LUNATIX

“Boris darling, will you come to bed?”

“Not now, dear. Not now.”

“Not-now, not-now... You keep telling this to me for five fucking nights. You don’t eat with me, you don’t sleep with me, you don’t go shopping with me. What is so important that you do?”

“The equation of motion of a harmonic oscillator which can also be thought of as the covariant derivative of the tangent vector of a particle’s path. I guess this equation is mostly used for analysis of particle motion in General Relativity, but I also understand it is applicable to any other situations with position-dependent coefficients and...”

“The-equation-of-motion, the-equation-of-motion... Fuck that equation!!!”

“Which one, dear? Because there are many. Let’s associate the coordinates x^{\mu} in the geodesic equation with spacetime (rather than just space). Since the space in the harmonic oscillator example is 1-dimensional x^1:=x, the corresponding spacetime will be 2-dimensional (x^0,x^1), say with (+,-) signature convention. However, models like this don’t end up being very relevant in the regime where general relativity is important. You could use this to analyse the simple harmonic oscillator in curvilinear coordinates, though. But...”

“Not a word any more, Bo! You shut that oscillating mouth of yours up, come to bed and give me a hard fuck. Now! Or my head will explode!!”

“Fuck, that’s it, Bonnie. Yes! Eureka!! You got it. Whoahhhahah!! Allow me to pee and I’ll fuck you all night long, till sunrise.”

“Well then, hurry up. It’s three o’clock in the morning. You’ll have you fuck me till noon.”

Boris makes love to Bonnie until eleven o’clock, when she decides to crack a dozen eggs, chop whatever she finds in the fridge, or on the kitchen table, and there goes the frittata. Ta-da!

“You are my muse, Bonnie. A gift from heaven. What would I be without you?”

“Dead! You’d be dead, Boris Berlinsky! Now tell me what is the new idea that I’ve inspired you with? Because, you know, I have no clue. Don’t even know what I said to have you fuck me, to bring you back to the living.”

“You said ‘explode’ and this, my dear, the explosion, is the answer, the explanation to the equation of motion of a harmonic oscillator. As I have already told you, many times, this is...”

“Stop talking the same crap to me. Speak Russian, or Japanese, or English for the readers if you wish. Just end this general relativity nonsense. Will you?”

“Okay, little Bonnie, you deserve that. After all, you had it solved. The entire paradox, with just one word. Amazing!”

“Cut to the chase, Bo.”

“Remember that Yuri has given me access to those data, collected by Pyotr’s submarine across the Pacific.”

“How could I forget? It’s been almost one week with zero sex. This didn’t happen since the summer of 2013, if my recollections are correct, when you’ve talked about alterations in the quantum gravity field.”

“Seems so. You’ve got a great memory. And most inspiring indeed. These two events could be related. I must investigate. Let me...”

“Not letting you do anything. Stay here, eat your omelette and talk to me in plain decent language. Or I’ll cut your dick off.”

“Fine. For the sake of my dick, I’ll make it simple: our planet is free of nuclear weapons, darling. As we speak.”

“Hold on, hold on. How do you know that? Have you hacked in some secret servers of the military? I don’t understand.”

“That’s your charm, dear. You can only inspire. Think I’m getting a new erection. Your frittata works wonders.”

“Splendid. I can’t miss that. Come get me.”

Twenty minutes later. “So the nukes won’t explode any more, you were saying. How comes?”

“Electromagnetic resonance can alter not only gravity but it can also influence the rate of neutrons escaping a nucleus. This means that under certain conditions...”

“Bingo! The chain reaction won’t happen. I get it. Praise God! Hallelujah!! Let us sing!”

Bonnie walks naked around the kitchen island, singing from the Psalms of David.

“A Song, a Psalm of David. Prepared is my heart, O God, I sing, yea, I sing praise, also my honour.”

“Awake, psaltery and harp, I awake the dawn.”

“I thank Thee among peoples, O Yahwah, And I praise Thee among the nations.”

“For great above the heavens is Thy kindness, And unto the clouds Thy truth.”

“Be Thou exalted above the heavens, O God, And above all the earth Thy honour.”

“That Thy beloved ones may be delivered, Save with Thy right hand, and answer us.”

In silence, Boris sneaks out of the kitchen, climbs up to the servers’ room where he hastily copies the live camera feed to a file which he sends to USAF Chaplain Christian Bell, stationed at Misawa Air Base in Japan.

The phone rings, interrupting Bonnie from singing. “Oh, Papa! Hello Papa. (...) I am dancing and singing. I praise the Lord because He freed us! (...) Yes, I know, I know. But this is yet another liberty that He has given us, or at least I just found out. Well, Boris did. (...) Papa! I wish to talk to you. Face to face. (...) Call you back.”

She hangs up and climbs the ladder, looking for Boris. “You rascal. Told you not to send feeds of me naked to Papa. You know too well that he’s never been comfortable accepting what I do for a living.”

“That was too supercool not to share with him. Actually, I never told you, but I often chat with him. In secret. He is very proud of you. Even if our generation doesn’t wear clothes, like theirs. Cultural trends aside, you are his daughter, and will always be.”

“Bo, I want to visit him. To tell him in person. This is unbelievable. This is–well–is this happening? Like for real? Are you sure about those quantum fields, the harmonic oscillators, whatever?”

“In theory, yes. I am certain. But what is theory without practice?”

“What do you mean? Oh, no!”

“Oh, yes. They don’t experiment with this type of explosions any more. But testing one and seeing the test fail would give you a practical answer.”

“How about the nuclear power plants?”

“Ah, you’re such a treasure. But of course. Let me see.” Command line keystrokes. “Cold reactor... Cold reactor... Cold reactor... This one too... Same here... Fuck! All these plants are frigid.”

“Which means?”

“Which means that no fission takes place in any of those reactors. Let me hack the grid. You come over here and look at this screen. No, not that one, this one!”

“The power grid is functioning at normal parameters. All of Russia, and Japan, China... Heck, the entire world has electricity. Yet the nuclear power plants are cold. All of them?”

“Checking... Checking... Brazil... Australia... Yes! Power is on, everywhere. But no nuclear power reactor works. What generates this power then?”

“Coal plants?”

“Discontinued since 2020, remember?”

“No. Why should I remember. Never cared. Wind mills?”

“You’re too clever to even ask such a question, Bonnie.”

“Then what is going on here? Where from comes all this energy? No heat, no energy.”

“Let me flip the sensors,” says Boris before immersing his fingers in a quite long and uneventful keystroke dance. “How about this? Look at the temperatures.”

“Where?”

“At random points on the grid. No correlation with the power plants. See?”

“Yes, tiny places indicate minus 273 degrees Celsius. Myriads of spots. All over the map. Incredible.”

“What do they do with those out of order power plants?”

“Dunno. Perhaps they use them as decoys. Smells like a cover up. A massive one.”

“Uhm, what if Papa already knows?”

“Why would they bother disclose classified information to a Chaplain?”

“You know that he can read minds.”

“Right. They don’t need to tell him. I didn’t need to tell him about my love for you. He already knew.”

“One can see that with the naked eye. Telepath or not.”

“You know what. Show me the data feeds from the Akula submarine.”

“They look like gibberish. Better show you the post processed volumes.”

“Who has processed the gibberish, you?”

“No, not me. Pyotr.”

“Can you run it here?”

“Think so. It may take a couple of weeks. Oh, and I’d need at least ten exaFLOPs.”

“What have you got here?”

“Here and distributed, about two petaFLOPs.”

“Ask Pyotr how he did it.”

“Asked him and he said that he’s crunching data for over two years. Continuously. He had no idea where this may lead but I guess...”

“Me too. Pyotr knows that one cannot get nuclear energy any longer, that the reactors are cold and... Oh no. What about the core of the earth? What if the engine of our planet will stop? During our lifetime? What if?”

“Bonnie! Compose yourself. We’ll find out.”

“How?? You say it would take weeks to only model the data, let alone to analyse.”

“It took me five days to baffle and it took you one word to clue me in. I think that at this point–where no computing power can make a difference or give a meaning to the overwhelming data–the best we can is sing and pray for inspiration.”

“Good idea. I’ll pack now. The first flight departs in two hours. Will you drive me to the airport?”

“Sure do.”