Science Fiction Short Stories

The misadventures of Mark Murphy; The problems with X, Y, and Z

The problems with X, Y, and Z

Mark was a genius, he had just proven that.  Staring at the apple on the pedestal, he could not believe his eyes.  He had done it!  It had worked!  It was a surprise to himself, and others will surely not believe it.  But there it was, the apple sitting perfectly as he had predicted.

Theoretical physicist Mark Murphy was in fact a genius.  Graduating top at his class at MIT, with an IQ of just over two hundred, Mark was destined for greatness.  He didn't quite have an eidetic memory, but it was close enough that it might as well be.

Reaching out to pick up the apple, Mark's heart fluttered and he paused for a moment.  Anxiety grabbed at his heart, but he forced it back as well as he could.  Gently he picked it up as if it were some ancient relic of some grand historic importance.

The apple itself wasn't important, but what it had just been through was.  The apple was cool to the touch, slightly cooler that room temperature.  Mark made a note of the coolness, and filed it away in the back of his mind to think on more at a latter time.

A small blemish marred Mark's work history.  Maybe small wasn't the right word to use, it was fairly major depending on who you talk to.  Mark was a theoretical physicist, and theory was where his talents ended.

While still at MIT, Mark theorized a new model in which quarks, leptons, gauge bosons, and Higgs boson's interacted.  The model wasn't perfect but it took the world of physics one step closer to understanding how the universe worked.

After graduating, he briefly worked for a private firm that was working towards building a near light speed ship.  He along with several other physicists, modeled two new engines.  The first was fission based, for basic propulsion.  The second was a new solar sail, capable of ninety nine percent the speed of light.

The team theorized that the fission based engine would push the ship until it reached its maximum speed, then the solar sail would take over, with the assistance of a directional laser to help push the ship.  

The project was coming together well before it's deadline, and well under the budget when disaster struck the lab.  The prototype fission engine malfunctioned, four brilliant minds were lost, many others were injured severely.  The testing facility was almost completely destroyed, and billions of dollars in research with it.

From that day moving forward, Mark had not had a successful test of any of his theorys.  Investigation cleared Mark and all of the scientists working on the project, and official stance was that it was an "unfortunately string of several small incidents that allowed for a major mishap."

It seamed that no one wanted to work with him.  It was almost as if, a rumor was spreading around that placed the blame on him.  He assumed that part of that could have been because of the news coverage of one reporter seizing his name for the story.  The reporter signed off by simply by saying, "It seams that Murphy's Law has struck again."

There were all sorts of headlines that spread out from that initial story.  Murphy's Law this and Murphy's Law that.  After a while, he couldn't find anyone who was willing to work with him on any of his theories.  For Mark, it was all a little too much, and it was easy to lock himself away, and surround himself with his work.

Hiding away in his own private lab, Mark wrote and postulated many theories.  Most of these theories he sent to various scientific journals, and became published pieces of theory.  But there were several theories that he kept private.  Today, he held in his hand the outcome of a proper test of one of these theories.

Using a knife that Mark had picked up from the work bench, he carefully cut the apple in half.  Letting the two halves fall apart in his hand he felt another rush of adrenaline surge through his body.  The inside of the apple seamed to be perfectly normal.  The normal juicy white center that one would expect to find in any apple.