He was dead. Yet he wasn’t. He went from a physical self to a conscious self. Even that is not quite accurate. He went from a bundle of particles to a single particle with a conscious self. There is still something missing. Take three: He became a single particle that may be a wave with consciousness. What happened to the bundle of particles? Totally incinerated. Completely disintegrated. That’s what a CME can do to you.
He was out there working on a malfunctioning satellite tethered to the interstellar space station on Planet Gi that was strangely close to Earth but within Venus’s gravitational pull. He was eight hours away from the station when the alarm sounded: “G5 storm.” His first thought was all his work was going to go to waste: the satellite communication system was going to go haywire. His immediate second thought was: “Do I have enough time to get to the safety of the radiation shield module inside the station?” He knew G5 storms – solar flares – travelled fast and he had no time to lose. As he sped towards the station, a second alert sounded: “CME.” Control confirmed that G5 had bypassed Venus’s orbit and was headed towards the Earth. At the same time, Control was tracking massive oceans of plasma engulfing Mercury and hurtling towards 51° south latitude and 21° east longitude, the second rock’s location. Hence the CME alert. He breathed a sigh of relief. CMEs – coronal mass ejections that erupt from the Sun’s corona – didn’t travel as fast as solar flares, so he had plenty of time to get to the safety of the station. This particular CME – 10^22 – had other thoughts. When he was an hour away from the station, a wave of plasma enveloped him, and he was entombed in his spacesuit.
His first thought was to go check on his wife. His other first thought was not to go check on his wife. Of late, their marriage had ceased to be a marriage. He claimed she had stopped loving him, so he threw himself at work. She claimed she had stopped loving him because he threw himself at work. No matter the cause, something inside had died for both. But curiosity got the better of him and he went to see her. When he hovered at the bedroom door, she shrieked: “who is out there?” She pushed the man on top of her – his fellow astronaut Dome – and went to the hallway to make sure. She returned to the bed muttering, “I swear I saw someone.”
He had an irresistible urge to go see his mother. But she was away. Far, far away. In a different galaxy, a different universe, a different dimension? He did not know. So he looked inward for his superposition. No luck. He went frantically digging up all about shape-shifting deities of the past: Bull or Swan, Raven or Coyote, Boar or Bat. Then it hit him. He needed a cat – a Schrodinger breed. The very moment Schrodinger entered his consciousness, he shifted to a wave. And he took off! He was racing – a billion kilometers an hour.
Subconsciously he knew his being was entangled with his mother’s. So he went in search of the qubits that carried his mother’s markers. He flew all over the Milky Way looking for a flicker of a photon or a pulsing electron. He spent quite some time on Kepler-47 convinced that he would find signs of life in at least one of the three identical planets. He flew past Gilese 1061, L-98 59, and many others whose names he had forgotten. No life, no dice. He left the Milky Way and was the lone voyager in an inky black void for a very, very long time. He could not tell how long since Earthly measures had lost all relevance in spaces far, far away from the solar system.
His conscious self had lost consciousness. He regained it when electromagnetic waves showered him with charged particles. A distant star came into view and disappeared. As he started to feel the futility of his search, he sensed the faint energy of an unknown and, yet familiar, electrical field. Could this be his mother’s biofield? He headed in the direction of the void where the mysterious star had appeared. He sensed life. There’s promise after all. The atmospheric pressure told him that he was entering the orbit of a planet. From up above, he saw the contours of a planet-like object and then the object itself – a blue and white marble much like Earth. He was picking up stronger signals from what he presumed to be his mother’s biofield.
He wandered along an ocean shore and entered the jungle. He had barely advanced when he heard his mother call out: “Son.” A big drop of water hit his head, and he turned around to face a large tree. “Mother, it’s you,” he cried and hugged the tree. He wanted to know about her transmigration from human to dendron. She told him she was a pharmacist in the same community where she was now long before she had become his mother. A massive asteroid had hit the planet and annihilated everything in and out of sight. It forced her to seek life elsewhere and that elsewhere happened to be Earth. After her death on Earth, she wanted to return to her place of origin. He was about to ask her about her work as a pharmacist when he saw a possum clamber up his mother’s trunk, chew on a bark and then scamper away. He asked her about the inhabitants of the planet and all she said was “No humans. No malevolent creatures.” He trekked around and saw a Raven-beaked Coyote, a Bull-faced Swan, and a Boar shaped like a Bat. They went about their business and appeared to live in harmony. He liked the world where there was neither predator, nor prey. He asked his mother what he should do to become a part of her community. She said, “Pick something you like and make sure what you do helps others.” It’s the same advice she had given him when he was thirteen, long before he became a space voyager.
Balu Swami lives near Phoenix, AZ, USA. His works have appeared in online publications in the US and the UK. His main interests are sci-fi, folklore, fairy tales, and myths. Many of his stories explore the area where the paranormal intersects advanced science.
You can find more of Balu’s work here on Ink Pantry.