Storytime!

Today’s post will not be a recap of recent events because I don’t feel like recapitulating (I only know that that’s what “recap” stands for because of music…) today. Instead, I will expound upon a discussion that Elliott and I had today because it is infinitely more interesting.

The setting is a number of years in the future, and we follow Professor Wilhelm Christensen, who teaches physics at the University of Washington and who recently became quite famous for discovering a Unified Field Theory, uniting all forces under one big model.

Even more recently, he engineered a device that allowed him to sense fluctuations in the various fields permeating space and thus essentially know what was happening at any given moment. This device was implanted in his brain by neurosurgeon-engineer extraordinaire, Elliott J-W who also performed the first brain augmentation surgery.

We join the professor at a small park on campus, surrounded by a small crowd: some students, and a noticeably larger group who were just there to wonder what in God’s name was going on. The professor, who everyone knew was a few marbles short of a handbasket anyway, was crouched slightly, bubble pipe in mouth and duck on shoulder, waving his arms in roughly the fashion of a goose as it lands in a pond. He was muttering things under his breath and for some reason appeared at times to be conversing with the duck. The students, who were holding writing pads and pens, were looking rather bored with the whole procedure when suddenly the duck let out a quack.

The crowd jumped a little, except for the students who simply raised their writing pads and acted like they had seen it all before – which they had. This was a typical Monday lecture – the professor would quote off some numbers about the field at any given point and the students would set about deconstructing the equations to predict weather patterns, or prepare telescopes to watch an impending supernova in the Andromeda galaxy.

The students raised their eyebrows in anticipation, but the professor simply remained there, crouching, brow furrowed in concentration. His fingers wiggled slightly, sensing the ebb and flow of the universe. “That’s odd,” he muttered. “But that means if I take a step this way…” The professor did a slight hop onto the other foot—which to the students’ trained eyes was carefully calculated to adjust the field’s tumultuous quivering just so—and something rather unexpected happened. The professor’s feet lifted off the ground slightly, and he appeared to flatten out into a disk, rotating slightly, and parallel to the ground. The duck stood in the middle of the disk, looking rather dazed.

At this point the students were writing so furiously that passersby feared the clipboards might spontaneously combust. The dean of the College of Arts and Sciences came bursting out of nowhere in particular, yelling about the professor’s latest procedure as per usual. “I thought I told you to find somewhere off campus to perform your—what in GOD’S NAME has he done now?!” she screamed. The students were too intent trying to figure this out themselves to notice, and by this time the disk had begun rotating faster and faster, until it looked rather like a large galaxy dressed in a lab coat. The duck let out a somewhat more apprehensive quack and suddenly the disk collapsed in onto itself with a sound somewhere between a rip, a boom, and the groan of a previously respectable section of spacetime being made to do things that were never considered proper in the old days.

And then nothing seemed to happen. The duck floated to the ground with what appeared to be an air of confused success. While the dean stood agape at the possible ramifications of having a tenured professor do…whatever just happened, and the students wondered if they would have to forfeit their tuition, the duck looked up at them.

“Students,” it said with a suppressed quack, “I appear to have melded my consciousness with that of Quackums the duck. You can take the rest of the day off while I work out how this affects the lesson plan. Also, if somebody has some bits of dried bread I am rather famished.”

To be continued! Dun dun dun dunnn!!!