String Theory

By Richard Quarry

An revolutionary drive based on multi-dimensional String Theory just drove the starship Chaffinch straight into a Dimensional Paradox. Will the ship escape before the next Big Bang? All depends upon a jazz musician aboard coaxing the other-worldly sounds of the Paradox into something comprehensible to the human mind and human machinery. Unless, of course, he goes mad first.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Devray Publishing
• Release date: Oct 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223689942

Book preview

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String Theory

Richard Quarry

Copyright © 2023 by Richard Quarry

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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Contents

String Theory

About the Author

Absent From Felicity

String Theory

When the walls of the starship cabin began to ripple, Gerry Lindquist’s first reaction was to close his eyes, swallow, press his fingers to his temples, then look again.

They still wavered. And the blue-gray orange-peel texture he vaguely remembered had shifted radically toward pink, radiating light out from a now glass-smooth surface.

It wasn’t him. Leastways he felt no light-headedness or nausea, and the fingers of his right hand, when he reached out and spread them, did not quiver, though they too had taken on an undulating quality, and the veins were alarmingly clear through the skin.

Panic built.

Logic tried to intervene. Just a temporary aberration. One of those minor singularity phenomena space travelers reported from time to time. Not a virtual zone, time loop, inversion field, or any of the other interplanetary folk tales springing up around the new string-guidance technology. Frauds, all of them. Nothing but click-bait from pathetic souls desperate to claim their thirty seconds of anyone at all deigning to notice them.. Screen-zombies. Losers

Then Gerry heard the music.

Coming from all around. Not speakers. The walls. Vibrating like a musical saw.

No, more than that. The whole ship itself.

The music, if you could call it that, was atonal. But inhumanly so. A mix of tortured metal, whale song, the groans and laughter of the mad, and the frenzied hum of industrial machinery, with an intonation of bubbling lava, all sliding bizarrely up and down with no respect for scale steps at all. Without any of the rhythm or counterpoint that lent even the most experimental music a structure perceptible to the trained ear. Tones, half-tones, quarter-tones, and everything in between grinding into each other like the Titanic hitting ice.

To Gerry Lindquist’s beleaguered ears, the sound was not just tortured, but personally offensive.

For he was a musician, and random glissandos and meaningless clashes had no place in his world.

Music, true music, possessed an inherent logic. From a five-year old banging