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Memory Prose: Dreaming
Trigger Item: Black lacquer box (with Earth on the lid)
Source: Headcanon
Time: 2252 (age eleven)
A stretch of bleak terrain, barren and gray and broken only by small hills and rocks, comes into view. The sky above is black and full of stars. Far more stars than can be seen from even the highest, darkest place on Earth.
And Earth itself hangs just above the horizon. The planet is small--small enough to be covered by a hand if it were to be held a foot or from the face--and partially shrouded in darkness. Delicate swirls of clouds obscure most of the blue water and brown-green landmasses, leaving just North America's west coast and a bit of the Pacific Ocean clearly visible. Even now, well into the twenty-third century, nothing created by humans can be seen from the moon.
That's where Pavel, age eleven, is: the Mare Imbrium Colony on Luna, home to his maternal grandparents since they left Petersburg. Several kilometers outside of the colony proper, rather, in one the areas that hasn't been terraformed but is still protected by a transparent dome and an artificial atmosphere. He came here by shuttle. His grandparents, permissive as they are and fully confident that Pavel can handle himself, don't mind.
Pavel came here to be alone. It's a luxury, all of this solitude and idleness. He's usually shuttling between the university at Moscow and Heidelberg University in Germany, learning from the greatest theoretical physicists alive and studying whenever he's not in a classroom. He likes the busy-ness of it all, usually, because his mind has a way of catching up with him once it doesn't have any work to do. His mind can be very rude. It reminds him that he is too young, too smart, too small, too enthusiastic, too everything to be normal. His professors expect the best of him all the time. His peers are at least twice as old as him and want nothing to do with him; some resent his success, some just find him annoying. His family members either treat him like an independent adult or like some kind of fragile, precious treasure that they need to protect... and he lets them. Pavel doesn't want to disappoint by being too childish or hurt by refusing protection.
But sometimes he likes being alone with no one to annoy or disappoint or hurt, even though his mind is much too loud.
This is one of those times. The boy is sitting on the dusty ground next to a backpack and he is absolutely, perfectly content with the quiet and smiling absently at the Earth suspended above the horizon. Beyond the blue planet, the stars are remarkable. Their light is clear and steady here with no atmosphere to distort it. A dense band of stars and gases--the disk of the Milky Way--arcs across the black sky. It's beautiful.
Pavel's mind is still working like mad, spinning out equations and throwing out facts about individual stars and the nature of the space between him and them and plotting the distance from one to another. This is different from the usual noise his brain generates, though; he's on the brink of discovering something.
And then he does. All of the numbers in his head click into place and suddenly the universes are unfolding, perfect in their symmetry, breathtaking in a way that only the near-impossible can be. For a moment, everything from the vastest region of empty space to the most inconsequential subatomic particle crystallizes and hangs in front of him, clear and obvious and wonderful. He understands it all and he doesn't understand a single piece of it. He sees life as the improbable anomaly it is, mystical, a spark beyond all scientific understanding, and individual lives... each unique and beautiful, each tragically short. Each a snowflake, drifting into existence only to land and melt, one of near-infinitely many, almost immediately forgotten. Forgotten, but never entirely gone because the particles from which everything is made live forever, eternally coming together and falling apart in an infinitude of tangled universes.
Those words, of course, can't encompass what Pavel thinks and feels in one of the most important moments in his life, but this is it. This is the second where he really, truly saw the awesome beauty of the universe and everything within it and outside of it.
He comes back to himself slowly and blinks the stars back into focus as the moment slips away.
Source: Headcanon
Time: 2252 (age eleven)
A stretch of bleak terrain, barren and gray and broken only by small hills and rocks, comes into view. The sky above is black and full of stars. Far more stars than can be seen from even the highest, darkest place on Earth.
And Earth itself hangs just above the horizon. The planet is small--small enough to be covered by a hand if it were to be held a foot or from the face--and partially shrouded in darkness. Delicate swirls of clouds obscure most of the blue water and brown-green landmasses, leaving just North America's west coast and a bit of the Pacific Ocean clearly visible. Even now, well into the twenty-third century, nothing created by humans can be seen from the moon.
That's where Pavel, age eleven, is: the Mare Imbrium Colony on Luna, home to his maternal grandparents since they left Petersburg. Several kilometers outside of the colony proper, rather, in one the areas that hasn't been terraformed but is still protected by a transparent dome and an artificial atmosphere. He came here by shuttle. His grandparents, permissive as they are and fully confident that Pavel can handle himself, don't mind.
Pavel came here to be alone. It's a luxury, all of this solitude and idleness. He's usually shuttling between the university at Moscow and Heidelberg University in Germany, learning from the greatest theoretical physicists alive and studying whenever he's not in a classroom. He likes the busy-ness of it all, usually, because his mind has a way of catching up with him once it doesn't have any work to do. His mind can be very rude. It reminds him that he is too young, too smart, too small, too enthusiastic, too everything to be normal. His professors expect the best of him all the time. His peers are at least twice as old as him and want nothing to do with him; some resent his success, some just find him annoying. His family members either treat him like an independent adult or like some kind of fragile, precious treasure that they need to protect... and he lets them. Pavel doesn't want to disappoint by being too childish or hurt by refusing protection.
But sometimes he likes being alone with no one to annoy or disappoint or hurt, even though his mind is much too loud.
This is one of those times. The boy is sitting on the dusty ground next to a backpack and he is absolutely, perfectly content with the quiet and smiling absently at the Earth suspended above the horizon. Beyond the blue planet, the stars are remarkable. Their light is clear and steady here with no atmosphere to distort it. A dense band of stars and gases--the disk of the Milky Way--arcs across the black sky. It's beautiful.
Pavel's mind is still working like mad, spinning out equations and throwing out facts about individual stars and the nature of the space between him and them and plotting the distance from one to another. This is different from the usual noise his brain generates, though; he's on the brink of discovering something.
And then he does. All of the numbers in his head click into place and suddenly the universes are unfolding, perfect in their symmetry, breathtaking in a way that only the near-impossible can be. For a moment, everything from the vastest region of empty space to the most inconsequential subatomic particle crystallizes and hangs in front of him, clear and obvious and wonderful. He understands it all and he doesn't understand a single piece of it. He sees life as the improbable anomaly it is, mystical, a spark beyond all scientific understanding, and individual lives... each unique and beautiful, each tragically short. Each a snowflake, drifting into existence only to land and melt, one of near-infinitely many, almost immediately forgotten. Forgotten, but never entirely gone because the particles from which everything is made live forever, eternally coming together and falling apart in an infinitude of tangled universes.
Those words, of course, can't encompass what Pavel thinks and feels in one of the most important moments in his life, but this is it. This is the second where he really, truly saw the awesome beauty of the universe and everything within it and outside of it.
He comes back to himself slowly and blinks the stars back into focus as the moment slips away.