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Spaghettification


swahilimonkfish

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I've been writing up this story on my DA and not sure it was fast-paced or WG centric enough for these hallowed halls, but here's the first two chapters anyway that introduce the premise



Chapter 1 (prologue)

    We all know what we were doing on Wednesday 23rd April 2033. I think that much is safe to say.

    I’ll tell you what I was doing. I was curled up on this burgundy chaise-longue – and I’ll always remember the ghastly colour of it – in this hotel in New York that I was staying in, headphones over my ears and totally in the zone, editing the podcast that I host. Astro-logical Episode 33. Or 34, maybe. Can’t remember the exact episode number.

    So when my mobile lit up, I was grateful for the interruption to be honest. Editing is the most boring thing about having your own podcast. There’s only so much of your own voice you want to hear before you find yourself yearning to take pins to your eyes. Every man and their dog had one those days, and I felt that I was just as worthy a host as any over-opinionated man.

    I glanced at the caller ID and it was my old professor Dr. Chipo Oliseh. Dr Oliseh took me under her wing while I studied my Masters at the University of Melbourne back when I was just starting out. She had not just been my professor, nor just the woman that shaped me to become the woman I am today. She was and is also a good friend, and one of my oldest friends to boot. Still, it was unusual for her to ring, especially given the large time-zone difference.

    “Hello?” I answered hazily, my mind still not left the podcast I was working on, trying not to lose track of my progress and have to listen through the damn thing again.

    “Hi Gwen, it’s umm, well it’s me, Chipo”

    Her voice wasn’t as assured as it typically was. She always had a great voice did Chipo, a deep smokey Australian drawl with just a hint of her African ancestral roots coming through. It was always effortlessly authoritative despite its glacial pace and leisurely enunciation.

    “Hi Chipo, it’s nice to hear from you. Wait, what time is it over there?”

    “I need to tell you something, but you might want to sit down first.”


 

    It was a good job I was sitting down, the news came completely out of the left field. That’s what everyone says when they talk about how they first heard the news – the disorientation of being hit by something they didn’t see coming. And how literally that was the case. Chipo explained to me in clear and precise terms that Grendel was closer to us than the models predicted, and it was only getting closer. Astro-logical Episode 33 never got released.


 

    “Wow, this is a spectacular find Chips. Good on ya!” was my initial and wholly naive reply. But it was understandable on my part. It all but guaranteed Chipo and her team at the university a historic second Nobel Prize. She was already one of the most famous faces in astrophysics in the world but now her name would go down in history. But the kicker, of course, was that there wouldn’t be much history for her name to go down in.

    “The physics team at MIT are crunching the same numbers and coming up with the same answers, it doesn’t look good Gwen. I just thought you should know.”

    The timbre of her voice still maintained that rich sobriety, but there was a glassy edge to it now.

    “So what sort of probability are we looking at?”

    “It meets the five-sigma criteria. So, unless there is something fundamentally wrong with our understanding of physics, or with our model, then it’s a done deal I’m afraid.”

    I finally placed the tone of her voice. It was the same as the voice you hear when a policeman knocks on your door and tells you he has bad news. It was careful and deliberate, calm but empathetic. She was giving me bad news.

    “Do we have a time frame yet?”

    I was keeping my composure outwardly, but inside my mind was rattling. It was slipshod and spiralling down thought ravines trying to digest the news I’d just heard.

    “No, that will come next. I’ve got to go Gwen, sorry, I’ve got a call with our Prime Minister in 5, and I’ve got to tell him the news.”

    “Oh god, sorry. And good luck Chips. And thank you, thank you for thinking of me”

    “I just thought you should know, you’re a good friend Gwen, always have been. And given that Grendel was the subject of your doctoral thesis, it seemed fitting. Good luck”

    An awkward pause.

    “Yeah, you too.”


 

    And that was how I first heard about how our solar system was about to be swallowed up the black hole at the centre of our galaxy.

 

 

--------------------------------------------

Chapter 2

    I was down in a nearby breakfast bar, one of those bustling hipster joints where the orange juice is freshly pressed and the muesli bowls are hand-reared or whatever, trying to steady my nerve with an early morning coffee while the rest of New York just busied about their normal days. Gazing through the window and onto the main street, I could see New York oblivious to oblivion. There was a woman walking by and chatting to a friend without really listening to her, there was a man wearing a trilby checking himself out in the glass reflection of the bar I was stationed at, there was a mother with a child in her arms flustered as it squirmed rebelliously. New York city at full flow at 7.30am, without a care in the world. Without a care in the world for perhaps the last time.

    I kept glancing at my phone for news updates, since I figured that if Dr Chipo was informing the Australian president at this precise minute, then an official press release about the black hole was imminent. I dreaded it. The thought of a smog of panic settling across the planet like snow in a snow globe. That woman chatting to her friend, that vain bloke in the hat, that mother looking at her child and knowing it wouldn’t have a future. I didn’t feel too good.

    With controlled breathing as I rallied to gather my wits and composure, I scoured my digital storage space on my phone for that doctoral thesis that Chipo had alluded to. A phone wasn’t a great place to read such heavy data and math, even these new models with their dual-screen capabilities couldn’t really do justice the sheer volume of number-crunching that I’d gone through with Chips to guide me. But I read on through all the computational heavy lifting I had worked through nearly a decade earlier.

    When I wrote this, it was still a few years before Dr Chipo made it big with Starmap. Starmap was the spectacular piece of algorithmic brilliance that allowed the microscopic fluctuations in spacetime through gravitational waves to couple with existing observations to give us the most comprehensive image of what our galaxy looked like. The planet that was simply known as Planet 10 at the time was formally identified with it, and is now known as Olisus in her honour. It was Starmap that gave us a clear near-comprehensive Google maps of the stars and celestial bodies above our heads. With one dirty exception – black holes.

    You might have thought they would have been the easiest to pinpoint since they cause the greatest fluctuations in spacetime due to their spectacular mass, but that was in fact the problem. The model that she was using may have been near foolproof, but near foolproof is not foolproof, and any mathematical vulnerability was magnified billionfold due to the size of the numbers these black holes spit out. It was the one blindspot, the one chink in the otherwise impressive armour of Starmap. And it was a chink that was currently being remedied with a rollout of Starmap 2.0. This newer version had accumulated enough black hole data to flatten the extraordinary readings into something more averaged out, by compiling a modal model based on all the black holes that the original Starmap had revealed. I guess this new version was what found Grendel’s updated position.

    I wish I had been studying at Melbourne University a couple of years later when all this was kicking off, Starmap was just a work-in-progress at the time that many in academia dismissed as a pipedream back when I was with Chipo. I had been a shoulder to cry on at times as the insults got catty, and her greatest champion as she hammered on the various glass ceilings that were in her way. She was paraplegic, black and female, and with Xhosa as a first language, which was not a particularly celebratory background in the eyes of her esteemed colleagues. So I supported her during those early stages, but didn’t contribute particularly on the actual project itself since my fascination had always been black holes and black holes alone.

    The fascination stemmed from reading A History of Time and Space by Stephen Hawking as young girl at secondary school. I was about to be the only girl in my school in rural Wales to take Physics at A-Level and was given a boatload of encouragement as one of those “Get women in STEM” programs that keep popping up to confront the inbuilt gender bias of the sciences. And part of that came in the form of funding for textbooks, which I splurged on Dr Hawking's meisterwurk. And I was enthralled by these big beasts of space; they reminded me of the big beasts of ancient mythology, all mystical, powerful and scary. Your Goliaths, your cyclopses, your dragons. And of course your Grendels.

    So when I eventually travelled down to Melbourne for my doctorate, I studied the black hole at the centre of our galaxy, and I affectionately nicknamed it Grendel. Chips thought it was a good nickname, being fond of the classics herself, and the name stuck. Between us, that is, nobody else had such a silly name for it.

    So that was how I became tangentially involved in the discovery of the demise of the human race and, as far as we know, life in the universe. Reading my old notes, it all came flooding back to me. I wondered if there was anything in the data sets that I had that could have pointed to this, but we would have spotted it if there was. No, I had studied this one black hole for 4 years and failed to notice just how close it was to us, and how fast it was getting closer. And it was probably that last one that was the kicker.

    Sitting in the corner by the window of the coffee shop, I wondered what to do next. The obvious call was to head back home, back to deepest, darkest Wales to see my dad who I hadn’t seen for over a year thanks to work. To catch up and to hold him tightly. To forgive him for being such an arsehole. But, what then? Where do I go from there?

    My phone binged and I rushed to look at it, fearing that this was the official announcement, but it wasn’t. It was just my phone alarm reminding me it was 7.45am so time to hit the gym. It all seemed a bit futile now, the years of hard work on my body. The hours straining and sweating to rid myself of the scant few calories I had permitted myself to consume each day. The sheer mindnumbing monotony of ruling over my body with enough discipline to keep the lard away. All for what, so that there’s less of me to be swallowed by a black hole? It all seemed so pointless.

    Do you know what they believe happens to the human body in a black hole? The closer you get to it, the larger the force of gravity. Yeah? Sounds simple enough, except the amount of gravity increases so enormously, so exponentially, that the closer to it you are that your feet will be experiencing a far stronger force on them than, say, the top of your body. Because every millimetre closer is met with a force much stronger. So, in theory, what happens is that your toes will be dragged towards the black hole’s ceaseless stomach much faster than the rest of you, stretching you out towards its unknown centre. Stretching you out like spaghetti. That’s why they call it spaghettification. So, when I die, I’ll be thin anyway, no matter what happens. Because spaghettification.

    So, to my own morbid amusement, I decided to replace my gym session with a slice of coffee cake instead. It wasn’t really me waving the white flag or anything, just a little joke to myself about how futile and pointless everything felt all of a sudden. One slice of cake and one missed gym session wouldn’t make much of a dent on my body, even though being 34 years old meant that maintaining my weight was harder than ever. But, it was a challenge I had risen to, time and time again, pushing myself further to compensate for the glacial braking of my metabolism as I drifted towards middle-age.

    I was in good physical condition, it had to be said. My stomach was flat with toned abs and those Vs around the pelvis that you get from hard work and little body mass. And yes, it meant my breasts were anaemic convex swells on my chest rather than anything more pronounced, clinging to my chest tightly like barnacles on a ship. But the upside was I had a thigh gap between these muscled sticks, and I had definition in my arms. I was proud of the way I looked. I looked fierce, and it helped me feel fierce too.

    My hair was similarly fierce too, it was naturally ringletted, black and expansive over my tired face. My skin was weathered and leathered, as years of striving had taken their toll and left signs of exhaustions around my eyes and hollowed my face out under my cheeks. I was still a catch, but years of living off cigarettes and coffee instead of vitamins and vegetables made me look tired even when wide awake.

    My clothes that I was currently wearing seemed similarly tired, a worn grey shirt and jeans with the holes in the knees and that clasped tightly around my diminutive arsecheeks. I never wanted to look like I was making an effort, despite all those years at the gym taking considerable effort. I didn’t want to be seen as a floozy so I wanted to look naturally attractive, a look which required lots of work. I wanted people to think, if she smarted herself up I bet she’s really pretty, but without ever smarting myself up just in case I wasn’t really pretty and they were wrong. It was why I applied very little make-up very subtly, since I wanted to be made-up and looking my best without looking like I was made-up and looking my best. So, dishevelled chic was the look I tended to rock, allowing my trim figure, glorious mane and warm smile to be the main takeaways and not the smoothness of my skin.

    I hadn’t had cake in years. It had been verboten. It was out-of-bounds. And here I was pushing my fork down it and scooping up a slice of it and putting it towards my mouth. The sponge sprang as I bit into it and that delightful coffee aroma drifted up my nasal passage. It was sweet but tempered by that deep coffee heart, and then moistened with the saccharine cream in its centre and along its top. Sweet hazelnutty flavours made their way across my tongue and slipped effortlessly down my throat. It was a delight. It felt like time had stood still, and there was just me and the coffee cake alone in the universe.

    Of course, it hadn’t and it wasn’t. And a glance at my phone would have told me that. An urgent news update chimed on my phone and most of the phones at the coffee and breakfast bar.

    Mine was, revealing its anglo-centric bias, from the BBC and said:

    BREAKING NEWS: STARMAP TEAM DECLARE SOLAR SYSTEM UNDER THREAT FROM BLACK HOLE (click for more)

    But I didn’t click just yet. I was obliviously eating my slice of coffee cake and wasn’t making time for anybody or anything else.

 

 

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Another chapter and it's still all plot and no WG so far, I'm sorry and I'm working on it

Chapter 3

    A flick through the various US news stations portrayed the rest of the day as utter bedlam. They would show pictures of people rushing to their local store to buy emergency supplies and long-lasting essentials, or old women breaking down in the streets and crying. They showed people turning up in their droves to their local churches, synagogues, temples and mosques looking for answers or salvation in theistic desperation. But this wasn’t how the majority of people responded to the news, not from where I had been sitting in that streetside breakfast bar in New York. Maybe it was just the people of this bustling metropolis, let's face it New York breed 'em different to anywhere else in this world, but the overriding response, as far as I could make out, was mainly just a shrug, an eye-roll and then getting back to the rest of their day. They were busy people and these busy people had deadlines to meet and parties to arrange and bedrooms to paint and b**s to make. They didn’t have time to be swallowed up by no black hole.

    So, most of the day was just going on as normal for most people in my close proximity. People would say things like “Have you seen the news, something about a black hole eating the sun… oh and did you hear about Janet from accounts...” before drifting off into the frivolous minutiae of their day-to-day days. Families would gather round for dinner and not even broach the subject for fear of causing a ruckus, choosing safer topics like the sports or weather, as if this was Brexit (which is still going on by the way) or the 2026 Nuclear Disarmament Treaty. As if people would have diverging and contrasting opinions on the nighness of the end. As if the ruddy-cheeked and beer-bellied man of the household would say “actually, I’m pro-black hole. I ain’t no snowflake. It’ll get rid of them darned pesky immigrants and make America great again, again”. So, the first response was one of surprising calm. The general consensus was that the headlines were clickbait, and that everything would be alright in the end because existence had never stopped before, so why would it start stopping now? Things would be alright, they always are. And it’s easy to look back (or is it forward?) and mock, but living was the habit of a lifetime and there had been no precedent of it ever ending.

    But the media were enjoying this with irresponsible verve, and were railing against this inertia and social malaise with their frenzy-whipping tendencies. And this was great news for high-profile astrophysicists, because they could book gigs and get paid and feel like celebrities, which was, let’s face it, far more important than our impending doom. And, as I discovered, it was great news for low-profile astrophysicists too. You see, I discovered this when I got an email from an executive producer from Sky News based back in the UK, to maybe do a video-chat on live television to discuss what I knew about event horizons and apocalypses. How they got my name I’ll never know, I don’t have an agent for this kind of thing who pimps me out for televisual dollar, and I just churn away in the background. Maybe they listened to the 33 episodes of Astro-logical, my vastly underrated (or perhaps fairly rated, just not popular) podcast, or maybe they follow me on Weibo where I post interesting articles about the great blanket above the sky we call space, or maybe they saw my name in the acknowledgements of Chipo’s famous book Starmap: A Road to Everywhere, available on a device near you. Either way, in this particular slot for this particular channel on this particular day, I was their expert of choice to discuss doomsday.

    I had been scouring the internet for flights back to the UK when this email landed in my inbox, and did not see the notification angle in from the corner of my laptop to tell me the email had landed, since I was distracted by the fact that every flight from JFK was getting booked up in the swelling madness that had slowly taken hold. The people in New York might not have been giving it the time of day but it turns out lots of people were. All the aliens, all the illegal aliens, all the Englishmen in New York were planning on planing back to ol' Blighty. My British tendency towards underreaction was also being scuppered by the news and dragging me begrudgingly towards the enveloping hysteria. I’d even, such was the desperate state of affairs, text my dad to check if he was OK, but he hadn’t answered so was probably tending his farm, feeding his chickens or arguing with the contractors of the new potato-planting equipment he'd just bought or some such rural bollocks. Still, given the news, I couldn’t shake the background hum of worry, and kept glancing at my phone for his response. And I was just checking to see if he’d replied when I saw the email from this executive producer. My first instinct was that the whole thing wasn’t legit, that this was a phishing scam or something. But it seemed genuine, and they seemed keen to have me live on air within the hour.

    Wait? What? Within the hour? I called the number given on the email to discuss a number of things, the first of which being... what the actual fuck? And the second being, will I get paid for this? And the third being, of course I’d love to appear on your show. The details were clear, it was a quick turnover – I suspect I hadn’t been first-choice but that other people were getting booked up due to surge in demand of experts in space science – and I had to get ready and prepped for a ten minute interview with the anchor Ruth Spelling to impart my scientific insight on this topic, and either debunk or support the claim. I was, of course, going to support it, Chipo was my hero and friend, and I trusted her with my life when it came to this stuff. Then, he stressed, do not cause too much panic. Downplay the severity of it if necessary, but do not do anything to unnecessarily cause a panic. This advice took me by surprise, since hyperbole was currency in their journalistic industry and we were sitting on a lonely mountain of the stuff with this news story, but he had apparently had this stressed to him from further up the chain. Do not panic! Such a poetically Douglas Adams quote for such fittingly world-ending times. I guess at some point, parliamentary officials had made the case to the national broadcasters to keep things calm and not incite rioting and looting. I promised I would be my level-headed best self.

    For the actual interview, I had to set up my phone to record the interview so they could see my face, but first I would have to fix up my face. So that would mean it was time for my fabled routine of applying just enough make-up to not appear like I’m wearing make-up and that I’m just naturally pretty. Then, I’d pick an angle for my phone to face me, which meant judging lighting through the window so that they could see me without too much glare, which meant picking a flattering angle so the inevitable crevices that form on the face when early-onset ageing sets in don’t cast whopping great shadows across by otherwise unblemished (because I'll be wearing my subtle make-up) visage, and which also meant aiming so that the background would be the part of the hotel room that didn’t have worn clothes chucked together in a messy pile. And then, with my notes and expertise ready, we’d do a trial run to check sound quality and just guide me through the types of answers I had to give. No swearing, short answers but with sufficient elaboration, keep the scientific language simple enough to not disorient, but complex enough to exude expertise, that kind of thing. And then I waited. I filled the these anxious minutes with a crafty fag or two. I had been trying to give up smoking, and had for the most part succeeded, but come on! The world was going to end soon and I don’t think that the black hole was going to give a fuck the extent to which I had caked my lungs with black gunky tar. I was nervous, and when I was nervous, I headed straight for the Marlboros.

    You have to remember, I’d never done anything like this in my life. Sure, I’d had the podcast, but nobody listened to it, and I had contributed to scientific journals, but nobody read those. I’d written for online websites like The Conversation and WWW, to enthuse about my great passion for black holes, but these were niche websites for nerds and SJWs well away from the mainstream. But live national television, on the other hand, was a completely different kettle of fish to me, and I was getting nervous. And we would be going to me live in about 2 minutes. I quickly looked at the hotel mirror to make sure my hair looked just the right side of stylishly crumpled, and that the bags that haunted my eyes were ironed out with the thin layer of foundation I had coated myself with. I looked good, I thought, but I couldn't really waste time literally admiring my own reflection when there was so such much more to worry about. Worrying about things like accidentally swearing or forgetting my notes or putting my foot in it. A successful interview and maybe it would be the first of many. But was that even something that I wanted? After all, I was an established academic and university professor, and now also a leading proofreader and reviewer of published books in the field of physics. Wasn’t that enough? Or did I want more?

    “Ok, so you’ll be going live in 30 seconds, just be calm, talk slowly and speak to Ruth like you spoke to me. You’ll be fine” came the voice from the headphones that I was using as a stand-in earpiece. This producer sounded young enough to be my son and here he was, mothering me.

    “Thanks” I said, before chastising myself silently for allowing nerves to slip into my voice, even then. If I sounded nervous to the producer just saying thanks, what would I sound like live on television in the heat of the moment. But my negative thoughttrain was derailed by a new voice coming through my headphones.

*Dum*

*Dum*

*Dum*

    "I'm Ruth Spelling and this is part of Sky News look at the showing announcement from esteemed Nobel-prize winning physicist Dr Chipo Oliseh that a black hole may be heading on its way... to our solar system. Here with us today to discuss this startling announcement is Dr Gwendolyn Hughes of the University of Brighton. Thank you for talking to us today, Dr Gwendolyn” came Ruth Spelling’s well-enunciated voice, strident and uninflected in that insipidly characteristic way that British broadcasters have.

    “Thank you for having me, pleasure to be here” I said politely, calmly, maybe this wouldn’t be so bad. Except… wait, what did I say? Pleasure to be here? Why did I say that? I wasn’t ‘here’, I was in a hotel room in New York. Oh god, I’ve made a tit of myself already. This was going to be a long interview.

    “So, first off, a simple question. Do you believe the news that is being reported across the globe that we are being told that our entire planet, our entire solar system, is at risk from a black hole?” Remember, I thought to myself, do not cause panic. But at the same time, support Chipo’s assertions. I didn’t realise that this was such a fine line to tread.

    “(Ermm) yes. Yes, I do believe it. I believe in the work that Dr Chipo Oliseh has been doing down in Melbourne, and I trust her findings. So, yes, without a shadow of a doubt, if Dr Chipo Oliseh says that this is the case, then it most certainly is the case.” There, I think that was about right. It wasn’t going to induce any riots, but I clearly had Chipo’s back.

    “But, if that’s the case, should we be worried?” Ruth’s questions seemed pointed.

    “Yes, we should be worried, I guess. Panicked, no. This (erm) this isn’t imminent I don’t believe, I believe they’re looking at time frames now but we’re not talking days or weeks here. But (umm) yes, there should be some healthy concern. Black holes are, well they are scary things, and this one’s getting closer.” Again, a fine line between honesty and scaremongering.

    “You mention time frames do you have an idea….”

    “None, no I don’t and, to be honest, it would be a little bit crass and disrespectful to hypothesise at this juncture. Look, I know Dr Chipo and I know how she works and she will tell us the numbers when they’ve been checked and re-checked. That’s how she operates, that why she’s so trusted and respected in her field. She will tell us when they’re ready but in the meantime, guessing does nobody any favours.”

Wait… you said you know Dr Chipo Oliseh?” Ruth Spelling seemed surprised by this. Obviously the producers hadn’t got me on the show on the basis of my credit in her book then.

Yes, (erm) yeah I do, I actually consider her to be a good friend and a great mind. One of the greatest of our generation, in fact. She (erm), well she guided me through my doctoral thesis back when I was at my Melborune Uni days, but that was back in the days before Starmap...”

    “And what’s she like? As a person?” Ruth inquired, curiously. I sometimes forgot that Chipo was something of a breakthrough celebrity of our field, because she was just Chips to me. Friendly and respectful, and always professional and considered Chips. But to the rest of the world, she was the face of, not just modern science, but also of diversity and triumph over adversity. She was a truly inspirational woman, and a lot of people were taking inspiration from her.

    “Lovely. Oh yeah, a lovely lady. Yeah, I have to say. Kind, strong, fiercely intelligent. She was a mother figure to me (errr) as she guided me through my doctorate on… well this black hole actually.” I winced as soon as I said this. Admitting that I had studied this particular black hole was admitting that I hadn’t observed its proximity or how much closer we were getting to it.

    “So, you’ve actually studied this black hole then?” More surprise in her voice, oh god this was going badly. Was time slowing down, because surely 15 minutes were up now? I swear a bead of sweat was trickling down my forehead and the picture camera on my Amazon Blitz 4 phone was of such good quality that I bet people could see it at home.

    “Yes, but (erm) like I said, (erm) this was before Starmap, so we (erm) didn’t know, couldn’t possibly even, y’know, conceive the notion that it would be a threat to us in our lifetime. But yes, no I studied, with the wonderful help of Chipo it has to be said, but I studied Grendel for four years” I confessed.

    “Grendel?” She asked, puzzled once more. Oh shit. I forgot about that. Our pet name for the black hole was just that, a pet name. Between two colleagues in the realm of astrophysics. Not between one physicist and the rest of Britain. Could I get just one answer out without putting my clop-hopping size 6s right in it.

    “Its the (um), the monster from Beowulf. We called it Grendel, because it reminded us of those (erm) those mysterious ancient wonders that they talked of when they didn’t understand scientific phenomena. You know how they thought volcanos were dragons and that Giant Squid were Krakens, that sort of thing, so we called this great monster of space and time, Grendel.” Here I was, justifying a silly pet name for a destroyer of worlds on national television. God, yesterday seemed like such a long time ago.

    “And, what do we know about this… Grendel then?” Ruth pried, leaping onto this term.

    “Well, we’ve actually long suspected there was one approximately pfft, um about 26,000 lightyears away in the centre of our galaxy, because it was the only thing that could explain the various trajectories of stars. And 26,000 lightyears is a lot, like a lot lot, for example it (erm)… well, it takes 8 minutes for light to reach us from the sun, but it would 26,000 years from this… from this black hole. If they emitted light of course. Which is why this result is such a surprise, because it seemed so far away at initial estimations.” I said, gathering myself and slipping into more comfortable territory. I felt on firmer footing explaining science to novices, and I found myself slipping into my podcast voice.

    “So, how can we have been so wrong?” She asked. And a damned good question it was too.

    “Well, um, that’s the million dollar question. There’s still lots we don’t know about these supermassive black holes, we may know how they’re formed but we don’t know what happens to the things that get swallowed by them. We think of them as if they are two-dimensional, like holograms, but that seems so counter-intuitive to our perception of the universe. There’s erm, there is still so much we… we don’t understand. And, you see, spacetime is constantly in flux, it’s not just our planet that’s moving by orbiting the sun, the sun is surging through space itself in a galaxy that’s surging through space in an expanding universe of space. But yes, this finding is surprising.”

    “Wait, sorry, can we go back a second, did you say supermassive black hole?” Did the laymen and laywomen really not know about this term even? Just one answer Gwen, for God sake just give one answer that she didn’t need to follow up for clarification.

    “Yes”

    “So, what is a supermassive black hole compared to a normal one?”

    “Ha, well, have a guess”

    “Oh” and I think Ruth began to get it. Grendel wasn’t big. Starbuck’s coffee servings were big. The back wheels on a pennyfarthing were big. But Grendel was something else too large for our simple human minds to comprehend. Imagine the biggest thing your mind can possibly fathom and then multiply it by the biggest number you can comprehend and you’re still nowhere close. Grendel was a monster of a black hole.

    “So, why shouldn’t people panic then, if this Grendel is as big and as deadly as you say?” Ruth’s question seemed ready to trap me into going against the producer’s instructions. I felt cornered.

    “I don’t know. I really don’t. Maybe we should, maybe we shouldn’t. Humankind has never not survived before, every challenge is one we’ve risen to, but we’ve never faced anything like this. So, I don’t know. I...” I paused, trying to work out what I was trying to say. I could tell I wasn’t really making sense. Should we be panicking? I was starting to panic, the more I talked about it. No, panicking would do no good. “I have faith. Yeah, I have faith in the brilliant minds around this planet to find a solution. I have faith in science and our willingness to rise to every occasion. But most of all, I have faith in Dr Chipo Oliseh, because she discovered this thing through sheer genius and I can’t believe the fates would conspire to have her uncover this threat just in time if we were unable to do anything about it” It was supposed to sound rousing, but I made a terrible mistake. I spoke of faith and fate. I’m a scientist and I said on national television that our greatest hope for survival was… faith.

    “Thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us on this Dr Gwendolyn Hughes of Brighton University. Now after the break we’ll be looking at...”

    Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. The only justification that I could think of for not panicking was religion. And I was staunchly atheist. Staunchly. At least my dad would be pleased.

    In fact, the whole interview had felt like a calamity. Every answer just warranted more questions. I was giving the cause of the end of the human race a quaint nickname on national television, I was explaining that I had somehow not noticed during my doctorate that I was studying the thing that was going to kill us all. Could the interview have gone any worse?


 

    In my despondent state, I looked around for mischief. Looking under my bed where I had hidden it from the camera, I picked up a thank you box of chocolates that I had been given from the publishing company I had been up in New York to meet, and opened them. It had been given as a kind acknowledgement for flying over and teaching the new employees the latest research and validation processes and methods for the publishing of scientific non-fiction. It was a nice gesture, especially since they were paying me to come out here and paying for my accommodation, but not one I had given much thought to until now. I wouldn’t normally eat these sorts of gifts, just give them out to a class perhaps, or share them amongst the less rigorously self-disciplined professors at the university. There was this one teacher there, a little bit older than me, who would eat anything sweet. But not me, no, I would never partake in such empty calorie consumption.

    There were plenty of reasons why I shouldn’t eat them now, either. I just couldn’t think of any that felt like they mattered all of a sudden. All my reasons seemed so flimsy compared to the imminent demise of humanity. I mean, I was pinning all my hopes of existence on divine bloody intervention, some sugar and cacao was hardly going to be the thing that killed me. Fuck it, I thought, and placed one of the chocolates in my mouth. White chocolate and pecan, blisteringly sweet and decadently creamy with a nutty garnish. I sighed as I realised I was going to eat the whole box, because I couldn’t think of a reason strong enough not too. Because, unless I’ve been wrong all these years about God, I’m about to not exist. I put a second chocolate in my mouth and chewed, whilst running my finger along the inside lid of the box where they list the descriptions, deciding which one to eat next.

 

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Hey guys, updates will slow down after the next one as I have nearly caught up with my Deviant Art page. But the plot is gradually grinding into action, WG and narrative thrills are lurking, I promise

Chapter 4

    I arrived at Stanstead airport in the early hours of the morning, in the pitch black and acid cold. The flight had been a nightmare, overbooked and overdue. There was a growing swell of concern about Grendel that had risen from the initial ambivalence to the news and it wouldn’t be long before it became fever pitch. The flight stewards and stewardesses were looking tired and disgruntled from being overworked, and their fake smiles and farewells seemed even less sincere than usual. I grabbed my luggage and proceeded to catch a MyTaxi to Euston station. The journey to the station was made worse by the driver insisting on having the radio on, and the radio insisting on discussing the black hole. The first half of the journey was just some Etonian blowhard praising himself for never worrying about climate change because it wasn’t the thing that was going to get us, as if that was the moral of story. Fuck the planet because there might be a black hole anyway.

    The second half was even worse. Some arseclown of a disc jockey was blathering on unintelligibly about the phenomenon despite being clearly woefully under-informed, when he had the temerity to call the thing “Grendel”. Shit, I thought to myself, what have I done? I could hear the quiet condescension of Chipo as she hears that our colloquial pet name for a supermassive black hole has now been adopted as the defacto term by our ever-abridging press corps. But there was a follow thought that I had when I heard this beyond the flinch of guilt and embarrassment. One of pride. They were quoting me, however indirectly, on LBC. I couldn’t fathom it, but had I accidentally named the biggest challenge to ever face mankind? Was I famous?

    The air was, if anything, even colder when we pulled up at the station, though those first few rays of hallowed sunlight were hitting the black night air. These virginal rays only illuminated the deathly cold that I could see simply by breathing out. I heaved my bags of luggage off the MyTaxi’s backseat and onto the pavement, and made my way to the platform where I would catch the train to Birmingham, which I could then follow up with a further train to Machynlleth in Powys, Wales. The final leg of the journey would be courtesy of my dad picking me up and taking me back to the farm.

    I say farm and you picture getting up at the crack of dawn to feed chickens, don’t you? Well, that’s true, I guess, but really a lot of people’s mental image of farming fails to account for the fact that it is essentially a food factory with livestock. This is big business, and our farm had a turnover of several £million a year, which was comparatively little in relation to some of the friends/rivals of my dad’s. It’s not some quaint venture, farming isn’t, oh no, this is as cruelly dog-eat-dog as the finance or tech industry. Sitting on the train, and I was surprised how busy it was for the time in the morning. It was Friday morning, so I guess people were finishing for the weekend, and leaving the city to go back home. And of course there were the people panicking and fearing the end. And I was a mixture of both of those people sets, I suppose.

    I was dreading seeing my father. I could hear his condescending voice in my head every time I didn’t do exactly what he would do in a situation. Every time I would travel and ‘abandon my roots’, or every time I would choose reputability over money in my career and ‘be part of the generation who expects other people to earn money for them’. Every time I dumped or was dumped and ‘damaged the Hughes dynasty, because it wasn’t all about me, you know’. He had wormed his way into my head with persistent disappointment in me that I could not speak to him for a whole year and still hear his tutting in the back of my head every time I chose my career and eduction over settling down and starting a family. I wasn’t allowed to be independent, I was just a vassal to perpetuate the Hughes farming dynasty “which has been going 250 years now, and doesn’t deserve some uppity missy thinking she’s better than the generations who built it before her”. I prayed for time to slow down so I’d not be in his company a little longer. Or maybe Grendel could just swallow us now and put me out of my misery.

    The rhythmic clatter of the train was a balm to my fractured mind, hatched apart with doubts and dread of issues that ranged from the local to the galactic. The world felt like it was spinning wildly out of control but the steady familiar bassline from the train charging down the tracks felt like it was grounding me down to Earth again. The world was going to end; I was about to see my dad; I appeared on the television as a paid expert; the world was going to end. For distraction, I began spying across the train carriage to see if others were as weighed down with the pressure and stress of it all. I’ve always been a bit of a people watcher, which was one of the reasons I was so happy to get away from home in deepest darkest Wales – where the people had furry coats, four legs and said ‘baaa’. Out in the city, in my flat in Brighton centre, or the accommodation at Melbourne, or the friend I would crash at’s flat in London, or just from the window of a breakfast bar in New York. I could just gaze out happily at them and wonder what they’re lives were like, smile as I hear them flirting on phone calls or watch with full schadenfreude as arrogant city-slickers were too self-absorbed to notice that they walking down a pavement next to a deep puddle and a bus was coming by. All these little slices of life. On here, the train was starting to thin again as we headed towards England’s second city, but we still had plenty to cast our eye over. There was a grizzled hippy looking fellow two seat rows down from me decked out in full Ban the Bomb regalia, looking fired up and determined at the forthcoming battle against war, this time a war against being swallowed up by nothingness. It was strangely reassuring that there was always a guy leaving London on a bus looking like he’d been dragged through a hedge backwards protesting a woodland being chopped down, as if, in all these days of earth-splintering revelations, there were still some things you could rely on. Across from me was a sour-faced woman, perhaps a decade or two my senior and draped in haberdasheried attire that tread a fine line between exquisite and eccentric. I recognised her, though I didn’t know her name, as one of those politicians who was always saying stupid shit on television and then claiming that she somehow is speaking on behalf of the British people. Which is possibly true, after all us British folk ain’t half stupid at times. I wonder if she had earlier looked at me with that same feeling of nagging familiarity, like she knew the face but not the name, now I had been on the news? No, that was silly to think, but that a silly thought like that had the legs to pass my mind tickled me. I wasn’t a familiar face from the telly like she was, but I had been on once and this gave my imagination to pretend. Lastly, on the seat behind me was an elderly gentlemen who looked for all the world that he was coming back from his high paid fintech gig at Canary Wharf if he was several decades too old. Smart suit, neat tie, strong posture and distant stare. I wonder what his life-story was? The Welshwoman in me wanted to turn around and ask him, but the city-dweller in me overrode and I left my own questions unanswered. But it was exciting that I was within a metre of this man and had no idea what was going through his head. He could be a hitman on his way to his next contract or a grieving widow on the way from the hospital for all I knew, and he was just a metre away. Maybe, in this post-Chipo age, it’s the human mind that is the final frontier.

    The grizzled hippy, much to my amusement, actually took this time to engage in conversation with a daft politician and began talking to her in an unnaturally loud tone. The rule with bus travel is your only allowed to talk to a person on a bus if you know them, need something or if they have a child/dog. This politician would obviously have fit none of those criteria with the man who still thought Thatcher and Reagan were world leaders. He began explaining, without making a great deal of sense, that the whole thing had been made up. By them. He didn’t explain who they were, but they were obviously faking a supermassive black hole, as one does, and they were doing it to distract from the truth, that Socialism is the only way to rule a nation, free from the iron grip of leeching parasitical corporations. It was all some proper Mr Robot conspiracy claptrap, and, presumably obliviously, being bellowed at an actual member of the government itself. To the MPs credit, she actually bit her tongue well and offered only patronising “oh really”s to him, rather than bash him round the head with a rolled up newspaper like the rest of us would. She went slightly up in my estimation for her composure when confronted with the increasingly rabid and frothing anarchist. But he got the hint after a bit and calmed down got back to looking out the window like a normal train passenger.

    This minor altercation livened up the conversation levels on the bus though. The idle amusement of our hippy friend and his tirade, gave people the confidence to break traditional train etiquette and strike up conversation with their fellow passengers. It certainly gave the smartly dressed octogenarian behind me the chance to strike up a conversation with me. And naturally, he did this by asking the one question on everyone’s lips at this moment.

    “I say, do you think it will rain today?” He said, with concern.

    “Um, I’m not sure, I can check the weather forecast for you if you like.” I said, obligingly. There were very few people in this day and age who weren’t googlers and smart phone users, but this man might just about be old enough to be one.

    “Oh, that’d be tip-top love, if you could. I don’t want to put you out but if it was no bother, with your dual-screen phone thingy, well I’d really appreciate it”

    “Ah, I’m afraid it’s going to start raining at 4.15pm for about… 30 to 35 minutes and then the occasional intermittent shower.” I feared from the worry with which he asked the question that this would be bad news.

    “Oh no, that’s fine. She’ll be married by then. My daughter that is.” I genuine smile warmly spread across his time-addled face.

    “Oh that’s lovely!” I said, surprising myself with how much enthusiasm I had for that idea. I was always a big believer in not getting marriage, being resolutely atheist and also finding the idea of being tied down with someone like having a leash around my collar. But the idea that he could walk his daughter down the aisle was a warming one. “I’m so glad for her and her lucky partner!”

    “Thank you. You know, I was wondering if she never would, she’d been with Christopher for 35 years and never gotten around to do it. Then they heard the news about the...” he pointed upwards to gesture that the decision was sparked by Grendel, as if saying the word ‘black hole’ itself was off-limits and taboo in a Voldermort-y kinda way. “… and they booked to get married the next day! Apparently it’s a common thing and they’re all doing it. Black-Hole Weddings, they call them. Shame it took the end of the world and not me getting on a bit for them to hurry up about the whole thing but I’m just glad for the chance at last.”

    I got surprisingly emotional at this anecdote, this dear old man was made up like his final wish had come true, and that the impending end of everything was a small price to pay for that moment with his daughter. It made me feel guilty about my dad, who had always been nagging me about not getting married. I would always retort that this wasn’t first-come first-served type deal and there wasn’t a time limit, but now I guess there was. Was I doing to my dad, what this man’s daughter had been doing to him? Or was this different? Because, it’s not like I’m actually seeing anyone properly. Sometimes Theo comes around my place and gives me a good seeing to, but that’s less of a relationship and more like students with benefits. Oh, my mind ached with so many thoughts paragliding through it.

    “Well, I’m glad you got your wish and hope you and the bride have a wonderful day”

    The old man reciprocated getting emotional and dipped his head, half in thanks and half to hide the puddles forming around his eyes.

    The train was calling at Birmingham New Street Station next and scores of people shuffled in their seats ready to rouse themselves as the morning sun made more inroads across the skyscape. It would be a busy stop, this would be the major get off point for a lot of the city-to-city commuters who worked in London and loved the city life but couldn’t stretch to the stratospheric house rental prices so shacked up in Birmingham and would come back for the weekends.

    This would also be my chance to get some breakfast after a long early morning on an empty stomach. If I were being true to myself, I would have to confess that my stomach hadn’t really been empty through the entire course of yesterday, and it probably could have done with the rest. But nothing like everything turning to nothing to distract you from your healthy eating rota. And I didn’t mind really. I mean, would the past ten years not been more pleasant if I hadn’t whipped myself into shape relentlessly despite the diminishing returns of a fatiguing metabolism? I can’t see how they would have been worse, they’d have been the same but with more ice-cream. Maybe this would be the new me. The one who didn’t say “no thanks” when offered the dessert menu. The one who said “why not?” as a rhetorical question and not one to which I would reply. But how long would I even have as this new me?

    It’s not like I’ll balloon or anything, would I? There have been between 110 and 115 pounds on this 5ft8 frame for the past 18 years. So why not break the habit of a lifetime, before our lifetime begins to break? Will I really be worried about having to upgrade to size 6 jeans when the great monster Grendel comes in from the darkness to take us as its victim.

    Eatery options around the station in Birmingham were somewhat limited still as it was still before 7am, but there were always a few tried-and-trusteds, with their golden arches and their McBreakfast menu to fill your McStomach. There was also, thankfully, a newly renovated café/diner as part of the huge station complex that focused on vegetarian, vegan and for my interest non-lab made food. Everyone says that the lab-grown food tasted the same as the farm-grown stuff and only a real snob would know otherwise, but try telling that to a girl who grew on a farm and has eaten freshly slaughtered and butchered meats, eh boyo. As good as it is for the environment and everything, it’s the one conservative trait that my dad successfully drilled into me. So this new café – The New Street Nourisher – would be just the ticket so near the station.

    There was even a smokers veranda upstairs, which sounded like both a brilliant and terrible idea for a girl who that she had kicked that one unpleasant habit. And you can usually tell the extent to which a girl is enslaved to her habit by the conditions they are willing to endure to get that nicotine release. And I was opting to eat outside in the icy Spring morning air just as an excuse to light up a cigarette habit I thought I had extinguished. But, I sat down anyway and smiled as I spotted they had outdoor heating to protect me from the bitter windless air. I read through the limited but tasty sounding menu options on the plastic menu that was pre-set on the table. “Somerset grown jacket potatoes with freshly grown coleslaw” sounded like a good way to start the day, as did “free-range egg omelette with Birmingham dairy cheese and Midlands foraged mushrooms”. No meat options at this hipster joint to sate this farmgirl’s carnivorous cravings, but given that egg is essentially to chicken what lamb is to mutton I went for the omelette. And I decided to order coffee as black as Grendel to wash it down with. A sensible breakfast, not the dangerous blow-out I feared I might fall foul of.

    The omelette was lovely with its gooey cheese and those fresh button mushrooms for their juicy little surprises in alternating mouthfuls, and was even better washed down by my bitter black coffee. It went down with ease, despite the eating escapades of yesterday, and I was feeling quite good about myself. Looking up and blowing smoke rings in the sky, I felt the food hit my stomach and the coffee stimulate my brain. My flight had left me a little tired and jetlagged truth be told; it may have only been a five hour journey but when the flight travels against the gravitational spin of the planet, the jetlag is usually worse for me. But I thanked my lucky stars that nicotine, caffeine and a little grease had been my catholicon.

    After the meal, I made my way to the station for the train to the middle of nowhere in Wales. Britain isn’t particularly well-off for it’s rail coverage but there has always been a train running from Birmingham across the Welsh valleys at my nation’s centre, then down the Ceredigion coast, across the South coast and through Swansea and Cardiff and through to Bristol. This one rarely used line had been my lifeline growing as a teenager in the backwaters of Wales, a portal to the busier and more alive metropolises around me with their nightclubs and clothes shopping and city culture. It stopped me from feeling so cut off from the world that I wanted to belong to, and prevented me from being marooned in an agricultural nightmarescape of windy weather on rugged hills tending to misbehaving livestock. Marooned in the life that my dad wanted for me.

    My dad always wanted me to stay local, study local, live local and work local. He thought I should apply at Aberystwyth University which was on this trainline less than an hour away, and had strong courses in Welsh Language or Rural Management. I wanted to study science, he wanted me to take over the farm and his idea of a compromise was studying to become, I dunno a combine harvester engineer or whatever. My idea of a compromise was telling him to go do one, before packing my bags, slinging my hook and getting a degree at UCL to get away from him, and then to Australia for the masters and doctorate to get even further away. In retrospect, maybe I could have compromised more.

    This half of the train journey was always a more sedate one than the first half, with nice scenery to look out into and fewer people catching this particular one with its niche demand. I rested my head against the window and watched the world go by.

    I woke up an hour later, and halfway across the journey, just reaching the point where we cross into Wales and I’ll be on home soil once more. My mind hadn’t stopped racing when my eyelids drooped and I drifted off, it was still charging through the detritus of my mind trying to make sense of the senselessness of our impending swallowing. I had dreamt of my calculations on Grendel seeing the numbers in my head and going through them each time, but being a dream, they would each time change, sadistically flitting to different calculations so every time I re-ran the numbers I got wildly different answers. It was safe to say that my doctoral miscalculation was plaguing my mind. I needed more coffee after my impromptu hitting up of the land of nod, and also a KitKat Chunky for sugar and energy. Sweet food and dark coffee are great companions, even when the world is ending. I hadn’t had a chocolate bar in ages, years even, it had been blackballed from my diet after my metabolism turned down a notch at 30 and had not been seen since.. This was a rare bout of decadence, but these felt like the desperate measures for which these desperate times called. Two thirds of my hungry way through my chocolate bar and I began to wonder if there were any physical consequences to this recent gluttony. A perverse curiosity came over me as I began to wonder if my stomach had managed to quarantine the damage locally and would be gone post-digestion, or whether it would let some fatty deposits slip through the net and around my body.

    My bum still felt taut and lean, like humourless beanbags, aching from being deployed as a cushion for such a long journey. My legs still felt sinewy, with my fingers able to slip between the various tendons of my quads. Nothing to report then, almost to my disappointment, around the abdomen, now let’s focus on the stomach itself. Yes, it felt uncharacteristically compacted from my recent eating exertions, but there was still no outward shape. It didn’t glide inwards, but these days it rarely did. The only times my stomach looked convex was when I woke up first thing in the morning and it was still dehydrated. And for that wonderful brief window in the morning, I felt like I was a dancer or an athlete and not some physics nerd with delusions of grandeur. I hadn’t noticed if I had my temporary dancer’s body this morning because of the flight, but I worried that this recent irresponsible grazing would mean I never would again. Not that I knew how long ever again would be.

    I glanced down at my phone and hoped for updates from Chipo, or in fact anybody, about what was going down with this black hole, and how the fuck we’d only just noticed that it had been getting so close to us. Chipo hadn’t text, so I began browsing for think pieces from the sensible websites for more measured takes on the immeasurable destruction we were about to face. They were all written by experts who knew as much as anybody else did, since Chipo’s team was keeping all the data itself away from public viewing until they had validated how long we had. Worse still, these experts may have known their stuff but I don’t think I was being arrogant in believing I knew just as much if not more. Their scientific explanations were wasted on me since I knew this shit already.

I began to wonder if that was how Sky News decided to use me as an interviewee, they simply googled who would know about this stuff. If I googled my name, what would come up, and underneath the article about that raven-haired girl being released after serving her jail sentence for murder was…


 

The Woman who named Grendel” - 5 facts about the surprisingly talented woman who charmed us all as she talked us through ‘Grendel’.


 

    Umm, holy shit? There’s a BuzzfeedUK article about me? Why was there a Buzzfeed article about me? I clicked the link, curious as to what 5 facts they had come up about me and why they thought I deserved an article. On Buzzfeed. For real.


 

As soon as the 30-something attractive astrophysicist appeared on our screens on Sky News, we knew she wasn’t like the other greying talking heads, and people on Weibo went absolutely crazy for her immediately, with multiple Oscar winner and star of "The Spy Life" Saffron Spenser sending an Instagram message to her fans of Dr Gwendolyn Hughes’ picture with the caption “yesss grrrrl”. Amusing, informed and bad-ass, she treated the subject like she was an expert, but without talking down, and we all fell a little in love with her as she kept her calm and accidentally revealed that she was one of the foremost black-hole physicists of her generation. Here’s what we found out about her.

1. She wasn’t name-dropping about knowing Dr Chipo Oliseh

Dr Chipo Oliseh has been one of the most famous names and faces in the sciences for over a decade as matches scientific excellence with inspiring perception-busting heroism, and if Dr Gwendolyn is anything like her colleague she’s a great woman too and we should all get behind her. And it seems that these really are close friends, with multiple pictures at Melbourne dinners showing Dr Chipo receiving various deserved awards, and look who is on her table on this pic, if not our new favourite scientist. You don’t get to be invited as Dr Chipo Oliseh’s plus one unless you’re pretty close with the impressive woman.

2. She has a podcast

Yes, everyone has a podcast. My mum has a podcast, your mum has a podcast. Most of them are just jockish 20-something boys with nothing to do just shooting the wind and presuming that they’re funny. But Dr Gwendolyn’s is about astrophysics, it’s called Astro-logical and it’s worth checking out if you want to hear a brilliant woman talk you through the mysteries of the sky. And, at this moment in time, I think we all want that. And the podcast is also surprisingly funny, which leads us to...

3. She’s pretty goddamn funny

As well as being exceedingly pretty and extraordinarily intelligent, she’s also a hoot to boot. Ugh, some people get all the luck don’t they? But it stands to reason that the woman who said “Have a guess?” to Ruth Spelling when she asked what a supermassive black was, has a witty tongue, and her podcast showcases her droll humour, but not as much as her Weibo page where she lets rip at anything she feels deserves it, often to our amusement


 

GwenHughes99: Our PM should spend a little less time patronising the Welsh, and a little more time fucking off back to Hobbiton where he came from.


 

4. She’s Welsh and Proud

We love the Welsh, home of lamb and rugby. But nobody loves it like Dr Gwendolyn who regularly posts about here love of her home country and often fights her corner on Weibo in the ongoing Welsh IndyRef debates, or cheers on the football team in full voice as per the video below

[Video Made Unavailable Due To Ongoing Weibo Dispute – Apologies]


 

5. She knows her stuff.

Look on the back of Dr Chipo’s famed opus “Starmap” and you’ll see in her list of thanks a special mention to a Dr Gwendolyn Hughes. If Dr Chipo owes a special thanks to our Gwen for the most important science book since A Brief History of Time, then we can begin fathom just how smart this lady is. A first in Astrophysics from the prestigious University College of London, following by the similarly revered Melbourne University rewarding her with a Masters and Doctorate. She also leads the Physics course at Brighton University, and serves as a scientific proofreader and advisor for academic publishers. This girl really can do it all.


 

    I just sat there dumbstruck for the rest of the train journey in a stupor of fear and anxiety and pride and egotism. Was I famous?

    I didn’t feel it, I felt shell-shocked. I always thought these things about myself, you know? Always believed I was funny, smart and fiercely Welsh. But to read someone say that about you, someone you’ve never met… I started shaking. It felt like gravity was being pulled from underneath me. I was always the bridesmaid to Chipo’s bride. I was always the black sheep to my dad’s white swan. I kept telling myself that what I was doing meant something, who I was meant something, but I’m not sure I ever bought it. Every success always felt so second-place. UCL was a great university and I should have been proud to call myself an alumnus, but every time I spoke to another brilliant mind and they revealed that they were from Oxford or Cambridge, I felt a twinge of shame. That the heroics I should have been celebrating were never enough. I ‘helped’ Chipo but I was not part of the team that won the Nobel prize. I had a podcast with regular listeners but never in large numbers. I would wonder if I was being ungrateful for wishing for more when I had so much, and hate myself for judging myself negatively against Chipo’s bright light. Nobody ever remembers the runner-up, even though they were only one away from being the best in the world, and I felt my entire life was spent as runner-up. My dad’s farm was, by most laypeople’s reckoning a big old farm, but we always felt small given the size they can get to. It was always the same. Until now. My chest tightened and my visual periphery started to lose focus and drift. I was having a hard time concentrating and my breathing became staggered. I just wanted to be a big fish in a big pond, but I had to make do with small ponds because I was never big enough. Always the bridesmaid, never the bride, like I was literally and figuratively with Chips for her wedding. Was my dad wrong, was I succeeding? And what did it matter if the world was going to turn black anyway?

    And then I blacked out.

 

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This might be the last update of this story for a bit, because I've caught up with my DA page, but I am writing it furiously I promise. Pay attention to the plot here as some of the plot clues are becoming more obvious

 

Chapter 5

    A punching pain. A punching pain. A punching pain. Haymakers coming from inside my head. Like my brain is trying to evacuate my skull. Blistering, searing red-hot pain. I’m sure I’d felt this pain before, the excruciation felt distantly familiar. My brain hurt so much I felt sick. And then it dissolved like aspirin in water.


 

    Where was I? Oh yes, just landed at Birmingham New Street Station.

    Eatery options around the station in Birmingham were somewhat limited still as it was still before 7am, but there were always a few tried-and-trusteds, with their golden arches and their McBreakfast menu to fill your McStomach. Another alternative was a typical vegan hipster shebang called the New Street Nourisher, which didn’t sound like it would give me my meat fix. There was an early-opening Subway and an i-Food just around the corner. I couldn’t understand why but these just didn’t fascinate my curious stomach, any of these first four places would easily be the kind of joint would normally placate my plate, but they really didn’t seem the appetite whetters that I was hoping for. The past few days, my eating habits had been acting strange but the thought of a McDonalds breakfast wrap or a mushroom omelette just didn’t elicit the same Pavlovian pangs as something more fleshy and carnal. And this limited my food choices considerably. In fact the only places that this left that served non-grown meat were the Halal joints.

    It had always amused me that grown food had brought together two unlikely bedfellows, white conservatives and Muslims, but Halalled meat was real meat and so the little cafés originally just catering for followers of Islam had a second wave of clientèle. This nation’s problem with Islamophobia was cured by beef.

    “Beef Islam” was the piss-poor pun of a title for a little bistro-diner that had clearly been set up with non-Muslims in mind. Sure, the beef was Halal, as the stickers on the window proudly announced, but the menu read like a white man’s BBQ wet dream and Halal had just become a euphemism for reared meat these days. But it was reared meat I was after. They did burgers for breakfast, and proper burgers at that; burgers so big that a stick was stabbed through the centre of them to simply stop the whole thing falling apart. Beef patties, thick and juicy with a sliver of red at their heart, served with thinly sliced Cheddar (so very British, but really not the best cheese for a burger), beef tomato, lettuce and mayonnaise and ketchup. Served with on-the-premises made chips and a crispy coleslaw. Sounded perfect.

    Oh, and how right I was! It was succulent and savoury with a fresh salad aftertaste; big and heavy-hitting in portion and flavour. Every mouthful felt like an event, and a celebration of what food can do. I sat in the corner by the window of this dingy little diner in a state of beefy euphoria, and I couldn’t believe how right I was to make the decision to eat here.

    “So, you like our burgers babz?” Said the proprietor of the place, and short and elderly lady with frizzy hair called Hajra, who spoke in the broadest Brummie accent I had ever heard in my life.

    “Oh presh, this is something special I have to tell you. This is a very good burger.” I managed to say between heavy mouthfuls of greasy goodness. But my facial expression was doing the most of the complimenting.

    “Yes, we have this well nice new grill, bought it last week, keeps the flavour in, don’t you know. Absolute bostin’” She gloated, deservedly. Because “absolute bostin’” was exactly what it was. I pushed the last morsel of grilled cow into my still-chewing mouth and leaned back in my seat finally sated. I really shouldn’t be making a habit of eating like this, but sometimes you just have to answer the call of your own body, and mine had been calling out for just this sort of thing.

    In a haze of glutted satiety, I made my way to the train station to catch my train to the middle of nowhere in Wales. I had mixed feelings about seeing my dad, but I was determined to get through at least the initial backlash of seeing your father after such a long time and after such an acrimonious departure the first time round. I can’t remember the exact conversation that saw us go our own separate ways once more, but I remember accusing him of treating me like one of his animals, just there so he can reap the benefits of me further down the line. I may have, in a rash bout of petulance, said he considered me a cash cow. That he needed me not as a daughter but as an investor in his farm to keep the cashflow looking serviceable. And now I come to mention it, I remember then storming off without looking back, like it was the scene in the movie where the lead character finally gets her shit together. But I can’t imagine the story played like that from my dad’s perspective, or that he took it very well. And the thing about my dad was, he was certainly a man who knew how to hold onto a grudge. Going back today would feel like series of skirmishes, as he would try to tear chunks out of me until there was little but a carcass left. But you know what? The world was ending goddammit, and I wanted to make sure my dad was OK.

    I leaned against the window and watched the world go by as this quieter train began its round trip. It was an old train, creaking uncomfortably every time it moved or stopped. But it had a vintage air to it, it felt classical and throwback with its oily black carriages as opposed to the sleek silver bullets we’re used to. Normally I would sleep at this point in a journey, catch some vital shut-eye to counter-balance the grumbling background jetlag and make sure that I was ready and energised for my parental reunion, but I was actually feeling quite awake. I must have slept well on the plane because all I needed was a black coffee and maybe a chocolate bar and I would be ready and raring for my father. A KitKat Chunky or, no, a Double Decker perhaps, which was something I hadn’t had in years but I could innately tell that it was what would really go well with the squid-ink black coffee I was drinking.

    So, instead of sleep, I decided to scrawl through my phone for articles on our bringer of death – Grendel. Surprisingly, I had to wade past some articles about some dark-haired girl being released for murder up in Scotland, to get to the real headlines of today, and that was when I noticed it.


 

    “The Woman who named Grendel” - 5 facts about the surprisingly talented woman who charmed us all as she talked us through ‘Grendel’.


 

    Umm, holy shit? There’s a BuzzfeedUK article about me? Why was there a Buzzfeed article about me? I clicked the link, curious as to what 5 facts they had come up about me and why they thought I deserved an article. On Buzzfeed. For real.

    I read through the article with rapt curiosity as I was told about how wonderful and kickass a human being I was. Me, Gwen Hughes from Powys, Wales. Being kickass. I was absolutely buzzing at the thought of it. I almost felt a bit giddy. And it wasn’t just this one article but my social media was feeling the gale-force love-in that my Sky News cameo had prompted; my Weibo was also blowing up also with people decreeing that I was a bandwagon worth jumping upon and my podcast listening figures had spiked viciously. I felt like I was apocalypse royalty, queen of our untimely demise. The first time in my life that I feel like I’ve truly fulfilled my potential and done something genuinely worth remembering, and there’ll be nobody left to remember it. According to Warhol, everyone gets fifteen minutes of fame, and it seems the last fifteen minutes are all mine.

    And then I suddenly got dizzy, and all of a sudden the world felt like it was coming off its axis a little, and that gravity was pulling me every direction but down. I clasped the vacant chair in front of me firmly, and tried to snap myself out of it. I’d never felt anything like it, it was like nausea except… it was nothing like nausea at all. I don’t know how to describe it, but I didn’t like it. It seemed familiar but I couldn’t pinpoint it. But just before this vicious headache could wrap its talons around me… it dissipated. I’d come out the other side.

    What the hell was it? This otherworldly anguish? Maybe it was my body telling me to eat a bit healthier. Over a decade of drill-instructor diligence over what food passed my mouth and all of a sudden I was eating chocolate and burgers and eschewing exercise. My body was probably just rebelling from my healthy eating regimen going off the tracks. Yes, that was probably it. I was just glad to get to the other side of it, I had a nagging feeling that I had been there before and not managed it. But, stop being silly. It was just the consequence of my eating. Right?

    The consequences of the past few days of overeating were perhaps predictably minuscule when I briefly surveilled my body, but there was definitely signs to be found on my tiny tummy. It had always been flat, though frustratingly rarely inward curving, but now there was the hint of a gentle glide outwards for perhaps the first time in my life. It was probably just a food baby gestated thanks to my recent food conception, but food baby was a new look and feel for me and I shiver of nerves shot through me. The feeling of unchartered waters made me feel seasick with insecurity, but then I steadied myself with perspective; I was going to be spaghettified soon and here I was worrying about something as insignificant as my waistline. Fuck it, a second Double Decker would do no substantive harm.

    Time drifted ever onwards on this journey to the centre of nowhere, and I stared out the window as the built-up areas around the tracks became progressively greener and more rural. Signs of nearing my destination. Hills would ripple out to the horizon with their patchworks of fields, looking like a green table cloth had been spread across the landscape but the creases had been left in. A half-thought triggered in my brain but it petered out before I could make sense of it. Eventually this clunking old train started wheezing its brakes as it neared my stop and I readied myself for my departure. And as the train doors strained opened from the rusty shell that carried them, I saw my dad on the platform waiting for me.


 

    He was a tall and powerfully built man once, my father. A rugby player and all-round outdoorsy bloke. A farmer I guess. The years hadn’t flattered his waistline despite his levels of activity not dimming now he’d hit his sixties, a broad paunch had spread across his midriff and made his scale even more impressive. His hair had receded apart from at the centre where his thick grey whisps still made their way to the front of his head like a peninsular of hair in an ocean of scalp. The rest of face also showed the ravages of labour and time, with his fiery eyes encased in wrinkles and dark outlines and his forehead now rippling with historical frown lines. His beard was grey and bristly, made tough and rugged by the unfriendly Welsh winds that ripped through the valley, but there was still a stronghold of black at the ball of his chin to add dimension to his stern exterior.

    His arms were crossed tightly, like a child’s who was misbehaving or sulking, but it was just his custom. He was emotionally tightly-wound and physically tightly-wound as his arms gripped the other and his chest with ferocity. He was dressed in a light cagoule that would be doing little to repel the cold conditions of this early Spring morn, and his wellies were splattered with soggy clogs of mud from his early morning routine. His posture was tall and proud; he never hid his excellent height behind slumped shoulders but displayed his enormity with defiance and intimidation. All in all, he looked exactly the same as the day I left him, those years ago.

    “Hey” he said in his gruff Welsh accent and displaying his typical curt monosyllabicism. “You good Gwenny?”

    “Yeah, I’m alright dad. You know, considering.” I said, with little conviction.

    “Ah, don’t worry about all that space bollocks from the news, like. It’s just God’s way of telling you to come home. It’s… it’s good to have you back” And then he wrapped his colossal self around me in a hug and I was suddenly a child again in his arms. I could have tutted at the manipulation, sighed at the dismissal of science, roll my eyes that it was my field of science that he dismissed, or retort as he hid behind religious sentiment. But I was just glad to be in the arms of my father again. His chest felt like memory foam and that I was the perfect fit for it. The famous Hughes cwtch.

    I heaved my bags towards his car, carrying them myself despite my father’s gentle protestations. I was strong too you know. The final leg of this journey would be made in my dad’s trustiest companion, a dark green Land Rover Defender that had to be older than me. But he treasured it like a daughter, which annoyed me no end growing up as the daughter he was supposed to be treasuring. I dumped my luggage in the back and sat in the passenger seat of his rust-bucket of invulnerability.

    “So, how’s the farm?” I asked, trying to act like no time had passed and I hadn’t cut off contact from him, only to reconnect because of a black hole.

    “Doing tidy. Pigs doing good. Been focusing on the rarer breeds recently, getting good benefit from it too, I gotta say.” He said, not taking his eyes off the road. He had been moving towards the rarer breeds of pigs for a while now, because the EU provides subsidies for breeding them and because breeding studs of rare breeds is like printing money.

    “And the crops?”

    “I’m not being funny or anythin’, but crops don’t pay like they used to. Meat’s a different story, the bloody city hipsters can’t eat enough of the shit, the ones that aren’t veggie anyway, but nobody cares if a potato came from the ground or from the men in white.” My dad chuntered. The “men in white” being an old fashioned term for the laboratory assistants who grow the veg synthetically. “I sold off the land South of Dewey’s Road for development, no point not selling it. And I’m not gonna lie to you, got good money for it and all. I’m talking millions just for that one plot”

    “Good for you dad. Though, shame nobody appreciates proper vegetables, they don’t know what they’re missing.” It may have been true, home-grown stuff is better, but I mainly said this as an olive leaf to my dad. When he talks about “bloody city hipsters”, he’s talking about people like me. The generation that don’t understand hard work and real food. I’ve heard it all my life. The main reason I wanted to get away from him and move to the city was basically because he hated me for wanting to get away and move to the city. His insistence that I was some city girl at heart was what drove me to the city and he’ll never realise that.

    “Glad to hear it Gwenny. You’ll be pleased to hear that I’ve got a cracking dinner lined up for you, all home grown veg and a chunky slice of pig-arse. I’m not gonna lie, I’ll never ditch growing veg all together, if just for myself.” He said, failing to conceal the smile behind his terse expression. I was coming home.

    When we landed at the farm, I saw how little had changed. The cottage he lived in looked untouched from how I last saw it, with the same jingoistic flags adorning the outside and the same mottled white walls on the inside. The farm seemed in full flow too. He relied on farmhands from the local agricultural college who volunteered here to do the bulk of the farm-work these days, and he focused on the rare breeds and business side of things.

    “You can come back to the fold, eh Gwenny. You don’t have to do your city teaching thing, you don’t.” He suggested, and I flinched. I didn’t want an argument, but me coming home was because I wanted to see my dad, not because I wanted to ditch cutting edge astro-physics for sheep-shearing and pig grooming.

    “I’m sorry Dad. But that city teaching thing involves studying that black hole that’s been in the news. I actually feel kinda important. I was on the news and everything about it...” I replied in a half-assed brag that I knew he would overlook.

    “Look, not gonna lie to you but if the rapture’s coming, the important thing is that you’re in credit with God. But being with family is what He would want.” He said, tenderness veiling the glint of aggression in his voice.

    “And I’m here, aren’t I dad? I heard the news and I’m here. But I can’t stay, that’s all I’m saying. This black hole was the thing I studied at uni, thing I’ve spent my life studying, and now it’s the most important in the universe. I gotta be involved. It’s important to me.” I said, talking to quick with nervous defensiveness. My dad paused for an age, just looking upwards in contemplation before saying anything, leaving me in jittery tenterhooks.

    “Sounds like a sign. Maybe this is God’s plan. And if so, who am I to argue with God’s plan? I’m just grateful to see my little Gwenny again, and for that I thank him, I do.” He said, as he walked into the kitchen to grab two plates of dinner, one for each. “But after you’ve eaten, you can clean out the chickens. The Spanish kid who’s been volunteering has done a bunk, bloody untrustworthy Europeans, and it needs doing. So eat up, and then get to it”

    I smiled in agreement, and dove into my plate of gammon with potatoes and asparagus and covered in a cheese sauce. And it was delightful. The meat so salty and the potatoes so crisp. But the star of the show was the seasonally grown asparagus, honey glazed and grilled to give them a bit of bite. It was the best meal I’d had for ages. This was followed up with rhubarb crumble and custard. And again the rhubarb was in its narrow window of a season, still tart and tangy but mellowed out with the caster sugar and the crumble. The custard was about the only store-bought aspect of the meal. Rhubarb crumble tasted of my childhood, back when mum was still around. It tasted of picking the rhubarbs myself and of racing back into the house as my dad served up. It tasted of the good old days. I sat there and leant back in satisfaction.

    “I’m not being funny like, but I nearly didn’t do the rhubarb crumble. I was planning on apple and blackcurrant pie, I was. But, I dunno, I just got a funny feeling like it was a road I didn’t fancy going down. If that makes sense. Like Jesus was saying ‘eat the rhubarb’.” He said, spooning his last portion into his mouth. Normally I would scoff at this kind of comment. Like Jesus doesn’t have better things to do than recommend puddings. Typical dad, so self-aggrandising that he thinks the son of God is just sitting their and curating his dinner like it’s a Spotify playlist. But the feeling he was talking about was familiar. I’d felt it before, at New Street Station. A feeling of being at a cross-roads and then taking the path less taken. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but the thought rattled in my head. But I had a chicken coop to clean out, so couldn’t sit around stewing over it… and then I got that headache again. Pulsating pain, like a strobe-light in my brain setting my neurons on fire. A supervolcanic eruption bursting against the inside of my skull. My head craving trepany for a release from the pain. Just could it stop please?


 

---


 

    “I’m not being funny like, but I nearly didn’t do the apple and blackcurrant pie. I was planning on rhubarb crumble, I was. But, I dunno, I just got a funny feeling like it was a road I didn’t fancy going down. If that makes sense. Like Jesus was saying ‘eat the apple and blackcurrant’.” He said, spooning his last portion into his mouth. Normally I would scoff at this kind of comment. Like Jesus doesn’t have better things to do than recommend puddings. Typical dad, so self-aggrandising that he thinks the son of God is just sitting their and curating his dinner like it’s a Spotify playlist. But I had been having this feeling a lot recently. Still, I had a chicken coop to clean out and didn’t have time to pinpoint that precise feeling.

    Once it was done, I helped out with the lambing that was in full season. I was an a veteran of dealing with the birthing of baby sheep, I was comfortable and completely at ease where most are hesitant and awkward. But a lifetime of being educated in this environment and I felt utterly at home. A successful birth of baby lambs in the afternoon rounded off a great day. We now had a mother resting and being suckled upon after a fairly trauma-free birth. And it all just felt so natural to me. Being at home felt like putting on old clothes. Except talking of old clothes…

    I’d decided to wear some old weathered trousers since I was going to be getting them dirty over the course of the afternoon, getting my farm on. And my dad had kept all my old farming attire up in my old room. It was all bedraggled and unfashionable stuff with worn bits and clumps of mud indelibly staining them, but it was also wind-resistant, waterproof and sturdy. Perfect for cleaning a chicken coop.

    And tight. This was the unexpected bit. My trousers were a bit tight. My weight hadn’t wavered in decades and I only ever bought knew clothes when the old ones got tatty, but I hadn’t outgrown clothes since my final growth spurt as a teenager. And I had never outgrown clothes at the waist. But here I was toiling against a button that really didn’t want to fasten. There was this resistance coming from my stomach, still swollen from dinner, pressing against the fabric and getting in the way of my doing it up. Was I already over 115lbs, after just a couple of days of splurging? There had been a mere 111 of them when I weighed myself before New York, can you gain 4 pounds in a couple of days? With the trousers still not done up, I crept to the bathroom and rummaged through the cupboard to see if my dad hadn’t chucked out the old scales. And sure enough he hadn’t, I found it hidden underneath the medicine bag in the bathroom cupboard. I got it out and tested it to see if it still worked. It seemed fine, time hadn’t sabotaged it in any way as far as I could tell.

    Before stepping on, I glanced up at the reflection in the mirror. I still looked the same, as far as I could tell. My ringletted hair, my haunted eyes, my sinewy neck. Then I got down to the stomach and sure enough it was different. Jutting out a bit in fullness, rubbing itself against the inside of the t-shirt I was wearing. Front on and it was only the undone flies that gave away the physical alteration, I hadn’t widened and my legs hadn’t thickened. Or did my hips flick out further than before? No, don’t be silly, it had been two days since my eating habits had nosedived, not two months. But the physical change was obvious from a side-on perspective, the mirror not hiding my lank frame’s outward bulge at the stomach, looking alien on my trim build. It was a two day old food baby and I feared it gestating further.

    Finally I decided to step on the scales and see the damage. Except, it turns out that they must have been broken all along because no way can someone put on 10lbs in 2 days. The black digits that coldly expressed 121lbs were clearly mistaken because, even eating as I had, you can’t gain that much that quickly. It was a shame really, I was curious to know.

    Life on the farm is early up and early down, so tea would be at around 4.30pm. My dad would then be in bed by 7pm, ready to get up at 3.30am for the morning chores the next day. It was a hard knock life with its early morning skewing and not one that I missed, but I was here for my father and would attempt to assimilate as best I could for the short time that I was here. He had been uncharacteristically accommodating and forgiving – so far – and the least I could do to return the favour would be to operate at a similar body clock so that I could help my father with the jobs that needed doing at the crack of dawn.

    Tea was normally the main meal in our household since it was the one that you ate at the end of a long slog through a gruelling day, but since it was my first day, back my dad had front-loaded the meals and we ate substantially for dinner instead, when he would normally only have a sandwich to stave off hunger until later. But he was in a jolly mood, was dad, and we were feasting in the evening as well. And the thing upon which we were feasting was a Dave Proctor pie. Dave Proctor was a local company that made non-synthetic pies from local ingredients, and our farm was one of their leading supplier of chicken, pork and bacon. So when you went to a mid-Wales farmshop and bought yourself, say, a chicken and leek David Proctor pie, you were indirectly subsidising the Hughes family farm and eating the Hughes’ former farm animals. And that’s what we were doing this afternoon, with a chicken and mushroom Dave Proctor pie with freshly cooked, piping-hot chips bought from the local chippy. It sounded delicious, even though I had chips for breakfast with my burger this morning. Or did I choose the omelette from the hipster joint? I can’t remember, now you mention it. Either way, the idea of pie and chips still sounded great.

    Oh, and my word was it as great as it sounded. I hadn’t had a Dave Proctor pie in years and my god was it better than I remembered. Its thick shortcrust pastry was buttery and firm, and once you cut through it a tsunami of creamy sauce came oozing out with boulders of chicken and sweet explosions of mushroom riding the creamy filling like surfers on a wave. It felt deep and rich with savoury seriousness, but the mushroom gave it lightness and dexterity of flavour. The side-serving of chip shop chips were greasy and thin, but hot and flowery. I’d doused mine in vinegar for an acidic kick and then spread tomato ketchup over them for that shot of sugary sweetness. It was food nirvana and it tasted like teen memories. This was then finished with the rest of the apple and blackcurrant pie with custard, or was it rhubarb crumble? Either way, I began to remember why my dad was the size he was despite his active lifestyle. He ate like Henry VIII on the day after Ramadan, and I was going to get caught in the crossfire of his caloric lifestyle choices if I wasn’t careful. And I hadn’t been very careful thus far.

    The rest of the day petered out non-eventfully, with me grazing on some crisps and just looking on my laptop to see if any news had broken about Grendel, or if my 15 minutes of fame had passed. But I didn’t look for long, the jetlag crept up on me fairly quickly and I was asleep by about 6pm with the empty crisp packet by the side of me.


 

    The alarm on the telly woke me right out of my deep slumber with its squawking tintinnabulation. A glance at the time revealed why I was in such a deep sleep: 4:00am. I begrudgingly heaved myself and dragged myself to the shower to ready myself for another day on the Hughes farm. Stripping off before the shower, I looked down to see if my stomach had returned to its morning concave shape or whether the past few days had left it looking merely flat. It is, and here’s a cool tip for you, the dehydration that makes you look thinner in the morning, but even having gone the night without a glass of soft Welsh valley water, my stomach still wasn’t concave. Even more concerningly, it wasn’t even flat. No, for the first time in my adult life, my morning tummy was dabbling in an outward trajectory. It was so minor that someone unfamiliar would not have called it anything other than flat, but to my familiar eye it was most definitely shaping away from me. And this chilling novelty made me reassess the false readings on the scales. Maybe they weren’t so wrong after all, maybe I had put on more weight than I had even thought humanly possible. That’s how much damage I had clearly done to my metabolism over the past decade of thrifty food frugality. And this thought worried the fuck out of me.

    The weight didn’t look prominent elsewhere. I still looked like me, and the rest of my body looked like my own… except were my hips more notable? And, come to mention it, was my arse a little less compact. I got out the scales again to double-check, and 121lbs blinked back at me. And this time, looking at my reflection, I believed it. I was the heaviest I had ever been, and that was only after two days of indulgence. Oh Grendel, take me now!

    After the shower, a quick breakfast of egg on toast and then I was helping my dad with the morning tasks. And once sunlight was good, I offered to fix the posts around the goat pen.

    “Now presh, I’ll do that, it’s a man’s job. I’m not being funny but you need strength for that, you do. Not the work for a city slicker” He grumbled in reply, dismissing my offer for help. It hurt, to see him just put me down like that without a second’s thought or consideration. So I didn’t back down.

    “Oh fuck off dad, just because I’m a woman...”

    “Oi, now you listen up. First, don’t talk like that in front of your father. You’re not too old to have mouth washed out with soap, you’re not. And secondly, it’s not some feminist bullshit, it’s because you’re built like a bloody willow tree, it is. Don’t be all agenda-ing at your own father.” He said, curling up his face in disdain.

    “But you can swear in front of me?”

    “Too bloody right. I’m your father, I can do what I like...”

    “And anyway, just because I’m… lean, doesn’t mean I’m not strong. I hit the gym, you know?” I was starting to get defensive again. But all those years doing bicep curls and on the rowing machine just to be told I wasn’t strong enough, well it bloody well pissed me off.

    “City strength doesn’t count Gwenny. Real life strength is what you need, from doing real farmwork. Playing make-pretend with a gizmo in a gym is no substitute for doing proper work. And this isn’t a discussion, ok? Your father’s word is final.” And that was that. My dad just ignored everything I had to say without pausing for consideration. This was him all over, too arrogant to admit that I could do the job, and too bitter to wonder otherwise. So bloody headstrong and so bloody stuck in his ways. Argh, it annoyed me.

    Fortunately, my phone came to my rescue to spare me from my frustration. It lit up and told me that Chipo was calling me.

    “Hi Gwen, it’s me, Dr Chipo” she said with an air of calmness that placated my bubbling frustration with my obtuse dad.

    “I know Chips, I have user ID” I said, a smile appearing on my my face at the sound of my best friend. And then, before my grin could disappear, the dropped another bombshell on my lap.

    “I think we have the date. But I’m going to need you to get over here as soon as you can, these findings are unbelievable...” she said with unusual trepidation.

    “What’s the number? When will we all be dead by?”

    “No, you need to look at the figures first, they’re remarkable. They make no sense” She continued.

    “Just tell me the number first, and I’ll get down there as soon as possible” I said curtly. I really didn’t want this hanging over me, I needed to know.

    “Well, barring intervention...”

    “yeah, yeah yeah”

    “… and if these figures make sense, which they don’t...”

    “come on, just tell me!”

    “6 weeks”

    “6 weeks?”

    “Yes, the world ends in 6 weeks”

 

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28 minutes ago, >_< 0_0 said:

I check DeviantArt twice a day to see if the new chapter is out 😆 What a story! This is no ordinary black hole — if it is a black hole, which I doubt.

Thanks, we're both weaving our mysteries in our stories. I'm enjoying balancing the WG with the story elements with this one, hope you're having fun with yours too

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I thought I was the only one from our generation who keep amalgaming science drama/science-fiction, mystery, psychology comedy drama and fat/WG erotica whilst trying to lay off any essay on some virtual blank page.

I am glad that someone succeed to topple out of my eyes that one delusion of uniqueness such naturally.

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30 minutes ago, John Smith said:

I thought I was the only one from our generation who keep amalgaming science drama/science-fiction, mystery, psychology comedy drama and fat/WG erotica whilst trying to lay off any essay on some virtual blank page.

I am glad that someone succeed to topple out of my eyes that one delusion of uniqueness such naturally.

Thanks John, great minds think alike!

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It somehow remind me about the sociological - and somehow, metaphysical - aspects of the Law of Attraction portrayed on both a quantum and a mundane aspect. 

What if the near-oracular protagonist actually truly is the incoming destroyer of worlds and not some sort a Grendel's mother-like modern figure avenging herself and her long-deprived-of-any-riches bodily sanctum against the dikdats stomped by the Beowulf-like figure, e.g. white British patriarchy impersonate? If she truly is the ever-festered harbinger and progenitor of this uncanny Ragnarok of Men?

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1 minute ago, John Smith said:

It somehow remind me about the sociological - and somehow, metaphysical - aspects of the Law of Attraction portrayed on both a quantum and a mundane aspect. 

What if the near-oracular protagonist actually truly is the incoming destroyer of worlds and not some sort a Grendel's mother-like modern figure avenging herself and her long-deprived-of-any-riches bodily sanctum against the dikdats stomped by the Beowulf-like figure, e.g. white British patriarchy impersonate? If she truly is the ever-festered harbinger and progenitor of this uncanny Ragnarok of Men?

I love this! And you are asking the right questions. The aspects of the quantum and mundane do seem to be in conflict with one another, and you cannot contemplate one without considering the other. The so-called "theory of everything" at the heart of physics is about reconciling the massive with the minute. So you are correct to explore blending your hypothesis between the story as told from the ground level, and the astrological machinations. I hope it keeps you hooked and keeps you guessing!

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Sorry for the weight... I mean wait. Hope you like it...

Chapter 6

    “We need you Gwen. We need you here in Melbourne. We need you here ASAP. We need you here yesterday”

    I listened on the phone as Chipo’s voice concealed the desperation of her plea. I looked at my dad on the horizon, shifting all of his mass and swinging a hammer like Thor to knock in some new posts around the goat pen, and listened to Nobel Prize Winner for Physics Dr Chipo Oliseh of the University of Melbourne beg for me to up sticks and fly away from my family and to the land of Oz.

    “Most of the flights are grounded at the moment due to the panic and understaffing issues, but there is a flight from Heathrow to Syndey midnight tonight.”

    “Tonight? But I’d have to leave by dinner just to make it” I watched my dad lean against the post he had just put in to catch his breath from the physical exertion of one post whilst looking around him to see the other dozen posts that he’d have to put in. The ones I offered to do for him so he could look after himself a bit better.

    “Yes, after that, there’s not another one until Tuesday and that will be subject to possible cancellation. So, you need to leave right now. We need you Gwen. We need you to save the world.”

    It felt like an impossible choice, and certainly an impossible one to make in the negligible timeframe. My father or the possibly the world. Chipo was waiting on the other line for me to confirm and all I could see was my 60 year old father toiling on the family farm, and all I could think of was that he couldn’t cope with me abandoning him again. He did my head in, he truly did, but Lord knows I loved my father despite that. But the most important scientific mind in the world needed my help, and the fate of humanity might literally depend on me.

    “OK Chips, I’ll come. I guess. I’ll come” I sighed. I guess I’ll be abandoning my father once more.

    I hung up the call and looked up at the early morning sun in all of its burnt orange glory. The scene of the rolling farmland and the clear sunny sky seemed so picturesque that it was a real mindfuck to overlook the growing sound of martial drumming as the steady march of the apocalypse continued towards us. In weather like this and out in the rugged rural landscape of the farm that I grew up in, with the father I loved dearly despite all of his gruffness, it was so easy to put my hands over my ears and pretend that everything was A-OK. Ignorance would be bliss right about now.

    But it wasn’t to be unfortunately, and I had to face the music. As nice as the idea of sticking my head in the sand sounded, the knock on my door on responsibility could not go unanswered. Never mind that there were 8.5 billion people whose fates were being determined by a handful of science nerds at the arse end of planet Earth, my dad had spent his lifetime cultivating his farm as part of a dynastic legacy and the least I could do was everything I could to make all that work worth something by helping to create a future for it to continue into.

    I traipsed along the dewy grass with heavy steps, ready to crush my father’s battered heart. I could his grunts of effort as he poured pores of sweat into the groundposts to get them upright and sturdy from half a field away. His silhouette turned to colour as I closed the gap between us, and my heart beat started thumping the inside of my chest with greater intensity as I got closer to delivering the bad news. With each begrudging trudge towards my man-mountain of a father I replayed various potential iterations on how I thought this conversation would go. And every scenario that my imagination could project all ended with me kicking my poor father when he was done and making his old and scabbed-over emotional wounds raw again. I was doing this for him, I convinced myself, and not going just because the pull of feeling important was fluffing my ego. No, I was doing this for him, and I just hoped he would understand that.

    “Look, I’m fine Gwenny. Leave me to it! I’ve been putting up posts since before you were born. And I don’t remember you being so insistent on helping me when you fucked off on your jaunt to Australia!” He chided bitterly. I knew that he was only taking his frustration of the physical exertion out on me and that this wasn’t really about that, but those words were a serrated blade to my heart nonetheless. Because here I was, about to tell my dad that I had to fuck off to Australia again.

    “I’ve just a call, a phonecall” I started, still walking closer to him as he dismissively continued grinding away at the post in a huff.

    “Well done you for getting a signal out here” he said, without looking up from what he was doing.

    “I’m sorry dad”

    He paused and looked up.

    “What have you done now Gwenny” his voice softened a touch, that throaty Welsh brogue melting into something a little more syrupy as he recognised the guilt that was hewn all over my face. He rested his hammer against the post he’d put down and looked at me.

    “It was the call. The one we knew might happen. I’ve got to go again dad. I’ve got to leave you” and my voice crumbled as it got to the end of the sentence and a stinging burn around my eyes formed as salty water formed pools around them.

    He didn’t say anything straight away. He just continued looking at me with squinting eyes. Then he took a large inhale of breath and his lungs expanded the chest his crossed arms now rested on. And with the corresponding exhale he dropped his head and looked at the ground to think, to digest. I waited awkwardly, hovering in a place that I didn’t want to be for a period of time that felt strung out for eternities, as he computed and considered and eventually concluded.

    “Well, if that’s that Gwenny, then I guess I’ll be seeing you. Hopefully that is, but we know that might not be the case, eh Gwenny” and then he turned his back to me, picked up his hammer and walked towards the next collapsed post in the field to continue his work. And I stood, silhouetted to him now, as he walked away from me so I could walk away from him.

    No, I couldn’t cope with this. This was too much. Look, I try, okay? I try to be a good person and a brave person and an impressive person. But I have my limits, okay? The end of the world is bad enough, but this is too much. This was a wound that didn’t need salting. Chipo, the Apocalypse, fame, weight gain, seeing my father, losing my father. It was all too much. I had reached my limit and I just crashed. In a daze of dizzying emotions, I sat down on the wet grass and cried every tear my body could produce. I wailed until my throat was shredded, howling like a banshee until my breath escaped me. Grendel could take me, I didn’t care. Fuck existence. My face burned with anger at myself for letting him down once again. My heart palpitated as each memory came fizzing through of every occasion that I let my father down. A roll call of each screw up or streak of selfishness that I had subjected my father to. And I saw the cumulative effect of that sustained abuse in the way his broad shoulders slumped as he turned away from me after I told him I was leaving. A lifetime of letting him down but this straw was breaking this camel’s back.

    “Hey Gwenny, keep it down, you’re scaring the goats, you are” my father said, standing over me with his signature crossed arms and disapproving eyes.

    “Sorry I...” I mumbled, my snotty nose making articulation impossible.

    “Hey, look presh. Stop caterwauling and pull yourself together. You keep telling me what a brilliant, independent woman you are, now bloody well prove it!” He said, with honeyed sympathy in his voice. I strained to talk but my vocal chords were scorched dry from the undignified bawling I had been doing, turning my voice into an unintelligible breathy whisper.

    “Sorry”

    “And for fuck sake, stop apologising. You’re needed, you should be proud. I am. I’m proud of you Gwenny, I am” and he heaved his heavy mass onto his haunches to look at me in the eyes. “We knew this might happen, we did. He called, and you’ve answered.”

    “She called...” I delicately corrected. Chipo was many things, but she was definitely female.

    “No, you misunderstand me, He called” and dad gestured upwards with his head towards, presumably, the hypothetical Heavens. “Nothing is by chance, Gwenny. It’s all part of His plan. I know you don’t believe, but you can at least believe me. There is a reason for this, for all this, and you’re clearly part of it. So I have faith. I have in God, and I have faith in you.”

    I looked up with wounded pride and a broken heart and met his tender stare and listened to him as he consoled me like he did when mum died. His heart was hurt then too, but he put his faith in his religion and tended for me while he suffered, and he was doing the same here.

    “I still don’t want to leave you dad. Not again” was the best that I could muster.

    “And I don’t want you to go either. But I’m not being funny, I refuse to believe that this is a coincidence, that the black hole that you just so happen to study at university just so happens to be the one that they’re all talking about on the news. This is all happening for a reason, it is. What His plan is, I don’t know. But it includes you Gwenny, it looks like it includes you.” And he put his rough working man’s hands on my brittle shoulders in reassurance.

    “Wait, how did you know that this was the one I studied at university? We never talked about my studies...” my eyebrows burrowed back down in confusion.

    “I saw you on the telly, I did. Oh Gwenny, I was so proud, I was. I told everyone. I’ve shown David, David Evans, you remember, the tractor guy, and I showed Gethin and Eve at the church. I said, that’s my little girl, that is. She’s gonna save the world. And I was right. My very own little Saviour.” He smiled as he said it and his eyes drifted back to reminisce.

    I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t think my dad would care. He always thought my desire to be recognised for my work was vanity, and that my podcast was a superficial indulgence. I simply figured he’d feel the same way about my time on the telly. I didn’t know what to say. So I said the only words my tired brain could muster.

    “I should have time for a quick dinner before I go” I tepidly suggested. “If, you know, that’s okay?”

    “There’s nothing I’d like more, there isn’t. Let’s go on inside Gwenny, the posts can wait a bit longer, I reckon.” and we walked back to the farmhouse.


 

    Sitting at the wooden table in the large rustic kitchen, I watched my dad ready up a meal. I was only expecting a sandwich, given the time constraints anything else would be a luxury, but he wanted to prepare a rush-job farewell feast for me. I caught myself sitting there like an expectant child while my dad hustled and rustled in the hot heat of the bob, so decided to strike up conversation. I decided to talk about something that was on my mind, even if it wasn’t a topic that I felt comfortable talking about.

    “Dad?”

    “Hmm...” he replied, keeping his attention on the garlic that he was slicing.

    “When you said all those nice things to me, out in the field… it reminded me of when mum passed” My dad slowed down his cutting and turned around, wiping his hand on the nearby cloth as her turned. “I was just thinking about her, that’s all. Do you miss her?”

    “Your mother, of course I miss her. But it’s been so long… you were just 8 years old so… 26 years ago. I’ll always miss her, presh, that’s how it works when someone’s the love of your life. I’ll never not miss her, I won’t. What about you?” My dad’s exterior stoniness did a poor job of hiding his hurting heart.

    “Sometimes. I remember her smile, but I sometimes wonder if I’m remembering it right? If that makes sense. It feels like a memory of a memory of a memory, and I worry that it’s like Chinese Whispers and the message has been mixed.” I looked out the window as I said it.

    “Well, you were so young when she… passed. I’m not being funny like, but that’s natural I guess. But it’s okay. We’ll be reunited at some point or another, like. Hey, if you don’t fix that bloody black hole, we’ll be seeing her pretty soon. No pressure like.” He joked, but it wasn’t a funny joke.

    “I wish I was as religious as you Dad. I wish I believed God and heaven and everything, I really do. I want to believe everything happens for a reason, and I want to believe I’ll see her again. I just can’t dad, I try and I can’t.”

    “I wished it too. I got angry about it, I did. Took it out on you and I shouldn’t have. I’m not gonna lie, I thought it was disrespectful to your mother, like you were choosing never to see her again. Like you didn’t want her to be in heaven. Like you wanted nothingness for her. But I know that’s true now. You just believe in your eyes and your numbers, you do, and that’s why you work so bloody hard at them. And the funny thing is, that’s exactly how your mother was” He said, opening his reluctant heart to all that aged anguish.

    “My mother was like that?” I didn’t know much about how she was as a person. Not really. One of the downsides of spending so much of your adult life without talking to your father is you don’t get to ask him the questions that matter.

    “Oh yes, she wasn’t religious either. It caused a right ruckus in the family when I started dating her, like. My mum and dad considered her… I dunno… like some sort of bloody heathen I guess. Oh, the rows we had about it. But, and this is true Gwenny, I knew she was the one and I didn’t care. And that’s why I should have been more… understanding about the strengths of your non-beliefs. You’re just like your mother, that’s all. I can’t believe how much you look like her these days, now you’re not as skinny as you used to be. Put your hair in a… oh what do they call it… a messy bun? Yeah, do that and I swear you’d be her doppleganger.” And then he served dinner – peanut chicken with sticky rice. My favourite meal growing up.

    “I’m not gonna lie, I was gonna do a burger but then you said you had one in Birmingham. And then I realised, I could bring out the old peanut chicken. You used to live this, you did.”

    “Dad, I thought I had an omelette at Birmingham? Or a… McDonalds even?” I said, suddenly confused.

    “No, you definitely said burger Gwenny. A halal place apparently.”

    “Oh yeah, that’s right. I did” I remembered now. It had been a really tough couple of days, what with the jetlag and armageddon and whatnot. So I somehow got mixed up. Still, you can’t go wrong with peanut chicken dinner.

    We ate in pleasant silence after our burst of conversation about mum. I kept thinking about all the things my dad said, essentially apologising for holding my agnosticism against me and saying I remind him of my mum. But of all the touching and endearing comments in the conversation, I was unable to get past the most innocent of passing comments: “now you’re not as skinny as you used to be”. It was so petty, but my mind wouldn’t get past it every time I tried to move it elsewhere. It just rubberbanded back to that throwaway line in a heartfelt coming together between father and daughter. I was the same size as I had been all my life until a couple of days ago, and suddenly he’s treating me like I’m different now. It’s only 10lbs, how different can I look?

    To be fair, I wasn’t dressed in the most flattering of clothes. My dad wasn’t social media savvy, but I would upload photos onto an old social media site called Facebook which was essentially for old people to keep in contact with their middle aged kids. And from these photos, he would have seen me in my slimming workwear and the occasional photo from a night out where I would dust off a white dress with frilly bits that tapered in harshly at the waist to make me look thinner than I normally was. So, maybe it was just in comparison to this that he dropped the comment, but a couple of days should leave your dad saying “not as skinny as you used to be”.

    That said, this insecurity didn’t hinder my appetite. I was in a euphoria of nostalgia as the sweet and savoury chicken (but not spicy, my dad didn’t touch spicy food) slunk down my throat with thick oily goodness. It would always be the go-to meal for when I was upset growing up, my dad would serve it as a peace offering when I threw a typically teenage tantrum over some minor misdemeanour. And once that was all gone, I suddenly realised that there was a big dorky grin on my face. My dad had finished five minutes ago and was watching me eat with a smile on his face.

    “You enjoy that eh, presh?” he said with a knowing smile.

    “Fucking hell dad that was… sorry, um, blinking heck dad that was great.” I was still not used to not swearing, my tongue had become quite lax with profanity from years of working at a university. And nobody swears quite like university lecturers.

    “And to top it all off, Gareth Davies, works with his wife Margaret down in Borth. Well, he has a bakery he does, him and the missus. And they do these fantastic flapjacks and fudge cake. I was thinking, we’ll have the fudge cake with some ice cream and then you can eat the flapjack on the train to London.”

    “Flapjack? You remembered?” I said, since flapjack was something I would always buy my dad as a kid, for his birthday. I did it because he’d always share it with me and it was my favourite.

    “Oh, you better believe it. They’re amongst my fondest memories, they are”


 

    We were in the car heading to the train station. As long as the train wasn’t running late, I should be fine to catch the midnight plane to Melbourne. I was fairly lightly packed, as I tended to be thanks to so much travelling around on over the years, but I did have twelve pieces of flapjack to entertain me on the 5 hour train ride. I felt like a spoilt kid. And eventually we pulled up to the station so far off the beaten track that there was nobody around for as far as the eye could see. Even the station itself wasn’t manned these days.

    “Hey presh, I think this is you”

    “Thanks dad, for everything. Really.” And I hugged the big fella as tightly as I could. I hugged him until his woolly parka was wet with my tears. “This has meant everything to me. It’s been probably best 24 hours of my life. Genuinely. And I will see you again. I will stop the black hole and if I can’t, I will come home and spend the end with you. And, who knows, maybe I was wrong and we’ll see mum again.”

    Tears were forming on his face, a face that was normally wrinkled from scowling. “Oh don’t talk like that eh, my girl. You kick this black hole in the arse, okay. And then come home and I’ll do more peanut chicken, I will. Because I love you, Gwendolyn Hughes. And I believe in you”.

    He grabbed my cheek with his large hand with affection, before walking back to the land rover. He looked back when he got there and waved at me with a rare smile across his face, and I smiled and waved back, trying to hide the tears. And with a minor migraine, I then watched the old green rust-bucket drive off into the distance leaving me a horizon away from the nearest human and waiting for a train to take me to a plane to take me to save the world.

    I had a quick look in my bag to see if I had any paracetamol on me, as I could sense I headache coming. And then it came and took over with bone-crippling intensity. Pain so severe you could almost hear it. BAM-BAM-BAM like a battering ram against a castle door. BAM-BAM-BAM as my skull felt like it was on fire. BAM-BAM-BAM as I sat down hoping it would pass, and then lay down as it got worse. BAM-BAM-BAM as my eyes blacked out, and I violently spasmed on the floor in excruciating pain.




 

    “Would you like another gin and tonic?”

    “Sorry?”

    “Didn’t mean to disturb you ma’am. I was just wondered if you wanted another gin and tonic?” the polite air stewardess asked, pointing at the empty glass that I had by my side.

    “Oh, um, best not. Um, but will I be able to order some food?”

    “Yes, of course. I’ll just take this glass and this plate away and I’ll get my colleague to come and show you our evening courses” the pretty air stewardess with a plastic smile said, taking away the plate with the still warm lobster carcass on it and left my cabin.

    Wait, what?

    Oh yeah, I’m on the long-haul flight from London to Sydney. That’s right. It was in my own private cabin in first-class. I remember now. I think. Must be all this jetlag, leaving me dazed. Yeah, that was it, I was taking my first ever first-class flight, all paid for by the Australian government. So, if you’re Australian and you’re wondering where your tax dollars are going, they’re paying for me to fly to your country in luxury. And compared to every other flight I had ever experienced, my word was it luxury. There was enough leg room in the vast space in front of my seat to strike yoga poses, that area was large enough for some downward dog if the mood took me. It was as comfortable as it was spacey too, the heated and padded reclining chair seemed form-fitted around my drained body. The cabins were all apparently sound-proofed too, so you can watch movies or listen to music as loudly as you like without disturbing your fellow passengers, though the insulated feel meant I felt a horizon away from the nearest person. The multimedia screen in front of me was 30 inch and there were an assortment of movies from modern to classic to choose from. It was all climate-control, mood-lit and I even had the option of having a shower or even a massage on board this monstrosity of a flying luxury vehicle.

    I’d just eaten lobster thermidor, that’s right, that explains the carcass, for the first time. How could I forget, it had been a cavalcade of sumptuous juices and flavour all served at a steaming temperature. So ordering food had been a mistake it seems, after all, I can have only just eaten. In fact, not sure why I did it to be honest. Just forgot where I was for a second. My mind has been really unfocused of late. These constant headaches, family drama and catharsis, an unexpected bout of fame, oh and our impending doom of course.

    Wait, how did I get on this plane?

    Oh yes, long train journey. The same rickety train service that got me home took me back across the untempered beauty of the Ceredigion coast. I remember that I had twelve pieces of rich and creamy millionaire shortbread to eat over a five hour journey. No, flapjack sorry. Or was it? How strange, it’s like I can remember both. No, it was definitely the millionaire shortbread because I remember saying that it used to remind me of him when he was a kind because I thought he was a millionaire. Yes, I had twelve millionaire shortbread whilst staring out the window and watching the world go by. Then I got on the plane, and now we’re about 7 hours in. Another 14 to go. God, how weird. How time flies, it feels like I was at that train station just 5 minutes ago, grabbing paracetamol out my bag for my headaches.

    I felt like I was still getting my bearings when a second air stewardess came in with a smile as sincere as an electioneering politician. She looked familiar.

    “Did you enjoy your lobster and your black forest gateau?” She asked with eyes as dead the inhabitants of Highgate. Shit! Had I also had gateau? Fuck, she must thing I’m a right greedy shit. And now I’ve dragged her away from what she’s doing to apparently order even more food. What do I say? What do I say to not sound like a gluttonous arsehole?

    “Yes, it was lovely thanks”

    “And you want to order something else?”

    Oh god, so now what do I say? I have to say yes, I just summoned the tired looking girl and I didn’t want to seem ungrateful. But I didn’t want to seem greedy either in front of this young girl. My cheeks were turning red with embarrassment.

    “Um, yes I guess”

    “Haha, is it your first time flying first class?” she said and the deadness behind her eyes resuscitated back to life as she saw how awkward I was. And it was with that zip of life warming through her, I could see what an attractive young girl she was. With her black hair tied tightly back behind the Monaco Airways insignia-ed hat, her face of geometric symmetric was unobscured and treating all onlookers to her milky way eyes and plump lips. Her pink and white uniform of cliché air-stewardess shapeliness hugged her columnar shape. She was the kind of woman I would happily be jealous of, and would be unafraid to admit it.

    “Yes, can’t afford it myself, but work is paying. Can you tell?”

    “Oh, don’t worry about it. Lots of people on their first flight like to… over-indulge a bit. Remember, everything is in the ticket price on Monaco Airway. So, treat yourself. I actually get commission if you do.” she said, and now the air stewardess had stopped going through the motions and was showing a bit of her personality. She seemed bright and airy with warmth and kindness. The hours of exhaustion that her face showed seemed to melt away just from having someone to talk to that wasn’t so far up their own arsehole that they could tickle their colon.

    “Well, in that case, what do you recommend? Oh, and what’s your name?”

    “Jacinda” she said, smiling with her eyes and not just her mouth. “And you’ve had the lobster so… the wagyu steak maybe? But my commission is based on price so I might be biased.” And we both laughed. “But, if it was really me, I would go straight to the desserts. There are three sundaes, and they were freshly lab-grown yesterday. They’re a lot of calories but, have all three and just leave what you don’t want, you’re not paying” and she winked at me.

    “Three sundaes it is then. And how much would that normally be?”

    “In pounds stirling… about £55 each.” Shit, thank you Australian government.

    And Jacinda closed the door to my cabin and I leant back to watch a movie in my reclining chair, hoping this headache would pass. It was Deep Impact, which felt a bit inappropriate given the recent news, but dumb fun is better than clever boredom and I settled into watching the late great Morgan Freeman in his pomp as the US president. However, no sooner had I started to invest in the film I had seen hundreds of times with my dad, did I have company with the lovely Jacinda re-entering my cabin with five sundaes. She winked knowingly as she passed them to me with a big smile.

    “I thought you said there were three flavours?”

    “No, definitely said five. Oh, and if you want to fill in this form here, you can rate your flight and there is a section where you can pick out a particular staff member if you think they were especially nice” she said with a ruby red grin.

    “And what might this… person get as a result?”

    “$150! That will get the landlord off my back, haha!” and Jacinda wandered off, as I felt sorry for her and all the other poor worker bees up here waiting on us indulgent fucks hand and foot. I undid the button on my work trousers, switched the movie back on and started eat the sundaes.

    I’d never had to undo a button before on my trousers, but it was just impossible to leave done up. It was suffocating me and crushing my internal organs cruelly for simply having the temerity to exhale periodically. Hopefully it would also help this fucking recurring headache I’d been having since midday. So, I popped the button open and lowered the zipper and a soft batter of skin filled the space made available to it like air to a vacuum. I looked down at it curiously, like it was alien and not like it was a part of my body. I used the privacy of the cabins that each of the flying guests were provided with to lift up my shirt for more morbid analysis. It was my same milky white skin that I had always had, but the jagged lines of athletic musculature were banished and then vanished beneath a varnish of tarnish. It was as soft and gooey as the desserts I’d been eating recently, and the layer of virginal fat softened my midriff at the expense of any exercise mementos. I explored it curiously, and discovered, to my morbid amusement, that if I twisted my spine to the side then there would be the slight puckered formation of grabbable love handles and if I sat forward, a subdued little pooch would take corporeal form.

    I then looked up to start trying these 3… no 5 sundaes when I noticed I’d already eaten 2 of them. Of course I had, they were utterly delicious. I could still taste the light white cream, the sugar ice cream, the caramel and chocolate… it was no wonder I’d eaten all five. Wait, hang on a fucking minute, was that right? Had I really eaten five, and not two, and not none? Well, the empty glasses were still in front of me, so the proof of the pudding was quite literally in the eating.

    “Did you enjoy the three cakes I gave you?” Jacinda asked, poking her head around the door and kindly trying not to look at the stomach that I had on full display, to my red-cheeked embarrassment. It shook me from the unshakeable headache and focused me on what was going on.

    “Cakes, I thought I chose sundaes?” I said, looking back in front of me to see the three plates with smudges of cream or chocolate to indicate they had formerly been the bearer of cake. No, that wasn’t right. I remember, no I really remember ordering sundaes. I’m sure of it. Oh god, I’ll be glad when this flight ends and terra firma replaces this form of terror.

    “No, we chose the cream cakes in the end ma’am. Oh, and just a warning, I think we’re about to hit some turbulence, so things might get a bit bumpy” she said with a kind smile.

    “Turbulence… turbulence… could I borrow a pen?” I asked the kindly stewardess, my bruised mind suddenly elucidating.

    “Sure”, and she handed a pen to me. I looked around where to write the idea that was germinating in my head with a mild frenzy of disoriented panic. No, there was only one place to write it. And with the pen, I scrawled on my bared stomach:

Tablecloth turbulence

    And then a supernova of pain burst in my head, seismically plunging all my neuron receptors into catastrophic pain. A pneumatic drill puncturing my mental matter, causing inconceivable pain. And then, for a brief half-second, all went black.



 

    “Would you like another gin and tonic?”

    “Sorry?”

    “Didn’t mean to disturb you ma’am. I was just wondered if you wanted another gin and tonic?” the polite air stewardess asked, pointing at the empty glass that I had by my side.

    “Wait, how long have we been flying?” I asked, in a vague-minded state.

    “About 7 hours” the acid-faced air stewardess said through an engineered smile.

    “Oh God, it feels like longer. A lot longer, haha. Um, I’ll pass on the drink thanks. And I’m definitely not hungry. Or am I? Wait, you know what, actually I think I might have something” I said, still trying to gather my thoughts, jumbled though they were like they’d been for a spin in the tumble-dryer.

    “I’ll grab my colleague right away” she said as she leant over me to clear my desk of the G&T glass and the bone of the wagyu beef I’d just eaten.

    My head felt like there was an unauthorised rave going on inside, all glowsticks and jumping, and I was dizzy with pain. But then Jacinda turned up and she thankfully distracted me.

    “Help me Jacinda, I don’t know what to order?” I said, punch-drunk with confusion.

    “Haha, you know my name? Anyway, order whatever you like. You’re the boss” she said through her going-through-the-motions grin.

    “Look, I’m new to this whole… flying first-class thing. I think I need your help.” I was distracted as my stomach seemed to be pressing against the button of my work trousers. Her eyes softened a touch, though not as much as my belly.

    “Well, I’m biased, your choices influence my commission.” she said, daring a more genuine smile, daring to reveal a little bit about herself to this seemingly disoriented woman.

    “Oh god, I had no idea. Can I help? What’s expensive?”

    “Oh, the most expensive thing is the lobster thermidor...” she said, in hope of finding an ally on this plane of aloof business people. They were all entitled pricks who were utterly oblivious of their bubble of privilege but at least I was a semi-regular person. I say semi-regular because I wasn't acting very normally thanks to this headache. At least I wasn’t the kind of person who has portraits of themselves hanging in their own house, like some of the insufferable bastards around me undoubtedly do.

    “Yeah, that’s really nice. And the wagyu beef. The sundaes were really nice, and the cream cakes were good...”

    “Wow, sounds like you’ve worked through half our menu” she said with a smile. “I thought you said this was your first time in first-class?”

    I didn’t know how to answer that, my head was really throbbing now. I bet the vein in my forehead was in clear view.

    “Look, you’ve been so nice to me Jacinda, and I’ll fill in any survey you need to say that much. I’ll sing your praises until they shower you in commission hungry, you seem so nice. And the thing is, I’m not even hungry, I just feel like I should eat. Is that weird?”

    Jacinda’s grin burst into joy as she handed me the form to fill in. I had to single her out and she got a £150 bonus commission, which would help keep the landlord at bay. Or whatever, I mean how would I know where the money would be going.

    “Well, don’t worry about me ma’am. This survey comment is enough. Just pick something simple if you like. Our mac ‘n’ cheese is surprisingly good.” she said, looking at the survey form like she was Charlie and it was a golden ticket.

    “Mac ‘n’ cheese it is then” I said, and got back to watching Armageddon. The ramping up the tension as the deeply impactful comet tore towards humble planet Earth. I was really looking forward to it, revisiting all those childhood memories and laughing at how badly it aged, when we landed. As in the plane ride was over? Which was strange because 5 minutes ago, we had another 11 hours. It must have been the jet-lag, I really wasn’t with it today. The comet hadn’t even hit the Earth yet?

    “Did you enjoy your coffee cake?” Jacinder asked just as I was leaving.

    “Um… yeah, actually, really nice Jacinder” I said, having forgotten about the coffee cake. Of course, I’d had some coffee cake, hadn’t I. And another G&T which was leaving me a little unsteady on my feet actually. Which was strange, I can usually hold a lot more than that, especially over such a long period of time. Bet the real question was, what was up with the amount I’d been indulging lately? I needed to get a handle on that, just in case the Apocalypse doesn’t pan out.

    “Oh and your trousers are unbuttoned” she said with a wink.

    I blushed deep purple immediately and breathed in to button it up. Flapping jitterly to try and crane the button through its paired hole, squeezing and straining with undignified grunting, I managed to get it clasped on. And in doing so, I noticed some writing on my stomach that I didn’t remember being there.

    Tablecloth turbulence

    Oh shit, of course. I needed to speak to Chipo right away. I knew why the black hole was so much closer than it should have been.


 

    And in the cabin that I had spent the past 21 hours, on the plane that I was leaving, the comet collided into planet Earth on my TV screen.

 

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38 minutes ago, Batman76 said:

Its an interesting setting, the end of the world isn't exactly erotic, but the idea of the swirling alternate realities/timelines colliding together, and making our heroine increasingly fluffy, is done pretty well.

Haha, thanks. I must admit, there are very few things less erotic than the end of the world! Dentistry maybe, but that's about it. But thanks for the compliment, I'm enjoying writing it and I'm happy you're enjoying reading it. Especially from someone who is so much better at genre stuff!

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3 hours ago, >_< 0_0 said:

What I love about this is how it’s truly written from her perspective. Like, SHE doesn’t know she’s starring in a wg story, so why would she give that her full attention? Only now does she start realizing something is going on. This adds delicious amounts of tension.

Yeah, I worry that it's confusing to read, because it's from her perspective and it's confusing for her. But delicious is my favourite amount of tension, so I'm glad you find it so

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Apologies if this chapter is a bit complicated, it contains a lot of the explaining. Things should be easier to understand after this one, I promise

Chapter 7

 

Remember, Gwen, remember. Don't forget Tablecloth turbulence.


 

    Europe may have been battling a cold snap but Australia was not. I’d landed in nourishing sunshine and weather warm enough for a Welsh girl such as myself to consider sun cream. Britain bitingly bitter mornings suddenly seemed so very long ago and so very far away as I shuffled towards the airport terminal taking in as much vitamin D as I could. And once I’d made my way through the rigmarole of Australian customs (what is it with you guys? I’m here to save the world and you still haven’t gotten over your whole immigration insecurity thing?), I saw the other light of my life. Dr Chipo was waiting for me with a familiar smile.

    “Chips!” I shouted with excitement to see my mentor and friend sitting down and scanning for my arrival. I realise that might have been a strange thing to shout in the middle of an airport, but nobody seemed to look at me with too much disdain.

    “Gwendolyn! Hi!” she waved, as she attempted to stand up from her sitting position. She suffered from paraplegia and, as such, her lower limbs weren’t always on her side. But with the aid of the crutches that she had by the side of her, she managed to clamber to her feet and started walking towards me with those crutches until we were, at last, face to face.

    “Oh, it’s good to see you Chips! You look great!” I said, meaning every word of it. I wish it hadn’t taken the end of life as we know it for us to schedule a catch-up, but it was great to see her looking so healthy and happy.

    Dr Chipo was always happy looking. She had a soothing demeanour and sleepy eyes, but her mouth was always craned wide open into a toothy smile. Her face was cradled with frizzy hair that sprouted upwards and sidewards, and energised her appearance. Her posture was a little stooped thanks to the paraplegia, and her legs were a little bandied, but they were the only real clues that she wasn’t as able-bodied as myself. The rest of her looked good too. She prided herself on her appearance with a green and gold coloured jacket that hung to her soft but slim 45 year old body; a jacket that she wore in celebration of her South African heritage. Underneath it was a plain white shirt, and she also had a plain plaid skirt on. She had always worn striking colours, underneath her mellow exterior was a fun and extrovert woman, but the more formal clothing choices had been borne from her celebrity.

    “It’s great to see you too Gwen! I wasn’t expecting your plane to land until the sarvo. And you look great too” she paused as she took my physique in as subtly as she could. “Not as skinny as I remember”

    “Well, to be fair, in my defense, the Apocalypse has been taking my focus away a bit. Disrupting my zumba schedule and whatnot” I said, a little defensively but trying to deflect with humour.

    “Yeah, but you only found out about Grendel four days ago, so you can’t use that as an excuse” Chipo said, with wisdom as well as amusement. She had no idea that it actually stung for her to talk about that. Because, contrary to what she thought, this had been the damage of just four days… oh shit, that reminds me…

Tablecloth turbulence

    My new tummy that was dying to be unbound by the restrictive buttons of my size 4 shirt had that scrawled across it. How could I forget? I needed to tell Chips before another headache came and I forgot again.

    “Chips, I think I know where we were wrong with Grendel” I said, surprising Chipo with my bolt from the blue exclamation.

    “Okay, wow. Um, shall we sit at the restaurant, order a coffee and have a chat, because I have some findings to show you, and they are, well, I don’t know how to explain them.” She said, suddenly changing timbre to reflect the shift in seriousness of the conversation.


 

    “Do you want anything from our menu?” the hot Australian guy with the blonde goatee and ponytail and Red Rooster uniform over his well-built torso asked as we walking in with our game faces on, ready to discuss tablecloths and turbulence and Einsteinian physics.

    “Yeah, I’ll have a Bacon & Cheese Rippa...” Chipo said, ordering what was apparently a food stuff, though I had never heard of it. Apparently Red Rooster is a fast-food chain over here, not that I had ever heard of it, and they specialise on dumping a whole unflavoured chicken in front of you with chips and calling it a meal. Not exactly Nandos, is it?

    “I’ll just have a can of coke” I said timidly.

    “Is this about my weight comment earlier? I was only teasing Gwen, you look great. Oi, Thor, tell her she looks great” she said to the Hemsworth-type guy behind the counter that was serving her.

    “Aw, yeah she’s definitely alright I suppose.” he said, and the young, handsome man blushed.

    “See, you’re making Thor blush, so don’t worry. She’ll have the Rippa Mega Box” Chips said, her mouth so wide with grinning that it dominated her face.

    “Mega box? That sounds like a lot?” I said, self-consciously trying to pat down the puffiness around my middle.

    “Aw, it’s not as big as it sounds, you’ll be fine” Thor said, sneaking a cheeky smile at me. Guess, even as bloated as I was, I still had it.


 

    We sat down with our pile of junk food and she got the laptop out of her satchel so she could show me all of her incredible findings, while I made my first tentative prods at the meal that I had been chosen. It was a feast, regardless of what Thor said while flashing his baby blues at me, but it was that minor flirting that at least arrested my slide into insecurity.

    “So, first I need you to see this, because you won’t believe your eyes. It doesn’t make any sense” Chipo said as she switched it on.

    “Actually, let me guess what your findings are” I said as I chucked a chicken nugget into my mouth. “It looks like the black hole skips teleports and then carries on travelling, and then skips a bit more.”

    Chipo stopped everything she was doing and looked at me in shock. I bit into my Rippa. It tasted like calories. Tasty, and very salty, but definitely tasting unhealthy.

    “How did you know that? Was it from your notes?” Chipo asked, her velvety smooth voice fraying a bit at the edges.

    “And when you look at the other bodies that might have been in Grendel’s path, they actually travelled in an inexplicable direction before it got there” I said, trying to hide the smugness on my face by taking another bite. After all that posh food earlier, junk food seemed really nice.

    “Yes… that’s exactly what we’ve found. You know what’s going on? Because we’re all completely stumped.” Chipo said, hopeful that I had all the answers. I didn’t have them all, but I certainly had some. I pulled up my shirt to reveal the words on my stomach and began to explain what I thought was going on.

Tablecloth turbulence.


 

    So what I’m going to do here is I’m going to explain it to you guys. Yes, you, the people reading this story. Yes, I know that you’re there. How? Well, I guess I’ll explain later. Or should that be earlier? Either way, I’m going to give you the dumbed down version of what I had sussed out at this point in time, in a Red Rooster of all places. So, while I eat this Rippa Mega Box, I’ll explain to you the fundamentals of the universe and how they seem to no longer apply. Bare with me, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

    Right, so do you remember when I was on that train to Wales and I observed that:

Hills would ripple out to the horizon with their patchworks of fields, looking like a green table cloth had been spread across the landscape but the creases had been left in. A half-thought triggered in my brain but it petered out before I could make sense of it.

    Yes, that word tablecloth that I scribbled on my food baby. Well, the thought that it triggered was to do with how we explain the concept of spacetime to first year students at university. So, have any of you guys heard of spacetime? Don’t worry, doesn’t matter if you haven’t, I’ll give you an idiot’s guide to the fabric of everything.

I grabbed another bite of Rippa roll and grab a few chips, pushing it down my mouth hastily so I could get my words out.


 

    So, that Albert Einstein bloke was a clever geezer for the most part. He was a bit suspicious of quantum mechanics, but, for the most part, he knew his shit. And one of the bits of shit that he knew was that space and time aren’t separate entities. Which is a bit of a mindfuck at first. Space and time being somehow the same thing was only one part of some seriously bad-ass mathematical formulations that he did, but it is the bit that is relevant to us here and now. Or there and then? Whatever.

    So how does this work? How can space and time be the same thing? A thing called spacetime? Well, we tend to describe it as a tablecloth. See, that was what sparked the memory. Seeing this patchwork of fields spread over the landscape like a table cloth, just after I had an episode. It triggered a memory that I went and forgot straight away. But it lay in my subconscious, gnawing, like it was me with Rippa burger. So, here’s how we describe spacetime with a tablecloth. Ok, so with some friends, grab a tablecloth and pull it from all four corners so that it is stretched out fairly tightly. This tablecloth is spacetime, and every known thing travels along it. It is weird to think of it as time as well as space, but you’ve just got to trust us on this one. We’ve proven it, this is the case. But one of the cool features of this, and you can see my nerdish enthusiasm here, is that it isn’t impervious to forces affecting it. Say, for example, gravity.


 

I took a quick swig of my drink and then dipped some of the chips into the pot of gravy. It was warm and it dripped, so I had to be quick to snaffle it up into my mouth before I got it down me.


 

    So, with your tablecloth stretched out, imagine a football has been placed in the middle of it. See how the tablecloth sags a little around the ball? The weight of the ball is being exerted on the supple tablecloth material, leaving it to droop in the centre where the ball is. This is essentially what happens to spacetime with gravity. Items of large mass can have sufficient gravitational force that they can bend this spacetime. And this is where the fun stuff happens.

    For a start, this is the only known way to time-travel. Realistically. Wormholes and FTL travel are all hypothetical, and, in the case of the latter, demonstrably impossible, but bending spacetime can actually result in time-travel. Cool huh?

    Well, not as cool as you might hope. If you’ve watched the film Interstellar, you’ve been given a Hollywood definition of this theory, but Kip Thorne’s work that it was based on is a great introductory point for this sort of stuff. Basically, it works like this. Time travels slower, the closer you are to a large mass, because of the distortion of spacetime, so you can hypothetically use this to go into the future. If an hour to you feels like two hours to them, then in one hour, you’ve travelled two hours into the future. Which is catnip to sci-fi authors, but just more excuses for computational mathematics for an astro-physicist such as myself. And note, you can still not travel into the past, according to this proven Einsteinian theory, that’s escapist science fiction, but you can definitely travel into the future.


 

    A handful cleared the last of the chips in its container, and I put these into my mouth as if I was ravenously hungry. But I wasn’t, I was just talking about my passion subject and the food was an obstacle to me.


 

    So, this is all established science. Nothing I’ve said so far is new or controversial. But what of Grendel?

    Well, black holes have the kind of gravitational pull that can do this spacetime distortion. It is heavy enough to act as the ball that’s causing our tablecloth to sad. It takes something of such monumental mass for it to really bend something so fundamental that we can barely comprehend it, and when it comes to monumental mass, everything comes second to black holes. But what Grendel is doing is something that nobody has ever postulated before. It’s skipping bits of spacetime, and this defies everything we have learnt thus far about the universe. And this is where we delve into the land of broad hypotheticals. And this is where I come in. And this is where the second word sprawled on my, at the time still fairly dainty, stomach comes into play. Turbulence.


 

    I dipped another chicken nugget into the gravy whilst swigging from the depleting can of coke. Then I finished off the pineapple fritter that the box also came with.


 

    Okay, we need to go back to our tablecloth analogy to explain the next bit. Are you still with me? Good, you’ve just cracked first-year university astro-physics, give yourselves a pat on the back. So, the thing about this tablecloth that we have is that we’ve stretched it out haven’t we, by pulling at the four corners. There’s a little bit of give, so the ball sinks into the tablecloth and doesn’t roll off, but not a lot. However, what if we didn’t pull so hard? What if there were creases in our tablecloth? What if there was turbulence in the fabric of spacetime?

    Because, in the back of my mind, I was aware things were happening. I had been getting these brain-splintering headaches and disorienting deja vu, and memories of things that hadn’t happened, and remembering things that hadn’t happened yet. It felt like turbulence, like the rough vibrations when you fly over a mountain range on a long plain journey to, say, Australia. It felt like I was travelling across spacetime and feeling the vibrations of the bumps in the tablecloth. As if then, and now, and the future were bunched together like a scrunched up tablecloth. I felt like I was jumping to before and after where I was and then the rest of me was catching up until this impossibility made sense. This tremours in the fabric of spacetime was what was plaguing me on that flight to Australia. It was in-flight turbulence.

    The headaches and confusion where at their worst when I was travelling. I mean, we’re all always travelling, across the universe on a rock that is spinning round a star that is spinning around the heart of a galaxy that contains Grendel, that’s flying on the coattails of an expanding universe. But these tiny divots were magnified by long-distance travel as if that was the thing that tipped the whole thing over the edge. It was the train journey where I first noticed it, though I can’t guarantee that was when it started, and it was the much longer plane flight where things got really hairy. So, this seemed to be a factor, though I didn’t understand the ins and outs of it.


 

    And to finish off, I put the last of the Rippa roll intoo my mouth and dusted the crumbs off my lap as I did so, in satisfaction of getting the meal out of the way. I poured the remainder of the gravy into my mouth to put the nail in the meal’s coffin, and then got back to explaining.


 

    Also, eating seemed to make it worse, hence my reluctance to eat at Red Rooster for reasons other than my poor cholesterol levels. Every recurring experience seemed to have me over-indulging at the centre of it, for reasons annoying to my pinching waistline. It was almost as if our bodies experienced the day that our minds and the universe had forgotten, if that makes sense? So I would find myself reliving an experience, and everything would be as it was the first time around, apart from my body which clung onto features from the future I’d already lived. So, for example, I would catch a train to Birmingham for the first time, and eat a meal for the first time. And then the headaches would kick in. Then, I would find myself back in time, where I would catch a train to Birmingham for the first time, and eat a meal for the second time. This was why I wrote on my stomach. Because my body stayed the same as if it lived the thing that then got erased. And this was why I was gaining weight. Because I would have the same meal over and over again thanks to this deja vu.

    But, finally, what of Grendel? I know all that’s exhausted you, and it’s a lot to get your head around, but where nearly there now. We’re on the final straight.

    I’ve explained the headaches, but not the endless blackness hurtling towards us with our final will and testimony up its sleeve. Why is it jumping through spacetime? Well, think of it this way. If an ant (which, in this over-stretched analogy, is us) had to travel over a creased part of a tablecloth, it would have to ascend and descend the crease itself. In these folds and creases where spacetime concertinas, is where we get the time jumping. But what happens if you roll a ball over the crease? It rolls over it, flattening the creases out. The creases don’t increase the journey it takes, it shortens it. Now, imagine that in terms of astronomy and spacetime. What it would look like is what Chipo is describing; while other astral bodies are circumnavigating these spacetime bumps, Grendel is just cutting through them, appearing in one place, and then suddenly appearing a bit closer. It’s hard to conceptualise, because we’re representing spacetime physically with our analogy, and it’s the “time” concept of spacetime that makes it complicated. But yeah, that’s about the long and short of it. That’s why Grendel is coming for is. It is riding the ripples of spacetime that everything else is ascending and descending.

    And that’s what I told Chipo, only more scientifically and whatnot.


 

    “Wow. OK. That was… very… far-fetched, but I guess it does explain most of our findings. Even if it does sound like you’re trying to explain away why your trousers are so tight.” Chipo said, digesting what I had said with her typical rigorousness.

    “Thanks. It doesn’t explain how to stop it, but it at least explains what’s going on a bit more. Wait, what do you mean ‘most of our findings’?” I asked, taken aback that I hadn’t explained it all in one go. I wanted the smug satisfaction of Poirot going around the dining room guests and explaining who did it and how. I didn’t want loose strings.

    “The jumping that Grendel is doing… these spacetime creases… they’re increasing, the closer that it gets to our solar system. It’s not the cause of the creases. It seems as though these so-called creases are emanating from here. We’re causing them” she said, somberly.

    I had to take a moment out to collect my thoughts about this. I had no idea what was causing these “creases”, but I figured it was more likely the supermassive black hole, with all of its supermassive mass. But if the cause of the thing that is destroying us is here…

    “Then that’s good news Chips.” I said to her with a smile on my face, to her perplexity. “Because if Earth is the source of the problem, then we can fix… sorry, what was I saying… oh yes, we can fix it. Ow, fuck, what was I saying… oh yes, if Earth is the source of the problem, then we can fix… oh god, I’ve got a massive headache…”

    A ripping roar of pain shattered like the thunderclap of a pulsar around my fragile skull in unbearable pain. A headache was coming. Oh dear god, a headache was coming.

    And you know what that means. I’m either going to jump forwards or, more likely, backwards. Oh, I hoped not to jump backwards. I didn't fancy having to explain all of that again. It was bad enough doing it once.

    Then the thunderclap of pain reached its deafening highest pitch and I collapsed.


 

    “Do you want anything from our menu?” the hot Australian guy with the blonde goatee and ponytail and Red Rooster uniform over his well-built torso asked as we walking in with our game faces on, ready to discuss tablecloths and turbulence and Einsteinian physics.

    “Yeah, I’ll have a Bacon & Cheese Rippa...” Chipo said, ordering what was apparently a food stuff, though I had never heard of it. Apparently Red Rooster is a fast-food chain over here, not that I had ever heard of it, and they specialise on dumping a whole unflavoured chicken in front of you with chips and calling it a meal. Not exactly Nandos, is it?

    “And the Rippa mega box is good I think, I’ll go for that” I said, surprising the hot Thor lookalike behind the counter.

    “Wow, did you come here as a post-grad then?” Chipo asked, surprised I knew my way around the menu options before me.

    “No, first time I’ve ever been here. I think. Sort of. Actually, that’s kinda what I want to talk to you about Chips. So, you know how we describe spacetime as a tablecloth...” and then I began to tell my detailed description of why Grendel was getting so much closer to planet Earth. Actually, I can explain it to you guys too if you like? Oh, I bet you’ve already heard it once, haven’t you? You have? Good, because it’s a long-ass explanation, so I’m glad I don’t have to give it.

 

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