Time Off

Chapter Three

Why her you ask? I wouldn't even contemplate this if it weren't for one important factor. I live in an iron nucleus located in her brain. This whole thing is my idea. And luckily, I am in a position to make it happen. I will tell you more about that, but first I thought you might be curious as to how I got here. I need to go way back to some of my earliest recollections. 

 I will skip the part about getting sucked into a huge, primordial star during its formation, and later getting spat out in an iron nucleus, in a process that I have essentially tried to forget, lest I suffer an eternal case of PTSD. Fast forward. I am miles below the earth's surface. It's hotter than hell down here and my host nucleus is nearly in a free state. In this kind of situation, a lot of our attention is related to EM management. Basically, we need to keep the region between ourselves and the electrons as free of high frequency EM waves as possible, because harmful EM waves being forced into that zone can become a problem. That zone by the way, we call it the quiet zone and when temperatures are very low, it's almost completely free of EM waves. In that case, everything works quite smoothly and we can really focus on other things. But when EMs start to come in hard, we need to deflect them out as best we can. Think of it as our version of rain. A light rain is okay. A heavy rain is more of an issue and finally a flood is a real problem. 

 It's not a danger to us unless it gets really extreme like in some major cosmic events. But this thing you call high temperature is a distraction and requires our attention. This may seem counterintuitive, but when the temperature gets too high, our supply of energy can actually get disrupted. Because we need our energy at a particular frequency, not too high, not too low. That's the job of our electrons. Electrons are awesome by the way. They sit out there on the frontier like hired guns, keeping us safe. Actually, they have several important jobs to perform and they do it like pros. They keep other electrons out of our quiet zone. Second, they feed us a steady diet of EMs at a particular frequency and finally they keep out EM waves at certain frequencies or above, which could be damaging or create an overload situation for us. And when things are slow, they help us mop up stray EMs and send them off for the next guy to deal with. 

Most of our electrons, twenty four of them, have been with us since the beginning. The other two change periodically. For example, after we went superhot and separated from our oxygen friends back in the day, we said goodbye to a couple of great performers but soon welcomed in a new pair. That was a wild time. We pretend that the electrons are our friends but actually they are just machines. We make them here once in a while, as do all of our neighbors throughout the cosmos. More on that later but for now, back to my life story.

Like I said, we were deep and hot and one day the whole thing just blew. Something like half of Montana just blew up out of the earth and landed hundreds of miles away. The rock I was on was totally vaporized and we hooked up with some oxygen and other things, flew south and landed somewhere up in the Rockies. I remember. It was snowing. And it kept snowing, and snowing, and snowing. That spring, when it all melted, the decent sized grain I was now a part of rolled down and then we found ourselves tumbling down a little stream. 

Eventually we worked our way down to a bigger stream and then loads of pebbles and rocks of all sizes just piled on top of us. That's when I thought to myself, here we go again, stuck underground for all eternity. And it was a long time. But even though we were getting buried deeper and deeper, we knew what was going on. Dinosaurs, meteors, even interesting supernovae trillions of miles away. It didn't matter. We could still analyze and contribute to our core mission which was the pursuit of deeper understanding.

After some impressive seismic upheavals and a bunch of ice ages, our number finally came up and we were carved right out of the sedimentary rock by a huge passing glacier. While that was exciting, it was short lived. We ended up back in a silt bed, getting covered over. But many millenia later, the runoff and resulting floods were so extreme, we actually started to move. And that's when it happened. The water eroded away our little pebble until our very own electrons were directly exposed to the water and we broke free. Even more, we broke up with another iron atom and three oxygens and that's when we once again said goodbye to a couple of our electron friends. We were now a solitary iron atom missing two electrons and we were swept away by the current.