Science Fiction

Ch. 9: Area 10, 42 Crackers

Amanda reinvents the known universe

This is the penultimate chapter of a completely outrageous and unacceptable game of “Tag, you’re it” with my buddy Shadowgnosis (Dan Lee). Links to all previous chapters can be found at the end of this segment. Have fun!

Chapter 8 left Joe Lee and Flavio in the basement stairwell writing love letters to Amanda, who turned out to be half Bdelian and extremely attractive to her alien stalkers. Before her eyes, her half-visible alien suitors dissolved into a slime-green mist that enveloped her and her powerful unobtanium crystal, which had started to glow and throb in her clenched hand. Amanda has a big decision to make, and fast…

Three months prior…at her writing desk:

Amanda loved the farm her dad had left her, with her chickens, her pair of resident Canada geese, and a devoted border collie—named Cashew, because he was nuts. For three seasons of every year, Amanda’s attention was devoted to growing things—veggies, fruits, flowers, and baby chicks. But in cooler months, Amanda was a dedicated writer and artist-wannabe.

For several years, Amanda had been writing short essays and poems about her childhood and her father’s part in making it such a warm and happy one. And now, she was pulling all those bits and pieces together into a memoir about him and her early days with him. Still, she knew so little about her dad.

She remembered long, humid summertimes on the farm back east, where she would sit under the ancient, spreading oak tree, where the wild violets grew and the ground beneath was blanketed in soft green mosses.

She had named the tree “General Sherman” because it was already huge before the Civil War began. General Sherman was Amanda’s “thinking tree.” As an only child, she spent hours lying in General Sherman’s cool shade, imagining cures for leukemia, watching cloudy ballerinas pirouette across the sky, and plotting to build a rocket with “atoms” her dad would bring her from his Pentagon office in Washington, DC.

She thought about atoms a lot—always fascinated, never Bohred. In her mind, atoms were tiny, perfect universes, with tiny blue planets filled with tiny people and trees and animals and oceans, all made up of tiny atoms, each of which existed in its own tiny universe, perfect and complete.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour — WILLIAM BLAKE

It would be decades before Mandelbrot discovered fractals, but Amanda had always understood the concept, in her own way. She visualized an infinity of worlds within worlds within worlds, like the tiny atoms of her world as smaller versions of the macro-universe she lived in, and those smaller universes composed of an infinity of micro-verses, and so on.

She dreamed of going there, wishing she could drink a potion and shrink down to a mote, like Alice did. Somehow, she knew that there (wherever “there” was) she would find all those things she had been missing in this life, in this universe.

Back to the present…

Still on the stairs, holding the stair rail in a death grip with one hand, Amanda was enveloped in a stinking, slime-green mist as Joe Lee and Flavio evaporated before her eyes.

“Well, this is unpleasant,” she thought. “Yikes!” The unobtanium crystal was warming, glowing, urgently vibrating in her free hand. She might have been more frightened if it hadn’t reminded her of one of the special toys that she kept locked away in her nightstand.

She felt dizzy, discombobulated, accepting, relaxed—so relaxed that she dropped the crystal, watching it fall in slow motion, tumbling down the stairs, shattering into a million shining shards, literally ripping the universe a new one.

Recalling the first instruction her father had written in that mysterious little black book, she clicked her heels together three times, chanting “Cracker 10! Cracker Tin! Cracker Ten!” She felt herself falling. A ghostly image of George Clooney’s handsome smiling face hovered just out of reach.

To be continued…

Thanks for sticking with us this far! Stay tuned for who-knows-what-will-come-next in the exciting conclusion from my buddy Dan Shadowgnosis.

Meanwhile, take a peek inside Amanda’s young brain as she pondered the infinity of universes inside universes. Grab a cup of tea, exhale deeply, and settle down to watch this mesmerizing video, Temple of the Mandelbrot.

Below are links to all the previous episodes of Amanda’s adventures with her Bdelian visitors.