Thursday, September 5, 2019

Fiction Contest Story: Stranger in a Strange place


Thank you Strange Quark for entering the contest: 

(Author's note: The following is a chronicle of Strange Quark's first direct encounter with the alien threat known as The Legion. Although it is a stand-alone episode on its own, it is a continuation of the events that lead up to this point in Quark's RP story: HERE
The preceding episodes also place what follows in context.)
*****

Quark woke up in a strange place.

He felt very strange, much stranger than normal (if that was even possible). He sat motionless for 10 minutes before he was able to collect his thoughts and piece together the events that led to his current predicament.

Slowly, bits of his memory came back. He was in Dr Fulcrum's research lab that was contructed in a dimensional pocket that existed in a virtual limbo. Nowhereland. It would take a great feat of space-time manipulation to get out of that.

"Coerced" by his teammates to go undercover as Foxy Moron to investigate Dr Fulcrum's bizarre activities that seemed to be connected to The Legion, Quark was starting to rue the day he agreed to Fallen's crazy idea for "Operation Tootsie".

Plus, he had run out of Ichi's multivitamins (Morphon-infused ethanol pills), and the resulting sobriety was messing with his memory (and sanity).

He tried his best to piece together the fragments of memory that floated hazily around him.

Dr Fulcrum was trying to figure out why Foxy Moron was ageing backwards. Of course it was just a trick of Quark manipulating his physical molecular form. But Fulcrum did not know that. Test after test yielded no explanation, so he got desperate and resorted to taking Quark apart atom by atom. This he did by trapping Quark in a "room" which was actually the core of a particle accelerator. Then he proceeded to bombard Quark with protons from opposite directions until the collision energy exceeded 14 TeV, unheard of since the LHC at CERN.

Quark did not have a chance to do anything. The last question on his mind was where Fulcrum obtained all this technology from, but before he could even comprehend what was happening, he felt his body turn into a mass of Higgs bosons, which quickly decayed into a billion bottom quarks.

Then everything became a blank.

Endless nothingness.

Suddenly, a trio of eyes materialised, followed by a set of white teeth and a nose.

"Oh no, not again!" Quark sighed. He recognised this state of quantum uncertainty. "I'm back in Schrödinger's box!"

He vacillated between his improbable states of existence and non-existence, back and forth until suddenly he heard a voice.

It came from a cat sitting in the middle of the virtual box.

"Who...?" Quark stammered as he started to ask.

"Don't you recognise me? It's Higgs. Higgs boson. I am an improbable version of you!"

"But... Why do you - do I - look like... a cat?" Quark was flabbergasted.

"It's just one of my - our - many improbable states of being. This one is courtesy of Erwin Schrödinger." The Higgs boson cat replied with a grin.

"You are not supposed to be here," Higgs the cat-boson added. "You have to pull yourself together... Literally!"

"But how? Do I even exist?" Quark asked.

"Probably. Probably not. We all may or may not exist in this probability wave function. But you have a consciousness, and therefore the power to will yourself into existence." Cat the Higgs boson said emphatically.

"And you must do it before it is too late. Not here but in the temporal universe from which you came.

"Your consciousness already knows it. Dr Fulcrum is not who he seems to be. His physical body has been taken over by a symbiotic version of The Legion. He must be stopped before he infects all of humanity with Legion DNA."

Quark knew it had to be true. An improbable version of himself just told him so.

"How do I will myself into existence?" he pondered. "OK. I will to be, therefore..." before he could finish that thought, he felt the probability wave function collapse around him.

*****

Dr Fulcrum was busy examining the results of the proton-proton collision when suddenly Quark began to rematerialise before his very eyes.

"Who...?" his jaw dropped as Quark summoned all his will power and directed all his energy into Fulcrum's body, causing it to disassemble into a billion particles, and, in that brief moment of vulnerability, evicted the Legion symbiote from its host.

Freed of the symbiote, Dr Fulcrum passed out and collapsed on to the floor in a dishevelled mess.

As for the Legion symbiote, Quark sent it screaming into the uncertain oblivion of Schrödinger's box.

"Have fun with Higgs boson the cat," he grinned.

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