Time Waves

A very short story, for my brother

Daniel Hoffmann

Dec 2024

The photons raining down from the night sky are electromagnetic fossils, fleeting memories of events far away and ages ago, as they finally bump into Tenolaja’s retina, switching rhodopsin proteins in the rod cells, triggering an electric pulse that wanders along the optic nerve to the thalamus, then flows back through dorsal and ventral streams, reaching the hippocampus and branching out into several cortex areas. There, an association pattern forms across a network of neurons, which sends signals to speech and motor centers, then onward to muscles in jaw and neck, and to lips, tongue, and vocal chords.

“Special Relativity,” she mumbles mechanically.

Tenolaja hears her own words as if spoken by a stranger. She tries to trace back the origin of her utterance. Something is missing, something important. Her thoughts revolve around a foggy void that emanates a vaguely familiar feeling. She blinks and suddenly everything is back. Randocio! Rando, their disheveled, puppy-eyed, caricature of an astrophysics teacher!

It was the last evening lesson before the Acceleration, the final part of the Special Relativity course (one of the few subjects taught by a human). Randocio herded them out of the holoclass, out of the bunker, and onto the dark platform. There the sweet night air and the starry sky with the sparkling silver ribbon of the Galaxy quickly silenced the students’ chatter.

After a while, Randocio cleared his throat and they heard his matter-of-fact voice, “That’s the real thing. See, I have explained to you concepts like the Lorentz transformation, time dilation, and mass-energy equivalence. As a framework, all such scientific concepts taken together give us a full description of the whole world, from quarks to quasars. Nothing lies outside this knowable nature. But here’s the paradox.”

His voice now seemed to come from a slightly different angle. Perhaps he was no longer gazing upwards. “This full description of the world is also completely empty. Something is missing, something important.”

He paused. The students kept silent, looking at the stars and wondering.

He continued, and it sounded as if he was smiling, “I’ll give you a hint. Believe it or not, my biological mother taught me math and physics. You may actually have read her name in your civics science stack. She is the discoverer of the Randocio effect in emergent meta-civilizations. One evening, I must have been eleven or twelve, I had proven with her help some graph theoretic conjecture, and we had applied it immediately to calculate inter-planetary communication probabilities. That had been the first time I had done something so new and interesting. Naturally, I was elated. We went outside to cool off our brains in the summer night – I can still feel the pleasant breeze on my skin. While I was babbling along, my mother was only beaming and said nothing. After a few minutes I also fell silent so that we both stood there side by side, hands on the railing, and looked up to the stars. Oh, life can be corny at times.” He chuckled and a few of the students joined in.

Randocio went on, “Eventually, my mother broke the silence, ‘That has been exciting, hasn’t it? Quite different from being bored with dull facts in a holoclass.’

As so often, she knew me better than I did myself, and I happily agreed, ‘Yes! Doing the proof meant much more than the proof itself. It was like a story, and I was in that story. When we had that idea and then worked it out, I ... I cannot describe it, there’s something important missing in what I’ve said. Maybe there is a better word.’



She nodded, ‘I know what you mean. There are indeed better words, though they are meaningless when you just spell them out or scribble their letters. But sometimes you can find them, and that changes everything, or as old Eichendorff once wrote,
Sleeps a song in every thing,
dreaming still and never heard,
but the world begins to sing
if you find the magic word.’ ”