closed his eyes again. He rubbed them and the colors changed hues.  Some seemed to leak out beyond his peripheral vision.  He could almost make himself believe that they spilled from his head and soaked into the shirt covering his shoulder blades.

He took a deep breath.  He took another.  Trying to quiet his mind

He opened his eyes and stood.  He felt a little more normal.  The colors in his mind were still uncontainable–compulsive, but he suffered no fear of them, and they did not control him.  He let them play with his mind, for now.

He walked to the spare bedroom and could bear to look into it this time.  There it sat.  The final project for his class.  His obsession.  His masterpiece.

He knew enough about art, of course, to know that this piece was not worthy of awards.  But for him, it was perfection.  Every color perfect.  Every color glowed.  When he had turned out the light in the room the previous evening, he had almost expected the painting to continue to shine with a light of its own.

A simple composition, it was a still life of a dime-store unicorn, a bowl of plastic grapes, and the back of a cable control box.  In the background was the single light source–a dimly lit lamp that cast shade–and colors–throughout the scene.

But the colors…

The tone of the background was not ordinary–not a shade that could be found in nature.  It radiated from the light source and cast its surreal shadows across the ordinary landscape.  It was the right color.  It was the ONLY possible color.  It was that color that made the painting his painting.  It pulsated with life, and made the image so much more than a dime-store unicorn and plastic grapes.

It was dry now.  It was now complete.

Gingerly, with reverence, he lifted the painting and placed it into his portfolio bag.  It rested in front of a couple of other paintings–there was one of a single shoe glowing in a sea of orange.  He liked it, but he knew it was not his best.  His treatment of the cloth of the bed sheet was clumsy.  But he knew it was good enough for an A.

It was only Art 101, after all.

He sealed the portfolio bag, carried it out carefully to his car, and made sure it was well secure before driving off.

The cold spring sky helped him almost completely wash the colors from his mind.  He had finished his art projects early.  He still had finals in physics and computer engineering to complete, and he had spent far too little time studying for them.  He knew that he was going to have to spend a long evening of desperate cramming.  That was why he wanted to turn in this project early: so he could study the more complex subjects in peace.  It was only Art 101, after all–just an elective.  He never intended art to be anything more than a hobby.

Still, his fellow students knew him to be the most talented in his class.  He appreciated their compliments, but he could not make himself take them too seriously.  Most of them were not above the involuntary Picasso stage.  Their odd perspectives and distortions were not caused by deliberate genius, but rather by a simple inability to get them right.

His instructor had suggested that he might want to think about art as a career.  But he liked computers, and the idea of being a starving artist held no appeal for him.

The art studio was a plain classroom with a sink and a half a dozen still-lifes scattered here and there.  Many other students were already milling about–some of the others had finished their final projects early, others were still stabbing at canvases in feverous toil.  When fellow students had asked to see his work, he had shown first his shoe painting, which amused and suitably impressed them.  When however, with timid pride, he brought out his masterpiece, they would drop their jaws and exclaim wows and that is really goods.  He was happy, and anxious to show his work to his instructor.

Half the period had passed before the instructor arrived and looked at.

Again, he showed his shoe first.  She smiled and made no other comments.

Then he took out his masterpiece and placed it proudly upon his easel.

The instructor studied it thoughtfully for a moment

And then she shook her head.

“No, no, no.”

She reached for a brush, dabbed it in some blue paint, and, with three swift strokes, she desecrated the background.

Desecrated his one–perfect–color.

Each stroke felt like a knife across his stomach.

“There!” she exclaimed happily.  “That’s better.  Technical detail.  The background needs to be a cool color–too many other warms.  Just fix it up and turn it in.  Good job.”

Just fix it up.

The background was one quarter of the painting.

He had finals the next day.

The perfect color…HIS perfect color…how could she not have seen it?

And blue?  Blue would change the entire feel of the painting.  Blue could not glow here.  Blue would not try to leap from the canvas when the lights went out.

Blue may, technically, have been the correct color.  But to him, that made it EXACTLY the wrong color.

Finals tomorrow.  Much too tired.  Still feeling nauseous.

Numbly, he grabbed the blue brush.  It was wrong.  The three swift strokes of blue paint upon the background deadened the glow.  The painting was wounded.  He felt its pain.

Finals tomorrow.  This was supposed to be finished already.  This was already supposed to be a gold star in his notebook of pride.

No time.

…continued tomorrow.

Pregenesis

I’m cheating on this one.

Wren requested that I write a story about a seed.  It just so happens that I had one sitting in my great library of unpublished works.  It is not, I am quite sure, at all what she expected.  Yes, it deals with seeds and gardens, but only as analogies.

This story, as might be guessed from the title, deals with religious issues.  Most particularly, it was an attempt to answer the question of why God would let so much evil occur in the world.  It also comes up with viable reasons behind God’s behaviors in the Bible without pulling out the “mysterious ways” doctrine.  It is one of the few stories that I tried to get published, alas unsuccessfully.

All this in about 2000 words.  Sounds like a good deal to me. 

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Pregenesis

Before the time of the Creation, there was God.

And God was the All.  And God was the Only.

He existed.  Not much else could be said.  Before the Creation, there was no firmament.  There was no Garden.  There was no Seed.  There was God.  And God was the All, and God was the Only.

And God looked about Him, and saw Himself, and nothing else.

And yet, while God did not know expectation, He felt a sense lack of satisfaction and fulfillment.

And God saw the lack, and said that it was not good.

And, verily, God was the Bored.

Yet God did not know it as boredom.  And yet it could only be described as boredom.  Boredom implies expectation–a suggestion that perhaps things could be different.  This was a concept did not–could not–exist.  God was the All.  God was the Only.  So God expected nothing.

Yet, verily, it was a boredom that existed on an unimaginable scale.  It existed on a scale beyond that which could be understood by humanity.

And God was All-Powerful.  But God was the Only.  There was nothing around to be all-powerful with.  So, being All-Powerful was kind of pointless.

And God was All-Knowing.  But God was the All, and there existed nothing else.  So God was All-Knowing only about God.  And God knew only Himself, and to Himself, He was obvious.  So, being All-Knowing was kind of useless.

And God had existed forever, in a time before time had been invented.

And God was immortal, and would thus exist forevermore in the same state of dissatisfaction.

And, lo, the Boredom became Great.  And, verily, the Great Boredom pressed upon His holy presence.  And, not knowing expectation, it appeared certain that the Great Boredom, too, would exist forevermore.

And God felt that this was not good.

And, thus, it came to pass that God became discouraged.  Pressed by the Great Boredom, just for the ducks of it, He briefly caused His own nonexistence.  This failed to satisfy Him much either, so He brought Himself back shortly thereafter.

And God pressed on through His nonexistent time.  He waited as though He were waiting for something Great to pass.  God, however, knew that, because of being the All and the Only, that, if anything Great were going to happen, He would have to be the One to do it.

And, lo, it came to pass that He had an Idea!

God contemplated creating Something Else.  He contemplated creating something largish, and perhaps something that He would find esthetically pleasing.

Alas, He eventually dismissed this idea as pointless.  Since He would know His Creation perfectly, He would know its every action.  He would know its complete history even before He created it.  Why, then, bother?  What difference would it make, philosophically speaking, in the long run?

And, for God, all He really had was the long run.

And thus the Great Boredom pressed even more upon His holy presence.

And, lo, it came to pass that God had a Much Better Idea!

What God needed, He decided, was a Challenge.  He needed something He would not know the outcome of in advance.

Being All-Knowing, He knew that to do this would involve creating a paradox, but, being, as He felt, All-Wise as well, He decided that He could live with this without any deep emotional traumas.

And for this Challenge, He decided that He would create companionship for Himself.

To achieve true companionship, He would need to create something just as, if not more, unpredictable than Himself.  Better yet, it would have His level of omniscience and omnipotence.  An exact duplicate of Himself would never do, of course.  That would just result in two of Him being just as bored as one.  He could see no point in talking to Someone when You already knew everything that Someone would ever have to say.

To not be bored with these new beings made after His kind, God decided that they would have to evolve independently of Himself, without His guidance.

He would have to be unable to predict exactly how this evolution would take place.

Tricky to do, being All-Knowing and all, but, also because of being All-Knowing, He thought of a way to do it.

He would create and extremely large thing.  It would be so complicated that the tiniest change in any portion of it could affect the actions of the whole.  Being All-Knowing, He could of course foresee all the changes that would occur from the initial change.  But because this new thing would be so large and so complex, it would take Him just as long to figure it out as it would take to happen in the reality of time.

And thus did God create the Great Seed.

And the Great Seed was Perfection.  For from this Seed would grow another All-Powerful Being.  He Knew it to be so.  The Great Seed contained so much energy, and would grow so large so quickly, that He would not be able to see how this new Being would come to be.  He could not foresee what events would take place to create the Being.  He could not foresee the shape the Seed would need to form to create the Being.

And the Great Seed would need no tending.  It was Perfection.  It would grow completely independently of God Himself.  All He Knew was that from the Seed another All-Powerful Being would eventually emerge.

And God saw the Great Seed, and said it was good.

And, so as God willed it, it was so.

And the Seed burst forth with all its Tremendous Energies.  And the Seed grew to its Tremendous Size.

And God waited for the new Being to emerge.

And the Seed grew to an even more Tremendous Size.

And God waited for the new Being to emerge.

And the Seed grew to an even more Tremendous size yet.

And God waited for the new Being to emerge.

And the Seed was taking a very, very, very long time to grow.

And the Seed was taking a far longer time to grow than He expected.

And God saw the Seed grow, and said it was Good…

…He supposed.

As He Knew that He had to expect the unexpected from the Seed, which was no longer a Seed.

And He called the entity that burst from the Great Seed the Garden.

And the Garden continued to grow, and God decided that it was Good.

And it came to pass that God watched the growing Garden with interest.  He saw patterns emerge.  He saw the Great Energies cool and take on solid forms.  It was a thing of Great Beauty.  And for God it was a thing of Great Interest, for it was the only entity other than God that existed.

And God studied the Garden, and He saw how each part affected the whole, and He saw how on the tiniest levels the energies performed randomly, and yet within patterns.

And time continued to pass.  And God continued to watch.

And it came to pass that within one small place within the Garden, the patterns of energies became more complex.

And it came to pass that the complex patterns of energies would begin to copy themselves.

And God saw these patterns, and God said it was great!

And time continued to pass.  And the patterns of energies made a lot of copies of themselves.  And nothing else seemed to be happening.

So God decided to Tend the Garden.  He caused some of the patterns of energies to take on even greater complexities.

And the greater patterns grew fruitful and multiplied.

But the Great Balance of the Garden had been disturbed, and the greater patterns did not yet fit into the balance.

And it came to pass that all of the greater patterns stopped copying themselves.  And it came to pass that even the smaller patterns stopped reproducing.  And then all of the complex patterns disappeared.

And God was Disappointed.

And time continued.

And it came to pass that in another place within the Garden, the patterns of energies did become complex, and that the complex patterns of energies did again copy themselves.

And this time, God remained patient, and did not Tend the Garden.

And time continued to pass that the patterns again grew fruitful and multiplied.

And time continued to pass.

And then, when the Balance was right, the smaller patterns formed more complex patterns.  And the more complex patterns formed even more complex patterns.

And God saw that soon there were plants within the seas, and soon the plants began to survive upon the dry earth.

And God saw that soon there were fishes within the seas, and soon there were great fishes, and soon the fishes crawled out from the sea onto the dry earth and began to consume the plants.

And God continued to watch.  And the fishes became animals and no longer need to survive in the sea.  And the animals became larger and more complex.

And it came to pass that one of the animals began evolved a sense of self.  And it began to study the world around it with interest.

And God became Excited.  He decided to Tend the Garden, but He decided to be subtle, and He gave these animals greater challenges.

And, verily, the animals became even more intelligent.

But, again, the Great Balance had been disturbed.  And each part of the Garden affected each other part.  And with the Garden out of Balance it came to pass that a great stone fell from the sky, and all of the greatest of the animals died, including the more intelligent ones.

And God was again Disappointed.

But not all of life died this time, and God continued to watch.

The spirit of God moved upon the face of the seas and the earth, but it only watched.

And again it came to pass that one of the animals began to form a sense of self.  And this animal began to study the world around it with interest.

And this time, God did not Tend the Garden.

And soon the animals sense of self became more complete.  And He called them Human, and He said that they were Good.

And the Humans began to wonder about the world around them, and they imagined gods who created it all, and they did worship these gods.

And it came to pass that when other Humans did not worship the same gods, that they would fight amongst each other.  And many would die.

And God saw that this was not good.

So God chose some of the Humans, and said unto them, “I am the Lord Thy God.  There shall be no other gods before me.”  He did this so that this one group would know the Truth, and thus the Truth would spread, and soon all the world would stop fighting and killing each other.

But, again, the Great Balance was disturbed, and the fighting did not stop, but became more intense.  And His chosen people became a center of the disturbance, and they both persecuted others and were persecuted themselves.

And God decided that He really didn’t have a clue as to what these Humans were doing.

And so God decided to learn, and God became one of them and walked among them.

And God felt their pain.

And God felt their love.

And God felt their suffering.

And God felt that He finally understood, and He preached peace, and He preached tolerance, and He preached love.

And He preached it with such intensity, and He felt it so deeply, that He let Himself be killed, to let the people know how strongly He felt about peace and tolerance and love.

But, alas, again the Great Balance was disturbed.

And His Chosen People became more persecuted than ever.  And then His people came into power themselves, and most did not preach peace and tolerance and love.  They persecuted and tortured and killed all that did not believe as they believed.  And then, even His chosen people divided, and began to persecute and torture and kill themselves for the smallest differences in their beliefs.

And God, having learned to love, also learned to feel sadness.

And God wept, for He had truly learned to loved the people.

And God watched with great distress all the pain in the world.  But God had learned the Great Lesson.  God had learned that when He created the Garden to operate independent of Himself, that God Himself could never be part of the Garden.

And God learned that He must never Tend the Garden, for to do so would only disturb the Great Balance He Himself had created.  For, whatever He did, no matter how small, no matter how well intentioned, would end in far greater pain and disharmony and death.

And God was All-Powerful.  And God was All-Knowing.

But only then did God realize that He was not, nor had He ever been, All-Wise.

For wisdom can only be grown from experience.

And God had never before experienced being God.

And God passed the Great Judgment on Himself, and vowed that He would never–COULD never–again Tend the Garden.

And so God watched, with folded hands, and prayed to Himself that He had not caused too much disharmony, and that the people would not destroy themselves as the result of His disturbance of the Great Balance.

And this is how it is.

And this is how it ever shall be.

Amen.

All Things Must Pass

This was an entry suggested to me by AuroraSkye.  All she asked for was something about George Harrison, the former Beatle.  I kind of had an idea where I wanted to go with it from the beginning, but things don’t always work out as one expects they might, and this story does not end in the same way as I had originally envisioned.  My research on George was rather skimpy, and I doubt that I have his voice down.  Nonetheless, for better or for worse, the story is written.  Take what enjoyment you can out of it.

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All Things Must Pass

On a dirt road deep in a largely unexplored area of the Canadian wilderness, one of the richest men in the world grumbled, sat down on a rock, and tried to scrape the mud off of his shoes.

He mused that this was not, by far, the most difficult part of the journey, although it was part that he liked the least.  Being extremely wealthy and famous meant that it was almost impossible to go somewhere where SOMEONE wouldn’t know where you were.  The thinking and the technical difficulties of escaping the press, tabloids, paparazzi, his own security guards, and about 500 other people WITHOUT them noticing that you were gone was undoubtedly the most challenging aspect.  He was very intelligent (almost no one could become as rich and famous as he was without having some smarts), and he took on that task with relish.

Walking the last ten miles on foot on a rain soaked dirt road was not pleasant, however, and he wasn’t as young, or in nearly as good a shape, as he used to be.

There was no choice about it, though.  He had been summoned, and answering this particular call was far, far more important than the discomfort experienced by walking a couple of miles down a muddy road.

Having cleaned his shoes as best he could, he got up and began walking again, immediately making them just as bad as they were before.  He groaned in frustration, and clomped onward for the final mile.

The place he finally arrived at couldn’t be called a house.  It barely, in fact, qualified to be called a shack.  It was off the road just far enough to be invisible from it, and looked abandoned and about to fall over.  The man doubled checked the GPS coordinates on his cellphone; even he was surprised by the dilapidated condition of the place.  He had expected unassuming.  This, however, was a wreck.

He pushed the door open cautiously.  It didn’t quite fall off it’s hinges, but he wouldn’t expect it to be able to hold up to a push from, say, a rabbit if it was angry enough.

There was a neatly cut hole in the middle of the floor, and what looked like aluminum steps leading downward.

The man sighed, understanding a little more now, and proceeded down the dimly lit steps.  The floor slid closed above him the moment he was safely out of it’s range.

“Hello, Paul.”

The voice that came out of the dim light was not one that the man recognized.  The accent was completely unrecognizable and unidentifiable.  The shadowed shape was familiar, however.

“George?”

With that word the lights came on fully, and, indeed, it was George that stood before him.  He looked younger than he remembered, looking only 30 or 35 at most, with the long hair and mustache that characterized him so perfectly at that age.

“Is this voice a bit better for you?”

The voice change was amazing for Paul, for suddenly George had assumed a perfect Liverpool accent.  It was a voice he knew very well from his younger days.

“That voice change–that’s amazing, George.”

George shrugged.  “Changing voices becomes very matter of fact after a while.  So come in.  Have a seat.”

Paul walked into the underground chamber.  It was decorated modestly but comfortably, with a low glass table and several leather chairs.  Several musical instruments were scattered about.  A high quality piano sat in the corner, with a synthesizer next to it.  There were several guitars,  a violin, and a sitar  in various other places throughout the room.

“You look like you’re doing pretty well here, George,” commented Paul.

George laughed.  “I’ve lived a lot worse.  The diet gets a little monotonous.  I have to do my own hunting you know.  But there’s plenty of game and fish and berries if one knows where to look.”

Paul cringed a bit, but said nothing.  George caught it, of course.

“Ah, yes, I know I was a vegetarian, and you still are.  Not a good option for me out here in the wilderness, Paul.  I’m a carnivore again, and I have to say that I missed meat a great deal.”

“I understand, George.”

“No, you don’t.   Not really.  But that doesn’t matter.  So I understand that your want another hit song from me?”

Paul paused.  “I asked for that almost ten years ago, before you even died.”

“You weren’t ready for it yet, Paul.  You were still too young.  Your performances were still strong.  If I had given you one then, you still would have wanted another later.”

“Ah, so now that I have one foot in the grave you’ll condescend to write a song for me?  That gives me the warm fuzzies all over, that does.”

George smiled.  “All things must pass, Paul.  If I gave you your epic too early no one would have believed it.  You have to feel the weight of mortality pressing on your bones.”

“I got that when John was shot.  When Linda died.  Even when you pulled that death thing.  It’s not easy, knowing, well, in your case thinking, that your never going to see someone again.”

George took a cigarette, lit it, and took a long drag on it.  “No, it isn’t easy.  But you never really felt that weight.  Not then.  Not like you do now.  Age, experience, a few humiliating surgical procedures; you needed to get all of that under your belt before you felt the reality of death.”

Paul forced a laugh.  “I got to tell you, George, I can see why you don’t have a lot of people stopping to visit you these days.  You aren’t exactly a bundle of good cheer and laughs, you know that?”

George leaned back in his chair and blew a perfect smoke circle.  “Are you going to tell me I’m wrong?”

“Of course not.  But tact has never been one of your strong points.”

“Eh.  People don’t live long enough for tact.”

“Yes yes, I know.  All things must pass, except you, of course.’

“Just cause I don’t die doesn’t mean that I don’t experience death.  I’ve learned to walk away from my friends, my wife, my children; everything that I’ve grown to love and cherish.  I voluntarily walk away from it.  Throw away one life completely, start another.  T’ain’t easy, my friend.”

“Okay, I’ll give you that.  And to answer your question, yeah, I do want one final hit song.  Something that will remind people that I was an artist, you know.”

“Yeah, I know.  And you’ve kept my secret, so I do owe you a bit of something.”

Paul guafawed.  “It’s not like anyone would believe me, anyway.  ‘Yeah, that George Harrison.  Not his real name you know?  He’s been alive for seven hundred years and used to be Mozart and a lot of other famous people.’  I’ve no particular interest in being considered any more eccentric than I already am.”

“Okay, so you’re not dumb, either.  In this world, I still think that deserves a bit of a reward.”

“I’m not turning it down, you know.  I’ve never turned down what you’ve offered.  I owe you everything, man.  You were everything behind the Beatles, and you let me and John take all the credit.”

“Well, you turned into a passable artist yourself.  And John, well, he had genius in him, he did.”

“And Ringo had his name.”  Paul laughed.   “He never guessed it was you.”

“Well, he didn’t need to know, did he?  Would you like a smoke for old times sake.”

Paul smiled and reached out for the proffered cigarette.  “Why not.  It’s not like it’s going to shorten my life too much now.”

Paul took the cigarette, lit it, and took a long, slow, savoring drag.

“So, when are you planning to come out again?  You can’t stay buried in the place forever.”

“Well, I probably could, but I’ll give it another ten years or so.  Maybe.  Not so sure it’ll be possible, actually.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, science is making things a lot harder than it used to be.  Everyone is so well tracked these days.  Just walking into the world at 15 years of age or so isn’t as likely to go unnoticed as it would in years past.”

“Hmmm.  I suppose not.  Haven’t really thought about that.”

“I might be able to pull it off once more, if I’m ‘born’ in an obscure enough place.  This would be the last time, though.”

“What?  One more life to live?  You can’t do that, George.  I mean, can you?”

“I may not have a choice.  With luck, they’ll eventually find a cure for death.  Then I’ll never need to hide again.”

“Yeah, well, that’ll be too late for me, won’t it?”

“You could always have your body frozen, you know.”

Paul laughed.  “Not bloody likely.  I’m trying to be remembered as a songwriter.  An artist.  Not as some bloody fruitjob   Let me be buried with dignity rather than have myself turned in to a frozen lolly.”

“Hey, don’t sell it short, you know.  It might be your ticket to eternal life.”

“Not interested.  I’ve done enough in this one, thank you very much.”

George nodded his head, a trace of sadness in his expression.  Paul didn’t pick up on it.

“Well, anyway,” said George, “here’s your swansong.  I can give you the music.  It’s up to you to sell it.”

Paul read over the music, humming occasionally as he went along.  He bit his lip and shook his head.

“Wow!” was all he said.

“Yeah, well, it could be my swansong too you know.  Don’t screw it up.”

“I’ll make you proud, Georgie.”

The two of them looked at each other for a long moment.

“Well, I suppose that this may be the last time we see each other, mate,” said Paul.

“Another goodbye.  I’m far too used to them.  I hope the rest of your life turns out well.”

“Yeah.  And you, well, you I hope what ever is keeping you alive keeps working.”

“Do you?  I’d trade it away in a minute, you know, just to live a normal life.”

Paul paused.  “Well, I can’t help you there mate.  If you don’t know what’s keeping you alive I sure as hell don’t understand it.”

The two shook hands, grasping firmly.  George pulled a lever and the staircase re-appeared, as well as the exit to the surface.  Paul climbed the stairs into the approaching dusk.

He sighed as the floor closed behind him, and looked once again at the music in the dimming light of the setting sun.

It WAS good.  It managed to sound like something he may have written, but it carried so much more than that.

Paul recognized that this work was written less with his own demise in mind then it was written from the perspective of the passage of the man the world new as George Harrison from the world.  It was HIS goodbye, one that he could never have claimed to have written himself because he simply didn’t want that kind of expectation from people any more.  Whatever else happened, the world would never see anything of George Harrison any more.  Even the the person behind the man was apparently immortal, George himself had passed out of this life.  It felt more real this time even then it did with his faked death from brain cancer.

Whomever would emerge from that hole would not be George Harrison anymore.

He wondered briefly about the freezing himself comment.  It occurred to him that may George wanted him to try it, just so that he could have a chance to see someone consistent in his life from his past.  On those grounds, maybe he would consider it.

Paul carefully folded the music and put it in his pocket.  He would take George’s final message to the world.  Yes, he would pass it off as his own, but that was the way George wanted it…the way he had ALWAYS wanted it.

Paul McCartney bundled up his coat against a sudden cool breaze and hurried up the muddy road.