Hello! And thank you for listening to Rivers of the Mind Season 1.5. If this introduction fails to amuse you, then you can just skip to about one minute and fifteen seconds into the podcast, but since writing this introduction amuses me just fine, here it goes. Season 1.5 is like Rivers of the Mind but focusing on side characters who might be important later on, or just on the events between seasons one and two that you may want to know about. Just to be clear, Rivers of the Mind is not meant to condone education in the sciences, the development of superhuman powers, or wormhole technology. All events portrayed in Rivers of the Mind are completely fictional, and any resemblance to actual events or people, whether real or imagined, is simulataneously real and imagined, as are all things when reduced to their most basic level of existence. With all of that said, please enjoy this episode of Rivers of the Mind, entitled “How Dr. Desiree Elizabeth Whitebalm Tore A Hole In The Universe.”
[sounds of an alarm, fading into the sounds of an explosion, panicked voices, a beeping hospital room]
At first, all the colors seemed to glide like keys on a piano. Reds turned to oranges, oranges turned to yellows, and rambled up the spectrum until the only color was purple and then that color became black. And with every octave of red through which the colors passed, the centers of illumination around which they focused themselves shifted, creating a pulsing that was all around me the moment I opened my eyes. The color and light first came from all around, and grew dimmer and dimmer until only a few distant x-ray machines could be seen illuminating faraway floors in other sections of the hospital wing, and then nothing but a faint red light coming off of my skin. As that red light fell into purple, and then blue, and then green, in fluid, seamless succession, the world filled with light again, which multiplied as every heat source gave off bright light, followed every person's cell phone or radio or pager. “How are you feeling?”, asked a nurse, smiling as I intermittently saw her fade between a vaguely defined skeleton, a normal person, and a being covered in bright red and white light. “I can see.”, I mumbled, hazily. Savoring the moment, the experience of seeing someone as notoriously brilliant as myself reduced to an incoherent burn patient, she chuckled, slightly. “She says she can see!”, shouted the nurse over his shoulder. “She's awake?”, replied another. Immediately a crowd formed, vaguely despondent. No one wanted to tell me I was the only survivor.
It took no small effort to learn to control what I imagined the flow between spectrums. One, I supposed, represented what my brain thought was electromagnetic light. One octave higher, I must have been thinking of ultraviolet light. In the next, x-rays, and then gamma. Back down, I could see in...well. Infrared. Microwave. Radio. If I thought of one, then I could go there. Or, convince myself I could. Maybe some kind of brain damage. It was bizarre, but enjoyable once I learned to view it as a modest amusement. Imagine if this were real, I'd think. Imagine if you really were a source of weak gamma waves. Imagine if you could see light coming from that man's walkie talkie. And if I became immersed enough in one of these meaningless fantasies, I could start to pick it apart—I could move my field of vision close enough to a wall that I could start to see the fibers that made up its surface, and then the single celled organisms crawling over that surface, and then the clouds of electrons that weaved over tiny nuclei, free taus and positrons escaping for billionths of seconds, and underneath this still, layer upon layer of intricate forces between increasingly smaller units of reality, all eventually starting over at their beginning. I could imagine electrons passing through barriers impenetrable by the laws of classical physics—I could see photons of all colors reflecting against the wall in hundreds of different wavelengths, until they bled into a plain white in my eyes—I pictured myself brushing the photons around me aside and scattering them away, distorting the field of vision in a way that I imagined the doctor reacting to...Or...saw the doctor react to. He pressed a stethoscope against my chest and leaned in to look at my eyes and my ears. “Are you feeling any pain at all?”
“No,”, I said, mystified suddenly as I could see the molecules of air ripple towards him, producing what he heard as my voice. “Good.”, he said, producing the same rippling vibration. If I chose not to see it though, I didn't have to....hmmm. But what if it was real? I imagined myself grabbing onto the photons in the air, tuning them to the same frequency—this filled the room, for a second, with a flash of blue light. The doctor glanced up at the bulb. “Hmm. I'll have to see someone about that. Anyway, I'm sure you're getting tired of all the questions. I know I would be. Someone else will be in to ask more in a little bit, too. Now, let me just--”
----
In pretty short order, I was on my feet again—the doctors were surprised by how rapid a recovery I was making, they only advised that I keep a liquid diet since I was having trouble keeping down food. And I was starting to have cravings for...other things. I...well I'd like to give an example, but most of my examples are too sophisticated for laymen. How about...hmmm. What do the laymen do? Imagine you've finished leaving an uninformed comment on a YouTube video about space travel, and before you go to your job as an accountant or a marketing executive or a customer service person, you want to eat, so you microwave yourself a burrito, or, at least, whatever passes for a burrito in that moment. Well, it was exactly that, only there was no burrito. Just a microwave. I would feel the strongest desire to sit next to the microwave, and I'd just kept craving it every five minutes. I mean, eventually, I figured out how to hold myself over for a few hours by getting rid of some of the microwaves Farraday cage. But even that wasn't enough. Somehow, as much if not more than I needed food, I needed radiation. When I sat by the microwave, the radiation would enter my skin and slowly drop in color until it disappeared, forming a weak, ever dissipating aura, which made me feel...full...but I needed more.
Luckily, if it was radiation I wanted, I had access to it, but regardless I felt a need to approach this with some reserve. For one, it was particularly expensive to accrue sources of radiation. Moreover, there were certain risks posed by exposure to large quantities of radiation, both to laymen and to scientists. Attempts to discern to what extent I was hallucinating and to what extent my visions represented reality threw me for a loop for a while. But regardless, I needed to eat something, and even with the liquid diet I was having trouble finishing more than a sip or a bite at a time. Inspite of the risks, I gave up, I found a highly radioactive pellet of metal in a sealed lead crate. Immediately after unwrapping it, I began to feel more satisfied, strength returning to my muscles. The metal began to shrink, undergoing rapid alpha and beta decay, becoming warm, squirming light over my body. I wasn't hungry for the next week, and I still had all of my hair.
The only logical conclusion quickly became that I'd experienced an undocumented change in physiology brought about my exposure to a radiation that we identified as “Gamma Triple Prime”--this was somewhat erroneus, as closer examination revealed that it did not consist of photons at all, but the name stuck amongst some of the laymen working at the base, and when the laymen have named something, it is unfortunately quite difficult to reverse that process. I was unprepared to come forward with either a more accurate description of whatever the energy they had found was, and likewise unprepared to present my new vision or hunger for radiation to the others at the base. Everyone was on edge enough as it was, and still in mourning for many of their colleagues who had been present the night of the experiment. Perhaps more importantly, it seemed as though the changes to my physiology invited military applications. With only a little focus, I could easily manipulate ordinary light into higher, more destructive frequencies, or concentrate it into narrow beams. This was excellent for scientific research, but I feared it would also be excellent for, say, warfare, or any number of other applications that did not sit well with me.
I chose instead to work in private, as I was prone to doing, and to experiment as best I could with my abilities, working on developing instruments that could, in whatever way, mimic what I was doing. I'd sent in three papers with new theorums for review, and submitted patents for the equipment that enabled us to detect the energetic anomaly occurring one kilometer northeast of our laboratory. Research at the laboratory boomed—minor improvements in our knowledge of quantum physics enabled progress on wormhole technology, space travel, and materials sciences to expand exponentially. I soon was surrounded by a team of scientists who could at last keep up with and respect the demands I placed on them. Every morning at 7:30 am, we would wake up, eat breakfast, and go to work by 8:30. At three in the afternoon, after we broke for lunch, we would commence with more work, generally concluding at around eleven or twelve at night. I didn't feel alone, at all, in my mania any longer. The laboratory was surging back to life, outdoing all of our wildest expectations.
Perhaps we were a little bit too optimistic. The gravitation wave detected above the farm-- appearing to me to be a great purple column, housing a dense vortex—seemed a perfect oppurtunity to test our wormhole device. Unexpectedly, however, the wormhole device led to the total collapse of the phenomenon—the portal formed incompletely, leading to a leakage of so-called Gamma Triple Prime into the earth, and the breaking of an upper level of limestone, exposing a large sinkhole. The optimistic spirit of the past week and a half had been broken—we began to see that we'd gone to far before we were ready, that all of our advances were only fractions of what needed to be done. But I knew something more. Down on the ground, the accident had exposed the inhabitants of the small rural neighborhood to sufficient amounts of Gamma Triple Prime to put them through similar changes to what I'd experienced. I quickly presented the events to the chief military official at the base, Colonel Imes, warning him that anyone exposed to more than point zero five moles of the substance was likely to be at risk of major health complications. Understanding that the security of the base was at stake, we rushed into action.
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