Grief

Thought I’d never post again, didn’t you? Or perhaps you imagined another Patience Race. If only that were the reason. You see, it’s been a horrible year. Back in February, I lost Jalaa.

I don’t even know whether she’s actually dead; all I know is that all my efforts to rescue her have failed – and when I reveal what happened you’ll doubtless understand why.

Jalaa was one of life’s naturalistic mystics. She loved to experiment with reality; to squeeze it here and see it bulge over there; to probe the limits of energy density, time dilation and quantum entanglement. Basically, she was full of joy and the cosmos was her toy. Life with her was mostly chilled, but with bouts of intense stress scattered throughout, marking the moments of her bolder experiments.

I’m still not entirely sure what she was trying to achieve, because she didn’t confide in me. She’d been working on wormholes, so possibly she was trying a new method of creating time dimensions or something: I don’t really know. I finished my meditation session one morning and padded over to the observation window to look at Earth, and immediately noticed the anomaly.

It was a quivering ring of light, almost invisibly thin but surprisingly bright, floating between the ship and the planet, at a distance I had to check from instrumentation because it was too hard to gauge via eyesight. It turned out to be about a thousand kilometres away, which meant that the thing had to be about fifty kilometres in diameter at least. Analysis took a while and wasn’t completely conclusive, but my best guess is that she was attempting to create a toroidal wormhole and it collapsed, sucking her inside. The external cameras don’t show anything too clearly, but Jalaa appears on the images, suited up, operating some kind of field generator – and after a single frame filled with bright light, she and the instrument are gone, replaced with a shimmering string across the field of view. I think it had momentum away from the ship, because it was initially very close and later moved towards Earth.

Don’t worry – I have tracked the thing and there’s no way it’s going to hit you. Its path seems unaffected by gravity (which is extremely odd in itself) and it will simply leave the solar system without impacting anything as far as I can tell. I’ve tried everything I can think of to open up the wormhole again and release my friend, but anything I tried was ineffective, and plenty that I thought of trying was too risky. I suspect that some form of circulation is taking place within the loop of string, so that its contents follow the same circular path for eternity. In some ways, I hope Jalaa is not still alive – from her perspective, given the time dilation and the motion, I believe she would have seen the entire future of the cosmos played out within a few minutes (accompanied by insane rotational speeds), followed by the evaporation of the wormhole during the heat death of the universe, finally releasing her after all of that time had passed, to expire within an hour or two, seeing only blackness. Not a pleasant fate.

As you can imagine, I’m struggling to cope with this at the moment and it will be a while before I can return to my usual lifestyle. I don’t feel like living aboard this ship any more, that’s for sure. I sent this message off to Mike, but he didn’t reply immediately. My enquiries revealed that he has apparently moved to Scotland, and I’m considering following him. The way I feel right now, a bleak winter in the mountains would just about suit me.

I apologise for the downer, but hopefully you understand. I’m resilient and I’ll get over this eventually, at which point normal service will be resumed.

Dszira out.