Anabasis

TW: Physics

 

They say it was a positron leakage, as Meyrin, Switzerland, went off with a bang. 

 

A collision between any particle and its anti-particle partner leads to mutual annihilation.

The amount of energy released by that collision is proportional to the total mass of the colliding matter and antimatter. Thus, one gram of matter-antimatter collision releases more than 90 trillion Joules of energy — which is equivalent to two Hiroshima bombs. 

 

There were approximately 10 grams of antimatter in the container that was annihilated at CERN, Meyrin, Switzerland. 

 

And that was how Isabel Lyanne Wright’s whole theoretical physics team, and most of CERN, went up in smithereens, while she was stuck in a jail cell 4000 km away for “attempted robbery”. She only learnt of the news after her fortnight’s imprisonment; no one had lived to come tell her. 

 

The project was seemingly doomed. 

But it was fine. Isabel had some of the papers. The copies survived along with the secondary base. Isabel still had access to that base, and frankly, it was the more important one. The major machinery there was still intact. But most of all, Isabel had her brain. She had real knowledge of how this worked. 

 

She stared down. 

 

Penrose diagram – a map of the universe condensing the infinite area into a finite shape. The future lightcone points at where we can go, the past lightcone at what we can observe. 

 

There was only one way. Isabel had to travel faster than light. 

She climbed into the machine. It was going to turn parts of her into waves of probability, take her apart atom by atom. The force field created by the generator would be enough to send her to the edge of the universe, to infinite space. There, she could hop into the black hole to the next antiverse. 

 

Isabel just needed to make sure she did not go down the wrong rabbit hole, because the other path, the Einstein-Rosen Bridge, was dangerous.

The Einstein-Rosen Bridge is a fancy type of wormhole, connecting two parallel universes. And there are two problems with a wormhole that make it incredibly dangerous to jump down. For one, the tidal gravity was enough to pull everything in and leave nothing to escape, crushing any travellers along the way. That was easily solvable. Isabel was a quantum. She didn’t have a mass that could be crushed. 

 

The second problem, and the most dire one, was that the standard Schwarzschild wormhole had an event horizon. An unstable one. This meant that the tiniest of fluctuations would cause the bridge to “snatch off”, sealing and leaving the traveller to wander endlessly in some weird dimension of spacetime. 

 

However, where Isabel was headed was a black hole. Black holes were less scary than wormholes, in some ways. True, the similarly crushing tidal gravity still existed, but Isabel could be totally massless. 

 

Black holes are constructed of three regions. The outer horizon, the inner horizon, and singularity. The outer horizon is the point of no return, where the gravitational pull becomes stronger than light, trapping everything inside. The inner horizon where mathematics stops working. And singularity was the endpoint, the eye of a whirlpool that sucks up everything. 

 

But in the case of a rotating Kerr black hole, the physics allowed the singularity to not be a point, but a ring, something that a massless entity can hop down into. The difference between the Schwarzschild wormhole and the Black hole was that the black hole had a stable horizon, which would not snatch off when a traveller intended to cross it. 

 

Where would she end up on the other side of the singularity? That was the question. 

 

The machine whirred to life. Isabel closed her eyes. It might hurt less this way.

In truth, their team had not done any testing yet. It was a risk for Isabel; she would either succeed in becoming a string of thought, or she would die. Die and become a puddle of molten flesh. 

 

Isabel was willing to die for this. 

 

A piercing pain shot through her skull as the transmitter antenna drilled into her head. Breathe, Isabel thought. The machine had already started working; emotions, thoughts, and memories floated through her mind like videos, playing and replaying all at the same time, the colors flying into blurs.

And then it was all quiet. 

 

Quiet, cold, desolate. The emptiness of the space in front of, before, and across time stretched far beyond Isabel’s imagination. She couldn’t feel her fingers, her arms, or her head. She didn’t have fingers, arms, or a head anymore. She existed solely as consciousness.

 

Open your eyes. 

 

The singular thought floated through her mind. It was as if she could see the words, some intangible – stuff, that just – existed. 

 

Who am I? 

 

She opened her eyes. They weren’t her real eyes; those were rotting in the skull of her body back home. But she opened some pair of eyes, because out of the silence of the expanse, a light shone.

I am Isabel Lyanne Wright I am a certified theoretical physicist at CERN I graduated from MIT–

 

There was the same stuff floating out as she thought this. She could see it more clearly now with her eyes open.

 

It was an idea. A singular thought that floated in the air. A mind couldn’t decipher it, but she knew it existed, right there in space and time.

 

Plato, Euclid, Newton, Einstein, Maxwell would all have hated it here. There were no laws, no geometry, no equations. There were only the strings of consciousness being plucked, vibrations forming ideas. Only the soul of Isabel lingered, littered with fragments of the past. 

 

The path. 

 

She had to find the path. 

 

A yellow brick road materialized in front of her conscious eyes. It was quite like the one in the Wizard of OZ, golden and twisted, leading to an adventure. The colors shimmered, and the lines between road and nothingness were blurred, as Isabel imagined walking on the path. She was moving forward, walking through the fifth dimension. 

 

Who are you?

 

I am Isabel Lyanne Wright I…

 

A pang of ideas sent Isabel off the path and into nothingness again. The same fuzzy ideas orbited around her. 

 

I am Isabel Lyanne Wright I hate my name I hate my job I hate my family I hate my friends –

I am Isabel Lyanne Wright they framed me for stealing the phone on Sunday–

I am Isabel Lyanne Wright I am not scared of death –

 

Who was Isabel Lyanne Wright?

 

She tried to concentrate on the path again. 

 

Who was I?

 

Nothing made sense in this irrational place. Nothing mattered. Nothing existed. Nothing could be found. Everything had sense in this sensible place. Everything mattered. Everything existed. Everything could be found. 

 

I was Isabel Lyanne Wright I loved my name I loved my job I loved my family I loved my friends

I was Isabel Lyanne Wright I did steal the phone on Sunday

I was Isabel Lyanne Wright I want to live

 

The path. 

 

The yellow brick road materialized in front of her again. But at its end stood only the entrance to the Bridge. 

 

The stairs to the Bridge lay bent and broken. Twisted, changing, morphing lines seemed uncertain of placement. Spacetime itself was twisted, changing, morphing lines seemingly uncertain of placement. The red shoes of her consciousness tapped the first step twice, and Isabel felt spacetime curve around her, stretching, stretching into the distance. She knew that the silence would swallow her up, eat her from the inside. She climbed the stairs, and the idea of the Bridge extended out in front of her on all sides into infinity. 

 

As Isabel approached the Bridge, time itself seemed to stop. 

 

 

Writer – Cynthia Zheng
Editor – Angela Wei
Artist – Natalie Wei

–June 2026–