Daisy Jacobs Saves the World by Gary Hindhaugh

Author:Gary Hindhaugh [Hindhaugh, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-05-30T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 35

THE EPICENTRE OF ABSOLUTELY NOWHERE AT ALL

Quark?”

“Yes?”

“What’s the purpose of your life?”

There’s silence while Quark considers my question. “To exist,” he says finally.

“That’s it — just exist?”

“Yes. I drift through everlasting emptiness — that is if moving faster than the speed of light can be called drifting and deep space can be called empty.”

“So, your life is just existing in emptiness? Wow, that must be so inspiring! No wonder you want to get right back to it.”

He ignores the dig. “Well, there is a lot of nothing.” Weirdly, in the mirror I see the corners of my mouth quirk upward into a small smile at this. “And there is a lot of what you would call solitude. Or isolation. Or … loneliness.” The smile vanishes, replaced by a frown of concentration. “An aeon in terms of my overall existence is not a long time. Aeon is Greek, and it means an age in everyday language, but in scientific terms, an aeon is a billion years. And —”

“Boring!” I interrupt before he can get into full flow. “You’re lecturing again, Quark. How do you cope with all that … nothing? I couldn’t do it — I enjoy company too much. An afternoon by myself is okay. A day or two, not so good. But being alone for a billion years?!”

“Well, you can see a lot if you have a billion years to spare. At the speed of light, you are travelling at about 300,000km a second. So, in Earth terms you can travel a fair distance.”

I’m not convinced. “If you travel that far, where would you be? What exciting things would you see? None! Because you’ll have arrived at the epicentre of absolutely nowhere at all.”

“It would be wrong to say nothing,” Quark continues, pointedly, “because you would still see the twinkling of distant stars — without pollution or atmospheric interference. But, yes, they would still be very, very distant. There would be a great view of your Moon, but even that would still be over 80,000 kilometres away. That’s in just one second, though. In a mere eight minutes you would reach the Sun, less than 150 million kilometres away!”

“I hate to detract from your lecture, Quark, but that’s eight minutes out of a billion years! And you’d still be alone,” I scoff. “In fact, even more alone than you were eight minutes earlier. And you’d be a lot further away from the nearest McDonald’s!”

Quark frowns, and my lips firm in disapproval at the interruption. “From there you could look into the darkness beyond and maybe head for your nearest neighbour … ?”

I sigh, “Proxima Centauri”.

He nods. “At the maximum speed humanity can currently capable travel you would get there in 81,000 years. But you travel at light speed, so you would make it in just over four years.”

“So a long way in just four years. And over that distance you’d see an awful lot of very little.”

“Well, almost no dust or debris — it is not called the void for nothing!”

“Is that what passes for a joke on your planet?” I answer, tartly.

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