Deborah Harris confronted me today in the student union cafeteria. With her shrill , nasally voice she berated me with insults and accusations.
She had been turned down for the Hawking Grant. The very grant I had been awarded yesterday.
Dr. Harris is an expert in contained habitat Botany, agriculture, and low gravity cultivation. Her work was the key to the colonial ships communal farms and oxygen generation, as well as the great domed ecosystems on Mars and the Moon.
Her day however, had come and gone. Mine had now arrived. I pleaded my case to her, that obviously the Hawking Institute at Oxford had come to the same conclusion. She would not listen to me. The damnable woman began to raise her voice. She had to nerve to tell me that her work was only beginning, that it was the key to the permanent colonization of the planets and moons, that it was the key to the complete survival of the human race. A bit much. She continued to rant, how we would be nothing without food and air, and her technology and theories would free man from any threat.
I tried to explain that I appreciated that, and that I agreed, for long, interstellar multi-generational interstellar voyages, her technology, advancements, and theories were priceless. I tried to explain that with my work, those trips would not be necessary. If I could just open a gateway, a wormhole to a point in space, the ships could pop out at the other end of the galaxy instantaneously. I do not understand why she then retorted.
“You have no concept of should Anton, only can.”
I have no idea what she was so concerned about. I began to question it when she blasted me again.
“You are like a kid driving with the headlights off. Launching a rocket with no trajectory. You have no idea where you are going to open your little hole too. You risk all of us to prove your genius. No one doubts your genius Anton, but you need to plan this further.”
Well I took this personally. She told me that she was at my presentation before the alumni. That after the demonstration, when i had created a miniature wormhole from the podium on the stage connected to the balcony. I then folded a paper airplane, and tossed it into the wavering shimmer of distorted light. When it emerged from the matching distortion that hovered from above the balcony I knew my future was set.
What did it matter that I do not know the nature of what is inside the wormhole. The science tells me it is nothing, a fold in space, where two spots appear as one. I push the energy to the right level, the other side of the wormhole is farther away. She has had enough, and swears to me that she would bring this up to the trustees and the university President.
I swear, that woman will complain herself out of her richly deserved Nobel.
1Pulled from the wreckage of his MIT laboratory.
2 T-minus 62 days from activation of wormhole device.
