The Weapon - Oblivion  - part 23

By Diana the Valkyrie

It's a Little Fireball

Update: 31/08/2003 to valkyrie05





Black. Black was all around me, except for pinpoints of white. And not far

away, I could feel the pulsing throb of a fireball. A star. In the vacuum of

space, there's no sound, of course, but I could hear its electromagnetic

waves, the high bright flux of gamma rays, the contralto of the infra red

rhythms and the deep bass beat of the radio waves. I sniffed the savoury aroma

of mesons, and the sharp sour tang of the neutrino flux.



Then I saw her. She wasn't moving, other than the usual circulation of

existence as her four black holes wove their intricate dance around her centre

of gravity. Her gravitational tensor was full and clean, symmetric in the

spatial axes, with a hint of voluptuous side lobes. She was also drinking in

the energy of the nearby fireball, absorbing it by pumping up her quantum

states into higher levels. She was orbiting the fireball a little more closely

than I was, so her orbital period was less, and I watched as she sped by

between me and the fireball.



As she passed me in her inferior orbit, she rotated slowly, letting me see all

around her, displaying her beautiful symmetries, while she modestly kept her

internal structure concealed inside a reflective boundary.



It was time, time and again, time and past time. I traded some potential

energy for kinetic, dropped my orbit until it was below hers and I was passing

underneath, then traded some of that energy back to bring myself up into the

same orbit as hers, using small beams of massless neutrinos for reaction mass.

But she wasn't there! She'd changed orbit when I tried to match hers, and she

was speeding off around the fireball ahead of me. I repeated the manoever, and

this time she traded kinetic for potential and I overshot. But I was closer

now, close enough to aim at her tangentially, and use some of her rotational

energy to brake myself into her gravitational well.



She laughed, and threw out a beam of spinning neutrons; her spin increased in

the opposite sense, and the centrifugal force threw me off her, wobbling back

into a higher orbit around the fireball. I approached again, ready for her

angular momentum trick, but this time she orbited a stream of electrons,

creating a powerful magnetic field. My electric charges were twisted around,

throwing me out of the plane of the ecliptic, but I was expecting that, and I

revectored the new momentum back towards her, heading straight for her core.

She tried to twist out of the way, but she was too slow, and I passed straight

through her core, and as our space-time event lines intersected, we felt the

quantum entanglement that pulled us together, and our components reached a

steady-state orbit around each other.



The intimacy of the entanglement was like a kiss of the most personal kind,

and I felt her lines of force twisting around mine. I dropped a bunch of

hydrogen-bound electrons from excited state to ground state and focussed the

resulting photons in her direction; she responded by absorbing the photons,

kicking her hydrogen-bound electrons into the excited state. But then she

raised the stakes by dropping a bunch of electrons from E3 to the zero point

energy state, and focussing the electromagnetic quanta in my direction.



We continued to bounce photons back and forth; sometimes just reflecting each

other's quanta, but more often using that energy, plus some additional, to

trigger a spray of photons with a different frequency back to the other. We

continued this duet for a while, and then suddenly, instead of the radiation

I'd been getting used to, she shot a de Broglie wave at me, a stream of

electrons that she'd stripped entirely from their atoms. She used the beta

particles to deliver energy, electrostatic charge, spin and mass, and I

shivered deliciously with the multiple sensations. Quickly, I flowed a strong

current to create a magnetic field; her stream of electrons bent in the field,

bent and bent again, until I had turned them through a pair of right angles,

and sent her own electrons, and a whole bunch of my own, back through her

core, charging up her center with a huge coulumb charge. She was negative

overall; I was positive. Her mass was therefore attracted strongly toward me,

but she countered this by setting up a magnetic dipole exactly like mine, and

in the same orientation, so that the like poles would repel, and exactly

balance the electrostatic attraction. I increased the flow of electrons, in

order to strengthen the electrostatic attraction, but of course she just

increased the magnetic field to maintain the balance.



We batted the electrons to and fro, until they formed a Schrodinger standing

wave between our centers, unable to escape our joint passion, confined within

the combined potential well between us. Then she added mesons to the flow, far

more difficult to control because of their vastly greater mass, and tendency

to break apart into a shower of smaller particles. But I stayed with her,

keeping up my end of the resonance between us, and additionally tunnelling a

beam of alpha particles through the forbidden zone occupied by the electron

field. The danger with mesons, of course, is that they carry the power of the

Strong Interaction Force, the glue that holds together the atomic nucleons. If

that got loose, it would weld us into a single energetic particle. We were

tickling the dragon's tail, and she knew it, and dared me to play her game.



I looked up and around, and sure enough, our four good friends were

surrounding us, we were at the centroid of their tetrahedron of contribution.

They were full of energy; potential, kinetic, electromagnetic and

gravitational; all ready to party. Two of her best friends, and two of mine,

like a wedding party supporting the chupa, like the Best Man, Chief

Bridesmaid, and two people to hold the jumping broom. It's funny, you have the

same thing in so many cultures. The happy couple and four friends giving their

support. The processes of love have always been a social interaction;

intensely personal to the two protagonists, but also involving the community.



They saw our dangerous game with the mesonic glue, and knew that we'd gotten

to the point where we weren't being too rational any more. So they started to

add their energy to ours, pumping up our quantum states with their

electromagnetic waves. They sang a four-part harmony in the electromagnetic

spectrum, a symphonious Ode to Joy of radio, infra-red, X and gamma rays. My

particles resonated with their induced vibrations, pumping up the energy

levels.



We were forced by the rising temperature to abandon the mesonic interactions,

but not before we'd increased out quantum entanglement to a level that

guaranteed that we would be linked together for all time. We weren't a single

particle, we weren't one. But neither were we entirely separate now. Oh, the

entanglement can be broken, but to do so requires a great separation in

distance and in time, a divorce that rarely happens. We were bound to each

other - no, we were each bound to a common entity, which was neither her, nor

was it me, nor was it both of us, but it was part of each of those three, a

compound of her/me/us.



The energy of our friends, projected into our bound state, excited our quantum

states even more. I needed to discharge some of that surplus energy, and she

was the target for my discharge. Of course, from her point of view, I was the

target. Our attention turned from the tetrahedron of our good chums, to focus

entirely on each other. She glowed in the light from the nearby fireball, her

Cherenkov radiation a warm red contrast to the fireball's blue-green light.

She was the most desirable creature I had ever seen.



The foreplay was over, it was time for the main event. I moved my masses

carefully, thrusting vigorously, and the resulting gravitational wave licked

past her, exciting a corresponding vibration in her masses. Her vibration, of

course, created another gravitational wave, but she added energy to the field,

and I got back more than I'd given. So I did the same, naturally, and we

started the ancient gravitational amplification dance that is the act of love

for two of the People. The blanket hornpipe.



The gravaser wave reflected back and forth, and with each reflection we added

to its power, gradually increasing the amplitude of the ripple in space-time

that is the real nature of a gravity wave. Our movements grew more intense,

until even the fireball, millions of miles away, began to shake and shiver

from the intensity of our lovemaking. I was determined not to be the first to

fail, to continue to reflect the waves of gravity for longer than she could.



We were bound together by electrostatic attraction, yet separated by the

magnetic repulsion. We were far enough apart for the Strong Force carried by

our mesons not to bind us together into a single wavicle, but close enough for

quantum entanglement to bind us together into a single space-time event. Two

minds with but a single thought, two People, one flame. We are one, yet two;

two, but also one.



The graviton flux density increased with each reflection. Our proximity meant

that the travel time was femtoseconds, I had to be quick to maintain my

reflection of the waves. The flux density itself was starting to exert

relativistic effects; the energy that was flowing between us itself manifested

a gravitational field, and this second order effect was beginning to be

comparable to the main standing wave between us. And that caused a third order

effect, as the field caused by the flux, itself exerted a field, and then the

fourth, fifth ... and the whole system went out of control, a chain reaction

far beyond my capability to handle. So, despite my resolve to stay on top of

things, I couldn't help it, I lost it completely. There was a surge of energy

out past me as I failed to reflect the standing wave back to her. My core was

shaken like an electron in a cyclotron, as the huge energy of our coupling

roared past me, arrowed behind me, and plunged into the heart of the fireball

that had been witnessing our passion.



I floated in space, exhausted. I felt as if all my quantum states were

depleted to zero point. But she wasn't done yet, she dived past me, following

the wave of gravitons down into the fireball, and vanished beneath the surface

of flame that gives the fireball its name.



A little while later she returned. "It's done," she said. "Congratulations,

it's a Little Fireball. She'll be a Guardian to make us proud."