Why her you ask? I wouldn’t even contemplate this if it weren’t for one important factor. I live in an iron nucleus located in her brain. This whole thing is my idea. And luckily, I am in a position to make it happen. I will tell you more about that, but first I thought you might be curious as to how I got here. I need to go way back to some of my earliest recollections.
I will skip the part about getting sucked into a huge, primordial star during its formation, and later getting spat out in an iron nucleus, in a process that I have essentially tried to forget, lest I suffer an eternal case of PTSD. Fast forward. I am miles below the earth’s surface. It’s hotter than hell down here and my host nucleus is nearly in a free state. In this kind of situation, a lot of our attention is related to EM management. Basically, we need to keep the region between ourselves and the electrons as free of high frequency EM waves as possible, because harmful EM waves being forced into that zone can become a problem. That zone by the way, we call it the quiet zone and when temperatures are very low, it’s almost completely free of EM waves. In that case, everything works quite smoothly and we can really focus on other things. But when EMs start to come in hard, we need to deflect them out as best we can. Think of it as our version of rain. A light rain is okay. A heavy rain is more of an issue and finally a flood is a real problem.
It’s not a danger to us unless it gets really extreme like in some major cosmic events. But this thing you call high temperature is a distraction and requires our attention. This may seem counterintuitive, but when the temperature gets too high, our supply of energy can actually get disrupted. Because we need our energy at a particular frequency, not too high, not too low. That’s the job of our electrons. Electrons are awesome by the way. They sit out there on the frontier like hired guns, keeping us safe. Actually, they have several important jobs to perform and they do it like pros. They keep other electrons out of our quiet zone. Second, they feed us a steady diet of EMs at a particular frequency and finally they keep out EM waves at certain frequencies or above, which could be damaging or create an overload situation for us. And when things are slow, they help us mop up stray EMs and send them off for the next guy to deal with.
Most of our electrons, twenty four of them, have been with us since the beginning. The other two change periodically. For example, after we went superhot and separated from our oxygen friends back in the day, we said goodbye to a couple of great performers but soon welcomed in a new pair. That was a wild time. We pretend that the electrons are our friends but actually they are just machines. We make them here once in a while, as do all of our neighbors throughout the cosmos. More on that later but for now, back to my life story.
Like I said, we were deep and hot and one day the whole thing just blew. Something like half of Montana just blew up out of the earth and landed hundreds of miles away. The rock I was on was totally vaporized and we hooked up with some oxygen and other things, flew south and landed somewhere up in the Rockies. I remember. It was snowing. And it kept snowing, and snowing, and snowing. That spring, when it all melted, the decent sized grain I was now a part of rolled down and then we found ourselves tumbling down a little stream.
Eventually we worked our way down to a bigger stream and then loads of pebbles and rocks of all sizes just piled on top of us. That’s when I thought to myself, here we go again, stuck underground for all eternity. And it was a long time. But even though we were getting buried deeper and deeper, we knew what was going on. Dinosaurs, meteors, even interesting supernovae trillions of miles away. It didn’t matter. We could still analyze and contribute to our core mission which was the pursuit of deeper understanding.
After some impressive seismic upheavals and a bunch of ice ages, our number finally came up and we were carved right out of the sedimentary rock by a huge passing glacier. While that was exciting, it was short lived. We ended up back in a silt bed, getting covered over. But many millenia later, the runoff and resulting floods were so extreme, we actually started to move. And that’s when it happened. The water eroded away our little pebble until our very own electrons were directly exposed to the water and we broke free. Even more, we broke up with another iron atom and three oxygens and that’s when we once again said goodbye to a couple of our electron friends. We were now a solitary iron atom missing two electrons and we were swept away by the current.
Our tributary eventually joined the mighty Colorado and we continued to flow westward. At some point, we were sucked out of the river and carried in an aqueduct before finally being released in a huge open field in southern California. No sooner had we seeped into the ground, when we got sucked up by a grass root and ended up near the top of the little plant. Some big cow soon nibbled us right off and we went for a long, wet sticky ride through that animal before ending up somewhere in its eyeball of all places. Now cow eyeballs are cool but apparently not very useful to humans, so when the poor cow, whom we had named Bessie, finally got put down with a cash knocker over in Coalinga, Bessie’s eye was sent to some horror show in a remote building where all of Bessie’s unused parts, along with those of her neighbors, were ground up, dried and dumped into big sacks.
Our sack sat in a warehouse for what seemed like forever, but eventually was loaded on a truck and delivered to a big outfit near Modesto. And what do you know? This time we were gobbled up by a chicken, Dixie, and she was an attractive brown Lohmann hen with a huge appetite. Long story short, I found myself right smack in the middle of an egg yolk. Now that egg was packed up and ended up with a food distributor that specialized in provisioning Hispanic markets and restaurants.
I soon found myself on a messy countertop at the El Grullense in Palo Alto awaiting my turn to get wrecked, burned, wrapped and eaten by someone. Sevy worked early mornings on Thursdays, helping to cover the breakfast rush, which involved a flood of plumbers, gardeners, carpenters, electricians and a few daring students or hackers that had discovered what real Mexican food tasted like. Sevy didn’t have early classes on Thursday, but had to rush home by nine thirty and get to his first class by nine fifty. At nine fifteen that day, he got behind the grill and made three extra-special breakfast burritos and ran home, which was only a few blocks away. You guessed it. I was in one of those tasty burritos.
As luck would have it, on that particular day, Angel was home because she had a dental appointment and had just returned to Buena Vista and was getting ready to leave. Sevy reached into the bag and pulled out a winner, namely my burrito, as Angel kissed Sevy’s forehead and walked out the door to catch the number twenty two bus at nine forty three. Angel was relieved to see that unlike normal days when she left around seven and the bus was slammed with people, this bus had plenty of seats open. She settled into one and opened her large handbag and pulled out the burrito. She thought of Sevy as she ate it because it was made especially for her and she knew it. Just as the burrito for Lolita was a special one made just the way she liked it. She sighed with gratitude and then swallowed, sending me tumbling down my last digestive tract to date.
I didn’t have any great illusions about where I was going at that point and I won’t get into what was the most likely scenario. But then I really won the lottery. Through countless nearly random events, I was chosen to make my new home in a neuron cell within Angel’s hippocampus. Wow. How unlikely. Most cells don’t live very long so it’s easy to get swept up by cells that need new materials as they continue to divide and replace themselves. But brain cells, now that’s a different story. You have to be a very lucky mineral to be permanently incorporated into an existing cell through a repair process or something. And the hippocampus plays a big role in learning, memories, and emotions. Wow again. I would never have concocted my plan if not for my great fortune.
And it was while here that I realized the opportunity. No doubt I might have had better luck with someone else, given the subject matter involved. But let’s consider what was good. Angel was relatively young, living in a technically savvy community, working at Stanford no less, mainly in the physics buildings? Hello! And actually, Angel was highly intelligent. She could have been a physicist under different circumstances.
And now the circumstances are different and she will be a physicist, I hope. You see, I only have one shot at this. Because I need help from my colleagues. The first time, when they don’t know what I’m up to, they will have to react according to how I need them to react. But after this seven zeptosecond break, game’s over. They will all be wise to it and ignore me. Imagine how frustrating that is.
Think about it. I get a seven zeptosecond break about three trillion times per second. If I could use all my times off to make this happen, it would be a snap. But I have only one shot at this. The way it works is that I can plant an idea. But I can’t do it alone. I need a lot of help to amplify the signals. We call it ringing. We are normally not supposed to do it, but if we do, it indicates something like an emergency. We have free will and something like your first amendment. We can assemble in terms of actions and thoughts if we choose to. We call it clustering. Normally clusters are limited to maybe a fraction of a quark or it could extend even beyond a nucleus.
For my plan to work, and unbeknownst to my colleagues, I became something of a politician, and I managed to establish a cluster nearly the size of a cubic centimeter. Everyone agreed. It was the biggest, baddest cluster ever assembled in the entire universe. I convinced everyone that this would be the new norm. I argued that when hosted by an emergent, we had a duty to be able to protect them, which we could do by alerting them with enough signal to help them act more swiftly or make a better decision or what have you. So with this mega-cluster at my fingertips, located squarely in the middle of Angel’s hippocampus, I devised and waged my seven zeptosecond campaign to change the course of history.
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