1167. About melancholia, 8
(Armylè)
In early summer of the year 31, Morhens reappeared in the research centre.
He was coughing a little sometimes now. His throat was a little weaker to germs than before.
The doors opened naturally to his approach, almost naturally. He noticed the way they opened had changed a little, but didn’t concern himself as to how or why. Someone else was improving side details in the shadows. That was fine by him. As much as he would want to focus on what mattered, he was learning to appreciate the supporting roles slowly as well.
Eventually the door opening to his approach was the one of the meeting room.
He saw Johann standing and giving details to the other directors of the place. They all looked at the doctor who just returned, with a visible surprise over their face.
On their side, they saw how horrible Morhens now looked. He looked awful.
Johann concluded the most important points swiftly to get everyone out of their way.
Work was continuing anyway.
Johann then approached the tired man who stood there like a resentful ghost.
He began explaining what had happened since the other day. They had focused in producing more T.I. and concentrating at nearly the behavioural change level. They were still studying everything., more carefully.
They left the room and began walking toward the test chambers so he could see. Johann was talking him through everything meaningful and then the details.
Morhens was not reacting, and not saying anything. His younger second in command thus continued to develop everything in progress.
Eventually Johann had nothing left to say, and no question had come his way.
They had reached a laboratory and the end of the discussion. The silence felt awkward.
Now Johann felt embarrassed and had no other thing to ask but more personal or unrelated questions.
A good one came to him however.
J - Doctor Morhens... Why do you think no one discovered Terra In before you?
Morhens had a vacant gaze. He had asked himself the same question in a different time.
He looked back at Johann eventually, and then looked away to reply.
G - Because T.I. did not exist then...
J - You think so?
That sounded unlikely to him. You didn’t get spontaneous generation of energy so easily. Unless void expansion had reached another level?
G - Before, there was too little of it. It was statistically too rare to notice. Now it’s just more manifest.
J - Since... when?
G - The red storm day...
J - What is that?
Johann was a little incredulous and now some words had escaped them a little too hastily. Johann had asked with his sharper haughty tone in the end. He regretted it a moment too late; but Geder didn’t seem to have minded. The doctor seemed tired, and willing to talk about something else than work.
G - Thirty one years ago... There was an unusual kind of red storm, far above the city. The sky up there was turned red from iron oxides, from meteorites apparently... That was... Well, I think T.I. appeared that day.
J - Really...
Johann was all the more incredulous, not understanding what that story was about. He had never heard of it.
Morhens realised he had just talked about it and looked a little shocked. He made a sign for Johann to stay back for a while, before going away somewhere.
G - Excuse me...
~
Morhens went to sit somewhere alone and sigh.
He couldn’t find a good way to forget these things. For a long time he had been able to work above them, but now they were keeping him unfocused. Just a few hours of his life, still slowing him down after all this time.
A lot more lately, as if some echoes were triggering them. The objects exploding in the test chamber maybe. The destructive potential?
It was more than that...
He was nearing his goals, but the ups and down were sharper.
He was aware that his researches would continue after his death, and he was fine with that. But before he could accept his death, he had a dream to accomplish.
Morhens wanted to finish what he had started.
He found himself trembling a little and held his hands together.
There was this paradox about his health. And more importantly, he had his desire to accomplish something.
For all these years... To make something meaningful.
His gaze turned dark. He was not smiling. His anger was still brewing. His muscles grew more tense. He was still himself. Geder L. Morhens...
He would work his way through toward success.
He stood up and returned to work without restraints.
~
Morhens looked more awful than ever, and anger returned as expected.
He managed to keep some composure in his work, even though he could become quite disrespectful.
He worked too much, again.
Sacrificing his health was an easy bargain apparently. But he was ready to go odd lengths to get some progress on T.I. He took back in his hands the aspects where he was more efficient than Johann, and together they pursued their dream.
New machines conceived most often by Johann and his team were delivered in the upcoming weeks. And then more would come, for Morhens’s future experiments.
More results came and they were gradually steadying their grasp of the new baseline and the concentration paradigm shifts. It was more akin to a phase transition they began to realise.
T.I. was shifting from gaz to liquid, in that beyond some levels of concentration in space, its behaviour aspects changed drastically.
All the laboratory teams were rushing to discover and map out more of this new world.
Everything new and proven was recording new names.
They had been pushed back quite a distance previously, but now they were more firm and steady.
They were hungry for discoveries. So hungry...
And every day would bring a new surprise.
However doubts and fears remained. As the unknown and the new always brought. From the council and the collaborators around Geder quite equally.
Even Johann had his quiet moments of doubts.
He had bad feelings sometimes. Johann was wondering regularly whether this was the day when the doctor had finally gone insane from overwork. He had seen the decline.
He also had noticed the occasional clue about something else.
The good doctor had a discreet obsession, carefully hidden behind his horrendous comportment. But something was devouring him from within clearly, without rest or pity.
That ember slowly consuming Morhens’s soul was a concern for Johann. But he couldn’t do anything about it.
Morhens was sick apparently. Terribly so. Almost cursed. He looked like an old man pursued by an angry ghost that he would have fought or fled from all his life. It only made him mad and paranoid.
Morhens welcomed everything and everyone aggressively now. Tireless in his anger apparently. His usual self for the unexperienced eye.
Johann noticed the difference and how in his attitude, beyond the anger and hatred, the fear or the madness, there seemed to be a perspiring form of deep hopelessness instead...
Morhens was wailing in the dark, alone.
He was fighting against gravity to keep himself sane.
~
One event tipped the edge, the wrong way unfortunately.
On that day of summer, a quantum experiment was made.
They were attempting to transmute an atom of helium, hitting it to eventually only turn one down quark into an up quark. Forcing a neutron decay would cause a noticeable electron emission, and they wanted to quantify the amount of T.I. required to statistically force this decay.
Unfortunately Morhens was under the same blessing and curse as Prume.
Test something, and the result will be unexpected. Always.
The atom collapsed in a different way. Its uncertainty principle was broken suddenly. Probably they had transmuted more than a proton, and a nuclear collapse followed.
It imploded into a miniature black hole that immediately bounced back into a sudden disintegration and explosion.
The atom was destroyed. The energy levels were high.
But for something that was supposed to detect one electron, that had been too much.
That day, Morhens looked very pale realising what had happened.
He left the test chamber without saying anything. To refresh himself probably.
Something had failed him in his plan that day. Even though every result should be useful and clearing the path toward progress eventually. It just never was the expected straight line.
But something affected him, and he had gone out to breathe.
Johann found him a minute later, sitting on a bench in a corridor, looking at the top of the wall in front of him. Day dreaming. He was unfocused again... He was holding his hands over his knees, nervously. Was he trembling?
Johann didn’t like what he was seeing. He looked more pathetic than he ever had.
J - Doctor Morhens?
Geder didn’t look back at him.
He just lowered his head and sighed.
For the first time, he had felt like giving up.
~
