Speed, Meter of Science and Technology
“No wonder they call you the Genius of Serenity, swift and clever improvising,” Serena appeared stunned. “We are in the same direction, Scarlet. It’s just that you focus on content and semantics, and I seek to unify poetry’s abstract syntax altogether, for a greater level of universality, much like universal algebra. I heard you write in common meter only. Is that true? If so, did Emily Dickinson influence you?”
“Well,” Scarlet grinned, “she’s certainly interesting, but I don’t do common meter for the same reason. I choose it because English works better with the ABAB rhyme scheme. Now, if you alternate your rhymes, you better do the same with meters for the best effect, hence common meter. I keep meters short, the shorter the more powerful. What works better than common meter? You? What do you like? I see you translate. Do you create? Any desire to be original?”
“As you said,” Serena looked down, “content is way more important. I rather focus on syntax now, till I feel confident enough. I was born in China, grew up in France, and finally came to Serenity for high school, because my parents expected me to speak Elvish. I’m not exactly good at Chinese, neither French nor English, basically good at nothing. When I translate, people criticize less. I wish I’d be like you one day, though English may not be my choice…”
“Excuses,” Scarlet interrupted her. “Just write. There’s no other way. You’ll never be confident until you write. Start with a stanza, get a grasp, once you find a touch, double it, and then double again. By the time you can write four stanzas in a row as one unit, you can write whatever you want at that point, including the slightly more difficult sonnets. A sonnet is easier to rhyme, but harder to hold, because there are fourteen lines to keep as one piece, with its last stanza being a couplet, breaking symmetry and uniformity in our patterns of thought.”
Both Scarlet and Serena majored in computer science at the University of Serenity, an Elvish school founded as a door to the Elven world, welcoming all qualifying life forms. Sadly, Elvish was not easy. Spoken by a forty-million-year-old civilization, with way more time to advance in evolution, Elvish required an IQ of 780 to master, not a joke at all. None the less, the situation was not as dire as one might expect, since an IQ of 200 would be well within our imagination, insufficient for its own level of language, while that of 50 without assistance could not survive as a human or an animal, the scale of IQ totally not as linear as it should. That said, Elvish was never easy, as anyone must agree. Most non-Elven students could not make it to graduation.
Their academic year started in March, the first month of a year for Elves, with every two months a semester. Students enjoyed two vacations, summer from July to August and winter from January to February. Why would March be the first month for Elves? Well, we should wonder why January could be the first for us. Did we all love winter so much to begin a year in winter? It turned out that Julius Caesar named January after Janus, the Roman god of beginnings, thereby making it our first month. Before Caesar, the Roman Empire started a year in March, namely, spring and time to initiate an agricultural cycle, similar to the rest of Earth. March was simply natural. Anything else like January or September was in fact the one to question. Given a year lasted 394.19 days or 435.76 Earth days on the Flower Planet, a month felt much longer than on Earth. As Christmas approached, Scarlet planned carefully her two-month winter vacation. The day neared its end. It was about time for dinner.
“Your English is pretty good already,” Scarlet encouraged Serena. “You’ll rise to my level within a couple of years for sure. If you are looking to be the best of the best, there’s of course a long way to go. Even I the best of Serenity can’t get too far in the Anglosphere, now a whopping two trillion in population, full of amazing talents. Serenity is a small town of two million, a mere millionth of it, not where you want to be if English is your destiny. At any rate, a Homo sapiens comes to Serenity for Elvish, the door to the Elven world that includes the entire Andromeda Galaxy and beyond. If we want Earth back from Draconians, we’ve got to maintain a good relationship with Elves. That’s probably why you’re here. Winter vacation is coming. I prepare to squander all of my savings in Elven dollars from the TA job. You? Wanna join?”
“Elven dollars aren’t easy to make,” Serena hesitated, biting her lips. “I prefer saving for a trip to the Elven capital, the Grace of Andromeda. That’s where you’ll elevate your world view.”
“That’s where I’ll land my first full-time offer,” Scarlet stroked her. “You’ll never save enough for the Grace of Andromeda. Plus, that’s where you’ll live after you graduate, no reason to save up for a trip. You’ve got straight A’s so far. Why worry?”
“The first year is the easiest,” Serena retorted, conservative as always. “You can’t use it for reference. However, you may be right. I suppose we must seize the day.”
Vora was how you would call the Flower City in Elvish, where vo- meant city and -ra flower. Elvish was monotonic and monosyllabic, whose single syllable could become highly sophisticated to prevent homophones. Simple concepts had simpler structures, thus explaining why the Flower City was easy to pronounce, as both city and flower were everyday notions. Likewise, the Flower Port was Vera, the Flower Planet Lora and the Flower Arc Dora, all common by nature. Because these names sounded uncool and confusing in English, most Serenitians referred to them as the Flower City, the Flower Port, the Flower Planet and the Flower Arc, a convention easy to follow and enforce as all Elvish syllables had meanings. To begin their winter vacation, Scarlet and Serena rented an aero at Serenity and drove it to Vora, pronounced without stress.
An aero was the least expensive vehicle available to Earthlings, for the Flower Planet had no roads. Wherever you wished to go, you must fly there. Since Earthling technologies were incompatible with the Elven, an aero could not find a gas station. Whenever you ran out of fuel on the road, you would call the refueling service, and they normally would arrive within five minutes, wherever on the planet. The service was reasonably fast thanks to the prevalence of another popular Earthling vehicle called omni. Unlike an aero, an omni literally could fly, run, swim, dive and even tunnel, had you a license. An omni needed refueling, too. That was why the refueling business became one of the largest industries at Serenity. How about Elves? Well, their daily outfit was their vehicle. Unfortunately, aerosuits and astrosuits sold in Elven dollars, not exactly affordable by most Earthlings. An aero flew up to Mach 30, able to reach any spot on the Flower Planet within forty minutes. Given the Flower Port was five thousand miles away from Serenity, the trip took approximately thirteen minutes.
Everything required Elven dollars outside Serenity. There was no currency exchange rate, as Elves absolutely would never take US dollars or any Earthling dollars. The only way for an ordinary Earthling to get them was to find an Elven job or offer tourism services. Business was impossible with Elves until you saved enough Elven dollars. Scarlet and Serena had a TA job at the University of Serenity yet could do little with the few hundred they had. They came to the Flower Port for the all-inclusive two-month Flower Arc Cruise, which cost them $250 each only. The cruise was popular among Serenitians. After all, it was well worth the money. For $250 Elven dollars, roughly the two-month pay of an Elven single-course TA, you got to visit sixty different terraformed planets, almost one per day, where you could experience diverse climates and cultures, seeing the world from a distinct perspective.
Elven warships mobilized at 150 thousand times the speed of light or simply 150 kc, crossing thousands of light years within days. Cruise ships were slower, not far behind at 120 kc. Elves taught us how to build a ship with a speed of 10 kc. We had thought we could be friends at that point, until they rejected further knowledge transfer. As a result, Earthling businesses could not compete in the Elven markets due to technological gaps. We ended up with our own economy, separate from theirs. It was rumored that Draconian ships traveled at 410 kc max, despite twenty million more years to advance in science and technology. There may be a bottleneck around that speed, hence explaining why Elves had a reserved attitude with anything beyond 10 kc, as going from 20 to 100 kc might be a trivial leap forward. Excuses were excuses. We knew we were not equal. Scarlet and Serena passed by the fabulous streets at the Flower Port, doing window shopping as they walked to their gate.
Located on the equator, the Flower Port leveraged the highest possible eccentric force to save on fuel. Space elevator was a joke because space stations orbited Earth at Mach 25 and above. For an elevator to have a zero horizontal ground speed, it must ascend all the way to the geostationary orbit, nearly thirty hours away from Earth at Mach 1. That was really too slow. In fact, the cheapest, simplest and fastest way to go to space was via recyclable rockets, which Elves termed elevators for those unable to afford astrosuits. However, Scarlet and Serena went on a cruise. It would be more convenient to just lift the whole ship into space. This was why the Flower Port was far into the ocean, combining a seaport, an airport and a spaceport into one, where water was four miles deep as a buffer for ships. Their gate opened, passengers streaming onboard.
It was their first time to board on an Elven ship, every inch of it Elven, spacious and luxurious. Elven cuisine was pricey at Serenity. Now, they could have it all-inclusive for two months, exquisite zests, flavors and tastes from over a trillion stars in Andromeda, many times more than in the Milky Way. The ship dived, like a vertically hanging donut, sinking and sucking the ocean as its fuel and propellant, while everyone fastened belts on their beds, ready for a rough ride at 0.3 G. In the meantime, its black hole engine hungrily devoured everything flowing to it, tearing particles apart and annihilating them into pure energy, heating the ocean into steam, pushing the ship into space like a gigantic whale soaring out of water, muscular and powerful, a scene you would never want to miss. Within five minutes, the ship exited the atmosphere of the Flower Planet. Its outer metallic shell opened, giving passengers a view of space through glass windows, which blocked cosmic rays and high frequency electromagnetic waves but permitted visible light to pass. Unfortunately, they could not yet get up from their beds.
The 0.3 G acceleration continued for seven minutes beyond 160 miles into the sky, before touching the inner Van Allen Belt, at which point it would finally be legal for the ship to turn on its faster-than-light inflation engine, and for its cruisers to start a wonderful onboard life out of their beds. Speaking of faster-than-light travel, we must date back to the Canadian physicist Nathalie Parent, whose genius discovered a trick in 2049, so simple that it almost looked stupid. That is, when a quark star collapsed into a black hole, its quarks, being already elementary, would not have a chance to form composite bosons again, or they would have done so prior to the pure quark phase. According to the Pauli exclusion principle, identical fermions could not occupy the same quantum state within a quantum system simultaneously. Therefore, for a black hole to be optimally charged right before its electromagnetic explosion, a portion of its quarks must transform into charged elementary bosons to maintain charge conservation, whose sole opportunity was the W boson, keeping its internal structure simple and elegant. There was no other way out for quarks.
Coding Scarlett 