Truth is stranger than fiction... (Part V)

"Would you like to drink something?"
Michael was brought to reality by the same dark man's voice. He simply nodded. Once the man was away to get a drink, Michael turned towards Daniel, taking a good long look at him before he uttered anything. Daniel did not seem surprised, he was rather expecting that stare; one full of questions, many of them.
"What.. happened.. How have you been?" were the only words Michael was able to get out.
He was finding it difficult to keep his voice steady.
"Still the same inquisitive nature.." Daniel spoke for the first time face to face with his partner after two years.
After a deep sigh, Daniel began...
“I woke up in a hospital room, back then. The only thing I remembered was the two.. objects hitting me.”
He was choosing his words carefully.
“The nurse kept telling me that I was shot at, but that was not what I wanted to hear. The next day two men came; agents. They said I needed to know something; and now it’s time you should too. I was taken to an underground facility in the desert. It was big and obviously out of the public eye. Few people in the bureau even knew it existed.”
Just then the dark man came back to serve their drinks. Michael looked at him, then at Daniel, making his suspicion apparent.
“It’s okay” Daniel nodded very slightly before continuing.
“It was a research facility; for the most bizarre and highly secretive of projects. Some would call it the lab of the future; for almost all the research carried out here was years ahead of anything seen outside. By the time the technology of this research was “cutting edge”, it was simply nostalgic for the people involved here, since they had moved on to other projects. Project Firefly was different.”
“It was not about using savaged alien technology from a fallen UFO?”
“That is just the cover up, since it wouldn’t attract much attention that way. It was not entirely untrue though. Most people thought of it as simply pulling out an engine from a UFO and putting it into one of ours, and boom!”
Michael couldn’t help a smirk considering the fact that he hadn’t thought much different either!
“It’s not that way. To start with, there’s no UFO involved. However, the technology that we have – learnt – in this case can be attributed beyond doubt to intelligent beings from outside our world.”
“And this has something to do with those objects that hit you..” Michael took out the two bullet-like objects he had kept with him for two years.
“It has everything to do with them! These pellets, what you’re holding Michael, are huge stores of information; unfathomable information. The two that hit me are identical to these. They were held in a cylindrical tubular structure, and designed to be “shot out” once their containers reached a high temperature. I was simply unlucky to be standing near one of those. There were two such cylinders buried into the meteorite.”
Michael’s mind raced fast to explore all possible implications.
“Someone had “placed” these into the meteorite.”
“But meteorites are moving at crazy speeds, which would make it impossible to..”
“NASA has already landed a small probe on an asteroid. Moreover, simply “shooting” such small cylinders at a high velocity would be sufficient to bury them into the meteorite.”
“You’re saying, someone far outside our solar system placed a package of information inside a meteorite, for a free ride across the galaxy?!” The words echoed inside Michael’s head.
“The capsules were just the protective casing. They had a highly polished, flat surface inside, held in place vertically by a series of membranes. Using a fine laser beam and continuously scanning the interior like the body scan, the capsules were cut open, taking care not to damage the flat surface. The capsule’s hardness was out of our current range of hardness which ends at diamond. It was estimated from the energy required by the laser, that the hardness of the surface was about four times that of diamond!”
“And then what? Our intelligent alien friends write a letter to us in Chinese and you simply get an interpreter to read it out for you?!” Michael had lost it! Anyone in his place would have.
Once he stopped smiling Daniel continued.
“You got the first part right. When we saw the polished surface under very high magnification, it appeared to be a very thin, semi-transparent plate, having a crystalline structure. Upon studying it further, several hundred irregularities were observed, what appeared to be.. etchings – symbols! For a long time no one was able to decipher these. However, when that was finally achieved, only a fraction of their “letter” was truly understood; this led to Project Firefly. The rest is for you to see yourself.”
“Are we going to the facility?”
Daniel smiled.

Truth is stranger than fiction... (Part IV)

As he watched the lights of the airport disappear below, everything from the past flashed in front of his eyes in a few seconds. Michael would never forget that day; the day that changed his life; the day that he lost a dear one; the day that shattered his most profound faith.
Michael and Daniel were on a routine patrol in their allotted sector that day. What was to happen was not routine. They were chatting away happily like they always did; for almost three years now. Michael and Daniel were field agents in the FBI. But they were more than just that; they were the best of buddies, since the academy. They would trust each other with their lives, and jeopardise their own if need be – way beyond the usual degree that other partners would. This duo was famous for surviving as a team in desperate situations in the call of duty.
“Attention all units! Proceed immediately to sector one-seven, repeat one-seven. Be advised, reports of unusual activity are coming in heavy”, the com unit in their vehicle blurted.
“Unusual activity?!” Michael exclaimed.
Daniel had already steered the vehicle off the road, into the desert sand; sector one-seven was nearby, but still a good fifteen minutes by road; this way they reached in five. They knew when they saw – their unusual activity was a meteorite! The reports would have been of UFO-crazy people flooding in calls to the bureau.

There it was – a solid mass of rock, about the size of their car, covered with deep cavities as seen upon approaching closer. Its surface glittered in the desert sun. Just as they were peering into the innumerable cavities, holes more so, they heard other vehicles coming to the site.
“This is Dr. Johnson from the Physics Department, University of Utah”, said one agent as he came near Michael and Daniel.
After brief handshaking, the PhD. in astrophysics began talking animatedly, without anyone asking any explanation in particular.
“This is what we were tracking for so many days!”
“Tracking? Who? You guys knew this was..”
Michael was cut short by Johnson, “For god’s sake yes! We track all possible
NEOs – that’s Near Earth Objects, and if this one is this big here, imagine what it would have been when it was coming!”
Johnson was obviously excited – more like a kid eying his Christmas present, ready to rip the wrapping apart! By now a lot of crowd had gathered around the fallen meteorite. The agents were busy setting up a perimeter of yellow tape around the object of great scientific value.
“Doctor could you please.. slow down a little..”, the third agent who had brought the doctor along spoke out.
But doctor was in no mood; he continued in his child like excitement.
“It’s just that we at the university were busy working on its trajectory, and other details since quite some time. You see, predicting the trajectory is very difficult, even of such a big ass – pardon me – meteorite, simply because it’s not orbiting our sun, and we don’t have much previous data on it.”
“You mean it’s..” Michael was finding this interesting, but was cut short again.
“Yes! It’s extra solar – not from our solar system! By studying its composition we can..”
Just then, there were two loud sounds in rapid succession; seemingly similar to gun shots. All the agents instantly drew their weapons from their holsters and were frantically scanning the crowd for anyone with a gun. They found none. Just then, Michael noticed Daniel had fallen to the ground, holding his chest. He immediately reached for the com unit in his car.
“Officer down, repeat officer down, request immediate medical backup!”
“Copy that, help is on its way.” The woman at the other end responded.
Her voice was as calm as was possible for her to maintain. An “officer down” is the last thing any dispatcher would want to hear, and this was the most unlikely times of all; the unit was not in pursuit of a suspect, nor was it raiding a hideout, nor was it engaged in a gun fight, nothing.

The day after the meteorite crashed, Michael felt a sudden desire to go out there and simply stand at the same place where he lost his dear friend. The place was still marked by a small flag, possibly by local amateur enthusiasts as a potential place to find a small piece of the meteoroid for their personal collection. As Michael stood there, he could feel the cold wind hitting his face. When he turned to head back, he noticed something sparkle in the sand below. He bent down to pick it up. There were two of those; he placed them on his other outstretched palm and looked at them closely. They were strikingly similar to riffle bullets, but only much heavier. The next day he went to his friend in the forensic department to have his opinion on the objects. Once under the microscope, his friend quickly dismissed it as any bullet. He then had it analysed at a more advanced lab for the objects’ material composition, to account for the abnormally high weight. Michael was speechless when his friend told him that the objects he analysed were of no known metals or alloys; their chemical structure was simply rejected by the computer as having absolutely no resemblance to any of the basic chemical structures in its database, which was exhaustive of all known elements!
“Are you telling me this thing is neither natural nor man-made?” Michael was sounding half mad to himself.
“In a word, yes” came the reply from his friend.
Next day, two days after the meteorite crashed, Michael got news that his friend at the forensic department died in a car accident. Someone also left a note in his car, asking him not to poke his nose into matters; else the consequences would be dire.

For the next two years, Michael would remember those two sounds distinctly. Nine minutes after he had made the distressed call, an ambulance arrived. Daniel was taken to a hospital, later shifted to an unknown location, and a month later declared missing. Michael tried hard to get to the root of everything, but someone high up in the bureau had taken care to tie up all loose ends; he had done a good job. The meteorite was shifted within the hour, to a “secure location” for scientific study; or so was told to the public. Desperate for answers, Michael tried his contacts on the inside, but every time, a dead end.

His most profound faith was shattered – his faith in the bureau.

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall!!

A great man once walked amongst us - he who dared to challenge all existing laws, the most fundamental laws, and bring in light a radically new theory, that would forever change the way in which we understand the behaviour of everything around us - from the tiniest of elementary particles to the working of the entire cosmos... We simply know him as Albert Einstein.

One of the outcomes of his famous Theory of Relativity is that time "dilates", or "slows down" as an object travels at very high velocities. This effect is more pronounced at relativistic speeds, that is to say at speeds near the speed of light. However absurd this may sound, it has been proven both theoretically and experimentally, beyond the shadow of doubt.

Here ends the physical aspect of time dilation. Can there be, or is there, another totally unconnected yet seemingly similar effect, psychologically? Can you be totally convinced that for a very small duration of time, the brain, under abnormal conditions of events, "stretches out" its sense of perception in time, to give a feeling that something is happening rather "slower" than it actually is? Mind you, I'm talking totally in the psychological sense, and I'm not insane enough to claim that the brain can reproduce "time dilation" in its true sense!

The reason for this weird chain of thinking is my recent accident. Following was the sequence of events - I was riding at about 60, signal ahead was green so the speed, a man came walking across the road much prior to the intersection, I was caught off guard, honked the horn and immediately let go of the accelerator, horn was still depressed and man was still just standing there right on collision course, I hit the brake and tried to steer clear, horn was still depressed and man was still in exact same spot looking at me dumb struck. Luck was not on my side. Oil was spilled on the road. As I initially hit the brake I realised this, since the bike was skidding, yet was recoverable, had the obstacle cleared by now and had I let go of the brakes. The obstacle was still in place. I knew where I was headed, but had no choice; I squeezed the brakes again, trying to maintain balance of the now very shaky bike, destined to fall on one side. Seeing me go down, the obstacle finally took two steps ahead, to get out of the crashing mass of my vehicle with me holding on. After the fall everything was more spontaneous and involuntary - I left the bike, and it went skidding, sideways now, about 20 feet away (I noticed after getting up).

I got up, went partially limping towards my obstacle, filled with rage and abusing on the way. A policeman came, supported me and guided me to the "chowky" just adjacent to the intersection. Another policeman started shouting at my obstacle, for trying to cross the road at the wrong place, despite a green signal for the traffic and despite seeing me approaching the intersection. It all ended 15 minutes later with me washing my wounds and hopping on my bike again and driving home. That night I got an xray done because the pain in my left wrist was excruciating. It is now in plaster, although there seems to be no apparent fracture or major dislocation. It will however be in plaster for 21 days since the doctor can't rule out the possibility of a small hairline crack which strangely enough is not seen in an xray for up to one week.

Getting back to the "time dilation" funda, when I think about it all, those few seconds just before the bike hit the ground, and few seconds of skidding, appear to be very prominent and strangely "slower" than the rest of the happening. By this I mean those 4-5 seconds passed in front of my eyes at that time and also pass in front of my mind's eye now, as though in slow motion! I know from sheer logic that at that speed it would have taken at the most 5 seconds for everything to happen, but it just felt so slow! I am forced to believe that something different goes on in our brain during such critical moments. For example, although I fell on the right side, my left wrist took all the impact, while my right hand was held above ground - why? Isn't it more natural or rather probable that my right wrist be injured?

It is a known medical phenomenon that the body has the capacity of sacrificial or preferential protection - for example, in conditions of hypothermia (extreme cold beyond the body's capacity) blood supply to vital organs is maintained at the cost of limbs being deprived of it. Similarly, does our brain process information from our sensory organs at a faster speed, allowing it to subconsciously take precautionary measures to preserve our body to the maximum extent? This faster-than-normal processing might explain the slowdown effect of time. Studies on house flea show that they see an approaching object "slower" than it actually is, and this explains their lightning fast reflexes when we try to hit them with a roll of paper. The fly is actually simply seeing the roll come slowly, thereby allowing it to avoid the roll effortlessly. Some may argue that it is the air movement caused by the motion that alerts the fly. However, last time I checked, the speed of light was faster than any air disturbance! ;-)

Whatever be the case, the human brain is and will perhaps always remain one of the most complicated wonders of nature to understand. As of now, it is estimated that we have understood only 10% of its functioning. Rather intriguing what all the brain might be capable of at full potential!

Kitties...

Kittens are one of the most adorable young ones of animals I feel... Not that I have seen young ones of many species, but they're better than human kids - for starters, they don't cry!
Just a couple of months back, a cat in the neighbourhood had a litter of kittens - three very sweet and innocent looking kittens. I was at once attached to the feline family, though ironically I'm not much of a fan of cats - the solitary, fully grown ones. I just somehow feel they are intrinsically not capable of loving humans the way their canine counterparts are. Cat lovers spare me, but this is just my personal observation, or better still, let's just dismiss it as a matter of individual like / dislike.
So coming back, I started playing around with the kittens, keeping milk and water for them, and simply observing them - all this from a distance. Once they realised I was no mean human set out to eradicate them, they became friends! They would come closer and closer to me as time passed, though it was a few days before I could actually touch them even. Mommy cat seemed to have no problem bringing her kids inside my house and playing around and even feeding them at one instant! Clearly she visualised me as no harm.
During my playtime with them I also clicked a lot of photos, out of which only a few came out nice, owing to the fact that it was really difficult to find a right opportunity, have my cam with me at that time, and clicking at that very instant - three independent factors!
Above I've put a couple of my favourite photos, the remaining can be seen here.