It’s not an atom, but it looks like one. Some subatomic blackbox, it’s got an electric pull like a nucleus without electrons and it moves with impatience like the world could end.
There’s some hydrogen floating around here, and it gropes at them hungrily. Laps at their electrons. Just as fast it changes its mind, and the hydrogen is flung far away. Missing a juicy electron.
It goes on like this. The blackbox spins that electron to its backside and maintains a positive pull in front and the electromagnetic force bullets it along like a tiny magnet. The stolen electron gets wiggled like a sail, and just like that the blackbox deftly weaves around — and away from — positive charges. In the swarm of cationic hydrogen, it takes quick lunges and sharp turns to elude the grasp of the thirsty atoms. Even still, the blackbox flies with a magnetic wake dragged in thrall. A 67-strong electron shell speaks to you — a cation would do a lot for a piece of that.
Think of it like a game of Snake, the blackbox the head, the magnetic wake the tail. But the third dimension changes everything.
Taken together, this all would look like the most elaborate chase sequence, except (1) you couldn’t hope to even see atoms and, more importantly, (2), you wouldn’t pick this thing out of all the chaos anyway — the whole cloud is full of blackboxes, and each one is dodging and lunging just the same. Some aren’t as lucky as our little box; grab even a few electrons and it’s not hard to imagine yourself surrounded.
Then two blackboxes meet for a kiss.
Several electrons get shuffled between them, and after some inscrutable quantum math, they both come away with 53 electrons, the remainder tossed to the ether. 53 electrons. That’s 110101 in binary.
It goes on like this. Some electrons are lost to the cation horde, some accreted by mistake, but collision after collision, kiss after kiss, electrons are traded, shuffled, donated, and always they come away closer and closer to that magic number 53 of electrons, like an answer.
It looks random, but it couldn’t be otherwise.
Watch closely. It’s not a microsecond before our blackbox is sauntering up to a conspecific for another smooch — but count the other one’s electrons: 89. That’s not the magic number. One collision later, though, and it moves with the zeal of neophytes, tackling cation after hydrogen cation before lunging away, every one of those lucky atoms sporting a generous new electron.
That’s the order in the chaos.
There are billions of blackboxes in here. They collide millions of times a microsecond. They exchange electrons in their odd quantum averaging dance. They go their separate ways, but chance by chance, the message spreads, and that magic number 53 resembles a virus. You can’t tell which one is patient zero, not yet, but it’s not chance, it’s fate.
And the message spreading, you might suspect it a command. But it’s a prediction.
An infallible prediction. It couldn’t be otherwise.
Microseconds elapse. You could pick out one, ten, two thousand, three million blackboxes, and their charge would all be the same.
In fact, time’s up and right now, doing just that, here comes some negatively charged metal fingers, combing through the cloud. The blackboxes glomp on like they found the last neutral hydrogen.
But the metal fingers conduct, and drain the boxes dry. When they’ve left the cloud, the fingers weigh their haul.
It’s math now. Quantity equals total mass divided by individual mass. Average charge equals total charge divided by quantity.
It comes out to something 52.6789 followed by more numbers you don’t care about. But rounding is easy.
A couple orders of magnitude away, there’s a row of gas tanks just like this, all wired up to a motherboard. They’re oracle circuits. The one we were just in was prophesying for a long division currently being calculated somewhere — but it’s a complex operation, and sometimes you get impatient.
Oracle circuits ain’t cheap, not in resources, and not in space. You could fit ten of them on your thumb nail, and this cheap cpu doesn’t even have ten.
Must’ve been an important division.
But this cpu runs on a tight clock, and you’d find that instantly — a rough synonym for microsecond — after the weighing, the division operation finishes up and it signals its prophesied answer (53, it couldn’t be otherwise) and it routes right to the oracle circuit — to the preposterity engine.
Then, as a result, as the last step of the process, a different kind of box falls into the gas. Let’s call it a whitebox. It’s got a charge of +53. The blackboxes already floating around, despite their overwhelmingly negative charge, they’re all busy dodging thirsty cations. The +53 doesn’t tempt them.
But they can tell a whitebox from another hydrogen atom.
Like fate, a -53 blackbox meets the newcomer (it couldn’t be otherwise), and that’s about the end of it. They kiss and stay that way, and the slower, luckless blackboxes still swoop in, and find somewhere to put themselves. A lattice forms around the pair. It should. It better.
Physicists have done the calculations. A whitebox meeting a blackbox of unequal charge creates a scary kind of instability, or so the calculations say. They compare it to a big black hole opening up — but worse, since black holes at least are bound by light speed and causality.
Or so the calculations say. No one has ever, ever seen whitebox meet a blackbox of unequal charge. It couldn’t be otherwise.
Now a lattice has formed, as it should, as it had to. The sensors in the preposterity engine can tell, but it’s a frill; what would they sense otherwise?
A couple more orders of magnitude away, there’s a biological photoreceptor peering at a liquid crystal display, an appendage tapping incessantly on the bezels, nervously waiting, against all laws of time and causality, for tomorrow’s email to open on today’s screen.
The pre-post-erity engine delivers.
Because sometimes you get impatient.
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