A Plea for Faster Informational Processing
As shrieking winds blustered across his face, and the endless swirling, reeling, and tumbling jostled his brain and churned the meagre contents of his stomach, Sidney found himself yearning for a faster informational processing speed. Some means with which I could pause time; perhaps then I could marvel the view I’ve been afforded! What a marvellous view! Instead he spent his remaining time alive rather wastefully – namely, flailing about and screaming in a vain hope that it’d make a jot of difference.
Deliriously, he began whispering apologies. “I’m really sorry, my particles.” That night I said I hated fermions, I didn’t actually mean it. I appreciate having substance. I appreciate my cells. I’m sure you all run busy little lives! Preserving homeostasis and breaking down proteins, and what-have-you. I appreciate all of it, really.
He remembered suffering from chronic nosebleeds his whole life. “Never mind, you cells are crap at your jobs. You’ve made my life miserable, and I’m taking you all with me.”
Have I finished accelerating? There’s a terminal velocity, right? I’m not exempt from that, am I?
Sidney couldn’t say how or for what purpose he had found himself in the situation he was currently in. But when it did happen, he thought his experiences with his wife were somehow a connection.
His wife, Sally, whose testiness knew no bounds! Sidney described her as the entire gamut of human emotion forcibly compactified into a single, petite body. Yes, small in frame, but tumultuously dense. A neutron star of a woman! Of course, he never mentioned that her hysterics reminded him of an old star convulsing in a death-dance.
Oh sweet Sally of mine. What force impelled me to marry you?
Sidney taught physics at a university. Sally worked at the hair salon he went to on the first Saturday morning of the month, precisely at 7:47 a.m.
7:47 a.m.! That was the time I met her! I was flying on a Boeing 747! Sally, you planned this all along!
Their marriage was borne from a mutual love for crossword puzzles. Sidney brought one with him to the hair salon as he waited for Sally to cut his hair. They started doing solving the clues together, and voila. They themselves became two words that matched because they shared a single letter.
They did the daily crossword puzzle over supper every night, without fail. When realizing that “a la carte” is eight letters long and was the perfect perpendicular fit for “horology” and “archer”, they would smile at each other smugly. The rest of their quotidian interactions with one another amounted to the sentences, “Drive safely”, “Are my socks in the laundry?”, “Conan’s on”, and “Night night.”
But as their crossword fetishism reached new heights, a rift surfaced between the two. The crosswords Sidney brought in became increasingly larger and more advanced. Sally couldn’t keep up. Not before long, he was solving whole puzzles before she could share any input.
One night, when Sidney wrote down “nuncupate” as an answer, Sally decided that divorce was the only option.
“What does that even mean?”
“To declare verbally,” said Sidney. “That’s what the clue says.”
She hopped on her feet. “Then I’m nuncupating that we get a divorce.”
Much yelling ensued, she stomped up the stairs, and slammed their bedroom door behind her with such force that it made the other doors in the hallway tremble with fear. She would then wrestle with the door for a moment, opening it, then shutting it; soon afterward she would give up with it and lock herself in Sidney’s study instead. Their bedroom door no longer could lock, as the doorjambs were no longer properly levelled with the door. Their house was gradually sinking due to poor foundation. The walls had even begun to crack; it was explained to them that their house was splitting in two as it sunk, ala the Titanic. Except this happened over the course of ten years, not overnight.
Therefore whenever Sally became utterly overwhelmed with her fiery angst-fury, she would wind up in Sidney’s study. His sanctum. His “ruminatorium”, as he called it. It was where he could retreat to whenever Sally was throwing a tantrum. Shelves of astrophysics lined one wall. An enormous crossword puzzle poster covered the opposite wall. Sidney was many months into it and approaching its completion.
“Open the door, Sal,” he requested in futility.
“Go away.”
“We can go back to the simpler puzzles. I promise.”
“**** off! I’m not dumb, Sidney!”
“You’re a massively intelligent woman, Sal.”
He could hear her snivelling. He slouched down to the ground, his back against the door, and waited patiently.
At length she spoke again.“What’s a six-letter word for a distinctive uniform worn by male servants of a household? Is that ‘livery’?”
“What! You’re not finishing that crossword without me!” Sidney stood up and started banging on the door. “Let me in!”
At points like this Sidney would lean and push against the door, and recall a phenomenon called quantum tunnelling. He told his college students that all the particles in one’s body could borrow energy and phase through a wall if one pushed against it long enough. He said that, in light of the discoveries of quantum mechanics, such things could potentially happen if one waited long enough, perhaps longer than the age of the universe.
“When the nature of quantum mechanics is combined with unfathomably vast lengths of time, you’ll find that there’s no such thing as physical impossibility. Only an improbability,” he had lectured.
So Sidney would push and lean and press and bang his head on the door in hopes that he would magically dematerialise and reappear in his ruminatorium, his rightful place.
He peered at his arm and muttered, “Fermions. I hate fermions.” He placed his hand gingerly on the door, and pushed against it ever so slightly. “Go through the damn door.”
To no avail.
“You better erase everything you did,” he grumbled.
“What’s a marine animal beginning with ‘d’ and ending in ‘g’?”
“I don’t know,” he said, admitting defeat.
Finally, the door opened, and Sidney fell back as his weight had been resting on it. He recovered and hugged Sally, who was still teary-eyed and phlegmy.
“It’s the last clue,” spoke Sally in a muffled whimper, her face buried in Sidney’s concave chest.
“What?”
“A marine animal. It begins with ‘d’ and ends in ‘g’. I left it for you.”
Sidney’s brain immediately started following a mental list of marine animals. He thought of nautiluses, beluga whales, Humboldt squids, lampreys, and whale sharks.
“Whale sharks!” he exclaimed.
“What? No. I told you it begins with a ‘d’. Do you ever listen?”
Sidney grasped Sally’s small arms, pushed her back so he could stare directly at her, and said, “Remember how we always wanted to go to Belize and scuba dive with the whale sharks? Winter break’s in three weeks!”
“But my mum’s visiting, remember? We still have to get those new curtains for the living room, and –“
He hugged her hastily in an effort to interrupt her. “Forget the crosswords. Forget all of that. Let’s see the whale sharks.”
And Sidney kept his word. For three weeks, he didn’t once venture into the sanctuary of his study. For three weeks, the two didn’t do crosswords at suppertime. For three weeks, Sally began talking to him about any trivial thing in a transparent, but earnest attempt to reopen conversation between the two. She talked about their future, about buying a new house that wasn’t sinking, and she spoke a whole lot about curtains. Far too much about curtains. Sidney merely smiled and nodded in absolute compliance.
And in three weeks’ time, they were on a flight to Belize.
Sidney sat next to the window. He underwent an hour-long cycle of drifting to sleep, jumping up suddenly as if all startled and befuddled by where he was, then murmuring something about quantum entanglement before falling asleep again.
“Will you stop doing that? You’re freaking everyone out with all your spasms. Just go to sleep or stay awake,” Sally told him scoldingly.
Sidney, exasperated, got up to retrieve his knapsack from the overhead storage compartment. He plopped back into his seat and sifted through the bag. Amongst a collection of various Belize tourist guides and books about whale sharks, he brought out a small soft-cover book. It looked like a puzzle book.
Sally furrowed her brows menacingly. “What is that?”
Sidney shrunk back, his eyes wide and blinking innocently. “Sudoku.”
“Oh. Good, then.” Sally yanked it from his hands. “I love Sudoku.”
He scoffed, and glanced at his watch. It would still be a good 40 minutes before arrival. He looked out the window. Above was the wispy, cottony whiteness of the clouds.
He immediately thought of electron clouds orbiting an atomic nucleus.
Below he saw the Gulf of Mexico falling back at last to reveal land. Deciding that he may as well get some sleep, he ungainly repositioned himself so his back lay against the window, stretching his legs out a bit. It was the most comfortable configuration he could manage, and that was enough. In short time he was contentedly murmuring about wave-particle duality and snoring.
The stewardess came down the aisle with lunch. Sally was deeply engrossed in Sudoku, but conscious enough to automatically lower her tray table.
“A ham or turkey sandwich, miss?” asked the stewardess as she approached their seats.
“Turkey.” Sally placed her Sudoku book down and turned to wake Sidney up so he could make his lunch decision.
But he wasn’t there.
I don’t remember him getting up to go to the bathroom, thought Sally quizzically.
It was by sheer happenstance (Sidney was not an advocate of the “luck” theory, whether it be in its good or bad form) that, while he was leaning against the airplane window, he experienced firsthand the effect of quantum tunnelling. All of his constituent particles slipped through the titanium alloy of the fuselage wall as if he were nothing more than a spectre, and then swiftly solidified on the other side. It was unfortunate that the other side also happened to be thirty-thousand feet in the air.
After a bout of screaming, flapping his arms madly, fumbling with his ears to make them pop, and a couple attempts to control the manner with which he fell, Sidney found that he was undergoing the emotional stages of someone who had just discovered he had a terminal illness. The anger, the denial, the sadness, and ultimately the complacent acceptance of his inevitable demise. Except Sidney was constrained by circumstances into gradating through these stages in a matter of seconds.
And then, when he had finally breathed in and rationalized, he thought, Okay, okay, I have a few minutes to live. How should I spend it?
He remembered reading about the Omega Point theory proposed by another physicist. According to this theory, if the universe were to ultimately collapse in on itself through a Big Crunch, a super-intelligent being could exploit the extremely high temperatures and densities to speed up its thought processes.
Faster informational processing. That’s all it came down to. The fact that Sidney had only a few minutes left to live would mean nothing if his subjective time could be stretched out to an eternity. He closed his eyes and imagined being in his place of peace, his beloved ruminatorium.
But sadly, Sidney was not a super-intelligent being. Only a moderately intelligent one. And the universe wasn’t dying. He was simply careening downward in free-fall, halfway through the troposphere.
At one point he felt an unconscious urge to check his watch, but suppressed it, as he thought it laughable to do so.
Without any crossword puzzle to do, he discovered that he was in fact sorely bored.
Whee.
Damn it, Sidney, come together! Think! You have nothing else to do with the rest of your time. At least spend these few minutes wisely.
I wonder what the world will be like without me. Actually, never mind. I’ve always subscribed to philosophical solipsism. The world will end when I die, surely. It was all just some stage act, a performance, a grand masquerade. It could have had more entertainment value. Except for Conan. He was a funny man. Or manifestation of my mind, rather.
Well, I may as well do something constructive. His gigantic crossword poster that was a clue left from completion!
What was that damn clue?
A marine animal that begins with ‘d’ and ends in ‘g’.
But, having been very excited about the thought of seeing whale sharks for the past few weeks, his brain always managed to trace its way back to them. He couldn’t follow a proper train of thought.
I guess I wasn’t a thinker after all. I can’t think at a time when it’s most important.
Sidney squinted his eyes. They were bleary and irritated because of the undying surge of heavy wind.
Well, there’s the Yucatan Peninsula below me. I couldn’t have at least fallen into the ocean. Wonderful. Just plain wonderful. Wouldn’t have mattered either way, I suppose. Smacking against the skin of water’s going to kill me at this speed anyway. And even if I were to miraculously survive the fall, it’s not going to help being stuck in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. Unless I somehow caught a ride on a dolphin. Or a whale shark?
Or a manatee.
The ground was becoming awfully close, intimidating, looming below him. This is the singularity, and I’ve passed the event horizon. It is a scientific inevitability that I merge with the singularity. There is no escape. Predestination in its purest physical form!
Unless it was a rotating black hole. Wait. The Earth rotates.
He didn’t notice any hints of civilization. Just forests, a mantle of mottled green and yellow-green. A sinuous line made its way between the trees, though. Maybe a road, or a river. Sidney wasn’t awfully concerned on finding out for certain.
This is it. In one last desperate attempt, he thought of his ruminatorium. He thought of calmness. But he couldn’t find it there. He thought of Sally cutting his hair. Such a soothing feeling, her fingers brushing through his hair and snipping away. He found calmness there. In that moment, he felt perfectly still. It was not him that was moving, but the ground as it charged towards him with its intent to kill.
Oh my god, it’s a dugong!
And then Sidney brushed through the forest canopy, and his body merged with the Yucatan Peninsula.
As shrieking winds blustered across his face, and the endless swirling, reeling, and tumbling jostled his brain and churned the meagre contents of his stomach, Sidney found himself yearning for a faster informational processing speed. Some means with which I could pause time; perhaps then I could marvel the view I’ve been afforded! What a marvellous view! Instead he spent his remaining time alive rather wastefully – namely, flailing about and screaming in a vain hope that it’d make a jot of difference.
Deliriously, he began whispering apologies. “I’m really sorry, my particles.” That night I said I hated fermions, I didn’t actually mean it. I appreciate having substance. I appreciate my cells. I’m sure you all run busy little lives! Preserving homeostasis and breaking down proteins, and what-have-you. I appreciate all of it, really.
He remembered suffering from chronic nosebleeds his whole life. “Never mind, you cells are crap at your jobs. You’ve made my life miserable, and I’m taking you all with me.”
Have I finished accelerating? There’s a terminal velocity, right? I’m not exempt from that, am I?
Sidney couldn’t say how or for what purpose he had found himself in the situation he was currently in. But when it did happen, he thought his experiences with his wife were somehow a connection.
His wife, Sally, whose testiness knew no bounds! Sidney described her as the entire gamut of human emotion forcibly compactified into a single, petite body. Yes, small in frame, but tumultuously dense. A neutron star of a woman! Of course, he never mentioned that her hysterics reminded him of an old star convulsing in a death-dance.
Oh sweet Sally of mine. What force impelled me to marry you?
Sidney taught physics at a university. Sally worked at the hair salon he went to on the first Saturday morning of the month, precisely at 7:47 a.m.
7:47 a.m.! That was the time I met her! I was flying on a Boeing 747! Sally, you planned this all along!
Their marriage was borne from a mutual love for crossword puzzles. Sidney brought one with him to the hair salon as he waited for Sally to cut his hair. They started doing solving the clues together, and voila. They themselves became two words that matched because they shared a single letter.
They did the daily crossword puzzle over supper every night, without fail. When realizing that “a la carte” is eight letters long and was the perfect perpendicular fit for “horology” and “archer”, they would smile at each other smugly. The rest of their quotidian interactions with one another amounted to the sentences, “Drive safely”, “Are my socks in the laundry?”, “Conan’s on”, and “Night night.”
But as their crossword fetishism reached new heights, a rift surfaced between the two. The crosswords Sidney brought in became increasingly larger and more advanced. Sally couldn’t keep up. Not before long, he was solving whole puzzles before she could share any input.
One night, when Sidney wrote down “nuncupate” as an answer, Sally decided that divorce was the only option.
“What does that even mean?”
“To declare verbally,” said Sidney. “That’s what the clue says.”
She hopped on her feet. “Then I’m nuncupating that we get a divorce.”
Much yelling ensued, she stomped up the stairs, and slammed their bedroom door behind her with such force that it made the other doors in the hallway tremble with fear. She would then wrestle with the door for a moment, opening it, then shutting it; soon afterward she would give up with it and lock herself in Sidney’s study instead. Their bedroom door no longer could lock, as the doorjambs were no longer properly levelled with the door. Their house was gradually sinking due to poor foundation. The walls had even begun to crack; it was explained to them that their house was splitting in two as it sunk, ala the Titanic. Except this happened over the course of ten years, not overnight.
Therefore whenever Sally became utterly overwhelmed with her fiery angst-fury, she would wind up in Sidney’s study. His sanctum. His “ruminatorium”, as he called it. It was where he could retreat to whenever Sally was throwing a tantrum. Shelves of astrophysics lined one wall. An enormous crossword puzzle poster covered the opposite wall. Sidney was many months into it and approaching its completion.
“Open the door, Sal,” he requested in futility.
“Go away.”
“We can go back to the simpler puzzles. I promise.”
“**** off! I’m not dumb, Sidney!”
“You’re a massively intelligent woman, Sal.”
He could hear her snivelling. He slouched down to the ground, his back against the door, and waited patiently.
At length she spoke again.“What’s a six-letter word for a distinctive uniform worn by male servants of a household? Is that ‘livery’?”
“What! You’re not finishing that crossword without me!” Sidney stood up and started banging on the door. “Let me in!”
At points like this Sidney would lean and push against the door, and recall a phenomenon called quantum tunnelling. He told his college students that all the particles in one’s body could borrow energy and phase through a wall if one pushed against it long enough. He said that, in light of the discoveries of quantum mechanics, such things could potentially happen if one waited long enough, perhaps longer than the age of the universe.
“When the nature of quantum mechanics is combined with unfathomably vast lengths of time, you’ll find that there’s no such thing as physical impossibility. Only an improbability,” he had lectured.
So Sidney would push and lean and press and bang his head on the door in hopes that he would magically dematerialise and reappear in his ruminatorium, his rightful place.
He peered at his arm and muttered, “Fermions. I hate fermions.” He placed his hand gingerly on the door, and pushed against it ever so slightly. “Go through the damn door.”
To no avail.
“You better erase everything you did,” he grumbled.
“What’s a marine animal beginning with ‘d’ and ending in ‘g’?”
“I don’t know,” he said, admitting defeat.
Finally, the door opened, and Sidney fell back as his weight had been resting on it. He recovered and hugged Sally, who was still teary-eyed and phlegmy.
“It’s the last clue,” spoke Sally in a muffled whimper, her face buried in Sidney’s concave chest.
“What?”
“A marine animal. It begins with ‘d’ and ends in ‘g’. I left it for you.”
Sidney’s brain immediately started following a mental list of marine animals. He thought of nautiluses, beluga whales, Humboldt squids, lampreys, and whale sharks.
“Whale sharks!” he exclaimed.
“What? No. I told you it begins with a ‘d’. Do you ever listen?”
Sidney grasped Sally’s small arms, pushed her back so he could stare directly at her, and said, “Remember how we always wanted to go to Belize and scuba dive with the whale sharks? Winter break’s in three weeks!”
“But my mum’s visiting, remember? We still have to get those new curtains for the living room, and –“
He hugged her hastily in an effort to interrupt her. “Forget the crosswords. Forget all of that. Let’s see the whale sharks.”
And Sidney kept his word. For three weeks, he didn’t once venture into the sanctuary of his study. For three weeks, the two didn’t do crosswords at suppertime. For three weeks, Sally began talking to him about any trivial thing in a transparent, but earnest attempt to reopen conversation between the two. She talked about their future, about buying a new house that wasn’t sinking, and she spoke a whole lot about curtains. Far too much about curtains. Sidney merely smiled and nodded in absolute compliance.
And in three weeks’ time, they were on a flight to Belize.
Sidney sat next to the window. He underwent an hour-long cycle of drifting to sleep, jumping up suddenly as if all startled and befuddled by where he was, then murmuring something about quantum entanglement before falling asleep again.
“Will you stop doing that? You’re freaking everyone out with all your spasms. Just go to sleep or stay awake,” Sally told him scoldingly.
Sidney, exasperated, got up to retrieve his knapsack from the overhead storage compartment. He plopped back into his seat and sifted through the bag. Amongst a collection of various Belize tourist guides and books about whale sharks, he brought out a small soft-cover book. It looked like a puzzle book.
Sally furrowed her brows menacingly. “What is that?”
Sidney shrunk back, his eyes wide and blinking innocently. “Sudoku.”
“Oh. Good, then.” Sally yanked it from his hands. “I love Sudoku.”
He scoffed, and glanced at his watch. It would still be a good 40 minutes before arrival. He looked out the window. Above was the wispy, cottony whiteness of the clouds.
He immediately thought of electron clouds orbiting an atomic nucleus.
Below he saw the Gulf of Mexico falling back at last to reveal land. Deciding that he may as well get some sleep, he ungainly repositioned himself so his back lay against the window, stretching his legs out a bit. It was the most comfortable configuration he could manage, and that was enough. In short time he was contentedly murmuring about wave-particle duality and snoring.
The stewardess came down the aisle with lunch. Sally was deeply engrossed in Sudoku, but conscious enough to automatically lower her tray table.
“A ham or turkey sandwich, miss?” asked the stewardess as she approached their seats.
“Turkey.” Sally placed her Sudoku book down and turned to wake Sidney up so he could make his lunch decision.
But he wasn’t there.
I don’t remember him getting up to go to the bathroom, thought Sally quizzically.
It was by sheer happenstance (Sidney was not an advocate of the “luck” theory, whether it be in its good or bad form) that, while he was leaning against the airplane window, he experienced firsthand the effect of quantum tunnelling. All of his constituent particles slipped through the titanium alloy of the fuselage wall as if he were nothing more than a spectre, and then swiftly solidified on the other side. It was unfortunate that the other side also happened to be thirty-thousand feet in the air.
After a bout of screaming, flapping his arms madly, fumbling with his ears to make them pop, and a couple attempts to control the manner with which he fell, Sidney found that he was undergoing the emotional stages of someone who had just discovered he had a terminal illness. The anger, the denial, the sadness, and ultimately the complacent acceptance of his inevitable demise. Except Sidney was constrained by circumstances into gradating through these stages in a matter of seconds.
And then, when he had finally breathed in and rationalized, he thought, Okay, okay, I have a few minutes to live. How should I spend it?
He remembered reading about the Omega Point theory proposed by another physicist. According to this theory, if the universe were to ultimately collapse in on itself through a Big Crunch, a super-intelligent being could exploit the extremely high temperatures and densities to speed up its thought processes.
Faster informational processing. That’s all it came down to. The fact that Sidney had only a few minutes left to live would mean nothing if his subjective time could be stretched out to an eternity. He closed his eyes and imagined being in his place of peace, his beloved ruminatorium.
But sadly, Sidney was not a super-intelligent being. Only a moderately intelligent one. And the universe wasn’t dying. He was simply careening downward in free-fall, halfway through the troposphere.
At one point he felt an unconscious urge to check his watch, but suppressed it, as he thought it laughable to do so.
Without any crossword puzzle to do, he discovered that he was in fact sorely bored.
Whee.
Damn it, Sidney, come together! Think! You have nothing else to do with the rest of your time. At least spend these few minutes wisely.
I wonder what the world will be like without me. Actually, never mind. I’ve always subscribed to philosophical solipsism. The world will end when I die, surely. It was all just some stage act, a performance, a grand masquerade. It could have had more entertainment value. Except for Conan. He was a funny man. Or manifestation of my mind, rather.
Well, I may as well do something constructive. His gigantic crossword poster that was a clue left from completion!
What was that damn clue?
A marine animal that begins with ‘d’ and ends in ‘g’.
But, having been very excited about the thought of seeing whale sharks for the past few weeks, his brain always managed to trace its way back to them. He couldn’t follow a proper train of thought.
I guess I wasn’t a thinker after all. I can’t think at a time when it’s most important.
Sidney squinted his eyes. They were bleary and irritated because of the undying surge of heavy wind.
Well, there’s the Yucatan Peninsula below me. I couldn’t have at least fallen into the ocean. Wonderful. Just plain wonderful. Wouldn’t have mattered either way, I suppose. Smacking against the skin of water’s going to kill me at this speed anyway. And even if I were to miraculously survive the fall, it’s not going to help being stuck in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. Unless I somehow caught a ride on a dolphin. Or a whale shark?
Or a manatee.
The ground was becoming awfully close, intimidating, looming below him. This is the singularity, and I’ve passed the event horizon. It is a scientific inevitability that I merge with the singularity. There is no escape. Predestination in its purest physical form!
Unless it was a rotating black hole. Wait. The Earth rotates.
He didn’t notice any hints of civilization. Just forests, a mantle of mottled green and yellow-green. A sinuous line made its way between the trees, though. Maybe a road, or a river. Sidney wasn’t awfully concerned on finding out for certain.
This is it. In one last desperate attempt, he thought of his ruminatorium. He thought of calmness. But he couldn’t find it there. He thought of Sally cutting his hair. Such a soothing feeling, her fingers brushing through his hair and snipping away. He found calmness there. In that moment, he felt perfectly still. It was not him that was moving, but the ground as it charged towards him with its intent to kill.
Oh my god, it’s a dugong!
And then Sidney brushed through the forest canopy, and his body merged with the Yucatan Peninsula.
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