CONSCIOUS GRAVITY (final) - VISHNU PASUPATHY

Conscious Gravity
By Pasupathy Vishnu

Seventeen space pods, each with the word ‘Hope’ embossed on their hulls were drifting with a certain ethereality in an illusion of vast emptiness. They were cast together to form a pyramid, a cold star that would never shine.
Orbiting the pyramid were three white dwarfs. Three illuminated pods.
They had all ventured into this abyss for a purpose never achieved. The three survivors could afford to stay powered but to to do so, they needed gravity, strong enough to hold them together at a stable locus. Plotting that locus on any map could be considered an act of insanity.
The pod pyramid was the only solution to Mizo’s biggest fear, that of waking to find her pod isolated in some maddening void to realise that the only non-scientific bonds she shared had drifted millions of miles away in space and time.
The two other pods contained Stark and Kramer, her most valuable assets. Both were colleagues and followers. Stark had studied string theory under Mizo at Massachusetts. Kramer had taken Mizo’s Quantum Electrodynamics ahead and won the Nobel Prize three years ago. Mizo had led seventeen such persons away from cataclysm, at a cost that has caused her excruciating guilt till date.
But shhe could not ponder about the past now, survival was at stake. The pods had to be stabilized.
The little remnants of plasmid fuel left on board the Hope-17 were used to run the particle accelerator and seethe out some of the heaviest elements known to mankind. The seventeen pods were filled to the brim with these dense elements, till they could form a little planet that the three “moons” could orbit. This would ensure that they stay together even if they got hauled by the gravitational field of some distant helium giant.
“G balance attained? Conform …Hope 17…Conform, over” Stark was growing impatient.
“3 degrees” answered a stiff piercing voice. A fatigued Mizo was maneuvering with great apprehension.
There was no fuel left to set any wrongs right again. The smallest of errors could leave them in solitude for the rest of their lifetimes.
May 15th, 2020 TS2
A smooth row of long hairs fringed the edge of her eyelid, soaked and stuck to her face like seaweed on a sandy shore. Her pupils seemed dilated. Mizo had just made the decision. The eight of them had decided to wash their hands off the whole project. They were returning home. How were they to tell their families about this? Unable to digest what had been proposed, they looked out their rhombic windows. They were just 30,000 feet above the sea level, flying at close proximity to the Alps, triggering an avalanche every time the X-15 cracked a sonic boom. They all hated the way Mizo influenced them, but they were learned men who could rationalize any emotion and turn it into numbers. She had the math right.
For six continuous years, Mizo had spilt blood over what she believed would yield answers to her tenebrous obscure state of being. Hope had mystified her & it was too late to avert what the Large Hadron collider was about to reveal - the very same eventuality, which the founder of CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) had purposefully averted ingeniously during its inception.
Twenty years hence, a new team had now anticipated everything. Did the world want to witness the effects of the Naked singularity? That was out of the question. The mission was almost running inside a black hole, some place no human could ever fantasize. Findings from the LHD had empowered CERN with technology that could completely camouflage its identity and generate a false realm of knowledge for the rest of the world. Even to the precocious Israeli intelligence.
It was in this dire situation that Mizo had persuaded her fellows to make the penultimate escape from Earth. The decision was hard but it needed to be quick. Loved ones were taken along. Twenty pods equipped with close to infinite life supplies shot out of the Alps with remarkable stealth.
Escaping the vicinities of a familiar environment, where the material manifestation of space and time drew seemed limited. It was all going in. Into the naked singularity that would disintegrate the nature and habitat of planetary life form. CERN was digging a nebulous trap; a burrow mankind would not climb out of.
August 10th, 2020 TS2
The singularity manifested, taking with it the entire mass of the planet. At least that’s what Hope 20 observed a few light years away.
Initially Mizo had hoped that the planet might have slipped into a worm hole and reincarnated itself in another part of the universe. She had hoped that the electron blast from the collision would have ionized all the harmful gases and made her home a better place to live.
“Imagine if there were no sun, Mizo!” Kramer would remind her. The kind of rationality Mizo would immediately discard in the hope of finding her home.
July 30th, 2021 TS2.
Hope 20 loses incentive and members turn fatalistic. Lack of purpose forces them to surrender consciousness. One could not move out of one’s pod and interact with another. Every man had control over his key to life. Mizo manages to hold Kramer and Stark to their senses and continue to force a sort of syllogism that would prevent them from acting irrational.
May 18th, 2023 TS2.
The three survivors had been saturated with guilt for the past three years till this morning. Radio waves had interrupted their fantasies of a new kingdom. The waves instantly triggered cyan auroras in their minds.
A peculiar cyan that evoked the one word that their pods bellowed from deep outside. Was the wait eventually worth it? Mizo could only speculate, enough to drive her to a new orbit of insanity.
Keeping focus was paramount. The three sat down to decipher the signal. It was still striking the H-17 like an invisible beacon. Stark tried converting it into all possible outputs. Kramer stared hopelessly. There was an embedded rhythm that resonated the frequency of mankind.
Mizo strove for consciousness. Gravity prevailed.
TS2 : Terra standards for time and space
(END)