This story is from the collection titled Strange Attractors.
That gone gorilla climbed down the root of the Earth, to where it could easily snap the fruit from the branch. With the slightest flick of the wrist, it turned the world inside out, repeatedly.
The Higgs boson was a free agent in time and space, eradicating all the normal boundaries of reality. Like Dr. Hoffman, I did not know what I was messing with. And like Dr. Hoffman, I found myself an explorer in a new world. Yet where his was an interior rabbit hole, mine was exterior. For me, as for Alice, it was reality that had taken a vacation.
Old Higgs, that gone gorilla, created a black hole in the fabric of existence. All of time stopped, yet as each moment of time shown equally bright and the barriers between them were gone, a moment now might attract next a day in the life of a peasant family three hundred years past, or thirty years into the future the life of a corporate slave tied into the grid.
Seductive Higgs was the fatal attractor, drawing through not only past and future, but through all probabilities, by his gravity bringing a new world of freedom from time and space.
Some wicked clown, towering far over head, took my hand –You’re comin with me.
He threw me into a roller coaster that rose up a Himalayan slope, then plunged down a precipice twice as high, spitting me right out of reality to skid across the pavement of my darkest dreams.
I fell under, down into the depths where the bubbles of reality are blown on the multiple bubble pipe of the child clown progenitor, who produces a sharp knife and offers to cut out of me the burning heart of Higg’s boson.
That was when I fled. I jumped into the car and drove. I had to get away somewhere, to the mountains, the desert, the ocean. I had to take reality back to its basics to catch hold of it again. But thanks to Higgs boson, the reality of the oceans, the desert, the mountains rippled with uncertainty, tossing in the wind that was the breath of Higgs boson.
The only way to escape such a tsunami was to reach out and flow through the world conducting the torrent of reality rather than impeding it.
A glance in the rear view mirror told me I was being tailed. It must be Higgs. He’s such a clown.
I dodge to the left around traffic, cross over in front and make a sharp right down a side street. Higgs is caught in traffic.
Down the block I turn right again, then another quick right. Back up the block and I am crossing the road behind my pursuer. He has no idea I am here. I can see the back of his head as he sits there in his four-wheel drive pickup. Higgs wears a stetson cowboy hat. He has a gun rack on the back window of his cab.
But there’s another car in pursuit, a black sedan. I hit the gas to run the next light, narrowly missing a car crossing the intersection. But the sedan doesn’t give up. It takes off the other car’s rear bumper and stays in pursuit.
We are dodging around traffic, flying at speeds far too fast for these streets. I can’t escape this guy. Then I see Higgs pull up ahead. He’s got a rifle in his hand; he’s pointing it right through his windshield at me.
There’s only one thing I can do. I pull the old 95° turn and head straight for the brick wall, flooring it.
Don’t ask me what happened next. You ever done a belly smacker? That’s nothing.
I slapped myself into next Tuesday. And the clowns were all standing around when I came to. Higgs was there. He told them to take off their masks, and when they did, I saw they were all secret agents who posed as various people in my life. The teacher, the friend, the drunk I gave a ride to. These were people who had once been there at crucial moments in my life. And now I knew they were aliens.
Resistance is futile — Higgs says in a voice so empty it is thick with passion –Why don’t you take your freedom where you find it.
–It ain’t freedom with you calling the shots. Put down that tire and we’ll talk.
But old Higgs, I know he ain’t going for this. So I got my legs up under me and braced myself. And when I saw my chance, I threw myself at him.
I wasn’t counting on old Higgs’ gravity though. My own momentum bounced me off of him. Next thing I knew, I was in the bunker with Oppenheimer and Einstein at the first nuclear detonation.
Oppenheimer looks at me and says –For all we know, this could set off a chain reaction through physical matter.
And I think –so thanks for telling me– as I look for something to hold onto.
The bomb went off. Looking through our goggles, we watched the flash of physical matter erupting. And as Oppenheimer said, so it was. That was Higgs boson standing at ground zero. His event horizon was thrown out by the shock wave and continued drawing energy as it ripped apart reality.
It hit us like a wild fire, bursting our very atoms with an ice hot rush of pure energy.
And I knew this was when the world ended, back when they set off the first A-bomb. We just didn’t know it at the time. It happened so fast, we went on with our reality, even though its physical basis was eradicated at an atomic level.
Then I looked past the nuclear detonation. I saw Higgs boson working in the coal mines at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and in the stockyards of Chicago. I saw the Higgs boson in the guns of every army that ever went to war. He wore the robes of the red death and haunted the count and his guests through the halls of many colors, with Hop Toad at his side. He rode with the armies of Attila the Hun, and with the Roman Legion. And he it was who struck in Tunguska, Siberia in 1908, a blow that did vaporize our world.
And so there is no escape. Reality is an illusion and the mirrors that maintain this illusion are broken beyond repair. We were able to maintain the image until Higgs showed up. But that big ape throws everything akimbo. And now there is no going back.
The gone gorilla caught reality by the corners and gave it such a shaking we were all tossed in the air. Bounced on our asses across the oily pavement.
So there’s only one thing to do: bow down before the tentacles of Higgs boson as they reach out to take root into all the distant probabilities. And then allow ourselves to flow through reality, riding the wave of Higgs boson into a new, intimate relationship with nature, as a balance to our ego-bound consciousness.
