by Femi Fadugba
‘Fine – I love you too.’
She stood waiting for spare details.
‘And I mean it from the bottom of my cold, cold heart.’
Olivia laughed first, the giggles less and less nervous each second. It wasn’t long till I was bent over with her. I’d forgotten how squinty her eyes went when she cackled, how miserable I’d been not hearing the snort that came after it. It was like we’d been transported back in time, to a better time. An idea I’d been thinking a lot about lately.
After we managed to straighten up, Olivia looked around and asked: ‘Where the hell are we, by the way? I couldn’t even find this place on the map.’
‘St Jude’s.’ I pointed my eyes at the green cross-hatched bench to our side. ‘Where my mum stayed before she died.’
Olivia covered her mouth. ‘That … that’s the bench from the photo.’
I nodded, thinking about how dazed I’d been when I first saw it. I was still dazed.
She rushed over to the bench to get a closer look, while I stood back trying, for the sake of chill, to fix my eyes on something less intense, anything else.
What my eyes landed on, about fifteen metres to our right, filled me with the sort of panic you’d only know if your mind had also been torn apart so violently you weren’t sure it’d ever piece together the same way again.
Olivia followed me over to a statue of a woman on her knees, reaching up with both hands. Both eyes were hollowed out and black.
‘No,’ I said. Weak with awe, I dropped to my knees. ‘That can’t be right. No way.’
I had no way of explaining how this figure I’d seen so many times in my dreams, and nowhere else, was right here with us in real life. I thought back to another one of Dr Esso’s warnings: about there being more to life than met the eye. Now everything that seemed impossible was coming to life – my dreams, my mum, even the Upper World felt one outstretched arm away.
Olivia was still speechless. Maybe now she was ready to believe the crazy things I wanted to tell her. Maybe now we could get to the answer.
The evening sun was bouncing off the top floors of the Shard like it was a prism. Further off, I could make out the meaty chest of a cloud with edges so dark it risked leaving a permanent stain in the sky.
‘English breakfast?’ Olivia pulled out a flask and two mugs from her rucksack and wiped the wet off the bench before pouring the rounds.
After a minute of worrying that me touching the bench might make it vanish into thin air, I finally sat down. The whole garden still felt fragile, scary even, especially after finding that statue. But being there had also added to my determination. All around me was proof I’d been right not to give up on Mum after all.
‘Thanks,’ I said, sipping the hot tea so fast it fried my front taste buds.
I knew I wanted to see Dr Esso. But what I needed to figure out now, hopefully with Olivia’s help, was what I wanted to tell him. Or to put it in Mum’s final words: what I was meant to tell him. I had one or two half-baked ideas, but, like a splinter in my heel, the harder I plucked at them, the further in they went. Mum was somewhere out there in the fabric of space and time – that much was a fact of maths. But the hope that we could get there somehow rested on much shakier ground. As Olivia was discovering.
‘So, according to Dr Esso,’ she started. I wondered if she was doing her typical thing of politely clarifying the facts before she shat on them. ‘Your mum said, “Rhia will tell you.”’
‘Yep.’
‘Which means you’re meant to teach him something?’
‘Yeah.’
‘OK, that part’s clear enough.’ There might have been just a lick of sarcasm in her comment. ‘And you reckon the message you’re meant to tell him has something to do with time or energy?’
‘No,’ I replied, impatiently shaking my head. ‘Time and energy.’
She almost choked on her own spit as she burst out laughing at how serious I sounded.
‘Olivia!’ I shouted, poking that spot on her ribs I knew she hated. ‘The difference is important.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, apparently accepting I’d sunk to Dr Esso’s depths of physics obsession since she’d last seen me, since we’d both seen what was in this garden. ‘Please just explain how you arrived at this time-and-energy thing.’
I couldn’t decide where to start. In the end, I went with my most recent discovery. ‘So, a couple nights ago, I was watching videos on gravity for homework and somehow got lost in a deep internet spiral. You know them ones?’
She nodded solemnly. She’d poured out twice as much liquor as me for time lost down there.
‘And I stumbled across one article that Albert Einstein wrote about a century ago.’
‘The E = mc2 guy, right?’
‘Exactly. So the title of this paper was “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend on Its Energy Content?”’ I spread my feet, bracing myself for her reaction. ‘Isn’t that manic?’
‘I quit physics after GCSEs, remember? First boat out. You’re gonna have to make this very simple for me, Rhia.’
‘That’s fair,’ I conceded. I’d had the privilege of a few days to think about all of this. ‘Well, basically, “inertia” is just a fancy word for something being sluggish and heavy. So Einstein’s title – in plain English – is basically: “Do Heavier Things Have More Energy?”’
She continued staring with eyes that screamed: Simple, please! I had to try harder.
‘Well, I guess I never saw “being heavy” and “having energy” as necessarily going hand in hand. It’s not like, if I gained ten kilos next month, I’d suddenly be more energetic because of it. In fact, I’d have guessed the opposite.’
I was rambling. ‘Anyway, what really threw me off about the title was the question mark.’
‘The question mark?’ she checked.
‘Yeah. It’s a weird choice. I mean, this ain’t no average bloke. This is Albert Einstein – the kind of person who gets to end their sentences in full stops. And yet, for some reason, he was so shook by what he’d discovered about energy that he wrote it as a question. Almost like he was hoping he was wrong.’
She squinted at me, probably wondering what had happened to me and what I was gonna come up with next. The craziest part was, I was only sharing a fraction of the madness I’d dug up online. Scrolling through it all, a terrifying trend had emerged: all the people who went too deep into the maths of time or energy had messed-up shit happen to them.
Take Leibnitz, for example. He invented a branch of maths called calculus, then right after decided to change his surname from Leibnitz to Leibniz, claiming he was deleting the ‘t’ since he no longer believed in time. But, if you asked me, those weren’t the actions of a non-believer. Those were the actions of a man so scared of the truth he had to check himself into witness protection with a different ID.
And Einstein himself, a month before he died, wrote these chilling words about a friend of his who’d just passed away: ‘He has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.’
Then there was the really dark stuff. Like what happened to Boltzmann. Boltzmann studied energy and was also the guy who figured out why we feel time the way we do – i.e. always flowing forward rather than back. He lectured at a uni in Austria and, according to his workmate, lived in constant fear that one day, while up at the board teaching his students, he’d suddenly lose his mind and all his memories. Just before the start of one school year, Boltzmann went on holiday with family. And, while his wife and daughter were out swimming, he hanged himself in the hotel room without leaving a note.
‘There’s something about that title,’ I continued, pacing across the grass. ‘Something about a guy secretly crapping himself while talking about physics … the only other time I ever saw something like that was the night Dr Esso told me about the Upper World.’
�
��I see.’ Olivia looked away. ‘So you think that your mum predicted that one day you’d be so good at physics – with Dr Esso’s help, obviously – that you’d single-handedly figure out a way to harness time and energy and then go back to save her?’
‘Hmmm,’ I said with a stare. ‘That sounded like a harsh judgement, wrapped inside a rhetorical question, and dressed up as a friendly clarification.’
‘I’ve missed that humour of yours,’ she said, reminding me there was still the thinnest sheet of frost between us. ‘Look, Rhia – I hate being the doubting Debbie here, I just don’t get how anything you tell him could give him the ability to go back in time.’ Her hands were pressed to her hips. ‘I know how important this is to you and, I swear, I want it all to make sense. I just don’t know how.’
As tempted as I was to jump back with a tidy response, I couldn’t. I didn’t have one. A blubbery flapping noise came from my lips instead. The last time she’d seen me this excited yet deflated must have been the night we queued for two rainy hours outside Peckham Belly only for the doorman to confiscate our fake IDs.
‘You know what,’ I said, proper spent. ‘Let’s call it for tonight.’ I was barely making sense to myself, let alone Olivia, and the crazy ideas I’d been chucking about wouldn’t have impressed Dr Esso either if he’d been on the other end of this bench. I’d have to figure it out on my own and on another day.
I filled her mug with fresh tea, but by the time I lifted it to her she was wandering towards the fence.
‘This place is manic,’ I heard her say while gazing into the eyes of another statue at the edge of the lawn. ‘They just need to fix it up.’
‘Be careful,’ I warned. I’d seen two driverless bully vans on the way here and wasn’t feeling a repeat of our evening run from Linford’s. ‘If a drone tags us here, Linford’s dog won’t arrive in time to save us.’
That one lightened her up. ‘I wouldn’t even bother running, you know.’ She pointed to the mansion in the distance. ‘I’d climb through that window at the bottom and hide, fam. Pass the time filing my nails or suttin.’
All of a sudden, my fingers went slippery, and the mug in my hand fell to the bench, smashing and crackling like fireworks.
‘Jesus!’ Olivia shouted. Seconds later, she was at my side. ‘You OK?’
‘You’re a genius!’ I replied, my hand still shaped like the cup was in it.
‘What?’
‘Even when we’re stationary …’ I grinned. ‘We’re still passing through time. We’re moving through time.’
The maths was pouring through my head faster than I could shape it, but I had to.fn1
‘Bom, so there’s this one bit of Einstein’s theory of relativity that says everything in the universe basically has two speeds: the speed it moves through 3D space and its speed through time. And, whenever you add up those two speeds, it always adds up to the speed of light. Never more. Never less.’
I grabbed four stones from the ground, then scooped a dollop of mud. ‘Hold your hands out, please.’
Even if she was just humouring me, she obliged. I watched her face crease in disgust as I massaged the mud into her nearest palm, then plopped all four pebbles on top.
‘I want you to pretend this muddy hand represents your speed through time. And your other hand, the clean one,’ I continued, holding her empty palm, ‘that represents your speed through 3D space.’
‘Please know I’m only doing this cos you told me you loved me.’
‘I still love you,’ I replied. I’d have said it a million times if I wasn’t so anxious to get out what I was processing.
‘Now look: physics says that the faster you move in space, the slower you move in time.’ I took the pebbles from her dirty ‘time-hand’ and placed them one by one in her clean ‘space-hand’ to represent her speed shifting from one domain to another.
‘Hold on, this is that thingamajig you explained with the Tesla when we watched that match.’ She paused to search for it. ‘Time dilation, wasn’t it?’
‘Exactly.’ It warmed me that she’d been listening. ‘And d’you remember me saying that once you hit the maximum speed possible in space – which is always the speed of light – time stops completely? Cos you’ve maxed out your quota.’
‘Yeah, I remember,’ she said, staring at her time-hand, which was now empty.
‘Now look what happens when we start slowing down again.’ I moved the pebbles back into her dirty time-hand one at a time. ‘It all goes in the other direction; since you’re moving slower in space, you start moving faster through time. Until, eventually, you’re passing through time at –’
I stopped when I saw it in her eyes: she knew the answer. She was just too scared to say it in case she sounded daft. ‘The speed of light?’
‘Yes!’ I screamed. ‘You know what this means? Even though we’re both standing still right now, we’re actually moving through time at the speed of bloody light.’
‘Umm, that doesn’t feel right.’ She was shaking her head while I was trying to calm my heart palpitations. ‘I mean, wouldn’t we feel it? If we were travelling through time that fast?’
It was a fair question, packed with common sense. But I remembered what Dr Esso had taught me about common sense – how it can sometimes play tricks on you.
‘Not necessarily. I mean, right now, the earth’s spinning on its axis at about 1,000 miles per hour. And we don’t feel that at all, do we?’ It was all coming together. ‘We’ve basically spent our whole lives moving through time at light speed, so we don’t know any better. We don’t know how it would feel if it were any different.’
She flipped her lips into a ‘fair enough’ shape. Until I hit the punchline, that was all I could expect.
‘And here’s the key,’ I continued. ‘If we’re both travelling through time at light speed right now, there has to be some source of energy pushing us forward at that pace, right? Even if that energy is hidden from us. And it couldn’t be just a little bit. You’d need a crap-ton of that hidden energy to keep everything in the universe ticking along through time.’
I thought back to when Dr Esso had described the Upper World. He’d actually used the words ‘hidden energy’ to describe the heat he’d felt up there.
Judging by Olivia’s darting eyes, I couldn’t tell if she was catching up or thinking ahead. ‘And you reckon there’s a way to tap into it? That hidden energy?’
‘Yeah,’ I replied. ‘And I think that’s what my mum wanted me to tell Dr Esso.’ I stopped to catch my breath. ‘That, if he allows himself to believe everything I’m telling you right now, he might be able to somehow get back to the Upper World and help her. Because, once he’s there, he’ll have power beyond his wildest dreams.’
I took the biggest stone from her hand and dropped it on my left foot, striking it and watching it soar into a glass window, setting off a loud echoey clank inside.
‘Jesus,’ Olivia whispered, her head tucked in. ‘Weren’t you the one warning me about drones spotting us!’
‘I’m sorry,’ I replied. She was 1,000 per cent right, but I was already thinking about the next thing.
I needed to see Dr Esso. He’d been right all along. There wasn’t an ounce of doubt in me now.
According to everything I’d read online, the restraining order that Care had filed against him would have tagged his address. That meant that if I got too close, I’d trigger a proximity alert at the nearest police station. Even if I turned off my phone or took the fuel cells out my shoes, they could find some other way to pick me up. I’d have fifteen minutes (max) to get in and out before police arrived, and I’d have to make every minute count.
And every day I waited brought more risk. Every day that passed would bring me closer to a day when it was all too late. A high-rise nearby had gone up in flames the week before. What if his was next? What if he left London? Or the UK altogether? What if something bad happened to him or, worse, he let something bad happen?
I’m going to
night, I decided. Nothing would stop me – not even having to go alone. Although, if I was being honest, I really wanted Olivia there. It just seemed so reckless to involve her in something she didn’t believe in and didn’t fully understand yet. And with our relationship still needing more time to mend, I felt shady asking her for a favour this soon and this big.
Thunder roared down, filling the sky with rain. The storm I’d seen earlier was almost on top of us. I thought back to what Dr Anahera had said – how, no matter how stingy life got, it always gave you a few choices. Now was my choice.
‘I’m gonna go see him,’ I told Olivia.
‘And I’m coming with you,’ she replied, smiling while she zipped her jacket to the chin. ‘There’s no way I’m missing this.’
PART IV: ENERGY
* * *
FROM BLAISE ADENON’S NOTEBOOK: LETTER 4
To Esso,
I believe, like our ancestors did, that the earth never hides the things we need, but instead provides them in abundance. Light Energy rains on us from the sun; Chemical Energy is digested from the harvest; Electrical Energy strikes in lightning. But Hidden Energy? Mother Earth concealed that from our eyes for millennia.
Then a new generation came along. Products of the Steel Age, you could call them. And one among them, Einstein, had the most original of ideas, followed by the most dangerous of afterthoughts.
Einstein took a well-known fact – that light travels at a constant speed for all observers – and went on to reveal that space and time were fluid. Exactly three months later he published a speculative article that ended with E = mc2.
I must emphasize just how abnormal this journey of discovery was. Imagine finding a loose string in your rug and pulling on it. As you pull, the thread arrives in a rainbow of brilliant colours, none of which you’ve ever seen on the surface. You keep pulling and pulling until your entire carpet has unwound and you finally realize the thread is tied to something underneath your floorboards. And, when you lift the plank to see what you’ve been tugging on, you discover that, buried under your living room, is a bomb.
