“The isogonal conjugate of the circumcircle is the line at infinity, given in trilinear coordinates by ax + by + cz = 0 and in barycentric coordinates by x + y + z = 0.”
The clock ticked forward in an increasingly delayed metronomic rhythm as Dave tried time and time again to grasp something – anything – that Professor Lundgren was saying. Being a non-traditional student, he had thought, would give him an advantage in his post-graduate work on quantum linear application engineering. He had already been proven a genius via his regular IQ testing, his work on updating the Time-Independent Schrödinger Equation to include dilation fields in and around massive gravitational anomalies, and his Stephen Hawking Fellowship where he had proven gravity was not a true constant as had been previously thought, but a relative constant based on the quantum shift of electrons in mass at various densities.
So he was smart, an otherworldly intelligence mixed with a mental sense of humor. He had a social life. Indeed, his head wasn’t swimming from the content of the class, but more of a reminder that possibly Tuesday nights before class were not the best to get into endless rounds of bar dice and ginger-brandy shots.
Lecture days were the best and the worst. He never saw them on lecture days. Thankfully, they left his mind alone when it needed it the most. Unfortunately, they pre-occupied his thoughts either way. They knew he needed to absorb more knowledge. It was their only hope. He believed that there was only one answer to the time dilemma, and that was to screech it to a stop for long enough for humanity to catch up to him. But he also knew that humanity had not been where he had, and they never will.
His grand experiment would also be his final experiment. He knew that he could bring time to near the line of infinity and any projected variation between, relative to the entire universe. Einstein was on the right track, but he had forgotten that the universe was only one plane of existence, and that time was relative across any and all planes. Time exists in exactly one place for each individual particle of matter and stream of energy. But time is a fickle beast, only observed from the outside-in.
Dave could observe it from the inside-out. As a young Gallifreyan, he had studied from the Masters and Time Lords of legend. When his life was, as all Gallifreyans, permanently put into a state of upheaval, he knew that only humanity, humans, could restore existence and time itself back to a stable plane. But it would take millennia.
But they dared show their face to remind him every day of his - no, not failures – his lack of success… so far. But what is waiting to a Gallifreyan? When you can see, feel, be and sense across planes of existence, what is a few thousand years but a speck of dust on a marble statue? They can wait, he thought, but they could handle waiting another few lifetimes.
He had to remind himself that they aren’t ghosts, they aren’t in the past, because there is no past if the relative observer makes it the present, or the future (he hoped?)!
Humans had already theorized that space curved, and that space-time was a concept, but they had no way to see it, no way to ride it, no way to control it. Dave knew how, but it was locked in his human brain, only 10% of which was active at any given time. Dave knew your could actually “ride” the space-time curve into a slingshot across the universe. He knew because he had done it thousands of times in his life. That’s how he ended up here on Terra, or “Earth” as the locals called it. Once he unlocked the secrets in his mind, he would show the humans that trick, and they would help him launch their plane and his plane into one bridged multiverse. He just needed to get to infinity… and beyond.
Starting at the whiteboard behind Professor Lundgren, he could see the electrons in the black marker etchings wiggle and wriggle in their probable mists of locations, predicting each individual calculation of mass and gravity within the quantum foam.
Only a few more thousand years… and everything would be made right again.
And it was going to be a lonely ride…
…to be continued
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