The Purple

A Quantum Dimension

A decade ago, Earth's physicists discovered a new particle several magnitudes smaller than the quark. Men believed, yet again, having found the smallest building block of matter forming our universe. Media tried and failed to interest the general population. This discovery would change the Solar System but not until today.

The notion that "a smallest particle" even existed was pure fallacy. Humans as they pushed to understand the small, saw something new and smaller and each time convinced itself this was it. Certain there was nothing smaller, it proved itself wrong decades later as it discovered another smaller building block. On the other end of that scale, men knew it’s Universe was large beyond scale, human stupidity thought there was a lower limit but not a large one. Mankind was obviously wrong, but it helped most sleep at night. Noting made sense really about living in a scale, half way between the very large and the very small but humans still had much to discover about the world.

As if to forewarn against a new future particle, yet again trashing this latest discovery, the latest particle was baptized with the last letter of the alphabet. Thus, the Zex was born. If anyone cared, it was a thousandth the size of a Quark.

But the first practical discovered use of the Zex proved to be breathtaking. Zexs, to scientists, are massless particles like photons or neutrinos without momentum. The Zex, when coupled to a photon, creates a stable pair for exactly two picoseconds, or more understandably, two trillionths of a second. As both massless particles unite or break, they drop any pretense of existing as a dual-wave particle group. Their spins intertwine, and the newly formed pair resonates as a heavy particle with mass. While complex, what remains is a reinforcement of field theory over particle-wave duality. Twelve people on Earth really understood what all this meant. But none of that mattered in 2072.

An expert on CNN joked “the Zex is the key of your car, you don’t need it once you are moving, but it’s critical when you need to start the car. We managed to remove the key of the moving car.”

Once again, to most people, all but a handful, sports and music overshadowed particle physics. These enhanced, ephemeral light particles called Zexs, have two interesting properties. First, they emit a perceptible green hue to the human eye made of a visible particle smaller than a photon, a new type of light. Nothing for now has been uncovered about this green hue.

What is amazing is that during the short life, the Zex can bounce off a mirror and push against it. The effect is akin to water from a fire hose hitting a brick wall. Yes, light, broken to a Zex gains momentum. Physicists were the first to understand the potential uses. “The powerful light of a lighthouse doesn’t push a boat on water it guides, the light bounces off, but a boat sail able to split the light into Zexs will be pushed by the light.”

Men, most of them simply did not care what this meant — they should have.

The first commercial application was on the AirBus's Light Drive. A new technology mounted in the engine room of the Airbus A2070, the ship taking Sophie and the Electoral 2072 contestants to Mars. The propulsion mirror was a plate able to accelerate the ship under the impulsion of a laser located in Earth's orbit. The laser was pointed at the back of the spaceship and the light from Earth instead of bouncing off, pushed the ship.

In a matter of months from discovery, Marilyn had the device it added to the ship taking her players to Mars. Trips between the planets could be shortened to weeks and in orbit of Mars, she began constructing a second laser, use to slow the ship down.

***

Malik, the quantum alien, was in awe of the destruction occurring before him.

He floated alone in the purple space of his microscopic world. Ahead, larger than a city, a flow of massive Zexs poured into his world form a giant green rift. He was alone in this portion of the Purple-colored space, but he was not scared -- because of who he was, alone he felt safe. In this adjacent quantum world, Malik, a young member of a race called Metils, was floating and pulsing. From the boy's vantage point, his world was much different.

The Purple was built on different fundamental laws of physics. Here, in this layer of the Multiverse, Zexs had been known for eons. In this quantum place, the Zexs appear as massive colorful spinning boulders made upon hundreds of layers of spinning particles the size of meteors. Each was capable of large-scale destruction.

On Earth, Zexs were small, here they were massive. It was, for the moment impossible for inhabitants of both worlds to even conceive life on such a difference in scale. The layers of the Multiverse were not layers of a cake with identical sizes. The physical realities in each was inconsequential to the neighbor, only time was the great equalizer.

The strange world where Malik resides is simply called the Purple because of the colorful purple hue of its deep space. In hotter areas, the world was deep red. Malik, a planetoid of spinning rocks was floating alone far from any other life. Gravity could not exist here, there were other fundamental forces in play.

To the inhabitants of this world, deadly rifts had been appearing with no discernible pattern in their world. One lone scientist feared the riffs were technology, a rape from a neighboring world. Through these rifts, rivers of massive Zexs poured in. The simplest description of the boy was a large modern art ball made of flashing pieces of uneven glass, each piece attached to a ballet of strings as light bounced between the plates. Blue sparks of energy bounced between the rocks.

The Zexs, these deadly enormous missiles ahead were created in the green tears of the Purple's quantum dimension and travelled as bullets only to crash into more deeply inhabited areas of the Purple. Zexs were in this world meteors sent to destroy cities. The slaughter has already killed over a billion Metils.

A green rift would appear, it then moved in space and vanished suddenly. Malik was sent here, and the large glowing green tear prognosticated appeared. It had opened deep in space, in a portion far from inhabitants. For now, Malik was the only one in danger.

The beauty of the rift could not be denied. Malik, the young sentinel had to report back before one boulder crushed him. They shot in every direction. Instead of reporting, the boy pulsed, hypnotized by the majesty of the sight.

This was beauty.

For the first time, the precise space-time coordinate of this rift had been accurately predicted. The researcher, once ridiculed was validated. The prediction had chilling repercussions, a world had new technology and the number of rifts would only accelerate until the Purple was gone.

Malik was a bit different, larger with seven main layers of orbiting rocks. Metils were normally made of five layers, a few of six. A handful of individuals in the race are ever been born with seven spinning layers. These rare individuals held higher public offices, but that was not the case for Malik. He was a pariah. Malik, even with his seven layers, was working as a simple security guard sent on a suicide mission.

Pulsing, at the edge of death, he forgot to report the aperture. Projectiles gush in, flying close in every direction. But he was in a trance, oblivious to them. The sight was impossible to ignore. The rift looked like a flat surface, a large mirror between two worlds. Zexs materialize at the interface as they shot into the Purple. The boy waited, avoiding as by miracle the onslaught of Zexs. Soon, as predicted, the large barrier between this world and the next began to fade.

The edge of the rift was irregular, like a sunspot. According to the scientists' calculations, this rift would be the first of three, the smallest in size and shortest in duration as the technology was being tested.

Malik was unclear if he was watching a gate between worlds, or a natural phenomenona. The sheer power generated by the rift was palpable at this distance. This was like standing half a mile away from Niagara Falls. The power cracking in the purple space felt strange, like a warming heat. Slowly, he began to pulse from being this close to raw, destructive energy. Somehow, the deadly rift was not scary.

Oddly, these Zexs were filled with strange green flashes.

The sight was beautiful. Mesmerizing.

His mind wandered. Metils had no respect for him because of his birth. All of his twenty-seven creators, who merged at the time of his conception died as he snapped off from the larger grouping. In this world, parents formed of hundreds of spinning and orbiting rocks literally merged and then like cellular division, gave small groups of themselves to form a child. Birth here was always dangerous. Normally, if twenty-seven merged, twenty-eight would emerge.

All progenitors died at the moment of his birth, his first sin. His second sin was his orbital flaws. Pairs of rocks forming individuals always rotated around each other in a clockwise fashion. In the rarest of cases, one pair flipped and turned in tandem with a negative spin. The kindest word used to describe someone with a negatively spinning pair was “bastard.” In the past, if such an inversion happened after birth, the Metil was instantly put to death. Birth inversions were shunned, but just recently tolerated by law. Malik would be lying if he said he was above the taunts. He was an outcast, nothing could change that.

This was probably why he cared little about the dangers of the rift.

This rift was a perfect death but in his mind, he felt something strange, a connection. A strange feeling deep within himself as if someone was calling him, attracting him. Watching the rift, pulsating with the energy, he fell into some type of trance. He no longer cared about his own safety. The sizes were deceiving, he was unaware that he was slowly moving closer to the rift. The giant Zexs appeared and shot at him from every direction. As he approached, the gate somehow seemed to shrink, he was growing in size. The Zexs were soon the size of buildings, not cities. He continued to advance and grow.

He had no way to measure distances or time. By floating so close to the rift, Malik began to absorb some of the energy. His five lower layers began to spin faster. He liked it. He turned his attention to the areas of the rift between the forming meteors. He saw black darkness, blanketed by stars.

Malik was no physicist. He was unable to understand what was going on at the rift, but ahead he saw into a different world, a place most called The Cold. The world where humans lived. It was there. Little did he know life on the Cold was formed of billions of merged particles. The Cold, Earth’s dimension even had stars.

Malik was floating in space, at the edge of the rift, where his own portions were moving in and out of existence. If the scientists were right, this region was about to be torn open, and he had a front-row seat. But he was not afraid. To the young creature, the rift was like a wall of boiling magma that he was ready to touch. His large body was now warm. He knew he was dying, yet he kept floating closer and closer.

Then Malik saw images in the rift -- he saw Sophie in a ship. As he did, he saw her look back. She saw him, a red sparkle in space. The boy was unable to understand any of what he saw.

The sight was amazing. A powerful flow of even larger particles, photons, all of the same type and size arrived from a distance and hit a mirror. The source was localized in space next to the rift. The photons on the mirror morphed like werewolves under a full moon into monstrously sized Zexs. The shells were torn off, and green energy spat out. The system on the other side of the rift was creating the Zexs. This was too complex to describe. He stood in a place that resembled magma from a volcano jumping into the ocean.

Malik floated even closer.

Space exploded around the young sentinel. The sight was beautiful. Malik ventured closer to the green light, like a moth drawn to a light.

Malik was now on the edge of the rift.

He could see strange images. There was a tube, a ship in space. Though Malik did not know it, he was seeing the Airbus A2070 taking Sophie to Mars. In the back of it was a Light Drive. The plate at the heart of the drive generated Zexs, giving them time to merge with a blue photon. From his vantage point, this was like using a tsunami to move a beach chair.

Then, by miracle, he moved from a purple area to a black one.

He did not see people, he saw their souls. There were many shining shapes floating in space. These looked alive, like bees swarming around their hive. The shapes seemed to have structure, coherence. Overwhelmed, he moved closer and counted over a hundred shining clouds, each forming a network of electricity in a defined space. These were sentient beings of some type. They sat in the ship. Malik was seeing the brain activity of each person onboard the ship. The electricity created by each neuron in the brains of those onboard left a trace that resembled many of the lower forms of life in his world. He also saw energy in the ship.

One of the living creatures was a bit smaller than the others. Its network of energy was not shining silver. It was gold. He knew her. In his heart she was important. This was all very confusing. As he approached, he did what was ordinary for him. Part of himself, he mimicked the structure and reproduced the pathways. This was how his race communicated. Malik was replicating the human pathways of Sophie the same was the sand creatures on Mars had copied the brain of the explorer. The Metis were unrelated to the Martians yet both managed life in its purest form. Humans had bodies around their brains.

Sophie’s being began to float in. Every memory, every feeling became his. The pathways began to send him messages and even emotions. Part of his mind was now a copy of Sophie's brain. What she was thinking, he was thinking. What she was seeing, he was seeing. The information he received was impossible to digest for an alien being. In his normal form, he had no eyes, no body. Then an emphatic bond formed. He felt sadness and worry. He was alone, far from home. That emotion he could relate to. He was also sharing the thoughts of an orphan; also easy to understand.

She blamed herself for her family’s destruction. He could relate.

Malik felt the girl; she had a name. She had a father, and he was on the ship. How could she be an orphan and have a father, he wondered. Malik knew this was dangerous, and he tried to disconnect from her. He could not. Instead, out of confusion and against his better judgment, he plunged. She was from the third planet, which she called Earth, and she was going to the fourth planet, which she called Mars.

The boy, irresponsibly slipped, moved and really began the sixth Multiversal Attraction.