2 - Gravity Bombs
Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice -- Robert Frost
I am sorry for the length of time between posts, if there was any. It's been a while for me.
Just after the last time I posted, a new anomaly started. There's a ghost town in Canada called Fort McMurray. It was really busy during the oil boom, but when gas started turning into pure hydrogen, people got really squirrelly really fast about living that close to a place where the ground is saturated for half a mile under their feet with oil. There are still a few thousand people there, but they're the hardcore conspiracy theorists who deny anything is really happening. I'm sure you know the type.
Anyways, they started reporting these "pinpricks" in things that would appear for no reason. Someone would wake up to a lot of noise and find that there's a hole in their roof. At first, people thought it was a meteor shower, but there were about a dozen of them around town, anywhere from the size of a nickel up to the size of a softball. Just holes. They'd go through a roof, straight down into the floor, through the cement foundation of the house, and down... The first measurements showed that those holes that went directly downwards with no variation were all exactly 206 meters deep. There were some straight through houses, one was through a bridge deck and down into the water of the Athabasca River, and one had sheered off a portion of a streetlight, causing it to snap to one side and take out the window of a shuttered-up store.
That was the first incident, but not the last. Reports showed them happening all over the world. They started small, and most of them stayed that way, but every once in a while there would be a loud WHOOMP and a blast of air that rattled windows a mile away. People would go searching, and it wouldn't be hard to find the meter-wide hole somewhere nearby, exactly 206 meters deep.
There were hundreds of them before anyone saw it actually happen, and when it did, it happened on a busy day at a supermarket in Beijing. There were people in the bread aisle, roughly a dozen of them, and 4 of them that were close together started screaming. Everyone saw them float up into the air almost a foot, their hair haloed out around their head like they were floating in space. People started laughing in delight, and a child of six ran over to them, and as he got close, he started to float as well.
That lasted almost 30 seconds. Precisely 29.34 seconds, actually, as that seemed to be a constant.
Gravity then changed again. Instead of experiencing weightlessness, they experienced the gravity of the surface of the sun, or thereabouts. Everything from the center of the earth on up in a perfect circle 3.5 meters wide came crashing down. A hole was pushed down into the earth exactly 206 meters, with everything above the surface being squeezed into either dust or goo. It took less than a second, and then all the air that got compressed downward suddenly came back up the hole. That blew the roof off the supermarket, and flying people from around the edge of the hole got blasted a few hundred feet. The aftermath took days to clean up.
The news is calling them gravity bombs. There have been close to a thousand of them since they started. It seems that gravity drops to zero, and then overcorrects itself (a lot), and then a second later, it's normal again, and all that compressed air decompresses. People don't decompress though, so anyone caught in those doesn't survive. Or get buried, for that matter.
The real fun is that it isn't just happening on earth. There are new craters on the moon. They aren't happening at the same rate, but they're there. They spotted a fairly large one on Jupiter too. It disrupted the storm, blasting a hole right into the center of it. They estimated that one was almost 50 km wide, but the outward blast disrupted the storm for almost a thousand km in every direction.
Did I tell you that reality is breaking down? I'm pretty sure I did, but I can't really remember. What we think is that the rules that make up how the universe works are breaking down. The forces that are supposed to be constant are apparently not as constant as we'd hoped, and there's no answer as to why. The strong force, which holds atoms together, has been choosing to stop holding atoms together for a moment in time, with no change in energy. Everything we know about the universe says that's impossible. Gravity has a constant pull. If we know the mass of something, we know the amount of force gravity exerts. Except, that seems to be changing, and it's directional, and it's scary as hell.
What will happen if other fundamental forces of the universe change? What happens if the speed of light changes, or the charge of an electron changes?
There is one thing I want to tell you all though. It's not all bad.
Not too long after the gravity bombs started, we also started finding areas of the world where light works a little differently. Or maybe it's our eyes. They are still researching it to find out the truth. But if you go to these places, you can see the world differently. Colors you've never seen before suddenly radiate from everything around you. One of these happened at a public garden near where I live in Springfield, and the flowers were red, and blue, and yellow, and ultraviolet and stygian blue, and colors that I don't think have ever been seen before. The amazing thing is that none of the flowers were the same color to anybody. What was red to me was green to my wife, black to my boss, and blorange to my neighbor. (I know. I can only guess what blorange looks like, and they couldn't describe it)
There's so much to know and see and learn, and a lot of this is terrible, but all of us, all over the world, are trying really hard to find the things we can enjoy in this while we can.
I have to get back to work though. Again, I'll explain what our work is soon. I'm not trying to be cryptic, but we're not sure if talking about it will cause problems, or if it would be better to share it so that research can start earlier. I'll let you know as soon as we figure that out.