Bad Choices (Hypernaturals 8)

Waiting Is ...

Waiting is a pain in the ass.

Right this moment Danny and Lori are talking with Morgan and I at the dinner table. Jessica is up in the clinic with Marvin. Rachel and Helen are love-bugging in the master bedroom. Presumably, Helen wants a slightly less enthusiastic level of love right now.

Dad is in the living room, telling the girls about the stars. They are going to go up to the observatory as soon as it is dark and look at the sky. Dad is doing what he used to do with me. 

Talking about infinity.

Not all waiting is a pain I suppose. I love the rapt looks he is getting as Dad enthuses about the things that go on in up in the sky. Supernovas and neutron stars and white dwarfs and the nucleosynthesis of all the elements on the periodic table. Gravity waves and EInsteins being right about almost everything around the time Jessica and Helen were first doing things together. 

Laura's expression is priceless, setting a new standard for seriousness. She is laser-focused on Dad. Nakoma is asking a lot of really good questions too. Not run of the mill things, but "Why did they choose 'light year' as a way to measure", and why are there also things like 'AU's and Parsecs? So many different ways to talk about the same thing!

Dad thought that was funny, and threw in miles, nautical miles, and kilometers as more examples. "The shortest thing we think we can ever measure is called the 'Plank Length' but we don't use that because it is so tiny. Each of those distance names is a way to measure a different realm of size. They were invented at different times by different people. It would be hard to say you are going to the grocery store if someone asked you how far away it is and you answered in light-years. You would be answering for a long time. Take the moon for example: just under a light second away, on average. Easy to say. Think how far away that is compared to the Grocery store! Two hundred and thirty thousand miles! It would be hard to say it's 'five two hundred and thirty-thousandths of a light second away'. Most measurements have a size they work best in, and light-years are best when you are talking about the stars. Even that is big numbers when you talk about how far away in our universe we can see..." Dad pointed to his right. "If we look as far in that direction as we can see, and then looked as far in the opposite direction as we can see..." Dad pointed to his left "... and we add all that up, it's about 45.7 billion light-years. Almost easier to use Parsecs at that scale: 14.0 billion of those, so still a lot. It's easy to see what a light-year is, or ten light-years, or a hundred. When you get to a thousand of them, it starts getting hard to think about how big that is. A million, or a billion or 45 billion light-years, and that is only the part we can see? Our little corner of the universe is huge."

"Why do you keep saying 'our Universe' grandpa? How many are there?" Nakoma asked, which launched him into superstrings and the multiverse. Not the DC comics version of the multiverse, but the quantum mechanical real one.

Danny was not listening to my Dad's exploration of the universe with the kids. He is focused on Marvin, saying to me "This is what it was like with you, dude! You went under and you never surfaced until you were good and damn ready. I would say it was horrible but that how I met my love."

Danny gave Lori a look to re-declare that love, and she leaned over and kissed him.

"You are still a romantic, after these years. That is how we fell in love, over a prone body." Lori painted the image.

"You went up and saw Adrian in the hospital? You saw him when he was turning?" Morgan asked, interested.

"Uh. Yes?" Lori said, suddenly guilty.

Danny was surprised at the confession. "You never told me that!"

Lori looked embarrassed "Well, he wasn't my patient. It is that I wanted to see who it was that was making that cute guy in the cafeteria all unhappy. I looked at the chart. Looked at the vitals. I thought Adrian was dying. I totally got why Danny was so unhappy. That is when they were trying the antivirals, and it was going so wrong. When Danny said Adrian was getting better, I looked in again. He was. The chart said they discontinued anything but supportive therapy and, to be honest, I thought they were going to talk to family about how long to leave him in his vegetative state, except his EEG said his brain function was high"