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[cincycinner]

CHAPTER 21 (A BIG ONE)

     21

Electro-magnetized blizzard bliss.

It was just a flicker.

But a flicker stretched out across more than one moment.

Or maybe no moment at all, maybe this always was.

 From what felt like an burgeoning immensity of mass constricted within the volumetric size of a marble spinning on its axis in the middle of a lighting storm that was telekinetically completely calm and sending off unilaterally unstoppable, infinitely energized waves of propagated space time across the known and unknown spectrums of the observable universe Albert Einstein awoke, although, slightly unsure of what he had awoken from, and even more unsure of what he had awoken into.

He looked around a room he did not recollect, confused by what his senses were now telling him. What Einstein was experiencing was actually the normal reaction one has to any amazing night of sleep full of deep, immersive dreaming.

Albert Einstein actually remembered everything. He remembered his birth in Germany, his life in Europe and America, his family and friends, his correspondences with other physics giants of the time like Bohr and Schrodinger, his work on Relativity and Field Theory, his eventual death in Princeton, and so much more.

Einstein knew he was not alive in the 1940s. Those days had come and gone, and were never to come back to him. Although he had no idea what time period he had actually awoken into, the time certainly felt different to him. Einstein laughed and thought to himself, “Time has a feel. How queer to have missed it and all the things it allows to manifest.”

 He took a deep breath and exhaled. The deep breathing seemed to bring him some relief. His body was warm, and upon looking at himself in the mirror, he found himself to be quite young and rather handsome. He took off his white cotton shirt to unveil the muscles he had come to miss in old age. He flexed his arms and gave an approving nod in the mirror.

 Einstein smiled at himself. “Whoever used whatever modern technology now exists to bring me back into existence has done a ship shape job,” he thought, “but this beard certainly has to go.” Einstein used his hands to feel and rub his overgrown beard. His hands had not been willed to touch anything in a long, long time. In the back of his mind Einstein remembered having no hands, and having no problem with the dismemberment.

Einstein heard the birds singing outside and recognized the song as that of the American Robin. The song sounded nice as it emanated through the air from the little bird perched on whatever branch it had deemed acceptable at the time. Einstein thought of Darwin’s birds, and then the one currently perched in song. “Is it your song that gives you the evolutionary advantage?” asked Einstein to the bird, “or something else, unquantifiable, that does so?

Having been an ornithologist in his past life, Einstein was please to realize their were still identifiable bird calls to be had here in whatever time he currently found himself. “Oh America,” thought Einstein, “land of the free and home of the brave.” Unfortunately, Einstein had yet to learn that most of the world had grown to resent America and her ‘exceptionalism’ as its rebranded neo-colonialism turned capitalism continued to ‘brand’ the world.

He felt the air coming in from an open window. Looking out he saw the greens of the trees and the blues of the billowing sky. At the tree line there was a gathering of deer. A mother, 2 babe fawns, and a gallant buck keeping its distance some 20 feet to the side. The sounds and smells of the morning peace emanated and permeated the space that Einstein’s brain now vibrantly filled. He was awake; he was alive.

Einstein sat up and looked at an electronic device that apparently told him the time, 11:00 in the morning, and the date, September 13th, 2077. Einstein laughed. Either this was an elaborate joke being played on him, or he truly had awoken encapsulated in his corpse. “I’ve been encorpsulated,” joking thought Einstein, in a surprisingly good mood for a genius who had just been jolted back into human reality.

Einstein thought deeply for a few moments with his eyes closed intent on taking in the Descartesian reality he was undeniably experiencing. He had been dreaming for a long time now both about his past life and what he realized now was going to be his future life. Einstein then wondered whether he knew he was dreaming the whole time, or was rather an oblivious dreamer unaware of the non-temporal, illusory nature of his dream propagated ‘reality’. The former, he hoped.

He now knew exactly when he was but still had no clue as to where he was except for somewhere in America, unless the American robin had accidentally been introduced somewhere in Europe. Although Einstein did not know ‘why’ he was, he felt a peculiar easiness and assuredness that even that too would soon make itself quite evident. He felt like a well traveled man in a well slept man’s body. He was a man who had ascended and descended a figurative mountain the size of Mt. Kilimanjaro and Everest combined and yet sat ready to do it all again, and more, with renewed pinache and vigor.

            A knock on the door startled Einstein.

“You may enter,” spoke Einstein with a voice that had not been used in over one hundred years.

On the opposite side of the door Medenov had stood next to Alford smiling a fake smile. He felt like an undertaker ready to put to the stake all of Alford’s scientific hopes, dreams, and achievements.

He had lost all hope that Einstein would actually awake, so when he heard the rustling of Einstein in the room and his warm laughter, his smile became authentic. “By some miracle, maybe our work worked!,” thought Medenov excitedly to himself.

“Here we go,” said Alford quietly to Medenov as he waved his hand over the door’s entrance mechanism. The laboratory door of Einstein’s room opened and in walked Medenov and Alford. Einstein stood up and brushed himself off as his sleeping body had apparently collected a slight coating of dust.

“Good morning Albert,” said Alford, “it is an unbelievable pleasure of mine to meet you.

            With those words at his ears Einstein turned around to greet his fellow men. “Good morning, and with whom do I have the pleasure of speaking with on this fine morning?” asked Einstein.

            “My name is Dr. Mitchell Alford. I am a particle physicist among other scientific realms endeavors, and this is my colleague, friend, and renowned Neurologist and Neuro-surgeon Dr. Alexander Medenov.”

            “It is a pleasure to be acquainted with both of you. Mitchell you remind me greatly of my good friend Gustav,” responded Einstein quite amiably, “you aren’t, by chance, of Slavic descent?”

            “You remember?” asked Medenov furtively, “That is, you remember who you were, I mean, who you are?” Medenov was clearly quite surprised Einstein had come back with all of his faculties in tact.

            “Also, to answer your last question, no,” said Medenov, “I am American, but my parents were Russian refugees.”

            “Unfortunately,” said Einstein seriously, “I am all too familiar with what being a refugee entails. Luckily, quantum mechanics tells us that everything happens due to chance and is inherently unpredictable. This inherently means eventually the world might get better!”

Einstein laughed and with his laughter the tension in the room dissipated. “As for remembering my life and everything I was blessed to experience while living it of course I remember it, of course I do. I remember everything so vividly. My youth, my education at the Polytechnic, my family, my patent office, my work, and everything else has all been flashing in my mind for what seems like months of eternity. I literally felt as if I was an ongoing eternal thought experiment on myself.”

            “That is incredible news,” blurted Medenov, “and absolutely fascinating that you’ve been able to conceptualize so much, so quickly.”

“May I presume that you two are responsible for this undertaking of bringing me back to life? Only you two? Surely there are many others who helped you,” spoke Einstein.

            “Yes, Albert, we are the scientists who brought you back. It was only the two of us who labored to bring you back to life Dr. Einstein; we could trust no one else.”

            The room grew silent for a moment and offered up a tense air of unsure footing.

 “Alexander and I are so ecstatic to have you here with us,” said Alford to break the awkward silence, “you were a visionary and since you’re groundbreaking work and research much progress has been made. Yet even in the midst of this progress we are still stuck looking at the achievements of your greatness. We have brought you back with the hopes that you may graciously lead us forward even more. Humanity needs you more than ever Albert. You will be surprised to find that many of the questions and discussions you and your quantum physics peers were having back in the 20th century are still being had today.”

            “In a world as changed as much as it has how can I change things? Why didn’t you leave me to rot? God damn you to hell for bringing me back to life and making a monstrosity of who I was. I should kill myself in the back, dear boy, hand me a rope for a noose,” were the words that Medenov expected to hear from Einstein in response to Alford’s inquiring introduction.

            “Yes, yes it does Mitchell,” replied Einstein, surprising both Medenov and Alford with his geniality, “the world needs us all. That being said I hope both of you would understand that all of this new existence has left me quite taken aback and somewhat bewildered. It has been a pleasure meeting you both and I thank you for what I’m sure has been painstaking work to bring me here. I look forward to our continued existence amongst one another, but I would appreciate some time to rest and ponder by myself.”

            “Of course Albert,” replied Alford, “please don’t hesitate to communicate to either Medenov or myself if you need anything, we are here to help.”

            “Actually, yes, there is one thing. I am extremely thirsty. Do you think you could fetch me a glass of water? Oh, and today’s paper would be lovely,” said Einstein. Einstein had yet to learn that newspapers, in their literal, physical paper manifestation, no longer existed on earth.

            “Of course Albert, I’ll be right back with them,” replied Alford.

            Medenov and Alford departed the room leaving Einstein alone looking out across the landscape. The clouds rolled above in the sky as if they were taking a midday saunter, slowly bathing in the late summer sun. Feeling the warmth of the radiant sun on his skin Einstein breathed heavily and relished the mix of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and various trace gases that slowly entered and exited his lungs, extracting oxygen with each boundless breath.

            Although it seemed like only a moment ago that Alford and Medenov had left, Einstein found himself listening to knocks again on the door.

            “Yes, come in,” said Einstein.

            Alford opened the door and brought in the desired affects Einstein had asked for. Alford had created a personalized newspaper full of all things that had happened in 2077 so far. Alford wanted to make sure there were still some comforts, however temporary, from the 20th century world Einstein came from. Setting the paper down and then the water on top of it Alford looked up at Einstein and smiled.           

            “Albert do you know who I am?” asked Alford.

            “But of course, you just introduced yourself Mitchell. I don’t forget a name, and I certainly don’t forget a face,” replied Einstein.

            “More than that though, I am your Student Albert. I have studied and delved into your relativities, philosophies, and thought experiments. I have looked at what you were able to do with atomic and quantum mechanics and it astounds me at how far reaching and leaping your achievements truly were. Generations and generations have passed and only a handful of minds have come along that are as stalwart as yours,” said Alford.

            “And you are one of those minds Mitchell?” asked Einstein.

            “Yes Albert,” replied Alford, “I am one of those minds.”

            With those words silence drew in on the room, a moment of empty discourse.

            “Well,” said Alford, “ I will leave you to peruse the journal as you please.”

            Turning around to leave and open the door Alford was startled by Einstein’s emerging voice.

            “Thank you Mitchell,” said Einstein.

            “You’re welcome Albert, but for what?” asked Alford, turning back around to face the room.

            “You have changed the world by bringing me back to life. You have changed it in ways I’m not sure you can even imagine,” said Einstein.

            “Thank you,” replied Alford, “but I assure you I can imagine anything.”

            “I believe, Mitchell, that you mean to say that you can imagine anything except anything,” replied Einstein.

            “I beg your pardon?” asked Alford.

            “The term ‘anything’ requires specification. Until that thing is identified there is an imaginitative void by which nothing is actually imagined yet,” replied Einstein.

            Again silence entered the discourse, and then, the two minds laughed heartily.

            “It is becoming quite obvious to me that I have truly met a soul who’s intellect rivals and likely outdistances even my own,” said Alford.

            “I believe our relationship will be truly mutualistic my friend. Here’s to a long and arduous discourse,” said Einstein as he picked up his glass of water.

            The two men smiled across the room at one another. Everything felt right.

            “Well, I will let you be Albert. I’ll be in my lab, just use the intercom on the wall here to the left of me by the door if you need to reach me,” said Alford.

            “Where is Dr. Medenov?” asked Einstein

            “Ah, Alexander had a lunch meeting to attend to for his company,” said Alford, “he will be back around to the laboratory complex in a couple of days.”           

“Good, good,” said Einstein, because I have a great deal of things I would like to discuss with him as well.”

“I’m sure you do Albert, Alexander was instrumental in the work undertaken so that we could have this conversation we are having here today,” said Alford.

With that, Alford finally left Einstein alone in his room. He took a drink of his water and took in the sensation of quenching one of life’s most essential thirsts, other essential thirsts being knowledge, freedom, and meaning.

Einstein picked up the paper and read the headline,  “Princeton Students injured during war protests.” The picture adjacent to the title showed a young, sunglass wearing man holding a sign that read “the Middle East deserves peace.”

Flipping through he then saw an Op-Ed piece on whether Israel really had the right to be a nation.

 “Life is time traveling,” thought Einstein, “and yet much of the world seems to have remained on the same old tracks.”

He continued reading and soon knew the president of the United States at that time, Martin B. Marshall, was planning on running for reelection. The scandal of Roger Barber and his robotically enhanced shoulders had struck Major League Baseball and was continuing to send ripples through the sports world. In scientific news a lead researcher in trans-human bio-enhancement surgeries, Dr. Arthur Ratheneau had gone missing. 

Some in Oregon were stealing and throwing away large amounts of lab raised meats, and the national initiative to subvert the building pressure of the caldera underneath Yellowstone National Park finally seemed to be working. Reading just the day’s news had Einstein realizing just how foreign this new world was, and with that, Einstein closed his eyes to rest his genius mind.

Einstein opened his eyes to the click of the intercom.

“Albert,” spurted the intercom, “if it pleases you, I’d like to give you a tour of the laboratory complex in about ten minutes if you’re done reading the paper. The intercom’s microphone is automatic and will immediately pick up whatever your response may be so you don’t have to worry about finding some button to give a response.”

Einstein smiled at how rigid Alford’s speech seemed to him. “You could be a robot,” thought Einstein.

“I’m ready now,” replied Einstein as he stood up and noticed the dark brown loafers that had been placed to the side of the door. He walked up to the shoes and looked down at his feet and frowned at the green and blue argyle socks that gripped his feet. He promptly took off the socks and threw them across the room.

Placing his naked feet into the loafers he bent down and began to tie them. The door opened to his room and in stepped Alford.

“Ah, I completely forgot,” blurted Alford, “you absolutely hate to wear socks with your shoes. Not to mention, I appreciate the durability of the shoe much more than the ragged, hole ridden existence that socks often inhabit.”

Einstein chuckled and momentarily paused from his shoe tying to push back the bushy dark brown hair from his eyes. “Indeed,” replied Einstein, “I never understood the point of putting on both shoes and socks to protect one’s feet from dirt and destruction.”

Alford chuckled in turn, “Oh the peculiarity of the human condition. Here you hate shoes with socks on and I thought my disdain for hats was odd.”

Einstein arose from his shoe tying and rushed his hands across his body to take out the wrinkles that had formed on the forest green v-neck t shirt he had awoken in.  The dark blue American jeans combined to give Einstein quite the modern look. For the first time he looked himself up and down and felt awkward in his skin, a feeling that Alford quickly noticed Einstein was feeling.

“Eh,” stammered Alford, “I know what you’re thinking, and I’m sorry. It’s just that, well, it’s impossible to find any kind of sensible clothing from back in your day. All I could find was trendy clothing for 25 year olds today.”

Einstein had finally finished taking himself in, “Well, truth be told, it is rather comfortable.”

“Oh” said Alford somewhat surprised by Einstein’s satisfaction, “well okay then good. I guess we should go ahead and get started with the tour.”

Alford turned around to head out of the guest bedroom only to by stymied by Einstein’s reproach.

“Mitchell, before we go, I have a few question that need answered. Who all knows that I’m alive?”

“Only me and Dr. Medenov at the moment,” replied Alford, unsure of how Einstein would take this news.

“Good, good,” said Einstein, “I was worried this was a government run experiment and you had brought me back with a mission goal of enslaving me to work on a new type of sophisticated, world killing bomb.”

Alford laughed, “Good god, no. Although, I do have a good deal of enemies, those bombs already exist.”

“The other thing is,” said Einstein somewhat abashed, “why did you bring me back as a young man? Did you think about the oddities that would arise from bringing back a man who remembers his entire existence and last remembers being an old man into a body he had long ago written off as past its time?”

Alford had been expecting this question, and had a good response saved for it. “Well see, going along with only me and Dr. Medenov knowing about your existence, we decided that the Albert Einstein that most of the world would recognize is the old, wrinkled man who had become a public icon with a face that has been trademarked. In bringing you back to life at the age of 25, we knew very few people would recognize who you were and you would thus have much less trouble with a general public that still reveres and adores you.”

“Reveres and adores?” asked Einstein somewhat puzzled.

“Since your death Albert the world has not had a soul like yours. The world has grown to love you and the work you did. You’re a celebrity Albert. There is even a Sunday morning cartoon with you in it.”

“Like Mickey Mouse?” asked Einstein now wearing a large smile, “who’d of thunk I’d become such a star while I was dead! Well, I suppose you have answered my questions well enough for now. Show me this great laboratory you have erected.”

The two men left the laboratory annex and began walking around the complex itself. From the particle physics and vacuum labs to the biochemical and genetic labs the two great minds milled around the circular enterprise until they had arrived in the ‘Thinking Room’.

Alford waved his hand in front a sensor and the lights came on giving a yellow abeyance to the desk and other constituents of the room.

“And here is where I do much of my great thinking,” said Alford feeling content with the way Einstein had graciously taken in the many multifarious sections of Alford’s laboratory complex and the tours completion that now seemed to be upon them.

Einstein went up to a shelve full of books and pulled down one that seemed familiar to him.

“General Relativity,” said Alford, “by Albert Einstein. Quite the accomplishment in Quantum Physics no doubt. How he had the imagination and intelligence to come up with such an incredible mainframe of understanding, I do not know.”

Einstein’s smile vanished from his face, “A man must be judged for the entirety of his work, not simply his greatest. We are the sum of our parts Alford. The atomic bomb is a monster my generation will never live down, and since now we’re all dead, all except for me, I’m the only one left alive to carry that burden.”

“It won us a war,” replied Alford.

“And started how many more?” asked Einstein dimly, “killed how many thousands? Threatens to kill how many millions? War breeds with itself inside the hearts of men, and the innocent are the ones that normally are made to suffer.”

“Well enough of this talk, scientists should have no hand in the world of war,” interjected Alford, clearly trying not to ruffle too many feathers with the new to this world Einstein.

Alford, in fact, was amazed at how perfectly Einstein already seemed to fit in the picture. His living likeness stirred Alford to be his awake and alive, full facultied self. At least, that is what he thought, as he sat their, proud of himself for his ingenuity.

“Do you like music?” asked Alford with a wry, old smile as if he were about to impart a deep, dark secret.

Einstein put on his Cheshire cat smile, “I love that question almost as much as I love music. Yet, I presume much of the music today is more bleeps and nodular noises than actual melodic intricacy.”

“You are a diviner and closer to the truth than you could believe. Yet, some people find modern music to be quite incredible. I, however, find that what modern artists create certainly stretch the bounds of what can be deemed ‘music’.”

“How Jackson Pollock of them,” replied Einstein followed by a chuckle.

“Watch and be amazed Albert,” said Alford as he stood from his chair and arched out his chest as if about to burst out a few rich chords himself. Instead, Alford whistled a few notes and music began pouring from speakers placed in various corners of the room.

The smile again returned to Einstein’s face. Alford opened a drawer on his desk and withdrew two wooden pipes and a box. In opening the box, its contents, tobacco, were carefully smushed into the pack of the two pipes. Done packing, Alford handed Einstein one of the pipes. Einstein nodded, grabbed the pipe, and began to inspect the wood crafted pipe now primed in his hands.

About to sit back and smoke a pipe with Albert Einstein, Alford took pause and internally asked himself whether now was a good time to start talking science. He looked across the table and saw Einstein seeming to enjoy himself and decided against scaling any scientific walls for the time being.

Alford had failed to notice the pipe had been placed to Einstein’s lips for a few moments. “Excuse me Mitchell,” said Einstein from atop his perch, but do you have a light?”

Alford again pulled from the drawer an old, worn Zippo lighter. “My great-grand father’s passed down from generation to generation,” said Alford proudly.

“You don’t say?” replied Einstein inquisitively.

“Passed down with a tradition of heavy smoking,” said Alford as he sparked his silver lighter and lit the plant Einstein clearly wished to burn. Crackling of red embers led to a frothing of smoke from the pipe and Einstein’s nose. The smells of tobacco and cherry began to fill the ‘Thinking Room’ with a thickness that glinted the light into opaqueness.

The smoke stymied Alford’s great mind. A constant thinker with a motor that never turned off, for once Alford reveled in his mental silence.

“I knew you’d love a good smoke,” said Alford as the two men sat back in their chairs and dipped into the relaxation of the classical music motoring around them.

“Mozart’s Requiem in D minor?” asked Einstein, trying to determine the music being played by Alford’s speakers.

“You have an impeccable ear Albert, that is indeed the song.”

“Do you play an instrument Mitchell?” asked Einstein.

“Upright bass actually,” replied Alford, “although admittedly I am not very good.”

“I was never the greatest on my ‘Lina’ either.”

“Lina?” asked Alford rather confused.

“That’s what I used to call my violins back in the 20th century,” said Einstein amidst chuckles, “although thinking on it now that is a rather silly name for the instrument.”

“Talking about his past?” thought Alford as he continued to purge his pipe of its contents, “clearly Albert is quite comfortable with me.” Alford, for once, was actually happy.

“You don’t by chance have some instruments we could play do you?” asked Einstein.

“Actually, I do, but they are the parlor room of my house.”

            “Oh,” said Einstein as he began to take another pass from his pipe, “and I suppose its too much an inconvenience to go all the way over to your house from here.”

            Normally Alford’s response would’ve been a quick quip about his lack of practice, dishevelment of his house, and how uncomfortable he was playing music in front of others. Yet, internally, Alford was in a different place.

  “Actually, I had my laboratory complex built and attached to my house. All we have to do is walk around to the opposite side of the annex and from there we’ll be able to get to the parlor rather easily. I must warn you though, I cannot guarantee much musical competency on my end. I stopped progressing after college.”

            “No worries my friend,” said Einstein, with the use of the word ‘friend’ making Alford heart flutter, “I, like you, have made no musical advancements in my day. Nevertheless, I am excited to see what Mitchell Alford the musician has to offer.”

            The two minds got up from the table and proceeded out of the laboratory complex and towards the door that entered into Alford’s home. Alford snaked from his pocket a chain of keys and nimbly found the one that unlocked the door. He sunk the key into the door, turned, and without a hitch swung the door open to reveal warn wooden floors and floral wall papered walls of the home once filled by Alford’s former family life.

            “This is quite lovely,” quipped Einstein as the two men proceeded into the house and towards the parlor. The parlor had green walls, and a large bay window that looked out onto the street. From underneath an ornate, 18th century chair Alford knelt down and pulled out a small black, violin shaped case.

            “Here, let me have a look,” said Einstein as he knelt next to Alford and opened the clasps of the case. Unearthing the violin from its tomb, light bounced off the violin and was at the same time disturbed by the millions of dust particles blown off the violin by Einstein’s blowing.

            “She looks lovely,” said Einstein as he placed the violin under his left cheek, picked up the bow, fingered his way across the violin’s neck, found some familiar fingerings, and swayed his arm back and forth to the creation of a soothing C Major. The violin should’ve sounded amazing, it was one of Stradivari’s last pieces of work.

            “Still works, good to know,” said Alford rather directly as he was still busy trying to wrench his upright bass from its case. Alford, having finally pulled the bass free, flipped it around and stood up to draw the bass to its feet.

            Piano keys twinkled and Alford turned to see Einstein sitting at the Grand piano filling the back corner of the parlor. “Don’t feel like playing the violin?” asked Alford confused.\

            “I always found the piano to be much more fascinating. All of the great composers who sat in front of this musical instrument…the genius that fell onto keys just like these,” Einstein said as his voice trailed off intermixed with the piano’s soft clamoring.

            Bass notes began to filter through the room, and with that, the two men began the musical tango. Alford rung out deep, somber notes as Einstein rambled away from key to key of the ivory. The two scientists, in all of their endeavors, had found a common ground in the foreign territory of a musical ensemble.

            It is of no surprise to any who knew Einstein that, reawoken, one of the first things he truly enjoyed doing was playing music. In contrast, Alford, though gifted on the upright bass and proficient at a few other instruments, rarely shared or showcased his talents.

            Nevertheless, the two physicists applied their practical knowledge of their respective instruments to a quick tempo and strong, sustained rhythm. Alford looked around the empty room and remembered all of the family moments that came to pass within the space in front of him. The music somehow gave new life to that vision.

            “I miss my daughter,” thought Alford to himself as he watched Einstein move back to the old violin.

“I wonder if anyone misses me?” as he continued to parlay across the bass frets in what he had determined was probably, most likely, the Key of C Major.

The music the two played gave a vibrant warmth to the parlor room and as the sunlight glimmered and glinted in through the windows one could imagine the photons slowing themselves down, if only metaphysically, to exist and persist in a room with matter as dense as the brains of the Einstein and Alford.

Einstein, readjusted, began to take the lead again and ferry about the fretless neck of the violin, dutifully if not beautifully. “Although, not perfect,” said Einstein over the music, “there is plenty of purity within imperfections when it comes to music. Yet, with science, this cannot be so.”

Alford was immediately jolted back to cosmic reality with that question.

“You are absolutely right, Albert. What is it about beauty that allows it to require re-definition when discussing science and music?” he said above the tune.

Einstein simply smiled and went back to playing the violin as if he hadn’t heard Alford at all. Maybe he hadn’t. Either way, Alford too simply left the discussion alone with the hopes that it was only one verse of many that were split between one, incredible chorus.

[cincycinner]

Chapters 19 and 20

    19

The day had arrived. Alford woke up with the same internal clamoring that is normally associated with the anxiety of a restless night’s sleep prior to Christmas morning. He got out of bed and looked at himself in the mirror. He smiled at himself and felt a feeling he had not truly felt in a while, happiness.

He floated through his morning routine. Alford woke up, quieted his alarm, put on his robe, and glided to the bathroom without a care in the world. Showered, shaved, and orally sparkling he found himself dressed in a light blue dress shirt tucked into the grey pair of trousers he had left on top of his desk chair from the night prior. He found himself in front of a mirror and, giving himself the look up and down, decided he looked quite presentable for when Albert awoke. Hours bled by, and at 10:30 he heard the ring of his door bell that announced Medenov had arrived to the complex.

Alford exited his bedroom into the annex and proceeded to the door. He opened it and with it came a cold chilly wind.

“Greetings Mitchell,” said Medenov.

“Good morning,” said Alford, “rather chilly today isn’t it? Nevertheless, I’m glad to see you are punctual as always because today’s work will soon be at hand. We have much to do, do you want some coffee?”

“Of course Mitchell,” replied a smiling Medenov, “of course.”

In reality the two great men had very little left to do. The sedation schedule for Einstein had already been set weeks ago to  administer smaller and smaller doses of the barbiturate ultimately leading to Einstein’s first awakening and reentering into the world of the 21st century at 11:00 in the morning on September 13th, 2077.

Einstein’s hair was dark, lush, and undeniably curly. His skin was youthful and a thick beard covered his unawoken face. Einstein, never a tall man, nevertheless fully filled out the bed he laid in with strong arms and legs, calmly breathing pulmonary sacks, and an ever beating heart.

Albert Einstein would be entering into a world full of new technologies, ideas, social constructs, people, and everything else so brazenly new. Telecommunications Satellites and cellular telephones, Quantum Particle Accelerators and Colliders, the genetic intellectual explosion, renewable energies, the internet and all things computer. The world’s history via mankind would include wars, moon landings, revolutions, and tragedies that would all together be a mix of both feeling wonderful and harrowed at just how much had happened since Einstein had last roamed the earth.

Like milk mixed in with coffee, it appears as if the world is intrinsically impossible to properly understand and differentiate when the plethora of good things and bad things all get mixed into one concoction called human existence. What is the primal force that drives the world? It is good, bad benevolent, neutral, or entirely non-existent?

Dr. Alford and Dr. Medenov hoped to shield the soon to be awake Einstein as best they could from the truth and turmoil of the modern world, but knew he would inevitably be immersed in the revelations that had occurred during the years he had missed. They had no intention of hiding information from Einstein, but did have the intention of keeping Einstein mostly confined to Alford’s laboratory complex and corresponding living quarters.

The two men entered the room and looked down at Einstein lying on the king sized bed that had been fully equipped with all the modern technology used to monitor the various outputs of the human body. Luckily this tech was compiled into one small device that attached to Einstein’s neck.

 For a moment the two simply stared at the beauty of man’s scientific creation. Suddenly, Einstein’s left arm jerked and relaxed back into place. Medenov smiled. “That is a good sign,” said Medenov, “Albert’s nerves appear to be firing properly during the REM sleep he is currently in. If my neural scans are reading accurately, it would appear Einstein is still very much in a deep sleep.”

Although Medenov appeared to be happy and assured of the work he and Alford had undertaken to bring Einstein to life in the late 21st century. On the inside, however, he was wrought with turmoil and deepening self-doubt.

Would he be able to live with himself if Einstein woke up a mental zombie or someone unrecognizable as the great mind that was Albert Einstein? How far would his resentment towards himself and his peer Dr. Alford go and grow if they potentially had to bury the regrown, but never reawoken, body of the world’s greatest genius? Would it be a secret he’d have to take to his grave?

“An early grave,” muttered Medenov to himself.

“What’s that?” asked Alford concerned.

“The techniques we’ve applied to Einstein,” replied Medenov in the midst of trying to defend his verbal slip unintended for Alford’s ears, “are one’s we could help use to save anyone from an early death.”

“Not just early deaths,” replied Alford with the assurance of one divinely inspired, “but all deaths entirely.”

The two men laughed and then stood in the deep silence of the morning. Outside the sun was rising into its high prominence. Sunrays full of Einstein’s quanta raced across the room and cast shadows of the two men standing above a third.

“Well, I’ll go get that coffee I promised you,” said Alford as he set some charts down and headed for the kitchen room attached to the annex of the complex.

“Sounds good,” said Medenov furtively as he scanned Einstein’s neural scans one more time looking for any indication that Einstein’s memories had been successfully adapted. “This is going to take a miracle for him to reawaken properly,” thought Medenov to himself as his right hand massaged his temples in an attempt to quell the pressure building beneath them for the past week.

Although Alford couldn’t sleep the night prior from anxiousness of a great occurrence, Medenov couldn’t sleep for seemingly opposite reasons. The worry of bringing someone unnatural into the world made Medenov question whether he himself was a monster.

He hoped that the brain scans he was reading simply were an aberration. Even though they weren’t picking up the manifestations of the memories he and Alford had hoped to propagate in Einstein formulating brain that didn’t mean the memories weren’t there. Although unlikely, this idea that his tech had failed him, and not his science, helped ease Medenov’s uneasy conscience.  

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, necessarily,” thought Medenov as his aged brow wrinkled mightily due to its currently furrowed nature. Medenov was no young man. Like Einstein later on in his life’s tenure, would Medenov’s old age slow him down when put up to task by the youthful, exuberant intellect of a young Einstein?

It was now 10:47. Alford abruptly reentered the room with Medenov sitting at the desk trying to look as if he was discerning new information from brain scans he had already looked at many times over. Medenov, however, was simply going over the various ways he had failed himself and society if his work truly had failed.

Alford paced towards Medenov and with an outstretched arm handed him the steaming coffee. With his other arm and corresponding hand Alford embraced Medenov around his shoulders. “Alex, I owe you everything. Science aside, you don’t know just how good it is to be in league with someone as intelligently capable as you are.

Medenov’s hand reached out and, shaking quite strongly, took hold of the smoking java. Medenov looked up to see Alford observing the nervous shaking of Medenov’s arm.

“Maybe we’ve been working too hard and too long of hours for our old bodies to sustain, my friend,” said Alford with an air of concern.

“Calm down Mitchell, my God, have you even had any coffee yet this morning?” replied Medenov after he took his first sip of the piping coffee.

“No,” replied Alford in the midst of sips of his own, “coffee was of no need this morning. I am quite wired.”

Medenov laughed, “You and I both Mitchell, drinking coffee with this type of energy…” Medenov laughed some more, “Albert is going to wake up and think he has come out of a bad drug bender with two crazy cocaine junkies laughing above his wasted body.”

“If he wakes up and doesn’t know who he is we’ll just tell him he’s having a bad acid trip,” joked Alford not knowing how true that proposed joke of reality was really about to be.

The two men’s laughter ruminated and warmed the feelings inside the lab. Medenov looked at the clock mid-laugh and noticed that the clock had struck 10:59. “Mitchell, it’s time to get serious, Albert will awake any moment.” Alford looked at Medenov and nodded. The two silently walked out of the lab and into the room adjacent for viewing. They wanted Albert Einstein to wake up peacefully alone, alive in the 21st century.

                                                      20

“I wish I was dead,” spoke Einstein, gravely.

He was slapped on his chest by Ivan, a large, muscular man friend of Einstein whose company specialized in advanced particle de-localization security systems, “Stop with your jokes, you know you love this. This game of basketball is almost as old as you are. Same for Madison Square Garden, although revamped recently by Marvin Van Gundy, this place smells old even.”

Ivan looked at the camera and waved, taking a moment here and there to stare up at the video boards hovering over various areas of the arena transmitting the highest quality video possible directly overhead of the actual game action.

“I miss being unknown,” conjectured Einstein as he broke a smile and waved to the camera and the thousands of cheering fans, “Dr. Alford was correct, I should’ve stayed anonymous.”

“I understand your sentiments,” replied Ivan, “I miss walking around the woods of Dr. Alford’s complex, especially on a clear moon lit night.”

“Ivan, you almost sound poetic,” replied Einstein as he finally found relief from the camera’s gaze, “Thank God, that escapade is finally over.”

“Einstein!” yelled an exuberant young enthusiast as she rushed down the stairs to greet the genius, “My shirt, look, my shirt!”

Einstein, sitting, was eye level with the woman’s midsection and caught himself staring at the image of him sticking out his tongue screen printed on a galaxy splattered black backdrop.

“Please,” asked the brunette haired beauty, “will you sign my shirt”

Ivan stood up, and at over 6 feet tall, made an imposing figure above the girl much like Einstein’s bodyguard would’ve done, had he had one.

“Ivan, sit down my friend, I intend on remaining quite approachable, even if my fame has continued to rebuild,” said Einstein, this time wearing an authentic smile for his authentic fan.

He signed he shirt diligently and after having done so looked past the young girl, Aubrey, to see a line of people had formed near his section.

Ivan laughter had been being drowned out by crowd noise, but now, Einstein understood his own hubris.

“Dr. Einstein,” spoke Ivan, tongue in cheek, “you cannot turn away any of your adoring fans!”

Einstein’s return to fame was in full-force, he was a magnet again for the world.

Einstein’s internal walls began to clamor and turn claustrophobic. Not a man to be afraid of crowds, these throngs possessed flashing diodes and cellular apparati that all gauged and gawked perspectives and platforms for others to gauge and gawk at.

            Arising from his seat, he quickly furnished his jacket and turned to walk towards the concessions. Ivan attempted to follow as best he could, but Einstein was soon lost in the buzzing crowd.

            As Einstein milled through the dizzying crowd he was grabbed on the arm by a stout, strong force.

            “Ivan, thank God,” stammered Einstein.

            “There is no God,” replied a muffled voice of a man who briskly pushed Einstein into a private club box that was apparently unoccupied.

            Einstein was frazzled, unsure how to react, but quickly tried to yank free from the yank’s grasp.

            “You’re not going anywhere until we’ve properly spoken Professor Einstein,” said the man, unknown.

            “The owners of these finely furnished club seats are surely to be back any time now, you won’t get away with my kidnapping,” replied Einstein, confidently.

            “These are my seats,” replied the man, “I am Dr. Ratheneau, leader of the Trans-humanist movement. I procure these seats via one of my trusted colleagues who I can trust not to impart to anyone around that I am the one attending these games.

            “Don’t people know what you look like?” asked Einstein, “aren’t you a fugitive?”

            “Oh god yes, I am,” replied Ratheneau with a laugh, “but fortunately, I have had enough elective surgery done that almost no one would be able to identify by any modern or post modern scientific or humanistic approach.”

            “You’re joking,” replied Einstein.

            “Yes, almost entirely,” replied Ratheneau, “please don’t tell the poppers I’m here.”

            The two minds laughed an awkward ease back into the room as Einstein began to understand he was in no real danger.

            “I would not take great lengths to get you in this room if it weren’t of urgent importance,” spoke Ratheneau, trying to display a sense of urgency by posturing on the edge of his seat, reaching out towards Einstein in the space between them with animated, articulated hand movements matching his words.

            “Whether you realize it or not,” continued Ratheneau, “there are many, many interested parties that have seen your 21st century revival and aim to do the same with other fallen icons from years past.”

            “That, I find to be not surprising at all,” replied Einstein, half joking.

            “This places you, and Dr. Alford, in substantial danger. I have worked diligently to create an underground network that is both physically and digitally working to extricate human progress from modernity. Deep learning and the information age have pushed us to capabilities and computational levels that should have pushed humanity far faster towards the perfect future, yet we continue to fall short.”

            “The perfect future?” asked Einstein, at least pretending to be interested.

            “Small, societal pitfalls aside, humanity is destined to achieve very predictable breakthroughs and paradigm shifts that revolutionize the world. Knowing this, we, as a whole, continue to drudge along with our modern problems. Yet, we already have the tools to solve all of our problems. The perfect future is the one we envision as Utopian, and unreachable. I portend that, in reality, the only thing stalling out on our flight towards perfection is our own lack of foresight. This lack of foresight, because of computational aiding and abetting, should no longer be a hindrance on human progress.”

            “What does any of this have to do with me?” asked Einstein, genuinely interested now.

            “I believe you could be the key swing man of change. Everyone loves you Professor, and they would follow you into the sun if you told them it was the scientifically prudent thing to do.”

            Einstein was humbled by the statement, but couldn’t take the offer seriously, could he?

            “This was what you were brought back to do,” spoke Ratheneau trying to sound certain, “Dr. Alford brought you back into this world to push us forward not just into any future, but the perfect one meant to be humanity’s destiny.”

            “That does sound a bit too idealistic to ever be attainable,” replied Einstein, starting to breath some grounded realism into the conversation, “and who are we to be so smug as to believe we are the ones that should be deciding what direction humanity should be going in? Perhaps this is a concept and force that cannot be wielded, but rather, is an abstract amalgamation of a multitude of different tracks and trajectories.”

            Ratheneau grew silent and stared down at his now unmoving hands.

            Einstein reached out and patted Ratheneau on the leg, “The future is meant to be limitless, for a reason, ours included.”

            Out on the court a Knick shot what appeared to be a wayward attempt, but it found the backboard and then began to circle around the rim as if it were destined to sink in. Instead, it lipped out. The opposing team picked up the loose ball, and turned to take it down to the opposite end of the court.

            “The back and forth nature of competition is, at its core, a manipulation of what we would term ‘the moment.’ Yet, this concept is one that although readily understandable and evident in each and every one of our lives, isn’t actually describable in any truly scientific way,” spoke Einstein, trying to change the course of this unexpected conversation.

            “Time, as you have so effectively elucidated in the past, is hardly as clear cut as it seems,” replied Ratheneau with a chuckle.

            “It is important that you focus on what you can change now for the humans currently with us. Your intentions to drive human change faster than its current pace is, at its core, a sign that you do not believe modern society to be advanced enough. This makes me bewildered,”

            “You don’t understand, I’ve” Ratheneau tried to interject but Einstein raised his hand to cut him off.

            “Forgive me, but I am a child of far older age and I have not forgotten in the slightest how vastly different this age is compared to that one. The progress and advances that have been seen since I last traversed this earth are unbelievable, and at times intimidating and terrifying. I find this future to be, not only far more advanced than I thought it would be, but also far blinder to this advancement as well.”

[cincycinner]

Chapters 17 and 18

   17

After their initial meeting and first few weeks of preparatory work Alford and Medenov got to work on properly reconstructing Albert Einstein’s brain and body. The two men spent the better part of a month adding newly developed equipment to the genetics lab and doing test runs of a new DNA extraction process that was capable of extracting, propagating, and proliferating genomic sequences at alarmingly quick and incredibly accurate rates.

Although neither Alford nor Medenov were experts in human cloning, human cloning techniques had become routine procedures and a way for those unable to bear children to ‘reproduce.” With proper purification processes and the newly bought machines in Alford’s Genetics lab, the two geniuses were assured the capability and possibility of rendering Einstein’s DNA and its subsequent proliferation into the cells that would one day divide into all of the different cellular residents of Einstein’s living 21st century body.

It was with great excitement that Alford declared the DNA from Einstein’s bottled brain to still be structurally viable. Carefully slicing a part of Albert Einstein’s temporal lobe into a Petri dish, Alexander Medenov swirled his laboratory chair to the other side of the laboratory tabletops and began to load the brain fragments to be pulverized and centrifuged. The irony of destroying Einstein’s brain bit by bit so as to make it again was not lost on the hard at work scientists.

Holding the DNA component of the brain cells of Albert Einstein in a small test tube, Alford sucked up and dispensed the DNA into his DNA Diagnostic Terminal and waited as the advanced algorithms determined Albert Einstein’s genetic blueprint and with 99.9% accuracy deduced the probable epigenetic palate of Albert Einstein at any age, but specifically, age 25. DNA to real life imaging spit out a picture of what the man owning the DNA would look like. Medenov and Alford looked at the screen and then each other, smiling.

“Why are you looking at a picture of Albert Einstein on the DNA Imaging screen?” asked Michelle the intern as the two men broke from their moment of grandeur to a real world where they had kept their work secretive and shrouded from the bustling interns working on the own various, extravagant projects.

The two men paused, until finally, Medenov gathered up a con, “We’re doing a retrospective study on the DNA of geniuses to determine if any specific genes or epigenetic circumstances may have aided these great minds in achieving such high mental acquiesences.”

“Sounds interesting,” replied Michelle, “but haven’t they already done that?”

The two men sat silent and growing in discomfort.

“Well let me know if you guys ever need any help,” she said as she noted the air of guarded men with unsure footing and decided to not broach on the works of the two men who were allowing her to delve into the quantum capabilities of seemingly unrelated particles.

With the properly maintained DNA from Einstein’s former brain Alford and Medenov properly resubstantiated, grew, and cultured Einstein’s arms, legs, bowels, blood, and the rest of his Grey’s Anatomy. Properly recreated were Einstein’s lungs, heart, teeth, and cells all for the purpose of bringing back the worlds greatest genius to again bring new scientific achievements to the world.

The two men would stay up late into the night talking about various scientific advancements and studies that were going on at the time. They’d chat about what they knew about Einstein’s life and which things they’d want to talk to Einstein about first when he awoke. How much of the world’s history since his first death did Einstein need to know about right away?

Successful at re-growing his body, the two men spent countless days standing next to, and over the body of Albert Einstein. When the time was right an electric jolt awoke a heart. Blips on the readout monitor declared that Einstein had a beating ticker. The smile across Medenov’s face gave away even more good news. The nodes attached to Einstein’s brain declared neural activity.

Medenov decided he was going to try a new procedure in which he hoped he would not need to simulate Einstein’s life and memories but rather propagate the neural pathways of Einstein’s long-term memory back into the 21st century by magnetic pulse therapy a technology Medenov had developed that stimulated neurons, ganglia, and grey matter alike to ‘flex’ in such a way as to revive the old neural pathways that encoded Einstein’s real vivid life. The problem with Medenov’s new technique was that he was unsure it would actually work on a brain from so long ago.           

Nevertheless, Medenov began mapping out the hippocampus and other memory regions of the brain down to the minutest of structures within Einstein’s brain. Medenov, always fascinated by how articulated and structured the brain was, had been doing lots of research on Einstein’s life. He was excited by the possibility of befriending one of history’s greatest minds and asking him how he managed to get through two world wars and the second greatest anti-Semitic rage the world had ever seen.

            Though excited, Medenov was also very wary of the work he was doing. He was nervous about the possibilities of bringing back to life a person whom bared no mental resemblance to Einstein even if, physically, he fit the part. What if Einstein was just a vegetable and never truly awoke to the 21st century world? How would the scientific community at large feel about the ethical boundaries the two great minds had chosen to bend in cloning Einstein back into existence only to fail? If fully mentally functioning would Einstein thank them for bringing him back to life, or be outraged at tasking him with having to die once more?

            Medenov, more than Alford, was a man who used science almost solely to make the world a better place. His and his wife’s first child, Melissa Medenov, had been born with a rare neural condition that hampered her ability to acknowledge and remember faces. Medenov, simply put, had not just professional but personal reasons for his never ending work on understanding and fixing the kinks of the human brain. He was always sure to keep his moral compass pointed north, and was thus, somewhat surprised by how unshakenly he conspired with Alford to bring back Einstein.

            Yet at those times he would remember his dream vividly and smile at all the things that Einstein had told him. Revelations of the foundation of the world and things that had turned Medenov into a believer were always at the back of his mind. So when he thought of the ethics of what they were doing, Medenov looked at the crumbling world at large, and saw a potential for more than just scientific advancement.

            Medenov, just recently, had overseen the production of the world’s first neural software company. The company had manufactured a program that, when properly aligned with the molectrical frequency of the brain could amplify and visualize memories onto a screen. The company was called Future Frequencies and the software was called ThinkTech.

Eventually the day came where Medenov had completed mapping out the memory patterns of Einstein’s brain. He then plugged the raw data into his company’s program and watched with great excitement as he saw the different first-person views of all the great places and people that had entered Einstein’s life. Before their very eyes Alford and Medenov watched the first person accounts of all the memories Albert Einstein’s eyes had seen and stored inside of his brain. Alford sat over Medenov’s shoulder watching and smiling, relishing and awaiting the chance to converse with a genius.

Both men felt like intruders in a way as they watched Einstein’s memories flash before them. Einstein had not given them permission to scour his brain for memories. He had wished to be turned to ashes. Yet here his life was, reborn digitally via bio-quantum technologies that he likely never would’ve even thought possible.

 Medenov woke up in the guest bedroom of the annex to Alford’s laboratory complex. The two men had spent the large part of the evening prior looking at Albert Einstein’s memories of his life flooding onto the screen. After talking about what they hoped to achieve and how happy they were to have had the opportunity to work together one more time Medenov had noticed the late hour and rose to go home. Noting that the two men had worked tirelessly for twenty straight hours, Alford insisted that his good friend simply crash in his guest room and drive home on the morrow.

Now awake, Medenov rose from the guest bed of deep red sheets and hard, darkened oak panelings and left the room to enter into the hallway of the Annex. He was impressed by how expansive and sprawling the complex appeared to be. Alford did not strike Medenov as a man who would keep such a large complex. Moreover, the decorum was sophisticated and refined; it showed an eye for detail and placement that required not only a discerning, but an artful eye. Had Medenov ever known Alford to be ‘artistic’? He could not remember.

Looking up at the ceiling Medenov chuckled as he remembered Alford telling him about his new installation for the annex, an observatory window fully equipped with the best telescope tech the world had to offer. That Alford had found a way to add touches of science to his living space in the annex of his lab complex was no surprise. That Alford did so with a sense of artistry spoke to a personal side of him that most the world never would encounter.

After properly arranging himself amongst his morning musings Medenov casually walked to the laboratory. Once inside and sitting comfortably in the computer chair Medenov looked at Einstein’s brain scans. Medenov tried to hold his tongue. Overnight an electrical anomaly occurred within Einstein’s brain. Somehow the molectrical frequency of Einstein’s new brain had completely changed overnight. It appeared as if none of Einstein’s life had been properly maintained in his new brain.  

“If Einstein came out of the medically induced sleep, he would likely awake knowing nothing,” thought Medenov. A cold sweat began to form on Medenov’s forehead, but he felt feverish.

The door opened and in came Alford. Startled, Medenov closed out of the scans and swiftly grabbed up the printed correlating charts that described the failures of the evening prior. He then turned around to greet his friend. “Good morning Mitchell.”

“Good morning my friend,” said Alford cheerfully, clearly happy about the progress he perceived to be making over the past few weeks, “How do the brain scans look?”

“Everything looks great Mitchell,” lied Medenov through his teeth.

“So we’re on schedule then? One month from today we begin the sedation decrease and awake Albert?”

“Yes, we will be ready,” Medenov turned around to look at Einstein, “He will be ready.”

“Great, great,” said Alford, “I’ll go get us some coffee,” and with those words Alford quickly departed through the lab room door. Medenov wasn’t sure why he told a mistruth to Alford; maybe he didn’t want to disappoint Alford. Even worse, maybe he didn’t want to realize the disrespect he had paid to Albert Einstein.

Alford came back in and smiled at Medenov after which he looked down at Einstein’s sleeping body and appeared to zone out. Medenov noticed Alford’s mental meandering. “What is it Mitchell?” he asked.

“I can hardly believe we have accomplished all we have, my friend. I could not have done this without your expertise.” Alford patted Medenov on the back as he handed him his coffee, “Thank you Alex, hopefully we will discern many ways to improve the world with Albert’s help.”

Medenov nodded at Alford, “Yes, I can only imagine what doors are waiting for us to open. Here’s to the failure,” he said as he raised his coffee mug and took a sip.

Alford stared at Medenov concerned.

“I mean future, not failure,” said Medenov as he nervously tried to laugh away the Freudian slip.

The two men talked of the beautiful morning that shown from the windows of Alford’s complex as their coffee mugs slowly dispensed their liquid constituents into the mouths of the morning scientists. Finally finished, Medenov set his kitten themed coffee mug down and turned away from the window towards Alford, “Well Mitchell, hopefully the fruits of our labor are sweet not sour. Thanks for your hospitality, who could’ve thought your cold, sanitized laboratory complex could be such a warm, embracing home at times, but for now I must return to my own home. I’m sure my wife is quite curious as to my whereabouts.”

“Sure enough, I understand,” replied Alford as Medenov reached out to shake Alford’s hand.

“Just think, in a week I expect we will be asking Einstein what he thinks of the universe after we divulge to him all the findings since his death. Hopefully his brain doesn’t explode from all the information, yet, something tells me he will blow us away with his insights,” said Alford as he too placed his mug down and turned away from the window and towards his friend.

“Truer words you have never spoken,” said Medenov as the two men extended and grasped hands in the familiar way that people, both unacquainted and acquainted, do.

Alford led Medenov to the front entrance and watched as he loaded himself into his car. Medenov looked in his rear view mirror at the waving, smiling Alford and couldn’t help but marvel at how this project had reinvigorated his spirits.

Medenov’s stomach turned as Einstein flashed in his mind’s eye. For the first time, Medenov truly felt maybe he had made a mistake. Yet, as sure as the route he was taking across town back to his family and home, Medenov knew there was no turning back now. “God help us,” muttered Medenov as his tires took him towards his home.

  Alford had wished his colleague Medenov off as he drove away in his fancy automobile. He turned away to walk away from the entrance and headed back towards Einstein.

Alford entered into the lab room where Einstein’s body and consciousness lay developing in what Alford had determined and inferred to be a most successful way. He picked up his coffee, took a sip, became disappointed at its decreased temperature, decried diffusion, and put the mug back down.

 “Outside of the universe is everything unchanging?” thought Alford.

 “Who is to say there is only one universe?” replied Einstein’s body silently.

 “Will you tell me there is no beginning or end to all of this?” asked Alford aloud, “Will you come back to life with exciting new details about the void that exists after life or tell me all about how wonderful ‘heaven’ was?”

Alford laughed and as his laugh echoed across the lab room and out into the complex he managed to imagine it was Einstein laughing along with him.

“Absurd,” spoke Alford, “that after all these years science and I still cannot answer the truest, deepest questions mankind has been asking for thousands of years.

 “What does that say about science?” thought Alford, “what does that say about me?”

“It says you are human,” replied Einstein’s silent body, once more.

             Alford shook out of his early morning daydream and turned to leave the lab. He shuffled his feet across his complex’s corridor and entered into the newest section of his complex, Einstein’s laboratory.

            Inside, the various interns with a wide array of varying scientific educational backgrounds were all busy bustling around various installments, calibrations, and certifications of the state of the art equipment deemed necessary for whichever region of the undetermined scientific universe Einstein, when returned, would determine to be worthy of his time.

            Alford had many discussions with Medenov about which areas Einstein would be most helpful with and what equipment would be needed. Ultimately, Alford had realized that almost anything Einstein would need already existed in another one of the labs within his complex.

            Despite this fact, Alford wanted to ensure that Einstein had his own space and room by which to unfurl the great inner trappings of Einstein’s prized mind. He looked around and saw an updated version of his micro-particle accelerating chamber being put into place by Ivan, a Rapid-Act genetic manifold capable of doing advanced diagnostic processes on genetic samples being tested by a girl named Chloe, and the world’s first sound-scopic device being worn and tested out by Carlisle, a female engineer who had turned out to be an avid fan of Alford’s work.

            “I can see the sound waves of your feet Dr. Alford,” said Carlisle behind the odd looking goggle like device she had mounted around her head.

            “I’m glad to see that everything appears to be working Ms. Carlisle,” replied Alford with a slight smile. He had truly come to enjoy having other scientists around again, even if they were all young enough to be his grand children.

            “Thank God the world isn’t just one big vacuum, otherwise these Sound Goggles wouldn’t be very helpful,” said Carlisle in jest.

            “You believe in God?” asked Alford with a scholarly seriousness.

            “I think so,” replied Carlisle as she took of the Sound Goggles, “do you Dr. Aflord?”

            Alford stared off into space and acted as if he was thinking about the question. In reality, he knew his answer.

            “No,” replied Alford, “I most certainly do not.”

                                                        18

“Hello, is anybody there?” asked Einstein, having awoken into darkness, he felt a cold rift in his own ability to conceptualize reality. Had he hit his head?

“You know who I am,” replied the deep, deep voice from no where in particular.

“I can’t see where you are, why can’t I see you?” asked Einstein.

“The human eye isn’t capable of observing my physical form,” spoke the echo.

“Why did you bring me back?” asked Einstein.

“You wanted to unlock the secrets of the electromagnetic radiation known as light in a past life.”

“I still do,” clamored Einstein.

“What happens to light that is removed from space?” asked the voice.

“That was never something I came to know,” replied Einstein.

“The light photon takes on the role of space in the woven fabric of space time when space is removed from the equation.”

“Fascinating,” replied Einstein, “so light inherently is imbued with properties that are manipulatable when dimensional complexity is either decreased or increased.

“So your terms ‘pre-space’ and ‘post-space’ are wrong. A more appropriate terminology would be ‘light-space’ in that ‘pre-space’ and ‘post-space’ are terms refer to one singular dimensionality where light has taken space’s place as the medium by which energetic waves ebb and flow.”

A light began to flash in the darkness in a strobing fashion, on off, on off, on off.

Einstein awoke to Alford shining a light in his face.

“Thank God, you finally came to,” uttered Alford in the silence, “ I was worried I’d have to embarrassingly call 911 for medical help, I’m somewhat certain they wouldn’t have been able to rescue you.

“Thank God, indeed,” replied Einstein.

Alford helped Einstein up from his fall. The two geniuses headed down a poorly lit rock walled corridor into a hollowed out cavern that seemed to rise upward into an infinite darkness. At the other end of the cavern was a bunker like structure.

Once inside Alford turned on a few old pieces of diagnostic equipment, turned on the Geiger meter to determine there were no heavy residual signatures, and then opened up a filing cabinet full of manuals and documents.

“Read away sir Albert,” Alford said as he pulled a couple of manuals out, “don’t expect me to babysit you and hold you hand while you determine how best to you this facility. I would hate to come down here one day to find you have succumbed to death by uncontrolled nuclear reaction.

“I hope one day, sooner rather than later, you come around to the fact that everything I’ve done had everyone’s best interest in mind, especially yours Mitchell,” spoke Einstein.

“I should never have tried bringing you back to life,” replied Alford

“You don’t mean that, and you know it,” replied Einstein.

“Do you need anything else from me, or can I finally be released from helping you in your crazy endeavors?” asked Alford.

“You don’t by chance have a large cache of refined nuclear material, do you?” asked Einstein, fingers crossed.

Alford shook his head yes and then walked back through the bunker into a highly secured room of the facility, beckoning Einstein to follow him with the wave of his arm.

Einstein got up and followed Alford into a viewing room where, down beneath them, was an unfathomably large reserve of a few different types of nuclear material.

“How much do you need for your experiments?” asked Alford, “Not much I imagine.”

“All of it,” replied Einstein, “we’re going to need all of it.”

[cincycinner]

CHAPTERS 14 15 16

      14

         Einstein was pretty sure he was dreaming. His laboratory felt familiar, his assistant Cassandra was as astute as he remembered her in real life, if it was a dream. He was talking to two Mitchell Alfords at the same time. One of them was angry so Cassandra had her hands up, trying to calm him down.

            “Why did you bring him to life?” asked the livid Alford, “Why did Dr. Medenov choose to help you in your ridiculous endeavor?”

            “You can talk to yourself all you want,” replied Einstein, “wasn’t that what you wanted to have when this lunacy began?”

            “I know everything now,” spoke the calm Alford, opening his eyes to look directly at Einstein, “that is to say, I remember.

            “Einstein, this calamity is your fault,” spoke the angry Alford, ignoring his cosmic twin, “how are you going to fix?”

            “He’s going to go time travel back to the moment you created your first microscopic black hole and kill you,” spoke the calmer Alford, immured in calm certainty.

            “You’re both lunatics,” replied Alford.

            He pointed his long, skinny index finger at Einstein, “You aren’t really Albert Einstein.”

            He then transfixed the aim of his pointer on the calm Alford, “And you are the greatest abomination of them all. I cannot stand to look at you, you are everything I am not. You are a tiny, insignificant mistake made by a 20th century genius ill equipped to operate in, let alone change and push forward, the 21st century world.”

            He awoke from the dream to an abrupt knock on the door of the guest quarters bedroom of Alford’s laboratory complex.

            Dr. Mitchell Alford stepped into the room and pulled a chair out, sitting on it near Einstein’s bed.

            “Dr. Medenov is concerned that even if we do find an appropriate place to trigger the nuclear reaction, the government agencies of America, I forget which ones, will likely sniff out our intentions and snuff out our operation before it achieves criticality,” inserted the doctor.

            “I am almost positive that Mitchell knows of a location and simply isn’t telling us. He was rather sleep deprived one night and began telling me of ‘nuclear testing’ that he used to do beneath the complex. I wrote it off as ridiculousness, but is this true?”

            “There are versions of the universe where Mitchell Alford does indeed dig miles down into the Earth to create an enclosed, underground Nuclear Fallout Shelter,” replied Dr. Alford.

            “That doesn’t help us much,” replied Einstein with a groan, besmirched.

            “80% of the time, those Mitchell Alfords created equally as deep Nuclear Reaction testing chambers directly next to the Nuclear Fallout Shelters in order to directly test various scenarios and the effectiveness of the aforementioned fallout shelters,” completed Dr. Alford.

            “So you’re telling me we can implement our operation underneath the very floors of this complex?” asked Einstein, both astonished and contented by the newfound nuclear location.

            “Hypothetically, if Dr. Alford gives his permission, I’d say there is a very good chance, yes,” replied Dr. Alford.

            “Thank you for your insight,” said Einstein, “as for the government agencies likely tracking us, we will simply have to hope they don’t acquire their warrants until after this has all been completed.”

            “What we are about to do is incredibly illegal, isn’t it?” asked Dr. Alford

                                                                                           15

A week had passed since Alford had last talked to Medenov. Alford assumed that he had successfully lost the only friend he had left in this, to him, Godless world.

 He felt foolish and embarrassed for how Medenov had reacted to what he thought would be a landmark achievement. Didn’t Albert Einstein deserve to exist in the world that could only have come into existence in large part thanks to his discernments and understandings?

Mitchell Alford sat in his office at his desk writing notes to himself. The notes were being written on a schematic of Alford’s laboratory with an aged pen that had long ago given it’s best ink. He had planned to discover many great things alongside his wife at this, his, ‘laboratory on the lake’, as she used to call it.

Alford had bought the parcel of land and built his laboratory immediately after his first Nobel Prize over 20 years ago. Although internally many different types of laboratories found there way into, and sometimes out of, existence, the exterior walls of his complex had remained untouched and unchanged since their foundation.

Alford now was busy sketching an additional room to the layout. Alford wanted to build an entirely new lab next to his own. It was to be Einstein’s personal workspace once he was brought back to life.

A buzz on the intercom announced that Alford had a visitor at the door. Alford was immediately startled but altogether not surprised after the foreshock seeing as he was expecting new arrivals that day. He hurriedly got up from his chair and walked over, curious with regards to whom his visitor might be. He opened the door to see three young people at the entrance. “Dr. Alford?” asked the young man in the middle.

“You must be the young students I’ve requested as interns from the university,” replied Alford as he dawned the smile of welcoming host that had been remiss for some time, “come into the lounge and make yourself comfortable.”

The students turned interns all entered into the room and took seats on the black leather couches that adorned the white walled lounge.

“Thank you so much for accepting us Dr. Alford, the Dean told us hundreds of students have sent letters of inquiry to you for potential internships and that you haven’t granted one in forever,” said one of the three, a tall Indian student.

“Unfortunately,” replied Alford, “I lost sight of the importance of eschewing scientific knowledge and understandings of that knowledge to younger generations of cellular biologists, geneticists, quantum physicists, chemical engineers, and all the other aptly named scientific endeavors. Science requires stewards, and I see now, I am required to be one of them. It is you three I should be thanking.

The three students sat silent trying to take in the magnitude of the mind they had just been given an open invitation to use.

“Let me see if I have this right”, said Alford as he perused over a list he had pulled seemingly from thin air. “You, my dear, must be Michelle Lee,” said Alford as Michelle smiled and nodded her head yes, “and you two fine gentlemen must be Amit Punjab and Jonathan Goldberg,” he continued as he pointed to the two ‘fine gentlemen’ sitting to Michelle’s left.

The two men shook their heads yes and both thanked ‘Dr. Alford’ for being such a great steward. Alford did not appreciate the brown nosing. He took note of their need to please. “Again,” said Alford, “I am here as a source of information and guidance, but you all must strive to drive your own scientific endeavors.”

“On the opposite sides of these walls are the laboratories I have built over the past two decades,” said Alford as he waved his arm around the room in a game show like endeavor.  

“You’ve come to me hoping to be a part of ground breaking research. What I offer is chance to take the wheels and drive the research yourselves. I have looked at your credentials and find that all three of you have shown great competence in multiple scientific fields. It is these fusions of different fields that almost always leads to the greatest discoveries.”

With that the door chimed, and although he was expecting 3 more interns, they were not due to arrive until tomorrow.

“Excuse me,” said Alford, “maybe I have a parcel.”

He walked up the door and again peered out to ascertain the identity of the just arrived. Alford found Dr. Medenov staring back at him from behind his glasses with his green eyes and black bushy eyebrows comfortably set above the glasses’ brim.

Alford stepped out onto the front patio on top of the steps that climbed from the street below the house Alford had come to call his own. “Good afternoon Alex, this unannounced visit is altogether unexpected based on the outcome of last weeks conversation. Nonetheless, I’m pleased to see you, I’m just now entertaining some new interns and I’m sure they’d love to meet you.”

“Interns Mitchell?” asked Medenov smiling, clearly noticing the renewed vigor that had seemed to displace Alford’s fatigue last week. “Glad to hear it, but that is besides the point. I came here to talk to you because I had a dream last night Mitchell.”

“A dream?” asked Alford somewhat bemused.

 “A dream,” responded Medenov, “where you and I were talking to Albert Einstein. He was telling us that if God made mankind in His image and He loved to create above all else, then it is rational to believe we too are created to create.”

“What is your point Medenov?” replied Alford.

“You, more than any man, have turned your science into creation. If any man was meant to take on the scientific conquest you propose, it is you. I’ll help you old friend,” said Medenov as he extended out his hand.

As the two men shook to their new collaboration Alford thanked Medenov. He invited him into his lab to begin discussion of how to bring Einstein back to life. First, though, Alford had a tour of the laboratory complex to give to his new interns. After introducing himself, Medenov asked to join in the facility tour, and was equally amazed at the sheer fortitude of what he had forgotten Alford had created here in his laboratory complex.

  Deemed the ‘Thinking Room’, this room was at the epicenter of the complex and consisted of one round, wooden table carved in the 18th century by a French man dead long before the wood ever saw America. Famous paintings used to adorn the walls, but Eileen, Alford’s ex-wife, had taken them during their divorce and her subsequent departure. “Rightfully so,” though Alford at the time, for the paintings had been in Eileen’s family for generations.

Yet, now, and like most times he was in the ‘Thinking Room’, Alford missed the oily paints on old canvasses and the ghostly figures he saw whenever light bounced off the paintings and into his eye. Now, only in his mind’s eye did Alford see the paintings. Had the paintings remained the same there, stored in his brain neural data, or had his mind changed them through misrememberment?  

The two great minds Alford and Medenov sat at the table setting out and talking about the preliminary framework for reincarnating one of the most unique and important minds the world had ever known. Alford was incredibly excited that Medenov had decided to join him in the endeavor of reawaking Einstein into the universe whereas Medenov was still slightly bewildered that such a thing was even achievable.

 “In order for us to have any chance at completing this most absurd task,” said Medenov, “we must have at least some of Einstein’s brain well preserved enough where the DNA is not completely useless. This alone is a task I am not sure we will be able to accomplish Mitchell.”

“Ah, it is by chance that this will be no problem at all,” replied Alford with an heir of confident certainty. I was fortunate enough to have in my possession a very unique artifact obtained at auction at a great personal cost. Come with me to the cold storage room for I have something to show you my friend,” said Alford with a large smile and corresponding gameshow like wave of his arm.

With that the two men got up from the table and walked to a large steel door on the opposite side of Alford’s lab. Alford removed the old, rusted, seemingly archaic lock from the door handle and opened the door to reveal a vast storehouse. The two men milled across the open room to another large steel door. Again, Alford rattled away a lock and opened up the door.

Out from the cold storage room came a mist that shrouded some of Alford’s coldest secrets. “After you good sir,” said Alford, “come see what’s behind door number one.” The two old men laughed. Game show television had died away years ago, and there was nothing in Alford’s cold storage room that could bring it back to life.

Medenov stepped into the cold storage room and in the room were various boxes of all miscellaneous shapes and sizes; some big and some small, and yet, Alford gravitated to the most discretely disinteresting box in the room, packed away in the back right corner.

“Yes, this is the one,” said Alford as he picked up the box and then promptly set it back down again on the floor. Alford carefully opened the box as if ii were the Holy Grail inside and he, Indiana Jones.

Instead, Alford pulled out a large jar filled with only two things; a light green liquid and a human brain, brain stem and everything.

“You do not have Einstein’s brain,” remarked Medenov with astonishment as his large green eyes reflected the green constituency of Alford’s cold-stored jar.

Alford shook his head up and down to indicate he did in fact have Einstein’s brains and the two then laughed loudly like crazy, mad scientists.

“How is that possible?” asked Medenov amidst a bemused, dying down chuckle.

“A prestigious doctor passed away about a decade and a half ago,” said Alford as he wiped frost from his frost bitten glasses.

“He was once a colleague of mine and at his estate sale many unusual things were put up on the block. Different scientific instruments from varying ages and decrees, non-dangerous amounts of rare-earth radioactive elements, and old dinosaur fossilized skeletons all up for the highest bidder!”

“Needless to say, this treasure was somehow one of them,” said Alford as he swished around the jar’s contents. “Although I was skeptical myself, after looking over documentation that came with the brain I am one hundred percent certain this is Albert Einstein’s noggin.”

“How much did you pay for that pretty piece of neural anatomical beauty?” asked Medenov.

“Too much,” replied Alford, “but now all too worth it given light of our present motivations.”

Medenov smiled, “We are on the right path Mitchell. With what you hold in your hands there is a good likelihood that in the not too distant future we will be having many interesting conversations with the world’s greatest genius.”

Alford chuckled to himself as he thought inwardly, “Who at that point will be the world’s ‘greatest genius’, Albert Einstein or myself?”

                                                      16

 Einstein’s brain hurt. He had skipped sleep the night prior in hopes of finishing the entirety of the preparatory computational work required to ensure that the nuclear implosion would create the proper amounts of energy down to the most minute of specificities. The directionality of their movement in time would completely stop within their restriction chamber while the world around them reversed in deterministic unison right back to Mitchell Alford’s first successful attempt at creating a black hole.

“You look awful,” muttered Claire as she handed Einstein some tea.

Einstein gratefully took the piping porcelain cup and took a few quiet sips.

Claire looked out across the landscape that the guest bedroom’s view showed while Einstein attempted to reconfigure his mental faculties.

“What was it you needed help with Ms. Masterson?”

“My project has hit a hiccup of an anthill,” replied Claire timidly.

“Hiccups and anthills are small farthings indeed, are you sure you can’t solve the problems on your own?”

“Ok, I lied,” replied Claire.

“About what?” asked Einstein, clearly already indentured to helping the poor girl.

“My problem is Mt. Everest,” surmised the young intern.

“Your problem is as large as Mt. Everest?” asked Einstein, trying to comprehend.

“No, no, no” replied Claire, embarrassed, “Well, yes. My problem is as large as Everest because is it literally Mt. Everest.”

Claire Masterson had been working on re-coordinating the usage of a some soon to be de-commissioned tele-communication satellites to create a electromagnetic resonance field that would blanket the globe in a quantum field capable of detecting, deciphering, and categorizing any and all interstellar objects traveling through earth’s atmosphere to their often times blazing demise.

“Mt. Everest is too tall, it’s getting in the way of my instrumentation when I run simulations. I have been working on this for 3 years and I literally between a very large rock and a hard place.”

“I am sorry to hear that, my dear,” replied Einstein, trying to be comforting, “I would tell you all about my failures and wastes of magnitudes of time if I felt they would make you feel any better.”

“Don’t be silly, you’re brilliant. You’re just saying that to make me feel better,” replied Claire, finally breaking a smile.

“In any case, there is a solution to your problem, but it would require more funding and a trip to the Himalayan Mountains.”

“Why would I go there? I’m terrified of heights,” stated the young lady.

“To oversee the proper installment of Mt. Everest’s first ever tele-communications receiver. I will personally help fund and see to it that you get everything you need,” said Einstein as he finished his tea, sat up, and went and patted Claire on the back.

“Ms. Masterson, if I worked half as hard as you do in my first life who knows what I could’ve accomplished. You are more brilliant at a far younger age than I was in any universe.”

“Okay, now I just know you are being silly,” said Claire, “are you really going to help me?”

“Absolutely,” replied Einstein, “now off with you, there is much I still have to accomplish today.”

Claire left Einstein with his solitude, and in it he unexpectedly got pangs of missing his old life. It was gone, all of it. He had been back for quite some time now, and his past life seemed more and more like dreams than memories. Was he losing himself?

Einstein entered the anti-particle laboratory and found Alford asleep at a desk.

“Mitchell,” spoke Einstein as he gently tried to wake the sleeping genius, “can you show me passage way to your underground nuclear testing chamber sometime?”

Alford opened his eyes to look up at Einstein, “I guess there are no secrets I can keep from you anymore, are there?”

“The future is almost always unknowable, Mitchell, you know that,” replied Einstein.

“Unknowability speaks nothing to predictability and our ability to model and simulate reality down to its basest constituents,” inserted Alford.

“Fair enough Mitchell,” spoke Einstein.

The gap between the two geniuses was a gulf that was breeched via bridges of necessity.

“You can have access to my nuclear testing facility, but you must keep me notified of any and all activities you intend on going through with down there. Also, that reminds me, I likely need to restock the food reserves of my fallout shelter the canned goods down there are all easily two decades past expiration,” said Alford as he scratched his chin’s stubble, not having shaved in days.

“You are easily the most well equipped scientific genius I have ever had the pleasure of finagling with,” spoke Einstein, trying not to obviously ingratiate Alford too much, “how you had the foresight to invest in all of these different laboratory amenities is beyond me.”

“Finagle?” quipped Alford, disapprovingly.

“It’s a 20th century word but a timeless creation meant to be used by more tongues than just mine,” joked Einstein, although he really did appreciate the word.

“If you say so,” replied Alford, unamused, as he got up from the chair and began to depart the anti-particle lab, stopping in the doorway, “are you coming or not? The sooner I show you how to get to the Nuclear Testing facility, the sooner you can complete your nonsense and leave me to my work.

Einstein got up and followed Alford, but had a hard time making eye contact with the genius as they passed through a couple of a corridors.

The two geniuses passed through a de-gowning room that had accumulated an inch or so of standing water due to a leaking ceiling.

Alford waved his hand over a communication nodule and spoke, “System Maintenance required in de-gowning room 52A.”

Alford embarrassingly looked at Einstein who was embarrassingly trying to avoid eye contact with him, “I haven’t been back this way in quite some time, myself. This leak is clearly an oversight that I hope you can forgive me.”

“Of course, Mitchell,” replied Einstein, “as an old man, I too was leaky.”

Alford smiled and almost laughed, maybe Einstein was finally breaking through Alford’s steely demeanor.

 Alford opened a door into a dimly lit, small sized closet that barely had enough room to comfortably fit both geniuses. He chimed in a sequence of numbers on an interior wall keypad that in turn whistled and whooped a green-lit response. The floor of the closet was nothing but a metal panel that retracted, showing a ladder falling away into darkness.

Alford went first down the metal ladder, each footstep down emitting a hollow, echoing clamor. Einstein was slightly unnerved by the darkness of the descent, but followed after Alford a minute or so after Alford did.

Einstein had not been on a ladder in years, and as his body adjusted to the somewhat unnatural movement of descending a ladder, he found himself thinking about just how great everything had fallen into place. Though a determinism of doom was likely to descend on the universe if Einstein and his colleagues didn’t succeed he felt incredibly confident that the universe was actively working to aide Einstein.

It was then that Einstein’s feet, still wearing shoes slightly wet from the standing water, slipped and dislodged Einstein from the ladder’s safety into the dangerous descent of gravity’s invisible grasp.

[cincycinner]

Chapters 12 and 13

12

The New Year’s Fireworks rung out across the landscape, people drunkenly celebrated the elegance of a calendar year starting anew, and Albert Einstein was busy rearticulating the necessary parameters for re-annealing the universe to the infinite possibilities of time-lapsed collective wave function.

He missed his past, and he was tired of defending an uncertain future, yet Albert Einstein knew he was exactly where he was needed. He had a purpose, and as the earth traveled thousands of miles each second of space time across the expansive universe the past he would be required to travel back towards was becoming harder and harder to particulate the exact space time sequence where Einstein would be able to find Dr. Mitchell Alford first creating his laboratory concocted black holes.

“If everything works properly,” spoke Einstein looking out across a table of incredible intellects, almost all of which he had met while they were busy studying under Alford’s tutelage, “our efforts will help establish an eternally entangled amalgamation of worlds that are free of mankind’s attempts to create and establish black holes.”

“If something goes wrong?” asked one of the young geniuses.

“If we fail, then the determinism of our actions and the general interactions of everything in the known universe will vanish away into a timeless chamber of non-existence.”

“The universe will stop experiencing time?!” asked Medenov, finally putting together the various parts of Einstein’s call to action.

“Perilous, is it not?” asked Einstein as he looked out his window just in time to see a golden burst of a firework’s prominence flicker on and then, just as quickly, off.

                                                          13

Although Alford was brilliant, he was not world renowned for studying the brain. Luckily, Alford did have at least one friend left in the world, and luckily this man was Alexander Medenov, the world’s most renowned neurologist and neuro-surgeon. Dr. Medenov had this distinction for good reason, as he was the first to properly deduce the physiological, mental, and physical factors that all coalesce into the formations of the human mind and the dreams that it propagates.

With Medenov’s neural understanding the world began to see true integration of the human brain with artificially designed, intelligence improving apparati. Those that had deficient portions of the brain could now regain cognitive and motor functions simply by relaying once misbegotten signals to what became known as “Extra Neural Pathways” or ENPs in its acronym form.

 It was Medenov who Alford sought out, with hopes that this man could help re-associate the ‘born again’ Einstein with his former life. In Alford’s mind’s eye the vision of the two great genius’ working together to bring back to life an even greater genius seemed like a home run of a proposition. Mitchell Alford’s great, great, great grand-father was supposedly a professional baseball player. Baseball bats were now made entirely out of synthetic wood. Like petrified wood, a true maple wood bat sat in the attic of Mitchell Alford’s house and quietly told of the stories of forgotten days and ages. Mitchell, in his own right, knew very little about the sport of baseball.

Alford swirled his chair around and found himself facing his slightly outdated desktop computer, moved the mouse to wake up the sleeping processor, and pitter-pattered on his keyboard quickly and diligently until an email had been composed and sent to Medenov inquiring into whether he was free to meet up and catch up over lunch. It seemed like no sooner had Alford sent the electronic message than a ping like chime from the speakers of his desktop notified him of a new email correspondence:

 Dear Dr. Mitchell Alford,

It is wonderful to hear from you, it’s been a while hasn’t it? How is Maddie? I imagine she’s all grown up and beautiful by now isn’t she? Hopefully you have kept in better contact with your own daughter than you have with me old friend.

Lunch sounds good, I, in fact, have no plans on my agenda for tomorrow. How about lunch at Marble at twelve tomorrow? I hear they have a filet mignon sandwich that’ll inundate your taste buds with enough flavor to impress even the staunchest of food critics.

Believe it or not, but I’ve actually had a pretty easy workload this year and have been able to travel through the entire world with Theodora. She couldn’t be happier Mitchell, and neither could I. Hopefully you’ve found equal fulfillment in your life lately as well.

Let me know if twelve o’clock works for you, other times may work as well. I’m looking forward to picking your brain on how you came up with the science to create Godzilla like cells!

People often ask me about you and how you are doing, so it will be good to finally tell them something accurate for a change. Most people believe you are busy bringing the air balloon technologicall into the 21st century to be used for personal transportation.

 Your esteemed colleague,

 Dr. Alexander Medenov.

 Alford quickly replied to the email and stated that the 12 o’clock time and choice of restaurant were both good choices and that he was quite excited to get to talk to a man that didn’t only care about all the nefarious affectations of the material world. Alford, always the man to save power, shut down his computer and proceeded to get up and leave the Data Collection Lab room of his laboratory complex.

The DCL room was actually one of the rooms of his laboratory closest to the house that attached to the complex. He stepped out into granite floors of the complex and looked up to see the pale moon showering light from above through the complex’s clear glass ceilings. Alford did most of his heavy mental lifting during late hours of night such as this. He found comfort in its solitude.

He opened the large metal door that led to the intermediate room between the laboratory complex and his home and stepped into a room with red velvet walls and freshly stained wooden lockers that once contained the personal affects that many of Alford’s colleagues left behind before entering into complex. Only once locker remained inhabited.

Alford walked up to the sole locker with things still inside of it. He unwrapped himself from his bleach white laboratory coat and switched out his work glasses for the more comfortable reading glasses he normally wore until bedtime. He sat down on the wooden bench in front of the lockers and began to unlace the black leather shoes he wore every day to work. They still looked brand new thanks to Alford’s almost religious attention to the benefits of shoe shining.

Placing the shoes in a cubbie beneath the main apportionment of the locker he slipped into green slippers and an equally green robe. Alford looked as scientific as a morning business man and his coffee, but unbeknownst to Alford there was a rumor that circled amongst his peers that he went to sleep in his laboratory coat and had a LCD screen configured and synchronized with the data loggers of his DCL so as to be able to be as productive as possible, even in moments of leisure.

He opened an old oak door with stained glass paneling and stepped into back foyer room of his house. He looked around at the paintings that adorned the walls, vases filled with exotic fake flowers placed between paintings, and an old 18th century roller desk that sat on the far wall of the house between two entrance ways that led to the kitchen and master bedroom, respectively.

He opened up the desk and peered down at a bow he had once used to play the upright bass. He hadn’t played in ages. He looked up and saw his reflection in a mirror hung above the desk. His hair was whiter than grey now and the stubble that appeared to have grown overnight on his face was similarly lacking of color. There was nothing youthful about Alford anymore. This fact, he enjoyed. He smiled, and then just as promptly, shook the smile away. Had Alford become afraid of happiness?

He turned away from the old chestnut desk and proceeded to go to his left down a hallway plastered with picture frames of Eileen, Maddiie, and himself from much younger and fuller times in his life. Momentarily realizing the brevity of his loss, Alford was taken aback by how many different emotions had struck him this night. His humanity was an uncharacteristically on full display this night, and to him, an open, unwanted sore.

He entered his bedroom and turned the light on to look at the lavender walls and dark blue bed spread of his king sized and ornately accented bed. The bed, and room as a whole, seemed slightly unfamiliar to him seeing as he had fallen asleep in one laboratory or another the past few nights. Sleeping in one laboratory chair or another had become the predominant theme of Alford’s sleeping habits.

He slipped off the robe and hung it on the inside of the door to his bedroom. Sliding into bed and under the covers Alford felt a peace from the assurance he had attained in the endeavor he was about to embark upon as well as, on the contrary, a burgeoning restlessness and excitement to go full steam ahead. He closed his eyes, and soon, was drifting into the subtleties of his subconscious sentiency and the realm that laid beyond Alford’s conscious thought.

Alford found himself in an eerie dream. He sat across the dining room table of his house from a man that appeared to be his doppelganger. The man seemed equally as sure of himself as Alford was himself, but in a slightly more palpable and distinguished way. Did this version of himself seem younger?

His dream twin, though calm, seemed to be lecturing Alford about something, but he could not make out all of the words being said. He caught snippets such as “you were meant for greatness,” and “but you lost sight of the truth” and lastly, “have faith”.

            He awoke to the chiming of his great grand father’s clock as it began to spout its best mechanical cover of a classic church ballad that had long since become archaic and forgotten. Alford wasn’t in the least bit religious, so awaking from a dream where he was telling himself to have faith seemed to be oddly beyond coincidental. Alford took the dream to mean he must stay true to himself and work at his maximum best to succeed in bring Albert Einstein back into existence.

            His morning routine flew by with great ease that morning, and before Alford could fully grasp how quickly the wheels of his day had begun turning the wheels of his Tesla electrically powered car had stopped spinning and had appropriately placed Alford outside of Marble a full fifteen minutes before 12 o’clock. Alford did this assuming Medenov would be his customary 20 minutes early to lunch just as he had been 20 minutes early to every place Alford had ever met him at in the past.

Alford was actually somewhat surprised Medenov had agreed to have lunch with him. Although Alford considered Medenov to be one of the best friends he had left, the two had not spoken in some time, and was worried maybe time had created a distance between the two scientists much like the gulfs that had formed in many of Alford’s other relationships both professional and personal.

Alford was sitting at a table by the window when Alexander Medenov stepped through the glass doors and into the confines of predetermined location for the meeting between the two esteemed doctors. Alford got up out of his seat and turned to Medenov as he walked up, shaking his hand, and dawning a smile not been gleaned in some time.

“Good day good friend,” said Medenov as he shook Alford’s big and bony hands. His hands, robust and meaty, enveloped most men’s mitts, but Alford’s, he found to be, oddly unsalable, “You’re looking well Mitchell, you go running much?”

Alford shook his head no and laughed, “Bicycling, on the occasion” he said as the two men sat down to their seats, “but I got tired of running over squirrels with my tires.”

“New York is infested, isn’t it?” asked Medenov as the light heartened banter made the lie Medenov had said about Alford looking good earlier almost seem believable.

This was the first casual social encounter Alford had had with another person in months. To Medenov, Alford had aged greatly since the last time the two had met. Although Alford still sported a full head of hair, it seemed a bit thinner and a lot greyer. The space under his eyes had sunk and the tired skin of his face had removed any of the youth that may have touched Alford’s face back when the two men first met at Princeton.

A waitress named Mindie came up to the two men and offered the recently arrived Medenov a choice of beverages with Medenov ultimately ordering water with lemon. Alford, having finished his first drink, scotch, asked for a water as well.

 The lunch began with small talk, but after ordering their meals and Medenov flirting with the waitress, Alford cut directly to his intentions with a question. “Alex, you have come up with technologies to recreate, with 99.9% accuracy, specific regions of a person’s brain that may have been damaged in an accident of some sorts, have you not?”

This question, to Medenov, was met with curiosity. Medenov knew Alford knew Medenov had opened a new scientific envelope with his techno-neurological advancements that had garnered great scholastic praise and won him a Nobel Prize for his work on the very idea.

The technology Alexander Medenov had invented allowed the brain to ‘repave’ layers of brain tissue in malfunctioning parts of a brain allowing it to properly reengage whichever section of whatever lobe the neural injury or necrosis occurred in.

The technology started with advanced neural scanning techniques that allowed time lapsed comparative analysis between a person’s optimal brain functioning and the person’s current hampered brain functioning. This comparative analysis allowed micro-viral printers to go into the injured brain center and repave whatever section of the brain had just been removed.

Obviously the technology was not, at first, a great hit with the public masses until family members of a couple wealthy vegetables decided to give one last shot at bringing back their beloved from the deep coma of sleep and asked Dr. Medenov to remove the traumatized sections of brain that had rendered them unconscious.

When these wealthy vegetables became reanimated with their pre-coma personalities Dr. Medenov’s ‘therapies’ were placed at the forefront of state of the art, commonplace, neurological procedures.

 “Yes Mitchell, you know very well that my work is already being used for brain trauma patients in hospitals across the world with great successes,” replied Medenov as Mindie came back with their lunch entrées. Alford had ordered the filet du jour on wheat light tartar and Mitchell had ordered the salmon biscuit, having absolutely no clue what it would end up being.

The two men looked at their plates, offered the good graces often spoke before a good meal, and began meandering through one of the 50,000 lunches they would eat during their lives.

Not forgetting the direction Alford was trying to take the conversation, he looked up from his plate, swallowed the last of the mayonnaise dipped fries down into his stomach and spoke, “With your brain trauma reconstruction in mind, would it be possible to consider a dead person’s brain completely traumatized and then take that dead person’s brain and properly reconstruct and reconstitute it to its full, functional capacity?” asked Alford.

“This is assuming that this dead person has a fully functioning body ready to be alive again and just needs a mental fix? Ethics aside, yes, it would be a rather simple modification of my work.”

“Would the cloned brain retain any memories of the life of the brain it was cloned from?” asked Alford.

“Mitchell although I cannot say with 100% certainty, I believe it would be very difficult to regenerate the memory patterns of a brain that is in that bad a state. It’s like trying to regain a document you lost when your computer crashed because you hadn’t saved it yet on your computer,” responded Medenov, “certainly possible, but not always 100 % up to date and accurate.

Alford’s questions got Medenov going, he continued on a tangent. “I have been doing new work since the last time you left your cave to visit me Mitchell. In patients who suffer severe memory loss from accident or disease I have been working on a technology that allows the person to regain their memories through simulated dreams. The cells of the brain that store dream memories are unlike those that store the short and long term memories of our living lives.”

“How long does a process like that take?” asked Alford.

“To properly adapt the person to his or her recreated memories, they must live their dreams as real life and come to know who they are again through the healing power of sleep. Depending on how large the memory load is for the brain, and accounting for the 6 to 8 months it takes to properly prepare for synthesizing any memories to the brain, it could take anywhere from a year to a year and a half,” answered Medenov.

Alford let go an impulse and slowly spelled out his secret, “I want to bring Albert Einstein back to life. Not in a year in a half, but much sooner.”

 Medenov heard Alford’s words and began laughing as if he had just heard a great joke. “You were stringing me along with all those questions just to joke about Einstein. New sense of humor Mitchell?”

Alford didn’t respond. He was slightly embarrassed. The silence made Medenov uneasy. “Why isn’t Alford laughing?” thought Medenov.

Then it dawned on him.

“Wait, Mitchell, you’re serious??” Medenov shook his head, “You can’t be serious.”

“The world could use a mind like his,” said Alford.

“The world is, on a whole, rather out of control,” replied Medenov, “but I thought it was men like us with minds like ours that were meant to balance out the equation. What you are talking about is as close to madness as I’ve ever seen.”

“What is so mad about bringing back the world’s smartest man? We still haven’t solved the free energy problem Alex, nor are we any closer to studying what may lie beyond our universe,” said Alford as he sipped on his water, wishing it was scotch.

For a second, Medenov took in the idea of talking with Albert Einstein and smiled. He could see where Alford was coming from. “Let’s be honest,” thought Medenov, “I have not been the most ethical of men.”

“How many more times do we need to scale the ladder rungs that lead to the plateau of nuclear war?” asked Alford.

“When did you become a man interested in the common good?” asked Medenov as he began to come back to his senses, “I’ve always considered us colleagues and good friends Mitchell, but what your asking of me goes beyond the bounds and limits that I have set for myself.”

            Medenov got up from his seat and began to walk away from Alford, “You’ve gone mad. Goodbye, Mitchell,” he said as Alford was left sitting, staring, and internally stirring.

            Mindie came up with the check and as Alford sat there finishing up the lunch the noise of the people and cars milling across the sidewalk and street outside created a loud rhythmic echo in the mind that was Alford’s.             “He’s right,” thought Alford, “when’s the last time I did something for someone else?”

            He couldn’t remember but outside he saw Medenov drive off in his Silver Mercedes Benz ultra light electric MZ III and he realized he would once more have to open his doors to the world around him if he really wanted to bring back Einstein.

            Alford pulled out his phone and spoke into it, “Please call the university,”

             “Connecting,” responded the velvety, British, female voice of his phone.

             Alford tapped on Marble’s non-marble countertop as he waited.

             “Yes, hello,” spoke Alford into the phone, “this is Dr. Mitchell Alford and I’m calling in regards to acquiring interns for the school year.”

[cincycinner]

Chapters 10 and 11

       10

“Between lives I became part of a micro-cosmos in a way that can only be described as being alive via tertiary connections to the electro-magnetic fields of large heavenly bodies.”

“How large are the heavenly bodies we are discussing here?” asked Alford bemusedly in response to the seemingly ridiculous utterance Einstein just gave rise to.

“He’s being genuinely sincere,” inserted Medenov while sitting at the local coffee shop he and Einstein had become accustomed to.

Having Alford inserted into the seating and situational gravitas of the moment turned the coffee collective into a less than relaxing, semi-charged atmosphere.

“We haven’t spoken in months, and you bring me here for what exactly?” asked Alford.

“We speak all the time,” replied Einstein.

“You and I?” asked Alford, incensed, “ you know what I mean. I didn’t choose this silence, and I certainly didn’t bring you back for silly endeavors.”

“The fact that you still believe it was you who brought Einstein back into life in the 21st century is quite enamoring,” spoke Medenov, frustrated.

“Miracles are a dime a dozen if you count things that aren’t miracles as the former,” stymied Alford.

“So you’re willing to discuss miracles?” asked Einstein, twisting Alford’s words to great affect.

“Only in as much as I will admit that all of existence is seemingly a miracle,” replied Alford, somewhat defeatedly as he retreated into his nitro-brewed coffee that had been recommended to him by the young, adorable barista named Brittany.

“Miracles should be reclassified as instances of cosmic intent,” inserted Medenov, looking to Einstein for approval.

“Well stated,” said Einstein as he packed his pipe with the intent of using it as a heat source once the minds departed the coffee shop into the cold December day.

Miracle of 51st street played silently via a projector on one of the walls of Coffee Collective. Santa Claus looked quite jolly on the wall. The three minds beneath the screen were bemoaning their predicament, each for their own reasons.

“Can we try and enjoy the Christmas spirit?” asked Einstein.

“You aren’t even Christian, Albert,” spoke Alford, as if he was telling Einstein something he did not know.

“Mitchell, you are too smart to be reduced to quipping left and right with conjectures that have less substance than the air particles you are attempting to manipulate with you air filled vocal chords,” replied Einstein, “and anyways, the charm and warmth of old-world holidays is something that keeps me anchored to the fact that this is still my earth.”

“We need you, Mitchell,” inserted Medenov, “Help us to recreate the necessary conditions listed in the study we sent to you last week.”

“Who came up with the speculatory speculations?” asked Alford.

“I did,” replied Einstein.

“They are wrong,” stamped Alford, resoundingly stiff, “I corrected them already as a measure of good faith between us all. The corrections should have arrived to your lab this morning.”

“We received them, yes,” replied Einstein.

“Then why did you summon me here today?” asked Alford, perturbed.

“We need you to create a black hole with us,” spoke Einstein, smiling while internally hoping Alford would simply say yes based on the opportunity to work with the famed intellect of Albert Einstein.

Alford sat and stared and Einstein intently for a few perplexing seconds.

“You can regain access to my laboratory complex and all of the facilities within it,” replied Alford with a wry smile, “but I will take no part in your scientific fantasies.”

“Thank you, Mitchell,” spoke Medenov, gratefully.

Silence was brokered in with each moment at the table slipping off and out into the world.

“I wish you would’ve believed me,” said Einstein, breaking the silence.

“I wish you would’ve trusted me,” replied Alford as he got up and left the coffee shop.

Medenov said a few parting words to Einstein and headed towards an afternoon appointment. Einstein got up from his chair and pushed it in, respectfully. As he exited the coffee shop named Annie’s CC he pulled from his coat pocket his packed pipe and quickly furnished a flame.

“No smoking on city streets!” clamored a NYPD officer patrolling the street and heading Einstein’s way.

“My apologies, good sir,” replied Einstein, re-pocketing the pipe and heading for home.

                                                         11

A smoldering pipe sat in his hand, Alford sat in his chair later that night thinking the thought tearing at his brain with the redundancy of a nursery rhyme. It had taken hold in all the regions of Alford’s brain that controlled conscious thought. He systematically inhaled and exhaled the aromatic smoke and attempted to unfurl his pent up mind.

 “Would I be labeled a mad-man?” asked Alford to himself.

“Only if you fail.”

 “Is it a crime if I clone Einstein?” he thought as he poured over relevant scientific literature.”

“Not cloning. Bringing back to life.”

 “Will I be blackballed and blacklisted?” he worried as he sipped his tea.

“Only by fools who don’t understand the importance of your work.”

 He had been busy rereading Einstein’s General Relativity and was growing nostalgic remembering the first time he had read Einstein’s greatest tome and how incredible it all seemed to a reverently fascinated Mitchell Alford. The excitement Alford felt over the possibility of having Albert Einstein to talk with put a glow over him that he had not felt since his daughter had been born. In fact, this glow may have been greater than the one that accompanied watching, more than participating, in the birth of Maddie.

What would she think of him now? He hadn’t talked to her in months. He had forgotten her birthday this year, and feared that years of aloof fathering had left her with no real need to communicate with him. The older she got the more beautiful and intelligent she became. When she entered college she decided to major in philosophy which Alford took as her own personal way of distancing herself from a father that had already put miles of emotional road between him and his family.

To Alford, his daughter Maddie reminded him incredibly of both Eleanor his ex-wife and the existential, perplexing nature of watching one’s own genes merge and create something new with another’s. Both would’ve saddened him greatly if he had ever left time to ponder the extent of the gulf that had grown between him and his once beloved family.

Eventually Alford stopped feeling sorry for himself and continued mentally going over the inner workings of his project. Surely, creating a cell from nothing was one thing, but recreating a human being from over a century ago into a vastly different world entailed entirely different circumstances and criteria.

New technologies and new societal nuances would make the world the 20th century’s Einstein would find to lay in stark contrast to the lost world of his former time period.

 “What if Einstein had nothing left to offer the world in the form of scientific advancement?” thought Alford as he dotted the two letters in Einstein that need dotting onto a notepad.

“Don’t be a fool, a mind of Einstein’s could help us understand the complete distention of both macro and micro physical and chemical properties seen in the natural world when time is taken out of the equation.”

 “What if Einstein doesn’t find me to be a suitable peer?” he worried as he scribbled a poorly articulated sketch of Albert Einstein onto the notepad.

“You are the greatest mind of the 21st century, he the 20th. That is all that needs to be said on the subject, Mitchell.”

 There were many tough problems to be addressed if Alford was truly to bring back the great Jewish genius to banter with. What of Einstein’s memories? How could he imbed the memories of a past brain in a freshly grown one? What would be the ideal age for bringing Einstein back to life? As a child or a teenager? Quarter-life? Mid-life? Should he introduce him to the public? Where should he live? Would Einstein be able to cope with how dynamically different the world had become since he had last been alive and breathing? What about Einstein’s soul?

Alford’s and Einstein’s intelligences inevitably got the best of him as he concluded a mind as great as Einstein undoubtedly had a plethora of possible new theories to give to the world. He assumed, for himself, the infallibility of God as he pondered over his scientific track record and ultimately decided his accomplishments and body of work gave credence to his credibility in analytical thought.

“There is no way that a person as smart as I am can’t overcome the problems lying ahead of my goal,” thought Alford as he began working out the beginnings of what was sure to be a long and arduous task of bringing Albert Einstein back to live life in the midst of the 21st century, technological glories and societal problems in all.

At the time in history that Alford decided to bring Albert Einstein back to life years of DNA sequencing research and technological development had allowed the then modern world the capabilities to know the exact genetic mappings of anyone and anything that lived on planet earth. Every different gene and its corresponding transcribed protein had been discovered and deduced.

However, genes are as living as the people that get to wear them, and it was not until scientists had properly determined the epigenetic, environmental, and temporal factors that affect the genetic progressions of individuals that the knowledge of genetics began to pay worldwide dividends for public health and other less noble, scientific realms.

Cancer mortality rates were at an all time low, dangerous allergies had essentially vanished from existence, and infectious diseases found it increasingly hard to infect new hosts due to the fact that hosts who’s cellular masses and the immune responses they were propagating were adapting as efficiently and robustly as the germs and viruses that were attempting to infect them had learned to do.

Scientists over a collection of lifetimes had mapped out the general epigenetic and genetic tendencies of mutational changes in transcriptional and translational levels of control that accompany the many aspects of aging over a given lifetime. Simply put, with the DNA of someone at their death, one could correctly resequence and deduce the proper genetic map for a given person at any age of their lives.

By properly controlling the telomeric redeposition on the ends of cells, cells could freshly divide ad infinitum, or, at least for an exponentially large amount of time. This lead to life extension therapies that allowed many people with an appointment with death’s toll to wait long enough for the scientific community to discover a remedy or antidote for the affliction of the afflicted.

So when Alford set out to try and bring Einstein back to life, in reality, who Alford was trying to bring back to life only had the potential to be Einstein. Even with all the genetic advancements the world had seen since Einstein’s death, there was no guarantee that the person Alford would give life to would be anyone close to Einstein, especially if he did not have any of Einstein’s DNA.

Even with viable DNA to use, the idea that Einstein with all the vibrant memories of his life in tow could simply just be revitalized into the 21st century was certainly something better left for science fiction. Yet Alford believed whole-heartedly he could make this a story of non-fiction, and not only that, a story of non-fiction that would lead to an ushering in of a new understanding of existence and humanity’s role within said existence.

Ultimately Alford decided bringing Einstein back at the age of 25 would allow for him to have his full mental and physical capabilities while also allowing him to garner less attraction than he would if Einstein were brought back to life as the idolized, aged Albert Einstein that most of America and the world had come to know in their science books.

Alford also decided Einstein would remain a secret to the world, at least for the immediate future. He had determined it best that the general public not know of Einstein’s reincarnation and would assure his private slip back into reality by housing him in the guest corridor attached to his laboratory complex.

The guest corridor was at the southern most portion of the complex and had glass windows that showed the sprawled out plot of land Alford had built his lab on top of. The beauty of the nature that surrounded Alford’s complexial abode were breath taking and not put to very good use by the complex’s currently sole inhabitant, Mitchell Alford. He was pleasantly excited by the idea of getting to put to use parts of his complex that had remained utterly unused.

As for why Alford’s laboratory complex laid on such a large heaping of beautifully green treed land had more to do with his ex-wife than his own doing. They had bought the three adjacent lots to his own many years ago and torn down the structures and houses on them to reforest and regenerate the woods and forestry that had once dominated the region. As the years passed the trees grew thicker and taller and what was once an open space had become quite an illustrious fold of nature. On more than one occasion Alford had even stopped to think about how glorious the healing of vegetative life appears to unfold and unfurl with time.

                                                                                 12

The New Year’s Fireworks rung out across the landscape, people drunkenly celebrated the elegance of a calendar year starting anew, and Albert Einstein was busy rearticulating the necessary parameters for re-annealing the universe to the infinite possibilities of time-lapsed collective wave function.

He missed his past, and he was tired of defending an uncertain future, yet Albert Einstein knew he was exactly where he was needed. He had a purpose, and as the earth traveled thousands of miles each second of space time across the expansive universe the past he would be required to travel back towards was becoming harder and harder to particulate the exact space time sequence where Einstein would be able to find Dr. Mitchell Alford first creating his laboratory concocted black holes.

“If everything works properly,” spoke Einstein looking out across a table of incredible intellects, almost all of which he had met while they were busy studying under Alford’s tutelage, “our efforts will help establish an eternally entangled amalgamation of worlds that are free of mankind’s attempts to create and establish black holes.”

“If something goes wrong?” asked one of the young geniuses.

“If we fail, then the determinism of our actions and the general interactions of everything in the known universe will vanish away into a timeless chamber of non-existence.”

“The universe will stop experiencing time?!” asked Medenov, finally putting together the various parts of Einstein’s call to action.

“Perilous, is it not?” asked Einstein as he looked out his window just in time to see a golden burst of a firework’s prominence flicker on and then, just as quickly, off.

[cincycinner]

         8

“Revolutionary” is what the 21st century New York city Time Square light show promised to be on all the magnetizing advertisements. The Christmas tree, the centerpiece of all of NYC’s festivities, stood adorned in gallant colors adrift across a man made snow-fall.

“We really micro-control the weather now?” asked Einstein in between attempts to eat snowflakes.

“Only for localized areas where governing bodies deem snow isn’t a public health threat,” replied Medenov, “you’d be surprised by how many less deaths occur each year because 89% of the U.S. mainland no longer sees accumulatable snowfall.”

“I love the snow, my friend,” replied Einstein, “cold weather used to bring me back to life, before I was brought back to life that is.”

The two minds chuckled.

“Anyways,” stammered Medenov, attempting to change the conversation, “What do you think of this light show??

The light display, borrowing heavy cosmic riffs of Christmas classics from Christmases past, panned out a variety of brilliant and bold electronic colors.

“This can’t be good for anyone’s eyesight, I cannot see the appeal,” replied Einstein.

“But you are the manipulator of light, master of photons!” exclaimed Medenov above the crowd noise, raising his arms in gesture to the world Einstein purportedly had domain over, “How can you not love this frenetic display of light backed by techno Christmas tunes?”

“I prefer the subtle beauty of ‘The Nutcracker’,” replied Einstein as he shut his eyes to the light pollution.

Medenov and Einstein stood amongst the 21st century crowded streets of New York City. Some of the younger gentlemen were wearing shorts as it snowed. Many of the younger kids milled about throwing the white precipitate. The skyscrapers, decked in shades of green and red, stood out like pyramids to a color coordinated God.

 “There is such a concept for our plexiverse as ‘Pre-Space’ and ‘Post-Space’,” said Einstein, “and in terms of dimensional rotation, these ‘Pre’ and ‘Post’ spaces are set up so as to directly interact in real time with the material universe intermittently across the time span of whichever universe we are referring to.”

“What is the point of these ‘spaces’ if they can’t be investigated or observed by us?” asked Medenov, interested.

“They can be observed by us,” replied Einstein, “I did so during death. Put way too simply, the edge of the material universe can be understood similarly to the edges of black holes in that data and information sharing between these seemingly disparate and separated entities does happen.”

“So in order to view and understand these regions of existence, we have to die?”

“That,” replied Einstein, “is the only way I know how to view these dimensional bubbles, yes.”

“So in order to return the wave functions of our universe and all the other dimensionalities tied to it, we will need Mitchell to join our efforts, you’re positive?”

“He is the key to all of this,” replied Einstein, “and the only way to know for certain that any of this worked is,”

“You will have to die again?” asked Medenov.

“Well,” replied Einstein, solemnly, “we all have to die sometime, even if your 21st century medical advancements due allow ridiculous extensions of modern life spans. I suppose I might as well die saving the universe, one more time!”

Einstein looked over to see Medenov’s concerned facial pattern, “Don’t worry my friend, I know what I’m doing.”

“Mitchell will need to be convinced,” replied Medenov.

“No worries,” spoke Einstein, assured, “there is only one path forward that will take us back to infinite pasts and infinite futures. Funny, this path requires us to go backwards.”

Einstein laughed a somewhat crazy laugh. He was talking about time travel, after all.

“You’re alluding to time travel?” asked Medenov.

Einstein shook his head yes, “What is important to realize is that all possible tangential outcomes in our universe are tied to the probabilistic avenues by which pre-space matter propagates itself via virtual particles that are neither real nor fake, but rather, a pattern of both depending on time’s ability to circularize.”

“Time can circularize?” asked a confused New Yorker, eavesdropping in on the conversation.

“Time’s ability to run in a loop isn’t actually as simple as replaying a video clip because time’s circularization requires micro-level changes to be pervasive and ubiquitous but also requires macro-level events to be rigorously defined by their algorithmically certain outcomes. The only time that time travel is a feasible, scientifically possible technique is when the wave function of a multiverse, or plexiverse has collapsed into a singular universe. Luckily, that is exactly what has happened to us,” said Einstein as if the onlooker would have any idea understanding of what he just said.

“Oh,” replied the onlooker, “okay, sure man. Are you some kind of Einstein impersonator?”

“Something like that,” replied Einstein.

                                                          9

As Alford sat in his seat in Stockholm, Sweden on December 10th, 2078 to receive his Nobel Prize Medal and Diploma he was anxious. Although he would never admit it he was also a little bit nervous.

His dark brown, piercing eyes queried across the audience and found familiar faces of colleagues he had known long ago, with faces and hair colors that hadn’t all aged as aggressively as Alford’s had. All of his colleagues could afford the epigenetic-neural chips that promoted the on switches for hair and hair color retainment. Alford could afford it as well, but simply chose not to subscribe to such new age nanory.

 Though clearly older looking than everyone in the room, Alford’s mind was acute and sharp, took quickly to tasks, found answers for questions that hadn’t even been asked yet, and took pleasure in being smarter than everyone he came into contact with, epigenetic-neural chip or not.

 Yet there was an urgent sadness in his life, a loneliness that could not be quelled. Alford did not consciously notice or acknowledge the ebbs and tides of his loneliness, but it certainly did exist. Who was it that said, “The most intelligent man on the Earth is the most lonely one.”?

Alford, though brilliant, was too brilliant. All men, innately, need other great men to become even greater men. In Alford’s deepest chasms of need, he needed someone to call a rival. Yet, for this question, Alford apparently had no answer. This question inevitably became a quest to find a person of his intellectual capabilities, and his inability to find this person left him alone at the top of the mental mountain.

Although Alford would certainly scoff at the idea that any real, intelligent competition existed, he relished the opportunity to prove his intellectual capacity across all the functions and domains of science that were applicable to his ever broadening endeavors.

The Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee stood at the podium as he kindly asked the winner of the Nobel Prize for Physiology to come accept his award. Alford heard his full name called and promptly stood up, giving a brief bow to the crowd to acknowledge their clapping. He realigned his white bowtie and proceeded to the podium.

Alford stepped up to the podium and the cordless, apparently levitating, microphone adjusted itself so as to be in the optimal position for rendering Alford’s forth coming speech audible to everyone listening, both in the audience, and abroad across the world.

Alford finished scanning the audience as they applauded his ascent to the podium. His acceptance speech was already memorized in his head. The Nobel Prize was his, and he deserved it. He smiled and nodded his head in acknowledgment that others were, indeed, acknowledging is accomplishments.

There were at least 500 hundred highly esteemed members of the scientific community in attendance; world-renowned physicists, chemists, biologists, all great thinkers alike. Yet, Alford knew that not a single one was capable of thinking on his level. “Maybe I’ll have to clone myself in order to get some competition,” Alford jokingly thought to himself. He chuckled, imagined himself talking to his cloned double about deep space travel to investigate black holes, refocused on the speech he was about to give, cleared his throat, and finally prepared to begin his speech.

Alford spoke, “Your Majesty, your Royal Highness, Mr. President, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen: I humbly accept the Nobel Prize for Physiology for creating cells that are able to synthesis large scale amounts of various proteins, amino acids, and molecules that all have extensions into many different benefits for the human species. All I was trying to do was make the cell large enough for my aging eyes.”

The audience laughed. None of their eyes were aging. They saw as brightly and as acutely as they ever had. Arthur C. Peabody had founded Optico Genetic a decade ago in light of his unlocking and mechanical mastering of the genetic provisions needed to properly prognostic and repair any unseen damage of the various parts of the human eye that may accrue over long periods of optical usage.

Tuxedoed men and well dressed women sat attentively as Alford dove into his speech, “My work will allow people of all ages to look at the inner workings of the cells much like those that make up all the life we see on this great planet of all, with the small exception of being substantially larger than any cell previously seen. Even more incredibly, hopefully it will ignite the imagination of some young, burgeoning scientist thirsty to observe the natural world who will one day be standing at this podium instead of me.”

Internally Alford was reveling in how much more satisfying this Nobel award felt than it did the first time. All those that left him were wrong. Peers did not validate his genius; the universe itself had done that. The universe had bowed to Alford, and in return, Alford had crowned himself royalty as sanctimonious as Einstein.

“In truth, I accept this award for all of the physicists, biologists, chemists, and engineers who’s work goes unheralded but pushes the ball of scientific advancement forward none the less. For science is a patchwork picture book with puzzle pieces that only come to fit together after many great men and women has solved it together,” said Alford, only half admitting internally that his accomplishments required others’ preceding contributions to science.

Alford continued his speech, “The things we have learned today will make way for the world tomorrow. I adhere to the historical insight that man has always wanted to push the frontier of conquest. Yet when man had spread over the Earth, people asked ‘What was left to search?’ and ‘What is left to discover?’.”

“So man decided to search beyond Earth into the universe. He became an astronaut made to saunter into the abyss of the universal constant that is eternal distances and infernal heavenly bodies,” said Alford eloquently as he painted a picture of the scope of man’s attempted conquest.

“Yet, I surmise,” said Alford, “that man, after attempting to conquer the frontier that is space, decided to conquer the frontiers of our minds as another means of determining all that is in and around us. With advances in neurological scanning we can now not only view the living brain but study and interpret the brain’s output functions. Our imaginations on screens and recording of our dreams have led to deep insights of the human psyche that are unparalleled in the history of man.”

 “I believe I have taken mankind’s scientific conquest one step further; much like all of the other great minds of history I have taken us to a world only I could’ve imagined. That is why I am dedicating this Nobel Prize to Albert Einstein, the only man who could have out-imagined me. A man that may have been even greater than me and a man I would have gladly called my peer.”

Alford finished his speech with ‘thank you’ after ‘thank you’ to the audience, voters, and his deceased parents. He turned away from the podium and began walking back to his seat. For an instant Alford felt a divine assurance in his life’s work, as if maybe someone had had a plan drawn out for Alford that he had, so far, executed with great acuity. He looked at the people in the audience as he walked back and noticed they all appeared, all together, to be avoiding his eye contact.

In his head Alford was wishing he really did have Einstein to talk with. Alford and Einstein sitting across a desk chopping at the quantum mechanical world like two of the finest samurai swung at enemies or two of the finest sculptures chipped away at their next masterpiece. It was at that moment that Alford came up with what he thought would be his greatest achievement ever.

Mitchell Alford, greatest mind of the 21st century, was going to bring Albert Einstein, greatest mind of the 20th, back to life.

[cincycinner]

Chapter 7

                               7

 Alford sat sequestered in this magnificent laboratory complex, often working alone and growing ever more bitter towards the rest of the world; introverted, alienated, and seemingly unable to come up with anything as incredible as ‘creating’ life. Alford had grown old and gray haired, but his eyes remained piercing and his mind remained sharp.

Alford had been spending most of his waking hours trying to maintain invisible, microscopic black holes inside of his vacuum chamber capable of reaching near zero temperatures. These microscopic black holes only lasted for fractions of seconds under the normal quantum physical environments found in the expanses of the universes’ space, but Alford was hoping being able to study, up close and personal, a black hole’s birth, life, and death would lead to advances in the understanding of not just a black hole’s existence, but all that existed in the known universe, including life and maybe even its meaning.  

Surprisingly, Alford never thought seriously of the dangers and unknown scenarios of propagating black holes into existence. Surely, if he had told the other people in his labs working on other projects what he was really doing in his vacuum lab they would have expressed their concerns, but Alford refrained from telling anyone. He wanted to keep it a secret until he was sure his work was bearing fruit, not that black holes bear fruit or anything, for that matter.

Alford, in his genius, had proposed that beaming his dark energy particles at microscopic black holes yielded the same effect on time’s spectrum that it had in his past experiments. That is to say, that fraction of a moment to Alford lasted much longer for the microscopic black hole he had created. By expanding the moment the miniature black hole got to experience, Alford hoped he could mine the black hole for the what it had been eating and turn the black hole’s diet into viable data.

Even crazier, with these black holes he was placing his Hydronium Solaris near them and then blasting them both with dark energy particles simultaneously. Alford believed the black hole and dark energy cancelled out each other’s effects on time. This insight, he believed, could possibly lead to astronaut led, close up exploration of black holes at the far reaches of the universe where the big bang may once have began it all.

 As much potential as his ideas had, Alford was bearing little fruit. He believed his microbe that could take incredibly high doses of radiation would be able to survive next to the miniature black hole he intended to create because of its genetic makeup that allowed it to thrive in radiation filled environments. His assertions were continually proved wrong when, much to his demure, his microbes were found deceased upon completion of each test run of his experiment.

Albert Einstein was born on March 14th 1879 in Württemberg, Germany. On March 14th, 2077 Alford sat at a table in his microbiological laboratory room of his laboratory complex in Princeton, New Jersey peering down a microscope. He hadn’t had any contact with another person in three weeks besides signing for a package from the mailwoman and turning down two girls who wandered to the front of the house trying to sell cookies. 

 Alford did not really notice or care that he had had such little human contact because he had been too busy setting up the specifications for his experiment, which he finally, that day, had finished. Although he did not realize it, he was lonely to the point where he was now talking out loud to himself. “This will work, it has to,” said Alford as he turned on the generator and watched the beginning of what he hoped to be groundbreaking work.

He patiently awaited the computer’s notification that anti-waves, signs of a black hole’s metabolism, had been detected. Computer modules blinked and beeped. Printers began to spew charts and graphs of every detail going on in the confines of Alford’s vacuum lab.

 Everything thing was going smoothly, Alford leaned back in his chair as his particle collider began emitting its guts. The machines revved and chattered the characteristic sounds of groundbreaking science. Alford knew his theoretical computations were sound; it was the physical universe he was worried about. More specifically, he was worried about its insistence on allowing itself to break its own rules.

Alford looked to the computer read out to see how the black hole formation was going and all documentation pointed towards the proper nuclear reconstruction required to hardwire colliding atoms into propagating a black hole and yet just before the point where Alford theorized and projected miniature black holes would form the power generator failed and with its failure went the fine tuned specs of the experiment. The specs would now need to be recalculated which left Alford days of work before he could try again. With the power outage went Alford’s experiment.

 Alford, full of anger over the lack of success after months of preparation, knocked his microscope off the lab table and sat their glaring in the dark as his microscope loudly crashed to the floor. The 100x objective piece of his microscope broke and careened itself halfway across the room. He put his hands to the sides of his head and rubbed his temples. Viewed from the side, his brook of a nose looked like a sharks fin jutting in and out of the agitated waters that were his temple rubbing hands.

For a few minutes Alford sat in the dark, illuminated solely by a shard of light perpetrating into the room by a sliver of window left uncovered by the blinds Alford had placed over it. For Alford, the silence was deafening and the darkness was palpable. He, for an instant, allowed himself some self reflection and saw shimmers of the shame he should have felt.

Then, with a buzz and a murmur the electricity came back on. Alford’s computer chimed on. Not that he noticed. Alford sat at the table with his hands on his head. Frustrated over his lack of success he could not figure out what he had done to draw such bad luck. Not that Alford believed in luck. “Luck is for fools,” thought Alford upon more than one occasion, although that is only sometimes statistically the case.

The computer monitor had been set to a screen saver with various scientific facts of that day in history. Alford looked up at the monitor and found himself staring at the iconic picture of Einstein sticking out his tongue. The caption below the picture read ‘Albert Einstein born today in 1879.’

 “Happy birthday Einstein,” said Alford as he chuckled, “I hope you were able to control your frustrations a little bit better than I just did when your equations and experiments failed you.”

Alford almost always kept perfect posture. Deflated from the power outage, he noticed an uncharacteristic slouch had crept onto his spine. Jostling in his chair to straighten up he looked down to see the broken parts of his microscope. “Well Albert, looks like I won’t be using that microscope anymore. You didn’t happen to get a microscope for your birthday, a microscope you’d so kindly lend me now? I got that one from my ex-wife on my birthday, and I don’t think she’d be one to get me another.”

Alford chuckled, “Talking to myself, and now talking to a person that’s not even alive.” Alford sat there staring at the microscope. An outside observer would have said that Alford was zoning out. Contrary to this idea though, Alford never zoned out, he only zoned in. Although Alford’s 100x objective was broken, his focus was legendary for its fortitude, strength, and magnitude.

It was at that moment while he was staring at his shattered, mitigated microscope that Alford came up with his next great idea. People like Thomas Brock were using the first microscopes of the 20th century to make great microscopic discoveries. Alford was the man that brilliantly came up with an idea that completely made meaningless the use of microscopy to view cells.

All matters of microbiology were always too small for the unaided human eye to see them. Rather than use electron microscopy to get blown up images of things incredibly small, Alford created the science that allowed him to make macro copies of cells with circumferences as large as pizzas bringing whole new puns to the phrase circumference equals pi times the radius squared. Apparently there are those that call pizzas ‘pies’.

By altering the biomolecular, environmental, and gravitational constraints that hindered cell size, Alford made the largest cells the world had ever seen. Visible to the naked eye were Golgi Apparati, Mitochondria, Nuclei, and Cytoplasm. Clear as day were chromosomes, chromatin, and DNA, all viewable during Metaphases, Interphases, and Anaphaseses of the cell.

“Remarkable Science” is what it was deemed on the covers of the science magazines Alford’s face adorned.

“Revolutionary” is what they called it as they began to offer Alford lifetime achievement awards that Alford would unilaterally decline on the premise that his lifetime was not even close to finishing its achievements.

That being said, he again was awarded, and accepted, the Nobel Prize in 2078 for his groundbreaking, and microscope breaking, discoveries. Realigned were the stars and reaffirmed was the brightness of his own thought to be fading star.

[cincycinner]

Chapter 6

                                            6

Trans-Humanism, in the mid 21st century, became a dominant thread of cultural normalcy.

Eventually it became realized that prejudice, bigotry, irrational behaviors, and pre-disposition towards destruction and dissolution were traits that could not be uprooted or subverted from humanity’s coat-trails. It turns out, these were inextricable fibers that directly caused a worldwide, man-made, mass extinction.

Although this outcome potentially, although not assuredly, could’ve been avoided, ultimately this forlorn disaster proved the final breaking point for what had become fairly ubiquitous global standards of living by the early 21st century.

The massive die offs across kingdoms and phylum of life coincided with food shortages that had been predicted and warned of for decades. Global food supply chain decisions required creating an entire industry of Aero-Agriculture and Aqua-Agriculture whereby large swaths of global food production were scaled and grown over the Mid-Atlantic and Pacific Oceans as well as in solar-plane hydro-gardens.

Simply put, with land based food production in a crisis it became a massive humanitarian effort to maintain food chains across almost all of the globe’s ecosystems. Never before had man’s architecture of knowledge on the tree of life been more important.

As species after species found its way into extinction a group of research firms started a Re-Speciation 2100 campaign. They were maneuvering to use deep-learning techniques via their patented “DIVERSICLONE” ‘toolkit’ that allowed them to extrapolate out the many genetic variances and quirks that would make up a healthy, robust, re-populated species.

Ultimately the ethics of re-speciation were quickly disparaged and panned, with government agencies working in international accord to uproot any and all efforts to do so. Yet, once a species had been re-entered into the population the general public’s response was adulation and adoration. The Re-Speciation 2100 campaign had turned these researchers into global icons, and global criminals. Having admitted to seeding clouds decades ago, governments released perfectly created designer clouds that made the likeness of all the animals intended to be reincarnated like the phoenix. To be clear the phoenix was not genetically created and put on earth during this campaign, despite the prior sentence’s syntax disspecifications.

Most recently the African elephant, hyena, lion, cheetah, gazelle, giraffe, rhino, and various fowl were reintroduced to what had become a mammal-less savannah. A full scale drop of hundreds of thousands of cloned animals had been performed seemingly overnight. As Africans awoke mid-summer 2087 they realized a part of the Old-World had returned to them.

This campaign for re-speciation was a rousing success, a “Guerilla War” to bring Gorillas back from extinction. One of the leaders of this group was also, at the time, the world’s most renowned TransHumanist – Dr. James Ratheneau.

    “Are you okay?” asked Ivan, shaking Einstein, collapsed on the stairs leading up to his apartment.

Einstein, awake, looked around at his surroundings and then himself, “Yes, I appear to be alright.”

“Let’s get you up then,” spoke the lumbering Ivan as he grabbed Einstein and up-righted him.

“Did you see who dropped me here?” asked Einstein, very confused and out of sorts at what had happened to him.

“I didn’t, but I do have security cameras and will pull up the footage. Why? Did somebody knock you out? You don’t look bruised or hurt?”

“Someone confronted me after my presentation at the University. I was walking towards my bicycle. Speaking of, where is my bicycle?”

“I’m not sure, but probably still where you left it. It’ll be fine, I’m sure,” replied Ivan.

Ajit ran out from inside the apartment to find Einstein and Ivan on the stoop.             “Oh Thank God! We’ve been so worried, we haven’t heard from you since yesterday. We were starting to think you had been kidnapped!”

Einstein rubbed his read, “I think I was.”

“Kidnapped?” asked Ajit, laughing as if Einstein was joking, Ivan, however realized something was amiss.

“Let’s get you inside,” spoke Ivan softly, as he shepherded the confused genius inside, “Medenov is here, we were about to file a missing person’s report and start a full-scale search for you.”

“I appreciate that I have so many people looking out for me,” spoke Einstein, truly appreciate of all that these 21st century friends had done for him, and would do for him.

The three men worked up the stairs, a light wind rolled across the way, only giving a faint reminder of all the autumnal offerings that used to demarcate the arrival of fall. Down the avenue a man was working on selling his last turkey and, in turn, was looking at the one he had set aside to take back to his family; it was the day before Thanksgiving.

Einstein was far too old to be a father, and yet he found himself surrounded by his large family on what was turning out to be the best Thanksgiving he could ever remember. He had reestablished himself authentically, and intelligently, back into a world that really did need him.

Thanksgiving had been turned into a global holiday celebrating the nuclear disarmament that was always unbelievably necessary, but only recently realized. Thank God the world hadn’t been blown up in a nuclear holocaust. Amen.

“Here’s to Albert,” spoke Ivan as he lifted a full glass of red wine, “the 20th century man who has shown the future why the past is always needed in the present. You have left an indelible mark on all of us.”

“Thank you my friend,” answered Einstein with gratitude, “but it is truly all of you I should be thanking. You have all shown me over the course of time just how innovative and technologically superior the modern brain can be.”

“I don’t know about that Albert,” replied a young beautiful woman, clearly in love with him.

“That’s the beautiful part about inquiry, you don’t ever have to know a thing at all to take part in true discovery,” Einstein commented.

“What is the craziest thing you felt when you were at the edge of the universe? The spatial plateau?” asked Dr. Medenov, carving away at the turkey.

“My particles thought for me in a plural singularity?” replied Einstein as he continued the procession of passing side dishes in front of him.

“Explain that so it makes sense?” asked a confused Amit.

“There, in reality, is no such thing as a solitary singularity,” replied Einstein as he realized the group he was speaking to hadn’t really been fully brought up to speed.

“The beauty of light being characteristically particle and wave is that it becomes increasingly impossible to capture all of it once is has started to disperse, simply being as fast as it is. Exotic, faster than light particles absolutely exist and permeated our universe before normal particulate matter began manipulating energy exchanges in real time and space. Able to exist pre and post space, these exotic particles are quantum entangled embodiments of a whirlpool of near infinite energetic capacity that in turn spurn the a rotational spectrum of randomized physical properties and realities depending on configurations over unrealized time, meaning they all happen instantly if necessary.”

“If necessary?” asked Ivan.

“Theoretically, all of these configurations are observable via non-embodied conscious interactions. Done properly, we could recreate the wave function of the plexiverse.”

“How could we accomplish this?” asked Dr. Medenov, growing increasingly worried.

“We’re going to need Mitchell Alford,” replied Einstein as he began to eat his Thanksgiving meal, “we’re going to need to find some nuclear materials.”

“This is a bad joke, I can assure everyone,” spoke Medenov.

“It most certainly is not,” replied Einstein, “Time travel requires an energy signature by which to identify and correlate past positions across the galactic plane. Seeing as the earth and sun are constantly moving across the galaxy, there is never simply a super easy explanation of where the planet will be.”

“Isn’t the earth a nuclear signature, in and of itself, depending on when we travel back in time to?” asked Ivan.

“Yes, absolutely!” exclaimed Einstein, “If we were to travel back to the nuclear age we would easily be able to locate planet earth without any problem. However, seeing as we very recently entered the age of nuclear disarmament and decommissioning of all nuclear energy plants across the globe, the time period we will be required to enter into would have no nuclear signature.”

“Sorry, but isn’t easier to just let our universe be all there is?” asked red headed girl name Cat.

“Fatalistic as this sounds, the cosmological consequences of there being no one and nothing to observe the plexiverse at all are incredibly scary,” replied Einstein.

“So nuclear materials and Dr. Alford are our grocery list?” asked Medenov, unfortunately convinced.

“Happy Thanksgiving everybody,” spoke Einstein as he smiled warmly and ate what must’ve seemed like close to his weight in festive food, “it is quite a delight to be a part of this nuclear family on such a joyous day.”

[cincycinner]

CHAPTER 5 EARLY

     5

After Alford was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2055, at the age of 33, many people in the scientific community were anxiously sitting and waiting to see what great achievement Alford had in store for the world next. Even Alford himself assumed he would need no time at all to brighten his star even more. Indeed, his star did brighten. He both started his own vibrant research and development firm and became a crucial member of a government organization that aimed at curtailing the many splendiferous effects that rapid technologization had wrought on the world.

Yet no matter what wavelength of time, the years pass quickly and over his career Alford did many respectable things for science, but nothing that garnered the respect and intrigue like creating life from scratch had.

During these less illustrious years Alford did do one thing he was very proud of. He bought a plot of land just outside of Princeton University and constructed the state of the art research laboratory that he had always dreamed. The laboratory was painstakingly built by contractors that had to listen to every minutia of Alford’s master vision for his grand personal playground for tinkering with the universe. The state of the art building was built behind, but connected to, a 19th century built house that Alford and his family came to call home. The ‘complex’, as Alford called it, was placed on 5 acres of wooded land that even included a penetrating creek that bristled across the length of the property and gnarled pines that looked like they had withstood the storms of time with many stories to tell stored between each historic ring.

The outer hallway of the complex had outer walls made of glass that allowed anyone on the inside clear, beautiful views of both nature and the night sky. The outer hallway encompassed an inner square of rooms and laboratories of various purposes that were, for all intensive purposes, all of the greatest things the world had to offer in the scientific realm. One could work on particle physics in one lab while simultaneously monitoring the growth stages of a genetically modified batch of microbes ready to be flash frozen in the chemically cooled temperature chamber that often allowed Alford to run his tests at near Absolute Zero temperature.

The home attached to Alford’s lab was incredibly beautiful. Red brick, roman pillars, and beautiful craftsmanship on the interior wood paneling of the steps made Eileen and Maddie immediately fall in love with it. Yet, to Alford, it was his complex that was truly breathtaking and loveable.

Sadly, while Maddie and Eileen were busy in the world of a family, Alford was never truly able to release himself from the dreams of the world he wanted to bring to fruition. As time passed more and more of Alford’s free hours became working hours. He was spending a disproportionate amount of time inside the complex as opposed to his house. There were more and more nights occurring where Eileen slept alone with Alford toiling away, dinner uneaten, a family life vacated.

How Alford did not notice his paternal failures had started to reach his father’s heights shall go down as a historical mystery. His father had etched in him the very burning that made him both great as a scientist, and terrible at anything beyond the scope of science. Where Alford’s father Michael was drunk on ethyl-alcohol, he was drunk on the idea that knowledge of the unknown filled the void in his soul while the known quantity, his family, slipped further and further from his universe-stretching grasp.

Alford was not a jovial man. He was a calculator in a man’s body. Many of his peers in the scientific community found him to be unemotional, distant, arrogant, hard to please, and even harder to talk to. Eventually the fervor over his discovery and achievement faded, and along with it, the celebrity status Alford had initially obtained from it. His grants began to dry up and Alford found himself footing the bill way more than half of the time for his scientific endeavors. Not that money mattered. What money Alford may have needed before and after he became a world famous scientist was all but delivered to him when he married into the Schmidt family, only one of the wealthiest families the Eastern Coast of the US had to offer.

Alford’s laboratory complex was a beautiful work of scientific ingenuity, but even though Alford’s areas of expertise, research, and knowledge were far and away the best the research world had to offer, what was once a bustling complex full of associates, interns, students, and scientists, soon dwindled as ties became severed, relationships became strained, students graduated, and the clout that Alford’s name and pedigree had drawn became less virulent. Not to mention, the only person that seemed to be willing to work for free was Alford himself. In his mind Alford’s productivity continued to skyrocket, while in reality, his human life crashed and burned.  

Some of the people and colleagues that he thought were friends became distant and hard to reach. Without other people coming around the house the relationship between Eileen and Alford became tenuous and, for Eileen, unbearable. She couldn’t bear letting her daughter see her parents bickering. Moreover, Eileen could no longer fight a man who refused to lose an argument. His wife divorced him because of ‘irreconcilable differences’ and moved out, with Maddie, in the spring of 2067. 

In the late fall of 2067 Alford’s father collapsed from a stroke that left him alive, but unconscious. Michael Alford lived another four days after his stroke. Utterly                                           k,  98AAS likely out of duty than contrition.

Eileen did not show up to Alford’s father’s funeral, she had met another man in Philadelphia. His name was Matthew Tisdale, although, Alford didn’t really care who he was. Tisdale was a successful, affluent lawyer, though not Eileen’s divorce lawyer, and when Alford met him he even found Eileen’s new love interest likeable. He told himself he was glad they were divorcing because it left him even more time to work in his laboratory. He told himself she would come back.

The funeral on October 10th, 2067 for Michael James Alford, born on May 21st of the year 1997, was a small, well planned out funeral that was enacted as efficiently as Alford believed such a situation called for. The readings talked of reaping what you sow, and of the great existence that good men came to when they expired from the earth. The priest expressed both sadness and great hope over the loss of men.

The death of his father left Alford feeling bare to the wind in a way. He had no doubts that he had proven his father to be a fool for having such ill wishes towards his son. Michael had always made Alford fear and feel inferior while he was a child. Alford’s intelligence had been his life’s denial of this concept. Would Alford have become so great with a father less irate and drunk than Michael had been?

Alford’s success certified his firm belief in the manifest destiny that had come to dominate his life, but this success never prostrated his father. Michael never sought reconciliation with his only son. No achievement could woo Michael Alford away from his alcoholism just as no alcoholic father could have swayed Alford away from his scholastic and scientific achievements.  The two were inseparably and irreparably intertwined inside each other’s reason to live.

Nevertheless, Alford buried his father in the designated plot of land graciously laid out next to his mother, as well as countless members from his father’s lineage. Here Alford caught a glimpse of his inevitable mortality. Alford knew he was smart enough to cheat and out maneuver death, but not arrogant enough to believe he could become completely invincible to it. He knew one day he would be laid down next to his father, and no one would know the disputes and turmoils between the two, only the kinship and similarities of their name and bones.

[cincycinner]

Evan Thomas McFadden Presents E=MC SQUARED PART II : EXPERIMENTS IN THE REIDONCTRINATION OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT

                 3

On May 10th, 2055, Mitchell Alford stood at a podium unfurling his findings to the academic world. “With DNA as a blueprint it is easy to properly replicate, package, and place the constituents of cells appropriately within themselves so that they can then assemble and make the sentient beings that we humans are. Our bodies, in fact, live by these DNA blueprints every day,” said Alford as the presentation slides began flickering images and words behind him.

Alford looked around the room, noticing the ornate gold backdrop and Greco-roman architecture of the hall that made a purely scientific congregation seem quite religiously tinged. “Replication of life is relatively easy for us and our cells because these cells of our bodies have maps and guidelines encrypted into our DNA that lay out the basic framework by which our molecular and microscopic lives are made possible,” said Alford.

“However, without DNA as a guideline it was unknown to science how to coerce inorganic elements and organic molecules into the proper synthesized state that would yield what science has deemed ‘life’. This idea of life requires the organism be able to grow, reproduce, adapt, and ultimately, die. I stand here before you today having created that life,” said Alford as he stood at a podium looking out into the lecture hall at Princeton University in New Jersey.

He had graduated from Princeton Magna Cum-Laude. As a student Alford had felt like a guest and a student amongst many of the minds he wished to outshine. Getting A+ after A+ in his Princeton professor’s classes and courses wasn’t nearly enough. He now stood in front of the podium feeling as if he had made the cerebral summit. The professors, researchers, and scientists around, to him, were now guests in their own place of worship, guests to the great achievements that Alford was about to unfurl to the world. To know and explain the universe was Mitchell Alford’s crown jewel of a goal, and to own it was his greatest gambit.

As Alford spoke he looked at the tenured professors listening intently to his lecture while they pretended to like him. There in the front row were Dr. Rumenhov and his extended, drawn-out lectures accompanying his extended, as if drawn out, mustache, Dr. McPherson and his trickily phrased exams, Dr. Schroeder and his pastel colored v-neck sweaters, and Dr. Sherman and her aged beauty that made it almost hard for Alford to concentrate during Biochemistry and had led on at least one occasion to the most impure solvent Mitchell Alford ever produced. Alford, deep down, loathed them all.

“What I have done has been hundreds of years in the making,” said Alford as he looked into the audience, “and my accomplishment has come only on the shoulders of other men like me who had the dedication to improve life. What I have successfully done is applied a newly discovered technique to the base constituents that make up what we call life and yielded viable, single celled organisms capable of showing all signs of what we would scientifically call ‘life’.”

Alford stopped, took a drink from his glass of water, and continued as the 3D holographic presentation switched between holograms to his left, “Condensed dark energy particles aimed at matter produce an effect on time that produces a stretching and elasticity of time’s spectrum. Much like how there are different wavelengths of light, some short in origin and others long, there are also different wavelengths of time. To go more in depth, and more into hypotheticals, I believe it to be completely possible that much like the different wavelengths of lights add up to white light, so too the different wavelengths of time add up to one time.”

The 3D hologram shifted and started to show what looked like a ball splitting into smaller, spiraling balls that fettered out from the division, “Shifting and altering time as an atom splits allows “odd” particles such as quarks to spin out like planets leaving a solar system in a very testable and identifiable way that would otherwise be impossible. The stretching of time, elastic in a way, allows what would otherwise be statistically anomalous, mostly by chance, reactions and sub-molecular conformations to chemically occur that would normally take a much longer time to take place and observe than is currently feasibly testable.”

Alford stopped, took another drink of water from the Styrofoam cup that sat on his podium and continued, “To get back to the point though, I have found that by applying highly condensed dark energy to matter there is a shift in time’s spectral moment around the matter from a long wavelength to a short wavelength.”

“In my experiments I did indeed change the wavelength of time inside my laboratory. However, I have found that this change in time could not be viewed subjectively. Simply put, a person being blasted with dark energy particles would not be able to notice a difference in the speed of time,” Alford paused and hoped that his points were sinking in.

 Alford continued, “This being said, by bombarding the chemical and biomolecular constituents of a living cell with dark energy particles one can manipulate time’s spectrum on these molecules. Much like a traveler at the speed of light in Einstein’s relativity, the molecules can never know or notice time’s shift. Outside of the laboratory conducting the experiment time goes as normally as it does here for us, but inside the laboratory molecules would be experiencing a million moments within each moment the subjective, human observer was experiencing outside, beyond the quantum jungle.”

Alford paused, expecting questions, expecting for everyone to think he was crazy. Yet, the crowd was silent, silent and staring. Finally someone raised their hand to ask a question. It was Dr. McPherson. He was wearing a baby blue v-neck sweater. “Can the reverse happen? Can you bombard something with dark matter particles and make them experience time more slowly relative to the observer?”

“Ah good question John,” replied Alford, “no I have found no experimental evidence to support the reversal of these particles effects on time’s inherent speed, and it is dark energy I was harnessing not dark matter.”

“How did you harness dark energy particles then, Mitchell?” asked Dr. McPherson rather rushedly.

“Dark energy particles do not naturally radiate from any of the radioactive elements but can be coerced to dismissal from their elemental bodies by simple fluctuation of the radioactive element’s molecular quantized  temporal ability to relate with time and its physical surrounding both macroscopically and microscopically. In short, please read my now published findings if you’d really like to understand this.

Alford waited for any other questions but then continued with his speech turned lecture, “Starting with simple molecular and nucleic acid components I then experimentally added variable levels of the keystone elements that make up living cells.

After a figuratively exponentially massive number of runs at different variables and varying levels of what I have deemed ‘bio-necessities’ the ingredients properly assimilated and led to an entity that resembled a primordial cell in that the organism was capable of most normal functions of what would scientifically be deemed ‘life’ such as literally, exponential growth.”  

The presentation flashed to an electron microscope picture of Alford’s microbe, “With the help of my fellow researchers we decided to don the new life form with the name Hydronii Solaris. This name arose from, and is attributed to, its unique setting of origin because although our cell was created in the confines of my laboratory complex, our work attempted to recreate the characteristics of a micro-physical environment close to the sun that was receiving extremely high doses of radiation. I believe this radiation plays a very formative roll in life’s creation.”

“In the presence of blasts of dark energy high temperatures, and radiation, I believed mutational conformations of complex molecules and selective permeability and diffusion of radioactive species of hydrogen and helium may possibly occur.”             “Furthermore, I believed this cell’s metabolism would embark upon the journey of stripping Helium-4 atoms to create alpha particles and using the leftover hydrogen both for metabolic and replication pathways.”

“After thorough calculations and experimentation my beliefs were confirmed by the creation of the Hydronii Solaris cell. Interestingly enough, under the temperature, pressure, and gravitational constraints of the various environments I was attempting to replicate what came to life was a Silicon based cell better suited for high temperatures and the sun’s infernal radiation. Also, yes, that is correct, I successfully created and observed nuclear fusion inside a living cell ”

“Progressions of experiments with H. Solaris have provided us with glimpses of what Silicon based life forms would look like, including an incorporated organelle filled sac full of magnesium that I believe may have various roles in the physiological makeup of the cell such as metabolism and more interestingly, promotion of a electro-magnetic field that may help stabilize the cell’s structure or even give the microbe higher level consciousness. Not only that, but this magnetic field appeared to allow the cell to dictate when an atom it was metabolically interested in chose to shed it’s particle.”

The crowd seemed in awe of Alford, he even for a moment felt as if they were being reverent. He always had believed he was the smartest man in the room, but now he had empirical evidence. They asked questions to which Alford had answers, and after shaking hands and talking to some highly esteemed peers, he found himself sifting through government grant offers as well as private offers to run research and development firms ranging from privatized space exploration and disease eradication firms to human cloning and pre manifestation disease prevention, a new endeavor aimed at taking what was termed a ‘living census’ of various background viral and bacterial entities that had yet to manifest themselves as pathogenic to the human body. As the 21st century unfolded the continued whitewashing of mankind’s genetic and microbial floras had left many, to most, of the citizens of planet earth more immune system inefficient than any other time in human history.

Many in the scientific community hailed Alford’s work as a benchmark point in history where man was not simply a liver of life but now also a giver of life. Alford’s life was like a sparkle in the sun. With his scientific achievements gaining worldwide notoriety Alford began touring the nation’s universities administering lecture upon lecture about the beauty of his science and the future it would unveil.

It was on the lecture road that he met and married a physicist named Eileen Schwartz, a charismatic and brilliant woman who convinced Alford to move into the bowels of New York City with her. Eileen was a tall, slender woman with beautiful brown hair and eyes that were Alford’s favorite shade of green. Those eyes, for a time, could convince Alford to do anything.

The two bought a new house in Manhattan that many of their friends gawked at, as well as a vacation home on a lake in Michigan that Alford intended to spend the rest of his summers at. The two began a happy family that was made one person bigger with the addition of a daughter, Maddie Alford on July 16th, 2058. With Eileen proudly enjoying being a mother, Alford got back to working on what he hoped would be his next landmark scientific achievement.

                                                       4

Einstein found himself outside on that windy winter evening, attending the funeral of the relative he wished he had gotten to know. Modern life affords humans few moments to mourn together over shared loss, but these moments are the hallmarks of humanity; making sure the loss never becomes insurmountable.

The wind had blown much of the cloud cover away earlier in the day, and left the night crystal clear, and cold.

“Here we are today to commemorate and remember Elsa Einstein-Lidell one last time before she enters her final celestial resting place,” spoke the rocket scientist as he looked from behind his glasses between the star-gazing audience and New York Harbor. Lady Liberty there to pay tribute.

Off in the distance on an adjacent barge a rocket began tailing flames and jetting up through the atmosphere.

“Is this something that lots of people do now?” asked Einstein, amazed, “Shoot their body or ashes up into space?”

His distant cousin Shiloh laughed, “Yo no one can afford this type of send off man, this is pure Einstein money.”

His cousin had apparently not recognized who he was saying ‘Yo’ to. No one ever really did anymore. Everyone only remembered Einstein when he was old and grey. Now young again, Einstein often thought about his new world anonymity and wondered how he’d fare in the hyperbolic world of 21st century celebrity as people began to seek him out again. As ‘famous’ and ‘recognizable’ as Albert Einstein was in the 20th century, he never felt he had become part of the ‘wealthy’ class then. Yet, here he stood amongst his descendants incredibly proud of the wealth and prosperity his hard work brought them all. He thought of Abraham, and of his own father, and of whether Einstein would one day have a second funeral.

 “This never gets any easier,” said Einstein to Shiloh. As old as Einstein was when he first passed away in the 1950s, he got to see his fair share of funerals and memorials for people he had known that passed before him.

Shiloh looked at Einstein and put his hand on his shoulder to console what Shiloh thought was a grieving Einstein, “Hang in there man, it’s us young Einstein’s that have to carry the torch. Time to head to the bars to see them off into the cosmos, cosmopolitans on me.”

“Unfortunately,” replied Einstein, truly wishing he could join, “I have a scholarly engagement I have to attend, but thanks for the invitation.”

“Oh, okay Albert,” spoke Shiloh in a way that Albert felt Einstein’s had grown to say in response to any other Einstein in the family attempting to look smart. He chuckled and hoped that was the case.

 Einstein had to rush to make it in time to his prior engagement, as a sign of good faith to the institution baring his name, Einstein found himself giving a presentation of his recent publishing to the Einstein College of Medicine. He was, instead, intending on going over some of his more recent findings.

Professors and moderators worked to hush and seat the crowd. Dr. Toschdale announced, as best he could, the distinguished guest.

            Einstein approached the podium, amidst applause.

            “Good evening everyone,” spoke Einstein, rather subdued.

            The crowd responded in turn to the revered guest speaker.

            “As has already been presented to the public, I am confident general relativity will be properly synthesized with my new understanding of what predominates the edge of our material universe.”

            A background panel flashed on and displayed the signatures of the cosmic background radiation that had been well studied for now, well over a century.

            “This interconnected web is almost a carbon copy, and in some ways quite literally a ‘carbon’ copy of the pathways that were formed by the very particles that, even now, are creating the edge of the universe. These particles, as they traverse farther and farther away from the material universe, have a corresponding quantum entangled particle or ‘entity’ that currently exists in said material universe of ours, the cosmos.”

            “As these particles at the edge of our universe move further away from the material that it is quantum entangled with, a tension eventually arises and produces an energy that becomes evident to us as ‘expansion of space’.”

            The panel began to display the various, all varying, calculated expansion rates of space that many studious minds had determined via many different methods and tests.

            “In fact, all of these differences can easily be explained. For instance, the reason the expansion rate is significantly smaller when looking at the red-shift of light from the big bang’s cosmic background radiation compared to that of light emitted by a rapidly spinning quasar is, in fact, because the particles permeating and creating the edge of space, and entangled with all of our material universe, were much, much closer to us at the dawn of the universe than now.”

            Einstein stopped to take a drink of water and, rather simply, breath.

            “Now, another question that arises is why the expansion rate appears to be speeding up. Similarly, this concept can be explained by the continuing growing distance between the material universe and the particles creating its edge; this growing distance, as mentioned, creates a ‘tension’ which inherently brings with it an energy field capable of transmuting space and time and providing necessary energy for countless quantum processes, quantum tunneling being the chief constituent of the group.”

            Those in attendance all sat silent, taking in as much as they could, almost surely recording and saving the presentation within their ocular’s cloud-mined for review and note taking later.

            “One area that is unclear to me, at present, is whether these particles pioneering our universe’s edge are quantum entangled to matter, or space. Also, it is unclear whether these particles are actually moving faster than the speed of light, or simply at the speed of light, yet augmented to appear faster.”

            “I also wanted to begin to discuss with you all, for the first time with the general public, how this all ties in to the existence of multiple universes.”

            The audience gasped and many broke from their enchanted gaze on Einstein to discuss with whomever was next to them. Disbelief, but maybe more interestingly, belief was coursing through the audience. A lot of this, as explained by Einstein, seemed to make sense. Did this mean Einstein had ways to prove the multi-verse existed? Many of them hoped they were about to find out universe-shattering news.

“I will be quick and to the point,” spoke Einstein, quickly drawing the attention of the room.

“There is only one universe now,” spoke Einstein into the microphone attached to the podium, “Out of infinite possibilities and quandaries of time and space has come one collapsed wave function whereby our ability to perceive and propagate the very time and space we are intricately intertwined with has become the very backbone of all reality.”

“We aren’t part of a multiverse?” asked one unconvinced woman in the front row.

“We used to be,” replied Einstein, “we used to be, but mankind’s mingling with quantum realm manipulations has led to some potentially irrevocable rifts.”

“That’s a pretty vague response,” said the woman, her name was Paige.

“Well,” spoke Einstein, trying to find the words, ”the best way to describe it is to not describe it at all, but show you. However, I am not able to currently do so. Therefore, I shall describe it to you.”

The audience chuckled at Einstein’s way of conjecture.

“We shall start with an assertion ‘every black hole exists in the exact same place across each universe of the multiverse’.”

“Can this be proven?” asked an interested onlooker.

            “No,” replied Einstein, “but the key concept is in viewing the universe at the scale of interstellar objects like stars and black holes. As any, and all, matter streams across the universe based on the pathways created by the particles I posit are creating the edge of space, currently, the pathways and origin points for all major celestial objects is predetermined, with degrees of degrading certainty as time passes.”

            “Degrees of degrading certainty?” asked a confused audience member.

            Einstein paused, and then continued, “When researchers mapped the filaments of dark matter connecting all of the galaxies of the universe they were unable to ascertain the reason behind these filaments. Simply put, the dark matter filaments are the primordial highways that particulate matter used to quantum-hone to whichever galactic system they’re destined for.”

            “Particles have destinies?” asked one of the faculty members, bemused.

            “Only in a relativistic sense that a free particle is always a moving one, and in that movement, a yielded, predictable outcome. More importantly, ever particle inevitably has one outcome and that is to become part of the non-outcome output that eats all particles, a black hole.”

            Einstein had the academic audience tuned in and listening like FDR was giving a fireside chat to the American masses.

“Every class of black hole ever to have existed in this observable universe of ours up until very recently was one that was capable of existing in every universe without collapsing the potentiality of the wave function that can be used to describe variances between various universes within a multiverse. As many physicists theorized while I was away, there are many distorted portions of the greater cosmic reality that are unable to adhere to the general physical principles that we find threaded through almost every corner of our cosmos.”

            “Up until very recently?” inquired one listening mind, “are you to say that the manipulatory work of minds like Dr. Mitchell Alford on microscopic black holes has directly led to the destruction of our multiverse, your plexiverse?”

            “Absolutely, yes,” replied Einstein.

            “What are the consequences?” asked a bemused scientist in the crowd, “how deterministic has the world around us just become?”

            “Mankind only existed in a fraction of a fraction of the universe,” replied Einstein, “Now we are potentially all that is left. This leads to a very real dilemma from both a quantum, and cosmological, standpoint. To put it mildly, if we were to cease existing, so too would the known history of the universe.”

            “That sounds quite far-fetched,” spoke Dr. Ambrose from the back portion of the audience, “There are inherently very large parts of the equation that you are leaving out when discussing such deterministic things.”

            “Truly, I am,” replied Einstein, “For instance there is a possibility that our universe actually requires mankind and all life on earth go extinct. Life is not meant to manifest from one solar system and seed creation across the cosmos. Location, location, location, and for proper cosmological constructing life can only become a relevant part of the pattern as a tertiary observer of structures both larger and smaller in scale than it can fully comprehend simply by being differentiated from them.”

            “Most of this ties into our misunderstandings of wormholes,” inserted Einstein, trying to steer the conversation in the right direction, “And by misunderstanding I mean that wormholes exist, almost exclusively, within tunnels of time, without the distension of space.”

            “How is that possible for particulate mass?” asked the continually bemused scientist,”

            “It is not, at all,” replied Einstein, “However, the information that the material universe is constantly transferring in its various forms is in and of itself capable of being reduced to, and propagated within wormholes, disregarding the material vectors by which the information is transferring.”

            “Oh, okay, please go on,” replied the no-longer bemused scientist as he began to grasp where Einstein was starting to go. If only Alford were here, Einstein thought to himself.

            “Another problem that our modern scientific minds must come to accept is that space is not a ubiquitous, interchangeable nothingness. Counter-intuitively, one must understand that ‘space’ itself is an encodable language capable of transmitting information when compressed, or again counter-intuitively, freed from having to be ‘space’ in the traditional sense at all. So again, when I refer to tunnels of time, without the distension of space, I truly mean space without the inherent cosmic pull all known space in our material universe experiences. The best comparison I can give is an astronaut floating in gravity-less space. Space, itself, experiences a very different reality when it does, and doesn’t have to interact with matter.”

            “A lot of this sounds like information theory,” inserted a rather loud individual in the front row.

            “Information, in flux, is incapable of establishing relativity with the known universe until coming into contact with other information. During this flux, the past/present/future specifications by which that information exists at all normally expand to include multiple tunnels of time, sequential timelines if you will. The chances of information being lost while in flux is normally at, or near, zero. However, in our current state of things, the rate of information loss while in flux is disturbingly high, depending on the medium by which the information is transferring.”

            “Shouldn’t we be seeing an effect in information processing output across many spectrums if this were the case?” asked another scientist, one whose eyebrows made his glasses doubly as distinctive.

            “Counter-intuitively,” spoke Einstein in reply, “These effects, on a Super-Macro scale, have started at the edge of our universe and sent a ripple affect inwards towards us. The rate of information loss, by the time it reaches back to the source of the tear in cosmic relativity, will be so stammering by the time a black hole reaches our local part of stellar space there will be little, if any, information left to strip from our local particle structures.”

            “What happens when this ripple affect reaches it’s point of origin?” asked an interested mind, “How fast is the ripple moving?”

            “That I do not have an actual answer for,” replied Einstein, “ for we are absolutely in uncharted territory. My best understanding of our situation would seem to indicate a re-architecturing of the laws by which the known universe operates. From a cosmological standpoint, the likelihood of galactic interstellar creation to occur in future universes would be incomprehensibly low, if not outright impossible. ‘Life’ may not be a construct that is possible in such a plane. Time, space, energy…none of these would be inherently necessary either.”

            “These are all hypothetical scenarios that are unproven and untestable,” replied a keen mind.

            Einstein has no answer for the man.

            “You, of course, are correct my friend,” replied Einstein, “I do intend on providing substantial inroads for the testing and verification of my concepts and theories just like I have always done. I have no intention of usurping the standard we have all built as intelligent, reason loving people.”

             The moderator stepped onto the stage and, kindly parting Einstein to the side of the podium, mentioned to the audience that Einstein was on a tight schedule and was required at another presentation. The audience stood and gave their loudest applause to Einstein yet.

            He did not feel he deserved the applause, considering he just broke the news to the world that they were potentially in the greatest cosmic danger one could ever be in. Yet, everyone seemed exuberant, they were all excitedly chattering.

            Despite the early 21st centuries adherence to being able to use digital cookie crumbs and fingerprints to trace user location and activity in real time, eventually proper legislation passed that, pared with properly encrypted quantum computing capabilities, allowed a majority of both web traffic, and real traffic, to go on unhindered by unwanted and unnecessary, unfettered surveillance.

This allowed celebrities to regain, on some level, anonymity when desired. Einstein, now nearly back to being a full blown celebrity, did not have to try very hard to blend in. Almost all men had facial hair now, it seemed to him, and the trappings of youth still afforded him more anonymity than if he were still his older, iconic self.

Einstein finished thanking some of the benefactors that brought him on stage, shook hands with a few dozen dedicated fans, and after gathering his things, found himself walking outside towards his bicycle.

Never considered to be a fast walker, Einstein was surprised to feel someone intertwine their left arm with is right and proceed to forcibly quicken the pace that Einstein and the unknown assailant were going at.

“Dr. Alford deserves better than having you on stage assaulting his good name telling everyone that his groundbreaking work on black hole propagation has endangered all of humanity and the known universe,” spoke the woman, trying to be deep-voiced and slightly raspy as if older.

“Take your hands of me, at once!” replied Einstein, trying, but failing, to remove himself from the tandem.

“You have to understand something, I am not your enemy. I am part of an organization capable of providing resources and outlets to you beyond your wildest imagination. You are in far more danger than you realize.”

“I imagine so,” replied Einstein, aghast, “seeing as I am currently being assailed where just minutes ago I was walking along, pondering the very fact that no one seemed to care I told them the world was in danger. So thank, in that regard, for caring.”

“Much like those that engineered the first atomic bomb, Alford should not be blamed for discovering and manipulating properties of our universe that others surely would’ve come along and discovered anyways,” spoke the woman as she ushered them down a darkly lit alley, devoid of onlookers.

Einstein tried to catch a glimpse of the person’s face but it was covered.

“I am the leader of a world wide movement to reveal the truth to the world. That we are meant to lead a future that is both trans-human and eventually post-human. I believe you are a harbinger of the world to come, and a both a relic of the world to leave behind. You, like me, are juxtaposed in a world that thinks it knows you well, but doesn’t know you at all.”

“And who are you, my friend,” asked Einstein, finally breaking free of the woman’s grasp, but not attempting to run to safety.

“I will, at some point, go in great detail with you my origins and interests, but for now it should be enough to know that I am more friend, than foe.”

With that the man put his gloved hand on Einstein’s shoulder.

“I’m sorry for this,” spoke the woman.

Before Einstein could ask what he was apologizing for, he lost consciousness and faded to a darker black.

[cincycinner]

E=MC2 PART II CHAPTERS 1 + 2

                   Frankeinstein

Experiments in the Re-indoctrination of the Human Spirit

                                                    1

The first man to recreate life from scratch, to create a living cell from its base constituents, was also at that time possibly the most intelligent man on planet earth. His name was Mitchell Alford.

Mitchell was born on the 12th of September in the year 2022. He was born into a world of technologies, increasingly smaller and smaller, making man’s scope of the universe greater and greater, and his ability to irrevocably alter the planet more consequential with each advancing q-bit.

Unfortunately, Mitchell Alford grew up without his mother because she died during childbirth, a casualty to ‘unforeseeable complications’ that sometimes, even in 2022, accompanied childbirth.

Although Mitchell learned to live without his mother and was never a ‘momma’s boy’ growing up, he did have a father. That being said, Mitchell might as well have had no father for the father he did have was a shallow, drunk of a man. Although a father genetically, Mitchell’s father diverged greatly from being any kind of “father figure”.  

Indeed, Mitchell’s father was an alcoholic, albeit, not Irish, but an alcoholic nonetheless. Mitchell’s father had a friend named Patrick O’Donnell who, although Irish, was not an alcoholic. Patrick O’Donnell’s great-grandfather was though.

Mitchell grew up in a household believing his father blamed him for his mother, Eleanor Alford’s death. This is because his father did indeed harbor delusional rage towards his offspring for his beloved wife’s demise.

“The love of my life for this?” he would think as he sat across the wood veneer dining table, pilsner in its glass and him sitting on his ass staring at Mitchell as he ate his microwaveable television dinner composed of turkey and slightly still frozen vegetables.   

 Disregarding rationality, Mitchell’s father shunned him throughout his youth. The older Alford grew, the more ignorant and incompetent he believed his drunk of a father to be. His father would come crashing home in the night, fresh from the bar, and mash his way to his bedroom, often waking up young Mitchell in the night leaving him awake and restless. Oftentimes young Mitchell would flip on his desk light and open up his book ‘du jour’ and use his imagination that could concoct reality just as real and visceral as the dreams he should’ve been having.

To him his father drank as a way to cope with the harsh reality of life. Michael Alford, Mitchell’s father, apparently had no zeal for life beyond the bottle at his lip. Mitchell’s father had only destructive ways to cope with the harshness of life. A wrecking ball of a man, Michael Alford had come from a wealthy family lineage that, unfortunately, also had a long lineage of alcoholism.

Luckily, Alford found a different way to cope with such harsh realities. Alford dreamed he could change and better those realities. At a young age Mitchell was blowing away competency tests at school. Mathematics, sciences, languages, Mitchell excelled at all of them. He mastered calculus, harnessed every language he could tongue, postulated on consciousness, and composed music he wouldn’t let anyone listen to.

  His mind was sharp, and unlike the minds of the other children of Mitchell’s generation, his mind had no deficit for attention. “Keen and aware,” were the words Michael Alford would have heard at the parent teacher conferences at Mitchell’s school had he been sober enough to remember to show up to them. “Fantastically alert and discerning,” would have been the description of Mitchell’s persona had his father had the state of mind to hear such things.

Having no mother, and no father to understand him, Mitchell hid himself in books of literature, using his imagination to build up beautiful visions of the stories he was reading; Homer’s Odyssey, Hemingway’s Cities, Twain’s steamboats. All types of works of literature were constantly under the light of Mitchell Alford’s increasingly scrutinizing eye. He always envisioned himself the hero of those narratives, always finding ways to save himself, and everyone else worth saving, in the end.

 As Mitchell grew older these fictional stories lost their appeal because often these things broke from the physical reality he had come to know, respect, and revere. He gravitated towards the physical sciences and found himself winning science fair 1st place prizes only have his ribbons put on a fridge full of beer or forgotten about altogether in the rustled heap he and his father called a household.

Alford’s brilliance was one grounded in reality, yet he was also still young enough to understand that even reality can be transformed. His inventiveness became a drive and device by which he could use and hone his powerful discerning capabilities. Mitchell Alford found his imagination lusting after an understanding of what great men in history had done before him for he desired greatly to surpass them.

Alford found science fascinating. Ironic, he thought, that scientists who make breakthrough discoveries that save countless lives claim pennies of fame on the dollars that movie stars and athletes garnered for their displays of showmanship and athleticism. Yet Alford did not mind that great scientists lacked acclaim, for he knew none had been as great as he would end up being.

            As he grew into adulthood Alford took on a serious manner of presenting himself that matched well with what he thought was a very serious mind. Alford had high hopes of going to an Ivey League College to study biochemical engineering or quantum physics, or quite possibly both at the same time. He dressed to please his ego and play the part, so he always wore a navy suit with a white button down shirt accompanied with a Full-Windsor knotted tie of one color or another, more often yellow than any other.

            Alford’s only real hindrance to his plans after graduating from high school were his father’s insistence that there was absolutely no way Alford could go to a school that expensive. Much to Michael Alford’s chagrin, Alford found out at his Grandmother’s funeral that all the Alford grandchildren had trust fund endowed by Grandma Etta to ensure that every one of her beloved grandchildren could get a sound education.

            Alford took it as a sign of providence when two letters in the early winter of 2039 that Alford had received notified him that both Princeton and Harvard had come to the conclusion that he was more than deserving of a full academic scholarship for four years of an undergraduate degree and master degree program all wrapped into one. Mitchell planned to finish in two and a half.

In the early spring of 2039 Mitchell Alford accepted his scholarship to Princeton University and began his scrupulous academic career the following fall double majoring in plasma physics and biogenetic engineering. A little known fact, Alford also minored in upright bass.

Constantly above a book, Alford did not notice his lack of a social life. He attended only two parties during his college career, finding the inordinate amount of alcohol consumed to almost as unsettling as the sites of the barbiturated men and women puking and pissing their nights away. 

Alford saw no interest in joining any clubs or fraternities except for “nerdy” clubs that garnered him few social contacts and even fewer chances at what, at the time, was considered to be the paradigm of college, drinking and partying. Nevertheless, Alford attended one of the finest universities and garnered the highest honors for his academic excellence.

At his 2044 graduation it is said that Alford, at the top of his class in grade point average, gave a speech. Although hardly anyone graduating knew who Mitchell Alford was, they took his main theme to heart, “I hope you, like me, will be great.”

Alford’s first major post-scholastic achievement was creating life from scratch; taking life’s parts and giving it an engine. Although many great men had tried, Mitchell Alford was the first man to create life from its disassembled parts. Alford won worldwide notoriety and fame; he was hailed as a man with the potential to be as great as Albert Einstein.

The greatest thinker of the 20th century, Albert Einstein died in April of 1955. Quite possibly the greatest thinker of the 21st century, Mitchell Alford made first his great scientific achievement in the same month of April, one hundred years later, in 2055.

                                                               2

“Your bicycle isn’t capable of being stolen,” replied the man on the other line, connected to Einstein.

            “Excuse me, Malcolm,” replied Einstein as he again scanned the immediate area for any signs of his bicycle, “but I can assure you it has been stolen. More importantly I have a funeral to attend here shortly and now need to reassess my mode of transit. Who has time for these things?”

            “Yes of course, my apologies,” stammered Malcolm, “ what I meant to say is I recently attached a ‘Personal Particle’ to your bicycle which unless your ol’ spinner was stolen by a highly trained infiltrator means we can track it across the city, and well, universe.”

            “A ‘Personal Particle’?” asked Einstein rather interested, but also very confused.

            “It has been quantum entangled with a corresponding particle embedded within my quantum computational systems,” answered Malcolm.

            “Meaning what precisely?” asked Einstein, smile wrapping across his relieved face.

            “As long as your bicycle isn’t actually in motion, I can pinpoint the location of your bicycle almost instantaneously,” answered Malcolm.

            Einstein laughed.

            “What is it?” asked Malcolm.

            “The murkiness of the quantum realm hasn’t been clarified yet under your watch?” asked Einstein, quite bemused.

            “Infinity has a way of being infinitely surprising,” he quipped.

            Malcolm laughed as he glossed over the incoming geo-location date of Einstein’s particle.

            “What is it?” asked Einstein, “where is my coveted bicycle?”

            “I actually have no idea. Your bicycle is in movement, my friend.”

            “You are useless, fine sir,” joked Einstein.

            “Not useless,” replied Malcolm, “but currently, admittedly, fruitless.”

            “Don’t drag fruit’s fruitful name into this,” stymied Einstein as he ended the call.

Looking around the city, Einstein was struck by how fervent it’s pace had remained. How there was a certain kind of peacefulness to it once one became accustomed. That old bicycle of Einstein’s was a part of its fervor somewhere out there. Recently repainted a royal blue, the bicycle was once on display in a Israeli bicycle shop, unfit for the road and forgotten to the world. An educated eye recognized the bicycle and brought it back from the dead. A lost friend had brought it back to him.

Einstein had been reunited with something from his life he could not holistically replace. Now detached, albeit only momentarily, from his vehicle for vectors of movement, Einstein realized just how attached he was to his bicycle.

Einstein, after hanging up on Malcolm rather rudely, had walked himself back to the front stoop of his apartment and was watching the city merge and converge in front of him.

The 21st century physical world is one that Einstein was reignited into without being asked. The frenetic, energetic requirements of being a part of the material universe again brought it’s own basket of recertifications of understandings about what is and isn’t a part of objective reality. Sometimes Einstein found it difficult to focus on the present world in front of him, he found himself unable to completely live in the moment.

Zoning out and pondering deeply into Einstein’s own spectrum of disjointed time, his old, newly painted, bicycle wheeled down the avenue towards Einstein’s stoop and promptly stopped. Two young girls jumped off the bicycle, laughed at Einstein, and ran past him through the doorway into the apartment complex residing inside.

“I most certainly locked you up, didn’t I?” asked Einstein as he grabbed his bicycle and scanned it over making sure it was both mechanically and cosmetically sound.

Bicycle secured, Einstein found himself upstairs at the door to his apartment.

            He touched his finger on a digital-display-unit (DDU) that quickly recognized his fingerprint and promptly unlocked and opened the door.

            As Einstein walked through the doorway a biometric scan was successfully administered that was able to cross reference past scans to ascertain the then-current state of Einstein’s homeostasis. The Digital-diagnostic-hub (DDH) maintained records of every inhabitant’s daily temperature and other vitals, as well as virology reports on prior/current infections, an increasingly important part of 21st century life for some reason.

            “You’re dehydrated,” spoke the lush female voice.

            “Some sparkling water then, please,” replied Einstein.

            “You got too much sun today,” posited the voice.

            “You’re jealous?” asked Einstein, being coy.

            “You’re not invincible,” she replied as she entered the room and gave Einstein his glass of water and made note to watch Einstein’s solar intake over the following days.

            Einstein met her eyes and at once was relieved of any constrained burden. Had she grown more beautiful since the last time Einstein saw her? It always seemed that way to him, as if she was constantly reprogramming herself.

            “They are making the announcements today, yes?” she asked, rubbing his shoulders as he sat and rehydrated.

            Einstein looked toward a visual-respondent transponder that quickly triggered the visual elegance of his ultra-visual holographic display station.

            A news reporter appeared, well dressed, and dressing the news with panache.

            “Exciting news out of the scientific community today!” popped the anchor.

            “Albert Einstein has just been awarded the Nobel Prize for his achievements in Physics. That’s right, THE Albert Einstein. What a genius….”

            The display dimmed and turned off as Einstein averted his gaze from the correspondence.

            “You didn’t want to watch that? Fine, but I did!” she spoke exasperated.

            “Watch it?” replied Einstein, “my dear, is it really necessary?”

            “Albert, I wasn’t there, and having read the transcript, you do not mention me. The least you can do is let me watch the replay with you,” she asked, and Einstein felt embarrassed. She had played a major role in re-invigorating his push to help humanity understand existence at its most intrinsic levels.

            “Fine,” replied Einstein, before finishing his utterance the visual-respondent transponder had already flipped back to the bulletin.

            “There is very good reason for the discrepancy in spatial expansion rate currently versus shortly after the ‘Big Bang’,” spoke Einstein via holographic emittance, “similarly, the discrepancy in localized expansion rate versus that of the expansion rate measured for distant parsecs of space has an equally good reason that I will work to explain to you.”

            “You look so handsome,” she said as she ran her hands through his thick, unkempt hair.

            “As a holographic projection?” asked Einstein, amused, his likeness continuing to unfurl the speech in front of them.

            “I’d kiss you if you weren’t so human,” she shot back, getting up and walking through Einstein’s holo-based doppelganger.

            “Particles capable of traveling faster than light will never be caught up to for direct observation. These particles form an elementary film ever pushing what could be termed the ‘Edge of the Universe’ outward. One thing that I must make clear, these particles ARE space so I wanted to dub them ‘Sparticles’. However, since this term was already taken, I have given them the name ‘Omnions’”

            “They’re still trying to come up with a name for your newly minted particle that doesn’t sound idiotic,” she quipped.

            “Shhhh,” replied Einstein, pressing his left index finger to his lips, ever enjoying the mystification of just how young he looked.

            “Luckily these particles are quantum entangled in two very important and distinct ways to the material universe. First, every particle of our ever-expanding universe has an umbrella omnion particle constantly, via ‘spooky action at a distance’, interacting with them. More interestingly, omnion particles are entangled with actual space and may actually be integral in the mechanics of space-time procreation.

            “I came up with that term!” she shouted, excited that the idea of space and time having sex to create their child space-time was likely going through the minds of many watching the holo-cast. The term ‘holo-cast’ being a term that made Einstein initially uneasy due to its pronunciatorial similarities to a certain 20th century scar. Almost as uneasy, the feeling in his stomach realizing how many 21st centurians failed to realize, or sometimes believe, the scope of the WWII tragedy. Einstein still saw its effects everywhere, even as the 22nd century dawned.

            “The primordial particle filaments that traverse our known universe and form the connected webbing of our galaxies initially started out as spatial signatures created like a paved highway by these ‘faster than light’ omnion particles. Due to their ability to move faster than light, omnion particles are capable of moving in space without time passing in any discernable forward directoin.”

            “Here comes the bombshell,” said Einstein, watching like an avid fan who knows every word to the song.

            “Omnion particles can interact with each other via planar polarization events and create normal particles that manifest themselves as the ‘virtual’ particles of our universe that come into and out of existence through quantum fluctuations of space-time, most times before anyone or anything has taken significant notice.”

            “You look so distinguished in the outfit I picked out for you,” she said as she pretended to play with holo-cast Einstein’s hair.

            “What has not been realized is that virtual particles, when propagated in space-time, also creates it’s own space. Although I have not come up with proper mechanisms for detection, I believe this virtual particle space, when created, is imbued with ‘spin’ and other quantum properties that may offer insights into the properties of the ‘Omnion’ particles that birthed them. We will require a full scale investigation in how to properly tag and differentiate quantized space.

“Albert,” she said softly into his ear, trying to distract him, “you were more famous than John Lennon before you came back to life. Can you imagine how popular you will become and how long lasting your legacy will be now that you’ve come back to save the cosmos?”

Einstein thought she was in love with him, sometimes he thought he was in love with her. Silly to think he could fall in love again, but why not?

“Ultimately, we may be able to tap into energy structures tied to the edge of the universe, instilled with energy and information capable of powering cosmic reality as we know it. This is may be an opportunity for interstellar travel, a finally realized goal of sending humans safely to other worlds in the timescales of years, and not of the light-beholden variety.”

“Do you think they’ll appoint you Chancellor of the New Galactic Empire headquartered here on mother earth?” she asked, fully aware that multiple government bodies had requested Einstein head task-forces on re-constitution on a solar scale.

“Now, more than ever, requires a return to global good-faith decision making. The decisions made now have a forbearance on all that humanity will aim to become in the future. Do not make my existence a preclusion to assume I have all the answers, for I do not. I merely have gleaned some insights into what may be worthy topics for research moving forward towards the 22nd century.”           

“Do you think they’ll make you run for President of the United States?” she asked, coyly.

            “President Albert Einstein’s first State of the Union Address,” spoke Einstein, as if commentating his own imaginary future, “will most certainly avoid going over whether or not being ‘re-incarnated’ within the continental U.S.A. makes the President an actual natural born citizen.”

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Albert Einstein sat with his legs crossed. Grey slacks were seamlessly rising, seam by seam, above the ankle on his right leg, which rested on his corresponding left leg, and displayed darker grey, argyle socks that were lost, along with his foot, into the black leather shoes he had recently received as a gift from an old, old friend.

A copy of Bohr’s 1913 Philosophical Magazine publications sat on his lap. In attempting to go over the old mistakes of his peers, he hoped to correct and foresee solutions to many of the mistakes of his own making. There were many of them, both peers and mistakes, and Einstein meant steadfastly to enlist all of their services to concoct the proper understandings needed to unlock the decisions before him.

At least he had made one quick decision correctly. A tall, to Einstein at least, and beautiful, to anyone’s standards, woman came out from the door Einstein sat next to and set down in front of him a smoking, thermally dynamic item Einstein remained eternally vexed by.

Einstein had learned during his life not to overestimate the importance of daytime tea. He smiled, thanked the kind woman, and made sure to tip her his last silver dollar he had left in his possession.

Although it was a type he’d never heard before, the tea he ordered and began to drink was pleasing both in taste and warmth. Sweet, somewhat spicy, and altogether wonderful, the tea’s floral aroma was quite enjoyable for nasally nuanced individuals on what was a rather cold, blustery day in New York City.

Albert Einstein was always sure New York City could one day be what a city was meant to be like in the idealistic mind’s eye that seems to always be used when one prognosticates their thoughts and hopes for everything into the future; that great Rome on the hill, that ever-undulating platitude of postulates. Had it succeeded? Had he?

New York City, on this day, seemed idealistic enough to Einstein to get the nod. Sure it was infernally dirty, the people were more quiet and reserved than he remembered, and everything was incredibly expensive. Yet, maybe that was just the cold that made them quiet, or the noise of the city that made everything else, even the yelling man on the sidewalk hailing a taxi, seem unruminatingly silent and small; and yet familiar.

Albert Einstein had a lot to do, but he was nonetheless militant about allowing the morning to diffract and slowly unfurl in front of him as he sipped on the tea he was so pleased with, and the cityscape he was so enamored by, and the dreams he was so entrenched in.

Even as old as Einstein felt some days, he was still experiencing and finding new things, newfound awe. For instance, he had never heard of the name and type of tea that had been recommended to him, and did not intend to commit it to memory. Albert Einstein had more than enough memories for one lifetime.

He sat up, put on and buttoned up his black, wool coat, affixed a black hat on top of his mop of hair, scratched his mustache, and began walking down the street. Automobiles buzzed by as he tried to youthfully saunter down what must’ve been 59th street or something there about.

He was hungry, but had decided to forgo breakfast in the interest of stopping by the local florist’s shop to pick up flowers for the family member’s funeral that was occurring in a few short hours. He had not really known her, but felt compelled attend her funeral anyways.

He felt his stomach churn for sustenance, and for family members of older days, but continued to churn his legs as he walked block by block, recognizing familiar buildings and street names and only stopping once before reaching his destination to pet a breed of dog he had never encountered before that was being walked by a pretty, pink-coated woman. Newfound awe.

Einstein walked up to what looked to be an apartment building. Red brick rose story over story. Einstein looked around, a concerned look painted across his face as he frantically traced his eyes across the neighborhood. He briefly set down the flowers, pulled a set of keys form his coat, reacquired the petals, and walked up to the gated entrance of the building and opened it.

Einstein proceeded to enter the premises and ascend a few flights of stairs to a daftly lit hallway and towards apartment 252’s door. Einstein, setting the flowers down on an end table, walked into a poorly lit studio apartment that was made slightly more illuminated by the two candles he lit with the simple strike of a match on matchbook. He thought of the 1930s and what the Depression Era was really like, took in the current fatigued state of his living quarters, and acquiesced to the impermanence of it all.

Einstein walked up to a screen door, opened it, and stepped back outside into the cold of winter. Across the way a woman stood staring down at the ground as she screamed into her cell phone. A helicopter buzzed overhead and two separate car alarms blared off into the distance. Einstein pulled out a cell phone of his own, scrolled through and selected the appropriate name and number, and listened to the digital ringing.

 “Hello?” chimed the person on the other end of Einstein’s call.

 “Someone has stolen my old bicycle,” replied Einstein as the driverless, electrically powered taxis buzzed below him, yellow like bees in the cold freeze of late 21st century New York City.

                               Frankeinstein

Experiments in the Re-indoctrination of the Human Spirit

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Newly written and recorded during the 2020 shutdown. #Cincinnati #Acoustic #NewMusic #JohnMayer

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Optimistic doodler. #cincycinner https://www.instagram.com/p/BnFiTQZgnNw/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=rulnl6fchu5c

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The Colorful Microbe

            When determining the identification of an isolated bacteria often times the macroscopic coloring of the colonization can lend valuable insights into what the microbe may be. Simply put, bacteria are capable of producing a variety of colors for the human eye to enjoy.

             Bacteria produce pigments for a variety of reasons that include energy production, UV protection, defense mechanisms, against potentially fatal threats, and energy storage.

             Pigments are mostly synthesized in the cell walls or periplasmic spaces of bacteria. Only aerobic and facultatively aerobic bacteria have been shown to naturally produce pigment because molecular oxygen is an essential component of pigmentation.

            Enterobacter species and non-fermentative Gram-Negative rods such as Chryseobacterium, Agrobacterium, and Sphingomonas species can be identified by their yellow pigmentation.

      Burkholderia species can be identified by their yellow-brown pigmentation.

          Chromobacterium violaceum produce violet pigmentation via violacein

             Roseomonas, Methylobacterium, and some Serratia species can be identified by their pink to red pigmentations.

             Pseudomonoas group can be distinguished by their fluorscent pigment pyoverdin but are capable of producing a variety of pigments.

            Micrococcus isolates can have a range of pigmentations from M. luteus’ yellow to the pink of M. roseus and red of M. agilis.

 Water Soluble vs. Water Insoluble

 Water Insoluble pigments are those that give color to only the bacterial colonies themselves and include:

 Carotenoids (Yellow-Orange): Carotenoids play a key role in protecting cells against photo-oxidative damage. Carotenoids have been shown to play a role in light harvesting for bacterial photosynthesis. The potential for microbial biotechnological production of carotenoids is of growing importance.

 Violacein (Violet or Purple): Indole derivative produced mostly by Chromobacterium that has shown antimicrobial properties. May be useful in treatment of cancers and leukemias due to its cyto-toxic properties.

 Phenazines (Yellow, Maroon, or Red): Phenazines have many roles including serving as electron shuttles to alternate terminal acceptors, modifying cellular redox states, acting as cell signals that regulate patterns of gene expression, contributing to bio-film formation and architecture, and enhancing bacterial survival. Phenazine producers make up a plethora of species including Nocardia, Sorangium, Brevibacterium, Burkholderia, Erwinia, Pantoea agglomerans, Vibrio, and Pelagiobacter. (That’s a mouth full)

 Water Soluble pigments are those that are diffusible and give color to the enrichment agar surrounding the pigment producing bacterial colony and include:

 Pyocyanin: Produced by Pseudomonas species, pyocyanin has shown to have antimicrobial properties

 Pyoverdin: Fluorescent pigment produced by Pseudomonas species. Complex siderophores that bind metal ions.

 “More than 750 structurally different yellow, orange, and red colored molecules are found in both eukaryotes and prokaryotes with an estimated market of $919 million by 2015”

 HISTORICAL CONSIDERATIONS:

In 332 B.C. during the siege of Tyre by Alexander the Great and his army of Macedonian, the soldiery became greatly concerned by the appearance of blood-like droplets on bread as it was broken. So great was the alarm that soldiers and king alike were about to give up the siege since they considered this phenomena as a portent of their destruction. Upon having this brought to his attention, Aristander, one of the king’s most skillful soothsayers, interpreted it to mean that since the droplets of blood were on the inside of the loaf, it indicated destruction for those within the walls. If the blood had been on the outside of the loaf, it would have portended evil to the army on the outside of the walls. Taking courage from these interpretations, the Macedonians continued their siege and the city of Tyre fell.

To the modern scientist and bacteriologist, this “miracle” can have but one clear and logical explanation. The growth of what is now known as Serratia marcescens, the red pigmented bacterium which grows profusely on bread and even today causes what is commonly called “bloody bread”.

Sources:

Practical Handbook of Microbiology, Second Edition

Emanuel Goldman, Lorrence H. Green

 “Colorful World of Microbes: Carotenoids and Their Applications” Kushwaha Kirti, Saini Amita, Saraswat Priti, Agarwal Mukesh Kumar, and Saxena Jyoti. Advances in Biology Volume 2014

 “Sequence analysis and functional characterization of Violacein biosynthetic pathway from Chromobacterium violaceum.” August, P.R, et al. J. Mol. Microbiol. Biotechnol. 2000

 “Metabolism and function of Phenazines in bacteria: impacts on the behavior of bacteria in the environment and biotechnological processes.” Pierson. Appl. Microbiol Biotecnol. May 2010.

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#wilddunes