Poem: "Return to Center"
Dec. 30th, 2012 01:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmithThis poem fills a square on my second card for the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
cottoncandy_bingo fest. This fest encourages people to create and share material focused on what is variously called fluff, schmoop, gentle fiction, light reading, comfort reading, positive thinking, chicken soup for the soul, or anything else that offers a fun alternative to usual run of sex, violence, and angst of modern media. I'm hoping to attract some new readers for my writing.
The following poem belongs to Schrodinger's Heroes, featuring an apocryphal television show supported by an imaginary fandom. It's science fiction about quantum physics and saving the world from alternate dimensions. It features a very mixed cast in terms of ethnicity and sexual orientation. This project developed with input from multiple people, and it's open for everyone to play in. You can read more about the background, the characters, and a bunch of assorted content on the menu page.
Fandom: Original (Schrodinger's Heroes)
Prompt: Return
Medium: Poetry
Summary: Alex uses quantum physics and advanced math to retrieve her scattered team.
Content Notes: Culpable bystanders. Alex is a genius. Science saves the day.
"Return to Center"
When everyone except for Alex
got shuffled off into alternate dimensions --
her colleagues, her friends,
the hapless soldiers who caused the problem --
she was left behind to solve it all
somehow.
The Teflon Tesseract itself was fairly new,
a thing of intricate dimensions
like a vast crystal tumbling through spacetime.
Alex was still just beginning to understand it,
and when someone tapped it unexpectedly --
well, things happened.
While the alter versions of the soldiers
were having hysterics and tantrums in the control room,
Alex quietly slipped away with a pen and some paper.
It was a way to map the Tef,
and through it,
the connections between worlds.
Alex plotted cube-connected cycles,
graphed them out in two dimensions,
each vertex of the hypercube
replaced by a cycle of length.
She could program the Tef
to ping for a response,
but she needed to filter the results.
A pulse of energy passing
across Planck-length distances
in order to trigger signals
would move along a given set of cycles
to reach its destination,
defining the hypercube as
the prism between the origin and any receivers.
As cube-connected cycles represented
the shortest loop an "informaton" could travel
through a null-distance region,
they should cause the infinite possibilities
to collapse down to one --
one path,
one person,
the core identity
belonging to the core dimension.
Describe the faces of a cubic-oriented crystal,
turn it with a quantum touch
so that null-distance
would connect person and destination --
transition
without travel, without motion.
Alex walked back into the control room,
slipped the elegant equations into place --
line and vertex, loop and facet --
computers cycling gracefully
so that it took only
the touch of one more key
to make everyone
return
to center.
* * *
Notes:
You can read more about cube-connected cycles online.
siliconshaman and LJ user siege suggested some possible uses for this material within the context of Schrodinger's Heroes.
cottoncandy_bingo fest. This fest encourages people to create and share material focused on what is variously called fluff, schmoop, gentle fiction, light reading, comfort reading, positive thinking, chicken soup for the soul, or anything else that offers a fun alternative to usual run of sex, violence, and angst of modern media. I'm hoping to attract some new readers for my writing.The following poem belongs to Schrodinger's Heroes, featuring an apocryphal television show supported by an imaginary fandom. It's science fiction about quantum physics and saving the world from alternate dimensions. It features a very mixed cast in terms of ethnicity and sexual orientation. This project developed with input from multiple people, and it's open for everyone to play in. You can read more about the background, the characters, and a bunch of assorted content on the menu page.
Fandom: Original (Schrodinger's Heroes)
Prompt: Return
Medium: Poetry
Summary: Alex uses quantum physics and advanced math to retrieve her scattered team.
Content Notes: Culpable bystanders. Alex is a genius. Science saves the day.
"Return to Center"
When everyone except for Alex
got shuffled off into alternate dimensions --
her colleagues, her friends,
the hapless soldiers who caused the problem --
she was left behind to solve it all
somehow.
The Teflon Tesseract itself was fairly new,
a thing of intricate dimensions
like a vast crystal tumbling through spacetime.
Alex was still just beginning to understand it,
and when someone tapped it unexpectedly --
well, things happened.
While the alter versions of the soldiers
were having hysterics and tantrums in the control room,
Alex quietly slipped away with a pen and some paper.
It was a way to map the Tef,
and through it,
the connections between worlds.
Alex plotted cube-connected cycles,
graphed them out in two dimensions,
each vertex of the hypercube
replaced by a cycle of length.
She could program the Tef
to ping for a response,
but she needed to filter the results.
A pulse of energy passing
across Planck-length distances
in order to trigger signals
would move along a given set of cycles
to reach its destination,
defining the hypercube as
the prism between the origin and any receivers.
As cube-connected cycles represented
the shortest loop an "informaton" could travel
through a null-distance region,
they should cause the infinite possibilities
to collapse down to one --
one path,
one person,
the core identity
belonging to the core dimension.
Describe the faces of a cubic-oriented crystal,
turn it with a quantum touch
so that null-distance
would connect person and destination --
transition
without travel, without motion.
Alex walked back into the control room,
slipped the elegant equations into place --
line and vertex, loop and facet --
computers cycling gracefully
so that it took only
the touch of one more key
to make everyone
return
to center.
* * *
Notes:
You can read more about cube-connected cycles online.
siliconshaman and LJ user siege suggested some possible uses for this material within the context of Schrodinger's Heroes.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-12-30 10:55 pm (UTC)Yay!
Date: 2012-12-30 10:59 pm (UTC)