Morgan Delaney

Dark, strange and fantastic fiction

Science fiction

10 Times “Mad” Science Almost Got It Right

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A vintage engraving of mad science
Photo from Depositphotos

I’m trying to keep these newsletters as short as possible while I power through NaNoWriMo, but this edition is still packed with cheese and mad hair (above), mad science in the main feature, and mad ads, dolls and music in the roundup at the end.

Killer List: 10 Times “Mad” Science Almost Got It Right

1. We all know that, according to chaos theory, if a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, it can cause a tornado in Texas, right?
Not quite. It turns out it was Bolsonaro chopping down the Amazon which was destroying weather around the world.

2. Time travel favourite: is it even possible to travel back in time without sleeping with your mother, and accidentally becoming your own father?

It turns out it is! Everything was better in those days, including the men.
You don’t stand a chance with your mom, snowflake!

3. Travelling to distant galaxies sounds great. Hibernating (sleeping!) until you arrive sounds brilliant. But robots still haven’t learned how to pour coffee between the lips of a sleeping human, so how are you going to wake up?

4. So how about zipping down a handy wormhole to go straight where you need to be?
You could do that, but it turns out wormholes will also send you back in time. This means you are now irresistibly attracted to your mother and therefore unable to concentrate on the important task the government selected you to do.
You pine away on a distance star and humanity goes extinct.

5. Bringing the dead back to life with a jolt of electricity?
Yes, you absolutely can do this.
The only problem is that the electricity will also fry you, meaning you’ll smell like bacon for as long as you continue to “live.”
In real life, Frankenstein’s monster would have been eaten by the villagers. Everyone loves bacon!

6. Live forever!
Sure, just listen to Aubrey de Grey on the subject.
Science fiction authors—a gloomy bunch—will try to convince you that you will get bored after the first few hundred years.
Empirical research, however, suggests this is simply not true: the 100th time you eat a bucket of KFC fried chicken is just as delicious as the first time.
Assuming, of course, that you are not eating only KFC fried chicken. If you are, even mad science cannot help you live forever.

7. Going forward in time?
Yes, but take another look at number 2 on this list.
That boy who finds you inexplicably irresistible?
Yep, that’s your son/grandson/ great grandson. Don’t do it!

8. The quantum Zeno effect says that measuring the state of a system (for example, whether a particle has a charge) frequently enough can prevent the system from changing state.
Almost! What’s actually happening here is a function of Zeno’s arrow paradox.
Let us examine this paradox by substituting a thirsty author for the arrow, and a cup of tea as the arrow’s destination.
In order for the author to get from their computer to the kettle where their tea is waiting (bag in), the author must first cross a distance equal to half the distance between the computer to the kettle.
After this, they cross the other half. So much so obvious.
But wait!
Before the author can reach the point halfway to the kettle, they must logically cross a distance equal to half the distance to the halfway point (a quarter of the way to the kettle), but first they need to cross a distance equal to half the distance of the halfway point of the first half of the (increasingly tedious) journey to the kettle, and so on.
Logically, every distance comprises two “half-distances”, and that includes each “half-distance”, so there are an infinite number of them.
Obviously, it takes a certain amount of time for the author to cross each and every distance, so it must therefore take the author an infinite amount of time to get to the kettle.
By which time the tea will have gone cold.

Bearing this in mind, it’s now obvious what is happening when quantum physicists attempt to “freeze” states through constant measurement.
All they’ve really done is foolishly lock themselves into a cycle of observing “halfway” measurement points.
The system will change… as soon as the last of the infinite measurements has been completed.

Don’t wait up!

*Quantum physicists like to call particles “systems”, and charges “states” because it sounds more impressive.

9. Nothing can go faster than the speed of light… except for light!
Think about it. Light is the fastest thing in the universe. But it still takes light from the sun a certain amount of time to reach the Earth, for example (roughly 8 minutes and 19 seconds). That’s how long it took last year and the year before that, too.
Yet the universe keeps expanding. Therefore, this year’s light must be moving faster than last year’s light.
Take that, fundamental law of physics!

10. Evil clones.
No. You use up finite resources with every breath. You burp, fart, and your armpits smell.
Plus, remember that time you said something that you knew would hurt people’s feelings?
So, if you’re now thinking “this world needs more of me!” then don’t blame the clone.
You’re the evil one.

What I Discovered This Week

Watch!
Jim Henson made ads in the 1950s. There’s almost 15 minutes of them collected here. I guarantee you will not want to try Wilkins Coffee after watching these! Weirdly brutal.

Read!
About the girl who adopted a terrifying creepy doll! This will make you go “aww!” and then wonder if she’s going to be okay…

Listen!
Leeds noise terrorists, Thank, have just brought out a live album! If you thought they made a shocking amount of irritating noise when they went into the studio, check out the live version here!

(Excerpted from my newsletter dated 19th November, 2022. Sign up for the full, up-to-date experience!)

Noise

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A futuristic looking greenhouse in Singapore
Photo by Kelly Heng on Unsplash

I’ve got a short science-fiction piece for you this week, as well as science-fiction themed recommendation at the bottom. Enjoy!

It sounded like wind, though there was no such thing on the moon. Safe in her biosphere, she didn’t want to go out. Didn’t need to. The walls were clear plastic to utilise the Moon’s meagre light. She could see there was nothing out there, and her suit would mean she wouldn’t be able to feel if there was a breeze. But her radio was squawking. HQ could read the sensors’ disturbance and demanded to know what was going on.

She consoled herself that there were no monsters on the moon either. Nothing and nobody until the next starter colony miles and miles over the horizon. She armed herself with a camera and a microphone to record what was out there, and a screwdriver to protect herself. Earth-learned patterns of behaviour were hard to shake.

Even when she adjusted the camera’s settings to cycle travel through different colour frequencies, she found nothing, and the microphone’s needle twitched at her footsteps, but otherwise remained still. She could hear it, though, a low rushing like wind or waves. No wonder HQ was getting excited.

If they were to find water, then the mission would start paying dividends in this generation, rather than in two or three down the line. She had been sent out to be caretaker for the enormous greenhouses full of engineered plants which were designed to pump oxygen into the air, jumpstart an atmosphere in preparation for humanity’s invasion. Arrival, not invasion. That was just how they had joked during training, when management wasn’t around. Still, she glanced up at Earth’s red and brown ball, which had only recently come back into view. When she had been a kid, it had been green and blue with white clouds for contrast. The sound was coming from behind her now, from inside the sphere.

When she turned around to see what was happening in the biosphere, it looked, from this angle, like the tall plants were also staring up, as if they’d also noticed the burned ball in the sky. Wind swirled around their green shoots, but it wasn’t the wind that was causing the plants to move. It was the plant’s movement that was causing the wind as they communicated with each other. She took a step towards the biosphere, and they turned to face her.

They whipped their bodies, and a gust of wind slammed the airlock door shut. She had four hours of oxygen left in the suit, plenty of time to prise out one of the sphere’s hard plastic panels. Instead, she sat down to watch the red rock of Earth. She could turn the air supply off now, but in this case, using up all the oxygen was the right thing to do.

Bandcamp is bringing back Bandcamp Friday this year. It’s always the first Friday of the month when Bandcamp waives their fees, so it’s the best day to support independant musicians.

The first one of 2022 is tomorrow, and if that’s too short notice to decide what to buy, then I’ve got you covered!

You know that scene at the start of 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the apes are messing around with bones, until one of them works out how to use it as a tool to kill other apes, thereby initiating evolution/civilisation?*

And you know the way you’ve always wondered what it would sound like if, instead of apes, it was a bunch of primitive Jarvis Cockers, and they were messing about with bones until they suddenly invented music? Well, head over to Bandcamp tomorrow to buy Thank’s new album, Thoughtless Cruelty, because that’s exactly what it would sound like!

*If you’re a keen Kubrick fan with strong feelings about this film and hate how I completely misunderstood the true significance of this pivotal scene: keep it to yourself, okay?

High-pitched

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Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Hi all! For this week’s flash fiction story we’re going into space. Please fasten your seat belts and refrain from screaming. No one can hear you anyway!

The alien leaned over to offer me a drink. It didn’t taste good, but was better than a probe up the rectum. Business class!

“How long will it take to get there?”

The alien answered, but as I had my earphones in (they had Bad Boys II on the TV, and I watch that whenever I get the chance!) I didn’t hear what it said. It smiled though, so I assumed everything must be fine. I went back to my film. How jealous would Will Smith be right now?

If I seem chill, it’s because I get abducted all the time. Ever since I was a kid, I’m used to floating out my bedroom window and being sucked up into intergalactic hoovers. Never had a trip this comfortable, though. I think it’s because I have a photographic memory. I remember everything, so they don’t have to start from scratch every time.

Like I say though, this was the most comfortable trip I’ve taken. Normally I’m on a table lying on my stomach, trying to explain that humans don’t communicate that way. Please remove that probe!

Maybe I’ve been promoted. Perhaps I’ll meet the guy in charge. Or girl, of course. Or… whatever. I hope I get to see the whole film before we get there. There’s no point looking outside, it’s all just black universe out there. What, am I going to try to remember the way? Don’t think so.

Nobody believes me anyway.

Well, that was weird. I suppose it was like a thank-you trip, or something. They took me to their planet, showed me around. We visited schools, and they showed me their textbooks. In Biology, all humans have my face. You know those drawings? With, like, cross sections, and organs and everything? Male and female? They all looked like me.

And they gave me a silverish ornamental probe with a plaque, then flew me home.

I got the feeling it’s all over. Don’t know if I’m relieved or worried.

Time

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Woman in a blanket looking at evening sky
Photo by on Reshot Photo by Karly V from Reshot

Hi all, this is probably my shortest (flashiest?) fiction ever. Enjoy!

There was no mirror in the capsule. She saw a dark blur in the metallic surfaces but relied on memory to know what she looked like. Her hands told her she probably looked older than she thought.

The Terraformer loved to sit in the wakening landscape, and dream of all that would one day grow, but was glad that, for now, it was just her. Was glad it held no message. No faces in the clouds. No metaphor of winter death and spring rebirth.

The first rain was a sign. The second rain was confirmation. The atmosphere was turning. It would be habitable soon. There were several more years—at least—before the transformation was complete, but after this everything speeded up. There was vegetation within a year, animals after another.

They had been bred to be scared of humans, so the first settlers couldn’t hunt them into immediate extinction. She saw their faces in the clouds.

The hole to hide the capsule in was ready when lights flashed across the sky.

She locked herself in and drove into the abyss. The capsule would lie there, in the burning centre of the world, until the surface had been exhausted. Sensors measured surface conditions, and she would wake when the settlers had moved on. Re-birth the planet anew.