562. T.I, 9
We would stay a few days, as welcomed guests in this city of men.
As days went on without anything suspicious, Night and I progressively went on different encounters, discussions and activities in the city.
That day, I left her chatting with the doctors and surgeons in the hospital, discussing the human vascular system as I exited. I joined a hunting party to head outside. I was given a modern hunting rifle, but I asked if they could try to find me a bow.
- You were hunting with a bow in Europe?
R - I was even fishing with one.
We proceeded as a group through the jungle, into the territory of the beasts.
I could notice the marks of fierce fights occurring around in the past.
The scattered group of hunters I was accompanying was well organised and very quiet. Coordinated and careful.
They called them predators. As I realised the beast’s real intelligence, I understood why.
The beasts hid with prodigious skill, careful in their ambushes and coordinated as well in their attacks.
It went like a fast skirmish.
The beasts no one had noticed suddenly surged from their holes and heights, meeting bullets with their sharp claws and fangs.
I wasn’t of much assistance there, but witnessed the real scope of their survival here. Competition he said...
A split second of slower reaction or less accuracy in their shots, the result of this skirmish would have been completely different.
R - These beasts, they didn’t exist before, did they?
- I don’t think so, mate.
Europe is more chaotic, but they’ve seen new species rise and settle here. Fast. Some of which are very hostile to humans.
I helped where I was more skilled. Pulling my red knives out, skinning and gutting cleanly carcasses, I’ve become good at that. It barely bleeds from my cuts.
For hunting such predators, I would need a sword more than a bow though.
~
On our way back, I ask about the sea in altitude and the falls. Unfortunately they don’t know much more than us.
- Many landscapes changed abruptly all around.
R - It really is the same everywhere...
Night and I share lunch later with them, and easily share their daily routine along. They’re good people.
Although we both notice on different occasions they value their human life above anything else.
They slaughtered the chicks of the beasts whose nest they found.
They burnt the poisonous trees of a new kind that can move and crawl a little.
I ask about their merciless politics.
- We’re alpha. The predators are like wolves or bears, we’re in competition.
R - I understand what you mean. Ever thought of trying taming or raising a cub?
- Yeah, one guy tried once.
They laugh bitterly. One of them indicating the pet had sliced his throat one night.
~
General laughed, putting his glasses down. We spent the evening chatting about our respective experiences over tea.
G - That doc was the last one to try to domesticate these monsters. It’s tolerance zero since then. You’re lucky there are no such things where you two grew.
R - Hm... Tell me more about the world before. How were the Americas before the fall?
G - Well... Mostly disunited after the war of Solaris. But the latest decades had been peaceful enough to see country states restart all sorts of exchanges. I grew in a city near the ocean, north... Nothing is left of it today...
~
I hear Night’ in the distance, giggling with someone. I’m curious but not worried.
I’m busy learning with General about the past and the present.
He shows me on a functioning computer a few things about space and the resources of Earth.
How Solaris vacuumed everything before the war...
R - I’ve heard the name of the city of sun many times, but where does it come from?
G - It’s centuries old, I don’t know. At first some people thought the apocalypse was its doing, but that seems unlikely now.
I chat about the clues demons guided me toward, as I looked for the source. I omit the part mentioning my sister being that very demon.
Of course my tales are mostly beyond plausibility for men who didn’t witness sorcery from daiûas. He still listens, only trying to comment on the points he accepts.
When I tell the tale of the floating northern palace, alien spaceship of medieval architecture of some sort, and guarded by a dragon; he only asked me to describe the architecture. His mind filters with ease what makes no sense, without judging. I like that.
The more we discuss about the Temps Imaginaire, T.I., the energy that behaves like magic to my eyes, the more intrigued he becomes. He has a good thought about it then.
On our next evening chat, he invited one of the older people in town to join us.
An old man with the stench of drool in his white beard and incontinence. But a man with the most advanced scientific education and knowledge in this land.
G - PhD. He doesn’t speak English. But I will translate.
R - Well... It’s been a while but, I recall seeing a thesis about T.I. His? Explaining it as a quantum particle?
He asks. The old man rambles. It’s not his thesis I get. I try to remember what was written in it.
R - The behaviour of T.I. would classify it certainly not as a quark, and neither a lepton...
G - ... He said that if not a fermion, then you mean a boson?
General is lost. I smile.
Interesting!
~
R - The last discussions I had on the matter pointed at two things. That T.I. would be the expression of a wider energetic field like Higgs field, perhaps linked to space time constant celerity as a complex dimension of the expression of time, which is mostly entropy. The other one is that the clue to understanding its overall principle was likely to be in the chromatic dynamic of particles...
The old man laughed. I think I just made his day.
~
I scribbled notes as General translated, as even the computer was helpless to teach that science and translate our ideas properly.
It seems to his early understanding that T.I. could be the coloured spectrum of Higgs.
It’s not intuitive, but I begin to see a picture.
Red, green and blue. Magenta, yellow and cyan. Or anti-red, anti-green and anti-blue as he calls them.
G - He said... Uh... Fuck Occam?
The old man is laughing, but I don’t get this one much better than General.
We continue discussion the colours of gluons until night and General’s exhaustion.
The ninth combination could have been a prelude to T.I. from his early thought about it.
I wish they taught me things like that in my childhood.
~
We discuss the next day one step further the physics of T.I.
Unfortunately I don’t have that French physicist’s thesis along and don’t know where to find it on the computer network’s remains.
But the old man, although his body is decaying, still has a good brain, strong enough to deduct and extrapolate from the little I can say.
He’s like a teacher. He knows enough to connect the faintest clues and mistakes.
He managed to explain to me why the main theory of quantum chromodynamics works with eight gluons types instead of nine. Which was hard to get.
He lost me at Lorentz and Mikowski space-time and vectors though. There’s so much I can learn and understand in a few hours.
What matters is that he found where T.I. could be, let’s say, seen.
QCD may not be the better approach he believes.
Although it’s hard to correlate the observation in real life to these mathematical models of quantum physics.
When I asked what a Lagrangian was, he seemed to become tired, or slightly hopeless. So much knowledge has withered.
At least we have the premises of a slightly more comprehensible theory of T.I. and its interactions.
Although the mathematical definitions of a chromatic Higgs field are far beyond my abilities. I didn’t even know what a matrix was not so long ago.
As for the relation between T.I. as a chromatic field and an imaginary term for vectorial time, that’s still a little... hazy.
G - He said time makes no sense...
R - Well, colours are nice to start with.
Abstraction isn’t an innate skill. It takes time...
~
