The Dark Unending – Part Negative One
This is the last thing in the universe I care to be doing.
Not ‘kind of a bother’. Not ‘sort of an imposition’. My throat is agonized shreds and I’m hungry. Each swallow feels like I’m trying to push the food past gravel, and the gravel chews a bit deeper into my throat each time.
I am beyond tired, diving headfirst into some primordial lake of human exhaustion. I just want to send the son to daycare and disappear from reality for a solid eight hours. That’s not happening until tomorrow, if then.
Suffice to say, I’m bitter, angry, tired, worn out, stressed out, and still sick. Yet… yet.
The words don’t write themselves, and I’ve finally reached a point where I’ve been consistent for a few weeks. I’m starting to get a reliable spike of readers during certain times of day. That happens because frequent readers know that there will be an update, and swing by on the update days to read it.
I don’t want to lose that momentum anymore. I don’t want to lose things anymore. I’m sick to death of losing.
No more.
Here comes the illness-exhaustion writing binge we’ve all been waiting for.
The Dark Unending – Part Negative One
Science Fiction. Fantasy. Pipe-dream. Wishful thinking. Bad science.
All of them flung at me from every direction my entire time at MIT, and for the first ten years of my scientific career.
They were all wrong, of course. Wrong in the worst and best possible ways. I stood, alone and triumphant, vindicated for my rock-solid belief in my work and the sciences behind it.
Yet I had my moments.
I was twelve my first semester in MIT. It would have been unusual in any other college, but I was hardly the only prodigy there. I say prodigy, but only because my dad isn’t going to read my diary. If he ever caught me using that word to describe myself, I don’t think any degree or scientific achievement on this world or any other would keep me safe.
You see, I started the space age. Not the one where we sent monkeys and dogs into orbit, or put a bunch of satellites into orbit to allow people to stare at cat photos anywhere on the planet.
No, I started The Space Age. An age of exploration and conquest, of advancement and collected achievement. I gave humankind the Solar System, and all the resources therein. I gave us the ability to reach space without burning precious and irreplaceable rocket fuel. I allowed humanity to clean the space junk which had begun to cloud our atmosphere.
And it was all made possible when I began researching graphene capacitors.
Graphene was new when I was in college. It had just begun the initial stages of production, and experimentation with it was still rampant. It was exciting to see all the possibilities for the material. It was stunning how strong the material was. Hundreds of times sturdier than even the strongest steel, more flexible and durable when woven than any kevlar imagined.
And, as it turned out, a superconductor and storage capacitor of immense power and durability.
That’s the bit where I came in. The research for graphene battery technology was still in its infancy. Thankfully, my dad had made sure every instance of ‘smart’ or ‘prodigy’ in my life had been turned into something far more useful: Hard work.
Hard work is infinitely more useful than latent talents anyway.
To be continued…
Graphenefully,
Justin
