Daily writing exercise, 750words.com
fiction by Jason Edwards
I’ve got the days chores done, so I should be able to get to bed early tonight. Good thing, too, as I’m exhausted. I made the beds, which I thought was going to be easy, but I had to go to three different lumber yards to get the right wood, and the stain at the hardware store was more expensive than I anticipated. And since disasters come in threes: Gloria insisted on 300 count sheets, but my sewing machine could only manage 150, so I had to get a new one. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy with the new one, and I’ll be able to do some things with pants I wasn’t able to do before, I’m just saying, it added to the stress. I suppose I should be thankful I have someone like Gloria in my life, to drive me towards successes like these. She calls herself “your own personal Lady Macbeth, but without all those murders.” She’s a peach.
I made lunch, which isn’t really a chore, except it is when the carrots weren’t the right size and I had to grow new ones. An otherwise good salad can be ruined by wrong-sized carrots, and it’s not just Gloria who says that. Other people do too, I’m sure. Still, it’s not every day that you are required to grow an entire season’s worth of carrots in just a few hours, which I guess is why I can’t call it a chore– chores are daily, aren’t they. The good news is I managed such a great crop that we have appropriately sized carrots for several meals to come, and that’s thanks also to the refrigerator I built. Ever smelt aluminum? I don’t recommend it, as a hobby.
But if you’re going to do something, do it right, I say. I washed the dishes, using good old elbow grease and a sponge this time. No power-washer for me. And I can really tell the difference too. Whereas before, when I used the power-washer, the radio signals we were getting from Cygnus-11 were kind of fuzzy. The computer I was using could see through the fuzz (programmed it myself) but I wondered how many picojoules of electricity I could save if it didn’t have to run those algorithms. picojoules add up when you spend most of your free time strapped to bar running circles to power a generator.
So, got the dishes washed, the signal is crystal clear now, and as we suspected (well, as Gloria suspected, since she’s the smart one, and I’m just grateful that she takes the time to explain things to me– the way she holds the knife helps) the patterns coming from C11 are not random, not if you solve for gravitational waves to the 12th decimal. I admit it, I was stopping at 10, and my excuse, that I had 40 acres to plow by hand was a lame one. Like it takes any mental effort to plow! Two birds, Gloria always says, and she’s right. See the result! At the 12th decimal place the pattern emerges, and so all that’s left is to put together a faster-than-light engine to get there before next Sunday and see who’s talking.
And here’s why I’m going to need to get to bed a bit early tonight. Technically, the laws of physics don’t allow for faster than light travel. Or, as Gloria puts it, the laws of physics don’t allow for faster than light travel yet. It’s really a simple matter of discovering new laws or, basically, new physics. Which is what I’ll be doing all day tomorrow.
Gloria’s a card. I promised I would do exactly that, “work on it all day” and she said “when you find the new laws, you can make it so you only worked on it for a few minutes, can’t you?” I laughed, and she did too. She’s such a good sport. I know she doesn’t like it, much, the idea of a project getting done in only a few minutes. I can see where she’s coming from. Sure, one can “buy” a bed, one can “buy” sheets, one can “read” SETI’s latest findings based out of their own arrays scattered around the world… but easy come, easy go, as they say. If you don’t work for something, does it have any value?
Actually, I’m going to let you in on a little secret– I’ve already worked out the equations, and I can, in fact, manipulate time sufficient to make any project as short as I like. Or as long. Which is why being with Gloria feels like eternity. ‘Cause it is!