The Thing in the Viewer
by The Apeiron Collective
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
Part 2 of the MSS: Arrival at Stromlo
You are all aware of my involvement with the Pre-Bang Telescope located amid the dry pines and eucalyptus that surround Mt Stromlo. There, on the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales, we find an observatory. One crisp winter’s day under a cupola sky, I drove my 1960s MG convertible along the mountain road for the first time, top down and white scarf flying, embracing the mid-year briskness well-known in this part of the world.
On the way, I had stopped at a quaint country town pub, the Bungendore Hotel, for a counter lunch. There I let some careless shrapnel fall into the jukebox. Two local elderly men turned from their own coins and customary places at the bar, glancing over to the hummed opening of Elvis Presley’s “Edge of Reality,” foreboding yet bittersweet.
Again, I have to acknowledge the penumbral assistance of Dr Shamass in getting me to Stromlo. The shadowy figure facilitated my abrupt and unusual career transition. This I had found out as I fretted about how to change fields, having kept my discovery of the potsherds secret. I had holed up at an ancient rooming house in Kabul, indulged excessively in hashish, and tried to decide between rival translations of the Parmenidean fragments, which concern being itself. Of course this lifestyle only served to stimulate my cosmic fixations.
Sure enough, on the summer solstice following, a photocopied yet elaborately handwritten card arrived. Shamass’s missive read: “The strings necessary for you to enter the faculty of science at The Australian National University have ...” At this point the roundhand melded into what looked like rubbings of a wooden surface. Peering into the grainy field, I was certain I could make out the words “been pulled.”
It was not long before I received official confirmation of this interpretation. So it was that I relocated from Kabul to Florey. This brickish northern suburb of Canberra is neither older nor brand-new, just dryly desolate. By the age of 42, I had gained a doctorate in astrophysics. Soon I had a post-doctoral fellowship with Professor Seymour Tilden, the academic in charge of the Pre-Bang Telescope.
The day of the trip via Bungendore I was framed for the first time by the white walls of the Stromlo observatory. Glancing up at the shallow orange gables I was reminded of University House, a hotel once servicing the main ANU campus. Stromlo was an outpost of the ANU and I wondered what I would encounter within. I was somewhat distanced from fellow researchers, having relied on Shamass’s influence rather than networking.
When I met the group stationed at Stromlo, they were slouched in the otherwise deserted mess room. Professor Tilden was taciturn rather than holding court. He was, judging from the snifter in his hand, drinking brandy mid-afternoon. Propped nearby at a canteen table was a duo I would come to know as a grave older post-doc and a boyishly good-looking post-grad: Edmund and Tan respectively. To one side, a fine-featured middle-aged woman stood smoking a thin black cigarette, against the rules. A single look and I knew her to be the administrator, resentful of her mountain commute.
“Dr de Hay, people.” Hearing my knee high white boots on the lino, Tilden had looked up from his drink and spoken dryly. He was momentarily smug that a gifted and relatively recently admitted candidate was now working under him at the Observatory. Yet he did not smile. Edmund and Tan turned as one, and said nothing. From that moment as I stood facing the others in silence, at least there were no illusions about collegiality.
“You must be freezing, dear,” intoned the administrator who had introduced herself as Marlene. “Fix yourself a cup of tea and I’ll show you to your office.” She took a deep drag on her cigarillo, as though the presence of another researcher up here would make it all the harder for her to give up.
The idea of the Pre-Bang Telescope is that it should be possible to glimpse whatever existed prior to The Big Bang. All we need is a powerful enough telescope to receive signals from far enough away, given the time taken for light to travel to earth. A gravitational lens assists when the gravitational field of a huge galactic cluster magnifies the light from objects behind it, otherwise too faint to observe. This light is faint not just because it is distant, but also because it is old. For the Pre-Bang project to succeed, the resulting signals need be only 13.8 billion years old, the current estimated age of our universe.
Using this method, we can already see back 13.6 billion years. It should be possible to find a patch of sky uncluttered by more recent stellar events and also adjacent to a gravitational lens. Then we should be able to see back the extra 200 million years to just beyond the Big Bang itself. For further explanation see the ANU’s Pre-Bang website, if it has not been taken down. Anyway, the majority of my readers will be erstwhile colleagues, already knowledgeable about these matters and skimming these pages only for clues as to the whereabouts of the Viewer.
Professor Tilden’s area of expertise is telescopy. The Pre-Bang Telescope was conceived when he became aware that increasingly sophisticated modellings of the sky had uncovered an appropriately vacant patch. The crucial component was now the Viewer, an interface capable of eliminating quantum interference from The Big Bang itself. After all, any signal from the pre-universe must have passed through the initial singularity.
Almost nothing had been done about the immensely difficult task of constructing this Viewer. That was to be my job. While it might sound incredible that a lone post-doc would be so entrusted, Shamass had passed on a certain highly unorthodox design that made me indispensable to the project, if also debarring me from academic networking. It was almost as though my colleagues were afraid of my annotated sketches of what at first seemed to be an utterly impossible device. Even to me the designs smacked of the fabled technology of the feared Fishpeople that Anaximander himself may have encountered.
According to the Necromonicon, a tome of supposedly deciphered insect noises — which cosmologists perhaps wisely shun — Fishpeople civilisation long pre-dated human beings. It is there hinted that Fishpeople somehow accessed technology developed by certain entities in what we can today assume was the low entropy conditions of the early universe.
Over the coming twelve months, Tilden provided all the equipment I needed. I was pestered only occasionally by Marlene, smelling of nicotine and sometimes stale alcohol and waving forms requiring my signature. As those searching these pages for the location of The Viewer will be all too aware, I always withheld certain technical details so that I remained indispensable. For this same reason, no one else had access to the Viewer as it took shape and, at night, I would secure my work in a sturdy safe that I kept in my locked office.
Perhaps this was one reason why the wider online astrophysical community, including colleagues assisting with calculations from Chile, remained unconvinced that we would sight the Apeiron. The general feeling was that we would sight a quantum anomaly, and that years would pass before we gained anything mathematically useful from what we saw.
It was hard to know what old Tilden thought, because he grew increasingly aloof. One relief from my labours was visiting the Observatory library. There, from behind shelved folios of James Webb Space Telescope and other interstellar photographs, I overheard Edmund gravidly whispering to Tan that old Tilden had begun to entertain negative feelings about the project. My impression was that Edmund found Tilden’s feelings more akin to superstition than to science. So the only post-doc regularly present at Stromlo was more dubious about the project’s head than he was about the project itself.
Certainly it would be wrong to suggest that either Edmund or Tan were overly cynical about the Pre-Bang Telescope, Edmund daily carrying out various duties punctually and effectively. Tan was generally well organised and efficient when he was there, but he often worked from home, especially in the bitter mid-year months. The pair did, however, scorn my faith in Anaximander, and once left an obscenely defaced picture of the Ancient on my desk. This I took to be misogynistic resentment regarding my rapid entry into their field and indispensability to the Pre-Bang endeavour.
So it was that I was left alone. Tilden and Edmund tinkered with gaining the right piggyback for the Pre-Bang Telescope from a powerful gravitational lens Tilden had located in otherwise vacant sky. On her many wandering smokos, Marlene was my sole confidante regarding my progress over twelve months’ work. The husky administrator in turn revealed something of her alcohol-fuelled debauches with students on the main campus. She extracted a promise from me to accompany her on such a campus bar-crawl in the near future, which I passingly allowed could provide some kind of relief after meeting the terrible challenge of gazing into the Viewer. As offhand as my part in these conversations, I was soon to realise I had told her too much.
Copyright © 2024 by The Apeiron Collective
