Dr Elric: Mad Scientist of the Wasteland
They warned his father that there was a risk of radiation, and that the effects might not manifest themselves for many years. That didn’t stop the small, mousy man from moving his little boy, Elric, to Los Alamos. The man took the only job he could find, a middle school science teacher at a small private school. Elric was only three years old, and the boy’s mother remained behind in California, an “amiable separation,” as his father called it. So Elric grew up in a town where everyone knew his single father to be a harmless ignoramus, the socially awkward man who claimed to understand physics more thoroughly than Einstein, quantum mechanics more astutely than Max Planck, and astronomy more adeptly than Carl Sagan. For as long as Elric can remember, he took refuge in music, particularly Nine Inch Nails. It was the only place where his father’s supposed knowledge could not penetrate.
When he died in November 2021, Elric went through his many scientific notes and half filled patent applications. It was as if his father was a hilariously inept parody of the great inventor Thomas Edison. The list of his inventions was endless: self-inflating socks, a social awkwardness meter powered by three AAA batteries, a rocket designed for a single individual to move perpendicular to a stationary target, a process designed to remove the color from children’s construction paper, a handheld leg skin exfoliator for men. Pure idiocy.
But then he saw it. In a manilla folder was a stack of papers. When he pulled it free, it was clear this one was different. A note attached to the manila folder read, “To Elric: This is yours.” He pulled the stack free. The patent was completely filled out, and the supporting documentation was 128 pages long, detailing everything from circuitry to materials procurement to collaborators, several of whom were listed as employees at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The title of the project was Eden Gate: Sub-Planckian Emergence Fields Under the Influence of Acute Nuclear Radiation.
As he held it in his hands, grief seemed to overwhelm him. Grief’s power over physics was made manifest, and space-time itself warped around the young man. He found himself somewhere beyond time and space, as if he had fallen into a gap between sub-Planckian particles, a place in which whole universes popped in and out of existence without care for their origins nor antecedents. The very void seemed to vibrate with potentials beyond comprehension, and comprehension itself fell away into simple awareness. Grief has a way of isolating us like that. And then, very slowly, he felt the weight of the hairs upon my arm, the pressure of air around him, and the slow breath of a world ready to explode. The explosion sucked him out of the reverie just as it sucked every ounce of air from his lungs and vivified the void around him like some invisible melee had broken out on a scale impossibly small and impossibly violent.
When he awoke, the plans were still grasped in his hand, smoldering and tattered, but whole. A building stood in front of him, standing in defiance of the flattened landscape that surrounded it. The sign read “Materials for the Future Building–Los Alamos National Laboratory.” Scientists ran from it and seemed to fade away at the margins of the grounds, unmanifested by the very cosmos that had birthed them. And then he was alone.
It does not mean anything to him now to say how long he has now been in Laboratory Sub-C271 of the Materials for the Future Building. It has been no time and every time. With his father’s plans, he has partially constructed the Eden Gate, though major issues confront him with every passage through it, and each time he makes the passage, there is a looseness in his bones and joints and mind that he must ascribe to his father’s simple decision, so many years ago, to move to Los Alamos. The past never leaves us. It simply becomes the present.
Now, locked in the laboratory, he hears banging on the hermetically sealed door, but he works undeterred. Nine Inch Nail’s “Every Day is Exactly the Same” blares through the speakers and the Knockers outside pound rhythmically along with the thrumming undertones of the bass as they seek entry into the edenic laboratory of Dr. Elric.
He lifts his goggles onto his forehead, rewires the console of the Eden gate, then pushes the assembly behind the console cover, his calloused fingers working deftly and calmly as he sings:
“I believe I can see the future
’Cause I repeat the same routine
I think I used to have a purpose
Then again, that might have been a dream
I think I used to have a voice
Now I never make a sound
I just do what I’ve been told
I really don’t want them to come around…”
