We Were Hungry

By Philip Avdey

2/3/2061

My name is Dr. Rohan Nayar. I’m making a log to document my work. Seems like the thing to do if you’re a scientist trying to save the world and all. 

Climate change has gotten bad. Really bad. We aren’t in apocalypse mode yet, but we’re getting there. People are dying by the millions, mostly from flooding or crop failures. Our food production isn’t able to keep up with the temperatures, and they are climbing so much faster than we ever thought possible. Diseases, too. They thrive in these sorts of conditions. 

In the United States, Florida is practically gone. California and New York aren’t doing much better. The states surrounding them have been exhausted with refugees. In India, it’s a disaster. My aunt and uncle died in a wildfire. Worse in Africa. Anywhere that infrastructure wasn’t great to begin with. Populations are swarming away from their drowning cities, and the rest of the world can’t accommodate. Did you know ten per cent of all people live in low coastal zones? You probably did. Most people know. 

Not many climate deniers left, which is good, I suppose, but it took too long to get here. The world is trying its best, but it’s not enough. Most people think it’s too late. Not that humanity will die out or anything, just that we’re going to take a short trip back to the stone age. Maybe feudal if we’re lucky. I’m not quite so hopeless. 

The issue is our energy usage. We’re running out. China and the U.S. are fighting over the last scraps, Europe not far behind, but it’s not sustainable. Soon, we’ll be left with a dying planet and no power to solve any of our problems. We need energy, and we don’t have the time or money to build solar farms anymore. If we’d started 50 years ago, maybe we’d be okay, but it’s too late for all that now. Doesn’t stop them from trying, of course. The big countries are all funneling billions if not trillions into solar, geothermal, etc. etc. It’s nonsense, if you ask me. Too little too late. We need something else ASAP. Something that will give us the energy we need, so we can remove the carbon from the atmosphere, build houses, cool our Earth down. A lot of people think fusion is the key. I think it’s rift particles. 

Eleven years ago, March 12, 2050, Dr. Richard Teller discovered the rifts. Interdimensional gateways. Blew everyone away at the time. People thought everything would change, that we would meet interdimensional beings or find God or whatever, but within a couple years, things were looking pretty bleak. You see, rifts are tiny. And there’s a lot of them. We’re made of them. Everything is. I estimate about 21% of all mass is composed of rift particles, squeezing their way between the preons. Millions of portals to alternate dimensions, all around us, all the time. Isn’t that the coolest thing you ever heard?

They’re about 120 times smaller than a quark. Meaning they’re 360 times smaller than an atom. Which begs the question: how the hell do you do anything with something so small? How do you send tests through it? Messages? People? You can’t do anything with the rifts, so they quickly became a curiosity and a common field of study, but nothing more. The world had more pressing things to deal with.

Which brings us here, to 2061. The government is giving out money like it’s candy to anyone with half a brain who’s willing to either work on reversing global warming or producing energy. Most people are working on Prometheus (that’s the government’s name for their fusion project). It’s good work, but it’s not going to do the trick. Sustainable and reproducible fusion is impossible, and everyone knows it, they’re just too blinded by its beckoning possibility. That’s ironic coming from me, considering most physicists would say the same of my line of work. So be it. I’m a firm believer that the rifts are the way. We know the energy is there, on the other side. That’s one of the only things we managed to figure out about them. Whole universes of infinite energy, ripe for the taking. Like apples hanging from a tree. We just need to build a ladder.

I have a small team of a dozen others. They’re like me, considered crazies by the rest of the scientific community, but the government is so desperate they gave us a huge grant anyway and a very nice lab and said, “Go.” So, we’re going. We’re going to solve this thing.

4/22/2061

So far, so bad. We’ve tried a lot of different ideas, poking and prodding rift particles as much as we can. Electromagnetic waves, so far, have been our main way of testing, or waves of any kind, really. We tried radio, X-ray, gamma, and so on. Nothing makes the particles react. It’s like they’re completely inert, swallowing everything and not responding. Only light seems to do anything, and only for a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second. When light hits them, they seem to “vibrate” in a way. Hard to say why or what it’s doing, but it’s something.

9/19/2061

It’s been kind of hopeless around here. Five months of little to no progress will do that. 

And then last week… Jesus Christ.

A bomb went off in the White House. They’re calling it the Red Hour. No one even knows who did it. Terrorists? Extremists? A lot of people want to declare war on China, since the States have been wanting an excuse to do that for a while, but I don’t know. I doubt it. All I do know is that our funding is probably going to be cut, and three of my scientists went back home. To be with their families. Haha. I don’t have to worry about all that, thankfully. A family was never meant for me. 

1/1/2062

Happy new year. Im drunk. Everyone is gone. Well not everyone. But most people. Jane left and so did ivan and keerthi. Tomás too. 

Fuck them the fucking cowards they should fucking die. Fuck. shitting fucking fuck.

Fuck.

1/2/2062

How embarrassing. Can’t figure out how to delete logs, so that’s not going anywhere. Sorry. But I stand by what I said, I suppose. They are cowards. We need every person we can get, we need to save the goddamn planet, but they leave? Because they’re scared? 

This was supposed to be a scientific log, but it’s becoming a place to put my ramblings. Oh well. 

The world has not been getting nicer. Texas froze over, and thousands died. Wildfires all over Oregon and Washington. Refugees are flooding into Nevada and Arizona, and most people finally abandoned New York completely. It’s a wasteland. I don’t even want to talk about the rest of the world. There’s full blown war in Africa and the Middle East. Pretty bad. We’re not getting too involved, but we don’t seem far from one either. Thailand lost many thousands to a sudden disease just three weeks ago. Apparently, it’s spreading to the rest of Asia and fast. Brazil elected a fascist government. Everyone thinks a war with the other South American countries is inevitable. Europe is tearing itself apart, too. No one can handle the refugees or the resource load. 

Oh, and did I mention we have had no progress? We’ve mostly been messing with light more and more, since that’s the only way we can get the particles to do anything, but our attempts are all failing. Our rift microscopes are expensive, and we’re running out of money. We haven’t been able to use it very much. We’re trying to ration our time with it. Every minute of the microscope’s usage costs about three thousand dollars. 

2/3/2062

Happy birthday, project. Yay.

I’m alone. After 2/1, everyone left. The United States sent missiles into China, so we could scare them into selling us their oil. Hundreds of thousands are dead. No one knows what’s going to happen next. Nuclear Armageddon? Perhaps. Either way, no one cares about rift particles anymore. No one cares about anything. Except me. I still have the microscope, and I still have power. Ironic, isn’t it? The government cut our funding but forgot to cut our power. I’ll keep working as long as I can.

4/17/2062

Eureka!!

Fucking fucking eureka!!!!

I have been fucking waiting to write eureka on this stupid log for more than a year. And now I can. Haha! Fuck you, former coworkers! I have done it! 

My hands are literally shaking. I’ve been screaming and running around like an animal. I haven’t slept or eaten in like two days. Three days? I don’t know. I’ve been sleeping in the lab. No point going home. No point going anywhere, really. This is all that’s left.

I did it. I put rift particles together. Together. Made them grow. People have been trying to put rift particles together, and now I did. They kissed. The rift particles gave each other a little smooch and then joined each other in holy matrimony. I sound like a fucking insane man. I need to sleep. Explain tomorrow.

4/18/2062

I have slept, eaten, showered, and drunk coffee. Even shaved. I am once again sane and human.

So, here’s the deal. Photons were not the key. Rift particles respond to light, but they don’t do anything. Not really. The key was radio. 

I have all the boring math and numbers, but here’s the main idea. Rifts excited by light, if stimulated by radio waves, can and will merge together. Not sure if they merge into bigger rift particles or into some new form of particle, but most signs point to the former. For now, I’ll just keep calling the merged thingies rifts. 

I checked the news for the first time in a while, by the way. We’re in the middle of a war with China, turns out. What a twist. I had my head stuck so far in the sand, I didn’t even know. It’s not a huge war, apparently, mostly posturing, but still. Things are getting pretty tense. Not much left of Guam, I heard. As for the rest of the country and the world, I’m too scared to even look. 

Regardless, I sent out my data and findings to anyone who’ll listen, and as for me, I have a little money left, but I think I can keep working for at least another three months before I run out and my microscope stops working. 

5/6/2062

No one is responding to me. No one fucking cares. I may have discovered a source of infinite energy, but no one fucking cares. Because I don’t have results. I don’t have energy. I just have kissing rifts. All right. Fine. I’ll show them.

5/12/2062

Like I hoped, the rift particles are stabilizing as they get bigger. I’m feeding more and more to each other, so my rift is getting pretty big. It’s the size of an atom. That’s huge. That means I can start interacting with it. The bigger it gets, the less it’s moving around. I can actually start poking and prodding and potentially sucking out energy. According to my scans, the readings are as huge as ever. Whatever lies on the other side of the rifts, they have more energy than they know what to do with. 

6/7/2062

I did it I did it I did it I did it I did it I did it I did it.

I actually did it.

I constructed a device, I won’t go into the details, that I’m calling the Needle. And I poked my little rift atom with it. The Needle can suck out energy, you see, and the readings are off the chart. With such a tiny particle, the energy I’m getting is miniscule compared to what the planet would need, but it’s there. Infinite energy. I just need to grow the rift. I think once it’s the size of a quarter, I can get enough energy to power a hundred Earths.

I’m crying as I type this. Silly, huh? My keyboard is all wet. Going to wipe it. 

6/8/2062

Couldn’t sleep. Had weird dreams. Lots of whales, for some reason, and these skinny looking people standing around, faceless. 

6/11/2062

The rift atom is no longer an atom, my friends. It’s a rift blob! About the size of a coin. It’s black and purple, sort of like a goo. I’m keeping it well contained, though, and it’s full of all sorts of wires and pipes and things that I’m using to funnel power. 

 I’ve been thinking of letting someone know, but… I don’t know. Maybe now’s not the time. To be completely transparent, I haven’t been out. I shut the internet off after my first rejection. I was a bit upset. And I haven’t left the lab. The windows are all closed, the doors are closed. I don’t actually know what’s going on out there. I could be the last human being alive, for all I know. I have enough food and water to last me another month at least. 

Energy output is through the roof. Don’t need to worry about that anymore. I’m producing something like 25,000 terawatts an hour. That’s like eighty percent of the entire output of our planet. I’m sending 99.9% of the energy back into the rift, of course, since I just don’t know what to do with all of it.

I should call it in, right? I mean, what more is there to do? I have it. Infinite energy. It’s done.

I feel kind of hollow, though. Weird. Like there’s more to do. 

Tomorrow, I’m leaving my cave and I’m calling someone. I’ll probably get a medal or something.

6/19/2062

Been a week. I haven’t told anyone. Can’t do it. Don’t know why.

Been pacing around a lot. Thinking. I keep trying to plug the router back in, fix the telephone line, but I can’t. I just can’t. It’s like something is stopping me. 

6/21/2062

Rift is growing. It’s the size of my hand. Don’t know how to stop it. Don’t want to. Haven’t slept.

6/22/2062

Shadows are growing long. Like men. Thin men with white eyes. So skinny their ribs poke out. They grow out of the rift and watch me. They don’t do anything. Just watch me. They don’t say anything. I can’t stop looking at them. I haven’t slept. I just dream.

7/1/2062

Naked. Burned my clothes. Can’t think. 

I see the thin men. They watch me.

The Rift is growing. It’s bigger than me. It’s calling me.

7/1/2062

Watching me. Calling me. They don’t say anything but they want me to come.

7/2/2062

No more food. Hungry. Ate my finger. 

Thin men are growing. Eyes watching. I see their eyes. They’re everywhere. Eyes in every wall, in the ceiling, in the floor. In me. Shadows. 

Sometimes, they dance. They make noises and dance. I watch.

 I have to touch it.

7/4/2062

Don’t touch it don’t touch it don’t touch it don’t touch it don’t touch it don’t touch it don’t touch it don’t touch it don’t touch it.

Don’t don’t don’t don’t don’t don’t don’t don’t don’t don’t don’t

7/4/2062

Growing growing growing 

7/5/2062

I put my hand in it. It’s cold and warm. Pleasure and pain. The thin men are laughing at me. Except they can’t laugh. How could they? They aren’t men anymore. They’re something different. 

They tricked me. They are twisted. They are not of our world. They don’t follow our rules. They are coming. 

The rift is taking me. I feel it. Growing. Spreading. I feel myself dying. Maybe not dying. Maybe leaving. Maybe going to the other side.

We were hungry. I stole from them. 

I let them into my home. 

They are hungry, too.

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