I watched Kyle McPeterson stand at entrance to the tube, the paper sleeve on his arm wrinkling back and forth as he waved to the crowd gathered to watch. He enters the chamber behind him and it closes him in, though monitors overhead show a live feed of the Quantumnaut as he breathes out to himself. A countdown begins. The crowd around me raised phones like plastic peacock feathers.
“Zero.” Came the announcement. There was a flash and Kyle McPeterson had disappeared. “Deconstruction achieved. Kyle has been broken down into subatomic particles.” The crowd cheered, hugging each other and high fiving. The parts that had made up Kyle McPeterson had now been broken down into their smallest unit and were travelling in a single line through the particle accelerator. A map comes up of his journey around the ring, his self had been broken down into organs, cells, atoms, protons, electrons and smaller as he made his orbit round and round.
“Eight hundred miles per hour. One thousand miles per hour. Eight thousand three hundred miles per hour. Eighty nine thousand miles per hour. Three hundred and seventy thousand miles per hour. Five million and eight miles per hour.” Said the announcer.
“C’mon, c’mon.” said a scientist next to me, taking off his sunglasses.
“A billion miles per hour. Twenty nine billion miles per hour. Six hundred and thirty billion miles per hour.” The room around us began to shake. Inside the tube the particles were travelling at such enormous speeds at almost every point inside its seventeen mile track it was overtaking itself constantly before they vanished.
“We have lost contact with the subject. No particles detected.” Said the announcer. Everyone began to talk amongst each other. Tension came in a new wave over the room.
“Particles have reappeared at a speed of three hundred and ninety billion miles an hour and decelerating.” Said the announcer, breathing a sigh of relief. A large block of acrylic is brought forwards via robotic trolley. Inside it there is a Lichtenberg figure, a version of Kyle McPeterson imprinted onto the glass as an electric tree, an exact atomic replica of the Quantumnaught. The fractal man is loaded into the tube, acting as a perfect reverse focus for the entirety of Kyle McPeterson. He comes back to formation quickly, in the exact position he had been before although immediately collapses.
“Particles have reformed back into Kyle. Subject is alive and well.” Said the announcer. There was a great cheering as medics rushed forward, pulling the man onto a stretcher.
A few hours later I am sat at a bar, eating peanuts from a chipped ceramic bowl.
“Hey, turn it up.” said someone behind me, the bartender obliges. Kyle McPeterson is sat at a press conference along with his wife and an old man.
“We have finally managed to accelerate a person faster than the speed of light. Anything is possible.” concluded the head scientist, Werner Von Maxim. The press all began to raise their arms and ask dozens of questions at once. The warble of voices merged into vaneesaheagakfogoayakneevanagoaheywappleplashahati. Werner pointed into the audience.
“Bessie Treadwell, New York Times. I wanna ask Kyle, what was it like to have travelled at such a speed? Were you conscious?”
“Well Ms. Treadwell, it went by so fast I barely noticed it.” Said Kyle with a smile. The crowd chuckled. “What I can say is this, that I’m thankful to be safe and glad that I can contribute to what might be the next step for humankind.”
“Charles Jones, BBC News. Doctor, what is it we can learn from this experiment?”
“We are working on storing people on miniature particle accelerators, spinning their particles faster than the speed of light indefinitely. Time will cease to be important. We can send these washing machines out into space, colonizing the infinite future like dandelion seeds in a cosmic night.”
“What about actually travelling at the speed of light?”
“What do you mean?”
“If we can accelerate a man faster than the speed of light, why not a jetplane or motorbike?”
“What is it about a particle accelerator you don’t understand? It accelerates particles, but that’s it. Anything out of the accelerator moves at a normal speed. The only way you could travel from Paris to Berlin at the speed of light would be to have a particle accelerator big enough that would include both cities somewhere on it's circumference. Next question.”
“Kenji Takanakagi, Japanese Reporter. This question is for Mrs. McPeterson, how does it feel to be married to the fastest man on the planet?”
“Well, I wish he’d be so fast to get out of bed in the morning.” said Francesca. The crowd chuckled. Kyle reached over and held her hand. “I’m so proud of him. I’d like to use this press conference to announce…I’m pregnant.” She said. The crowd cheered. “With twins!” she revealed. Kyle’s eyebrows shot up.
“Huh?!” Some journalists started to shout out ‘uh oh’ and other things like that. “Does this mean it’s buy one get one free with the midwife?” he quipped. The crowd laughed, started to cheer then clap as the couple embraced. As he pulled away she saw that his nose had started bleeding and had left a stain on her cardigan.
“Kyle…you’re bleeding.” she said. He slowly brought a hand up to face, poked his philtrum a few times and then outstretched his fingers to slowly examine the redness. “Someone get a doctor!” she shouted.
“The press conference is over!” said Werner, he stood up and started shaking his hands in a cutting motion. Kyle ascended from his chair, looked directly into the camera and beginning to shout. His entire face was turning purple, the bloodied nose had become a bubbling gush that cascaded down his swollen neck. His body was trembling, as if in anticipation of something. He then suddenly bolted forward, running forwards, knocking over the desk as he did so. Scrambling forward he began to run. He sprinted into the front row of journalists and kicked them out of the way, screaming at the top of his lungs as his eyes darted around like a frightened horse. The camera followed him as he made his way through the door at the back of the room. The camera cut back to the presenter in the studio, a finger to her ear pierce.
“We apologise for those distressing scenes but will continue to cover the story as it develops. In breaking news, so-called-” said the presenter. I turned back to my empty bowl and waved the bartender over.
“Could I have some more nuts please?”
As I leave the bar I see Kyle McPeterson sprint past me, the stitching on his clothes had begun to undo themselves. His shout changes pitch quickly as he passes me and runs off into the night, never to be seen again.
The chief editor throws a copy of my story on the desk, the headline reads ‘Man Travels Faster Than The Speed Of Light. What Happens Next Will Shock You.’
“What is this crap?”
“It’s what you asked for Don. Coverage of Rungate.”
“Get me the real story. I want two hundred words on the McPeterson twins by ten!”
“Don, c’mon.”
“No, you c’mon. This is Buzzfeed, our readers want the drama, the human side of the story. Can you do that for me before you give me a heart attack?" says Don, taking a puff on his electronic cigarette.
“Those things will kill you, you know.” I say. An intern walks up with a stack of ipads that Don knocks over as he turns to leave.
The human side of the story? What is more human than mad cap science gone wrong. I get the intern to write up the article Don wants whilst I head to the chateau of Dr. Werner Von Maxim. He answers the door and ushers me in.
“I wondered when you reporters would find me.”
“I’m the first?”
“Yes. So let me give you an exclusive…the truth.” Says the doctor ominously. We enter a study, he pours two glasses of whiskey. I take out a tape recorder and rest it down.
“What happened to Kyle McPeterson?”
“You were there, weren’t you? When we accelerated him? He disappeared for a moment, at first we thought he was moving so fast our sensors weren’t able to pick him up. But he’d disappeared. You know, when he came back he weighed nearly two grams heavier? We didn’t catch it on the x-rays, but the CT scan showed…modifications.”
“What kind of modifications?” I ask, taking a drink.
“His brain had been altered. I’m uncertain if this was a natural phenomenon or through a medical procedure far more advanced than anything we’re capable of. I believe Kyle entered another dimension…of pure speed.”
“The speed dimension?”
“Correct. Everyone knows about time and space, but how do the two interact? Movement. And how do we measure movement?”
“Speed.” I say, turning towards the fire.
“Precisely. You know, for a journalist you sure do know a lot about science.”
“What happened to Kyle on stage?” I say.
“I believe that whatever happened to his brain to make it two grams heavier kicked in under an intense emotional response, in this case, the discovery that his wife was pregnant. The surge of chemicals in his brain reprogrammed it to try and home in on the speed dimension and through doing so, forced the man to run as fast as he could. At least, until he couldn’t any more.”
“Running himself ragged?”
“Literally. To better design robotic legs they used to put human limbs through stress tests. They’d stimulate a pair of legs donated to science to run by being pushed and pulled faster than the body was capable of. You can imagine what happens to the leg as it is forced to run at hundreds of miles per hour.”
“Is that what happened to him?”
“For his sake, I hope he managed to run fast enough to get to where he was going to.” Said the doctor.
“Is that possible?”
“No.”
A few days later they found a pair of smouldering shoes at the edge of a field and a track leading through the corn. They couldn’t find any trace of Kyle McPeterson. Maybe he had entered the speed dimension, maybe aliens had abducted him. Wherever he was I hoped they had a good shoemaker.
