A Darker and More Curious Matter

 A Darker And More Curious Matter

The viewing room couldn’t have seemed less like a viewing room. It looked more like a tax accountant’s office than anything else. I understood that we weren’t going to see the inside of the particle accelerator where all the action was taking place (though I still visualized it as looking like some Disney animation from 1960 or so, all streaking particles in bright colors and explosions of bright light), and we weren’t in the control room (which I’d actually seen, and which was indistinguishable to my eye from the control room of a nuclear reactor or a mechanized bakery), but…a desk, a computer console and a whiteboard…? Lorina woke the computer and showed me the display which represented the control room and the accelerator, explained what various cryptic notations meant. As she did, she grew more animated than I’d ever seen her - and more attractive to me. She was clearly in her element here. “We got dark matter in the VISION last year,” she said modestly (it was Lorina who had worked out the process which had created the first specimen of dark matter in captivity). “Right now, there’s a knot of it in there about to be bombarded with Curious traffets. If I’m right about the anatomy of strange matter, the specimen should absorb them and increase in darkness,” I understood enough of particle physics to at least understand that there were so many forces at work down at that level that they had to be given arbitrary names all over the map. Protons were made up of quarks in three “colors”, Up Down and Strange. Quarks were made of traffets which were composed of Curiosity and Boredom. Dark matter didn’t seem to have either quarks or traffets in it, or anything else that was known in normal matter, and was formed from the interaction of Darkness, Antidarkness, Bright and Antibright. Even knowing all this, the wording had an odd effect on me, as I imagined the bombardment resulting in a darker and more curious matter.

The Magic Eight-Ball says: "Keep seeking after knowledge."