She had named it and thus she owned it. And it owned her. It terraformed her entire innerscape. Suchness.
Hard to say what in Sandral Pinnualta had animated this golem of irrelativity. When you worked, like she did, with particles that weren’t so much particles as shades of particles, it was easy to live in the abstract. The idea of mass without substance was breathtaking to theorize, but to stare into its irreality was unnerving.
All because of her. Irrelativity. Irreality. The scientific community kludged together these terms to describe her discovery that they, and even her fiancé, did not understand. Yet Sandral had discovered nothing. She had only named a feeling. A vague notion of Suchness that had taken hold of her when she first activated the quantum lens.
So many years, she had painstakingly labored to align and polish the carbon nanotubes into the nanomirror that became the quantum world's version of the Hubble telescope. She assembled and loosed it in the anti-ether, the infinitesimal netherverse of higgs-bosons and branestrings, the very vibrations of the inner universe. Her aim: to bridge dimensions and peer beyond time itself.
To the beginning. Pre-physics.
Her work had been such a lovely journey. The theoretical always surpassed the actual. Pure mind’s eye. Room for everything, especially the impossible.
But the Suchness.
How could Sandral have been prepared for it? Peering into the primordial, the elemental, the very essence of being. One does not know how to greet the Divine rubbing the sleep from Their eyes, brushing Their teeth, tying Their shoes. To see that in the mirror of a morning. To be on such familiar terms with the Divine.
It felt a burden. The knowledge. The Suchness. Until, on a fresh spring day, she held a bud newly fallen. Light as a quark. Abursting.
She quivered. She saw. She knew.
Witness to Creation.
Sandral joined it.
In the Suchness beyond.
