Time Off

Chapter Eleven

"My Hippocampus made me do it!" Oh, sorry. I was trying come up with T shirt slogans. I have to say, I did not see this coming, at least not well in advance. We do simulate and model ahead. In fact that's mostly what we do. But it's normally related to more immediate situations, not things like the multi-decade sea changes that humanity will now experience.

My more immediate concerns are always over EM management, electron launch preparedness and medium term concerns are things like the functioning of the Axon in the cell where I reside. In fact that particular task is near and dear to me. I don't want to end up in a dead or damaged cell and getting flushed out of my Angel's lovely brain. That would be a setback. So I need to make hay while the making is good. Carpe Diem.

We have not had an electron launch in ages, but it turns out that my quark is up next, should the need arise. So, we must stand at the ready. An electron takes up about a quarter of a quark in terms of mass, or less, but the size is small and the electron can move around, not within our quark, but within our neutron. Remember I told you before that I live in a proton? Well I did.  But once we were tapped to produce an electron and it was built and operational, we became a neutron. It's a rotating assignment. So I guess what I'm saying is that underneath it all, we are just protons.

Being a neutron is nice because our electron can gather EMs and supply our energy needs locally. Whereas protons need to be supplied by orbital electrons, which are also busy doing a lot of other things. Once in a long while, we screw up an electron build but we have a deadline. So we pull an electron out of service and do some refurbishment and kick out the leftover junk, what you guys call a neutrino. You would think that at least within one nucleus, we could all agree and stick to a plan, in terms of who is doing what and when. But in this regard, heck we are no better than you. I guess our basic flaws eventually become yours.

The kind of miscommunication that can happen sometimes is mind boggling. As an example, one of our neighboring iron atoms inadvertently launched an electron and no one knew it, and they didn't figure it out until it was too late. So, basically the quarks in one of the other protons was supposed to immediately get a new electron locked and loaded but they didn't. Suddenly they were a cobalt atom and they were immediately thrown out and flushed from the cell. Cobalt is toxic. Embarrassing and sad.  I for one, am watching this stuff very closely. I can't afford to get flushed like that, too much at stake.

As I mentioned earlier, Angel is patient zero with regard to the unfolding of super nerdom. Now I'm trying to get my hooks into Javier but no luck yet. There is some resistance by the quarks in his hippocampus to join my supercluster. They will break eventually. I would also like to pull in Javier's uncle, another genius. And very creative as well. But for now, I'm pretty happy with Angel in the driver's seat. She is brewing some ideas that I planted recently. She already drank the Kool-Aid on inertia and that's key. I need her to understand the connection between inertia, light and gravity. It's important for her to get a sense for how EMs operate. She and Javier have already started putting it together.

Energy consumption is the foundation she needs to understand. I don't know if she will ever realize the extent of it and its effects on the natural world, so I will share an example with you. Angel and Javier and uncle Juan are headed to the very tip of South America. Based on what they worked out, with a little help from Roy, it is the best location they can come up with. In fact, it's the only location short of Antarctica. That's the story in the south. But in the north there are plenty of choices. What's the deal? Well, let me blow your mind.

It's no accident that much of the land is crowded in the north. You see the north has a wee bit more energy supply than the south, coming from a richer supply of EMs. The south experiences rarefaction. This is not only true at the surface, but also within the earth. This plays out in an interesting way in the Earth's mantle where where temperatures and gravity cause varying degrees of plasticity. The plasticity gives atoms mobility and electrons, under the direction of their quarks, steer atoms toward better energy supplies. We can't help it, even if it isn't a good thing. You want to know where you all get that mob mentality from? That's right. So what happens, is that there is a constant pressure slightly more toward the oncoming EMs, as the atoms with mobility work their way north.