Reports from The Institute- 3

Down in the Steam Tunnels

By Alex Beyman

"What is nothingness? Can you show it to me?" More irrelevant questions. I was beginning to regret answering his email. The portly, withered old man with the severe dowager's hump sitting opposite me in the stately little office identified himself when we met as Professor Heironimus P. Travigan. He ogled me through a little pink monocle, invited me in, then began this bizarre spiel.

"Your email said that you knew something about the university's steam tunnels that wasn't in my article."

He shifted anxiously in his seat. "In good time, my dear boy. I assure you, this is all related." I couldn't see how, but that didn't seem to trouble him. "You know, these days, we're meant to believe that the universe sprang from nothing."

I braced myself for a religious diatribe. It turned out to be stranger still. "In truth, our universe exists due to an act of separation. Two substances, divided by some unknown force, which some understandably deify. When those substances are together, there is nothing.

But because they are divided, you and I can be sitting here talking about it. The Biblical 'waters above and below'. Matter and energy, negative gravitational energy. Pleasure and suffering. Yin and yang. Light and darkness, life and death, good and evil!"

He waved his arms about for effect. I stared for a moment, then challenged him. "Alright then. Can YOU show ME nothingness?" He flashed a devilish grin and withdrew a strange leather case from under the desk. Once open, it revealed a set of five syringes filled with some sort of black syrupy fluid. I protested. "That's clearly oil, or ink of some kind. Don't waste my time."

"Not so! A stable liquid suspension by all appearances, I will give you that much. But whereas any other liquid is comprised of atoms, this stuff simply continues to appear as it does to you now, however small a scale you examine it at. Which is to say, it isn't made of anything."

He then withdrew from the desk drawer a jar of blue luminescent gas. Not so easily identified. As he slid the jar near the syringes, both rattled subtly and the glow of the gas wildly fluctuated. They settled down once he restored the distance between them. "Magnets," I uttered, deadpan. "Are we done here?"

He released a quiet sigh. "You're quite right to be skeptical. I sensed that quality in your writing, it's why I contacted you. The proof's in the pudding, isn't it? Here, take this." He handed me an unfamiliar device consisting of two glass chambers, one containing the black fluid, the other containing the glowing blue gas. Between them, an ordinary electrical outlet.

"What is it?" I queried, studying the weird little mechanism.

"A battery! But then so is the universe and everything in it." I continued searching the gizmo for any signs of a hidden pair of double As or something that would explain the blue glow. That's usually how it works. So-called free energy magnetic motors, or perpetual motion machines of any kind always conceal some conventional means of motivation.

"A battery, when charged, is simply maintaining a chemical imbalance. Allowing that imbalance to slowly equalize, re-balancing itself, is what generates the current. Like a wind-up toy, the weight in a grandfather clock, or any other method of storing energy.

Our universe also exists in a state of imbalance, which equalizes as the energy supplied at the moment of the Big Bang very gradually depletes. The whole mess is slowly running down, lad! And every little thing in it.

Stars will someday burn out. The molten core of the Earth will go cold long before that. And of course, the finite quantity of Orgone you were infused with at birth slowly depletes with every breath you take, your body deteriorating along the way."