“Jenkins! Jenkins! Jenkins! Get in here! Get here, now!” Startled, I get there. It would seem that Professor Wintom has either spotted another spider in the lab or has just made an incredible discovery.
“Jenkins. Come here come here! Look into the microscope! Look! Look!” I looked. What I saw both killed the old me and birthed the new me. This was the exact point in time where I had to believe in almost anything. If I didn’t, then I was playing the fool. Bigfoot? Why not? Chupacabra? Who is to say? Extraterrestrial beings? Probably. From that point on, I had to question my definition of the word, “real”.
“Jenkins….”, Wintom breathed in an almost reverent, hushed tone. “What are you seeing?”, Wintom asked in a way that may have suggested that he did not really want to hear the answer. Any answer. The problem was that I could not answer. I could not talk. I could barely breathe. I had to break away from the spell that my vision was presenting to me. As I looked up and saw Wintom’s undeniably psychotic expression, I felt a certain kinship with him for I realized that I, most likely, was wearing that same face. “Wintom”, I gasped, “Water….water”.
Andrea, Professor Wintom’s suspiciously attractive lab assistant, brought me a bottle of water and backed away as if I were some kind of viper. Or perhaps it was the microscope which filled her with a feeling of foreboding. It did not matter at the moment. I took a sip from the bottle. A little bit of the water went down the wrong pipe. I choked and coughed and sputtered. “What in God’s name is happening here?”, I thought. “I need see again.”, I nonsensically spluttered as I crouched over the microscope to take another look.
It was the same as what I saw the first time. Yep. There it was. I was seeing that with my own eyes.
People. Impossibly tiny people. It was undeniable. I watched in wonder. I ran the emotional gamut of first shock, then disbelief, fear, catatonia, amazement, wonder, and finally cold calculation as I stared at the things my eyes were seeing. What were the implications? How far down does this existence go? How far up, for that matter? Here I was, after all, looking onto the surface of a quark, one of the tiniest known particles in the entire universe…and yet there were living creatures (who, by the way, looked exactly like us) existing there! What if the planet Earth is but a quark in a much larger universe?
I slowly became aware of a sound. It sounded urgent. “What is that?”, I thought. After a few moments the sounds turned into words. Apparently, I had become so flabbergasted that I had forgotten what words were. It was Wintom, I finally realized. He was trying to communicate. He was asking me if he had lost his marbles. He said, “Jenkins, have I lost my marbles?” Automatically, without any thought whatsoever, as if in a dreamlike haze, I began to scan the floor for marbles.
