Work In Progress
SHORT FICTION

Pulse
by Sebastian Meer


Bowland Lecture Theatre, Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom
14th June 2004 – 19:00-21:00 (Approx)
Lecture: Spatial dynamics and the pulse effect (by invitation only)

Gentlemen, ladies, members of the press, and of course the suited gentlemen wearing shades and covering the exits, thank you for coming. If those aforementioned fans of sunglasses who also happen to look as though they are standing vaguely to attention are government officials of some sort, please find a seat and try to relax a little. I am stood up here, centre stage, giving a talk to about a thousand people. I am not going anywhere just yet and when I do, you will be able to do nothing about it.

I have brought you here tonight to explain the basics of a theory that will change life on Earth and indeed the entire galaxy forever. If I can have complete silence, I shall begin.

Six years, twenty-three days and approximately nine hours ago I stood before the toilet in my ensuite, wearing nothing but shorts and thinking ‘I feel peculiarly tall this morning’. I was staring down at the bowl and just for a moment, it seemed further away than it should.

‘So?’ I can hear you all thinking.

Well the ‘so’ is this. I feel it in the kitchen too, when I’m leaning over the worktop chopping vegetables and I have to bow forward a little to bring the chopping-board close enough to focus properly. And sometimes the effect is reversed and the worktop seems too high to be comfortable. And sometimes my wife says she feels fat today, when she doesn’t look any different. I feel it when out for a walk in the Lakes, when a distant hill appears suddenly before me and is the next peak to climb or when the nearest brow to conquer is only a few hundred metres away, but takes hours to reach. I get the feeling that my car seat has either moved back or forwards a bit in the night, but after a moment I get instantly comfortable and doubt myself. I feel it when I peer over a precipice and get vertigo. But mostly I feel and see it when I have a migraine and the entire universe moves in and out of focus.

These, you might say, are my mind and my sight playing tricks, missing a connection briefly or simply not interpreting the available data correctly and you would be accurate, but not in the way you think.

I will keep the next bit as simple as possible so as to not lose the non-academic members of this esteemed audience.

What would you say if I told you that your mind was playing the trick in order to cover-up the fact that these things are really happening?

Would you laugh out loud and have me driven from the town? Would you form an angry mob and visit the madman with burning torches in the night?

Well technically I really was taller that morning and not just by the amount that my spine settles in the night. We are all taller or shorter than we perceive at any given moment, it’s just sometimes our minds take a tiny bit longer to catch up. Let me try to explain.

Our nearest neighbour in space is a small cooling star called Proxima Centauri. It is Alpha Centauri C and resides about 12 trillion miles away, towards the centre of the Milky Way. Light has been calculated to take 4.22 years to arrive on Earth from Proxima, which is slightly over 1540 days. This figure has been taken as read for some decades now and the fact that this length of time fluctuates ever so slightly is used to try and prove that light is a wave. The fluctuation is seen as the resonance of the light wave itself as it wobbles through space. Sometimes the curves of the wobble are bigger than other times, due to gravitational forces inflicted upon it by other bodies or even dark matter in the form of black holes. I will not explain this further, because it is all very complicated theoretical mathematics and wrong. Suffice to say; there are no “local” patches of space large enough or dark enough to be a black hole and there are no other astral bodies between Proxima and us. The Hubble Telescope has very kindly proved this much for us.

As of this morning, Proxima is almost exactly 1601.6 light days away from Earth. That is an increase of 61.6 days in six years or 0.33% per year. I expect the astronomers to dash out at the end and do the calculations, so you journalists might want to catch them if you want your proof for the morning editions. That aside, I have done the same set of sums for the nine stars that we have confirmed distances for and it always comes out the same, about 0.33% further away per year. All of this is outlined in the paper that will be passed around at the end. And before anyone tells me that the Milky Way is swirling, thus giving varying distances; I added this in and even stars that are shifting towards us are travelling away by the same amount.

What I am saying is that the universe is pulsing and it always has. The problem is; when it pulses out by 10 units, it only returns by 9. The galaxy is increasing in size, in all directions by 0.33 of a unit per year and that includes us.

I can still see the look of “So?” in a number of faces in the front row, so I will put this into layman’s terms for you.

Let us assume that I was exactly six feet tall in 1998, when I first took notice of this phenomenon, then today I am nearly six feet, one and a half inches tall. If you measure my height, I will still only be six feet because the measuring tape and the person doing the measuring will have stretched by the same amount. Now assume for a moment that I will live to the ripe old age of 1554 years. On that birthday in 3519AD I will be 500% bigger than I am now which would make me thirty feet tall, but also slightly faded and ethereal because of the dissipation of my component atoms.

If by some, as yet, unknown law of physics we can actually survive this, our brains will really start to notice the difference as our constituent parts spread out and the atoms can no longer mask the perceived gaps. And at some point our synaptic connections will begin to break down, refusing to cross the distances involved. A major part of that distance will be nothing, not even vacuum, but our thoughts will wobble and bend a little just like light and some will miss their destination.

Have you ever walked into a room and forgotten what you went in for in the first place? Have you started to say something and forgotten the end of the sentence, just before you got there? Sometimes the connections are missed.

I believe the Pulse is the reason why. From my calculations, that are now circulating, thank-you Jenny, you will be able to see on page five the mathematical proof that I am already nearly seventy-five feet tall in real terms, which just goes to show that the human mind really is a resilient piece of equipment. Apart from anything else, on my 1554th birthday, I will achieve the rather impressive height of 375 feet; in real terms. Now; as I can see a vast number of puzzled looks and an even greater number of smirks from my peers, I will show you my theory with a little practical demonstration.

Whilst suffering from a migraine, I can see this phenomenon much more clearly and through my research have shown that other sufferers are experiencing the same. Generally the sufferers mind will partially shut down and produce a pounding headache that borders on insanity. Others insist that they can see and feel the pulse, but put it down to various things including one woman in Connecticut who is adamant that her eyeballs are expanding and contract. Ironically they are. By meditating I have enabled myself to control the headaches and see glimpses of the real world around us. These glimpses are only for a split second, but come in rapid succession giving a sort of strobe effect. Excuse me a moment while I drink this glass of pineapple juice to help trigger a migraine. This is usually quite rapid, but I will need silence to concentrate. Thank you.

I shall continue; glasses with red lenses are a great help to migraine sufferers through altering their perception of the red/green colour spectrum and thus the Pulse effect, whereas these green ones help to enhance the effect by conversely altering that perception. And now for the good bit.

The last six years of trying have enabled me to not only see through the gaps in our existence, but also to reach through them. I shall take our men in black as our test subjects for this little demonstration. Gentlemen, please attempt to stop me from removing your sunglasses. Be aware that I am not going to move from this spot, but am merely going to reach through the intervening space, extract them from your faces and place them in my pocket. Everyone else should pick a subject and watch carefully.

See, that didn’t hurt did it?

I have here two pairs of Police, some very nice Diesel, one Calvin Klein and these appear to have prescription lenses. No wonder you didn’t take them off young man. Now before you consider coming up to retrieve them and me, please understand that I have a reach of about 40 feet and if I grip something at that distance, I can instantly pull myself to that point.

Any questions?


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