Schrobear #75, traveler in strange realms

Schrobear #75 traveler in strange realms


　

　
He was a tardigrade (water bear) of the species Mopsechiniscus franciscae about .01 inches in length. His body was rust-colored, comprised of a hard, horny substance and he had eight legs, four on each side of his segmented barrel-shaped carapace. His eyes were red-brown specks, easy enough to see under low magnification, and, when he was feeding, his gut shone like an emerald green ray from within his transparent chitinous shell. As the pronoun denotes, he was male, with a sperm-producing gonad mid-torso, and, in the microscope, his body looked molded, bulbous segments fused together at joints that did not bend. If you watched him moving in the magnified field under your eyepiece, you would see that he walked deliberately on his stubby, stiff legs – there was neither knee nor ankle nor hip in those members which were rather like the limbs supporting a piece of tiny furniture. His rear-most legs were clawed so that he could cling to the substrate over which he crawled, resisting the micro-currents in the droplet of water, a pale, translucent dome, in which he dwelt. Little sensors in the form of greyish whiskers protruded from his carapace, particularly in the places where his torso-segments were fused. He ambled through his world with his head down, snuffling at the debris under foot, for all the world like a bear crossing a meadow replete with earthworms and juicy grubs in the high mountains.

Schrobear #75, as he was named, came from a distinguished lineage. When his mother (or grandmother) molted, an impulse excited her to defecate as well and eggs emerged from her cloaca intermixed with excreta and cocooned by her discarded carapace. Tardigrades are binary: they are either open to the world or tightly sealed monads. # 75's father (or grandfather or great-grandfather – the number of generations is a matter of conjecture) was on the prowl when his mother writhed out of her skin and he expelled an oily plume of sperm into the female’s abandoned hull, coating the eggs and the rest of the detritus as well. In a couple weeks, baby tardigrades exactly identical to their parents, although much smaller, wriggled from within the battered shelter of carapace. Outside of that amber-colored quonset-hut shaped dwelling, it was green in all dimensions, liquid at a temperature that was viable for motion and feeding.

The tardigrades lived amidst moss wreathing a smooth pebble under three centimeters of water on the edge of the Ross Sea in Antartica. A brown mountain, deeply furrowed with avalanche chutes, dipped its knees into the ocean and, on the horizon, there was a volcano smoking like an old, half-extinguished cigar. A researcher studying phyto-plankton sampled the sea water and pebbles at the water’s edge and bottled Schrobear’s progenitors in a sealed flask. When the sea water was decanted in the laboratory examined under X50 magnification, the tardigrades hovering among the moss tendrils came into focus, little rust-colored zeppelins tethered to baroque-looking bright green arabesques – some people call tardigrades "moss piglets."

The scientists let the droplet of sea-water dry. The tardigrades shut all ducts to the outside, withered into themselves, and dessicated – they shrunk into inert skeletal forms, featureless and immobile. In this form, Schrobear’s clan proved to be even more resilient than others of their genus. Not only water but air was sucked out of the hypobaric chambers where they were tested and the inert tardigrade mummies were alternately roasted and, then, frozen – between minus 200 degrees and plus 800 centigrade, the tardigrade mummies endured and, then, when hydrated, cheerfully ambled back to life. Some of Schrobear’s cousins were irradiated by an Alektra AB gamma knife beam. The beam from this instrument, generated to destroy cancer cells, had no effect on the tardigrades. Schrobear’s species, in particular, resisted almost all attempts to destroy them – it was not that the little creatures thrived in hostile conditions, but, rather, that they seemed indifferent to them. In a waterless, crystal vacuum chamber, baked and, then, frozen to within a few degrees of absolute zero, blasted by deadly rays created by nuclear fission, the moss piglets simply withdrew into themselves, shrinking as they dried, the lymph in their coelums inhaled into their carapace, darkening into specks of matter dried from 80% fluid to less than 2 %, blackened germs that effloresced and, then, returned enthusiastically to life when drizzled by pipette into a droplet of water. One of Schrobear 75's cousins was shot into space on the Challenger, exposed to the void, where he orbited the earth 90 times before the capsule fell like a meteorite through layers of fire. The waterbear ensconced in the rocket’s sample chamber was dormant. But in a film of water, under the microscope, the creature rehydrated and came back to life, pooping enthusiastically as he shed his carapace in a full molt before knuckle-walking off in search of something to eat.

Schrobear #75 lived with others of his kind in a petri dish at the University of Technology in Delft. Once a month, crustose lichen scraped from trees in a nearby park was drizzled into the dish, mixed with distilled water to make a dilute tea. Periodically, a girl wearing ear-buds and listening to an I-Pod, made a census of the waterbears in the lichen suspension. Flattened out by the optical qualities of the 50X binocular microscope, the tardigrades looked a bit like greyish-brown crushed caterpillars, semi-translucent with tiny legs like spikes protruding from them, the tips of those appendages decorated with festive-looking short tentacles. They grazed on the lichen like indistinct cows, moving only imperceptibly. The light from the microscope warmed them and Schrobear #75 rolled over on his back to enjoy the radiance suffusing his world. There was neither up nor down and his insides felt pleasantly open, extending to the edges of the existence that he could sense, all ducts and spiracles dilated to enjoy the sweetness of things, his rhabdomeric eyes injecting a cloud of images into his brain, impressions that mingled with the sensations at his bristles to create a vaporous sense of a warm, well-lit interior expanding outward to all horizons.

This interior tilted and directions changed, the orbits spiraling slightly, and, then, there was a dislocation that turned the fields inside out – the corridors and doors began to slowly shut and Schrobear #75 felt himself darkening, a sensation we might experience as falling, albeit very, very slowly. Then, he slept. Then, he dreamed. His dream was bilaterally symmetrical – he dreamt it in both sides of the bundle of neurons that was his brain. To recount the dream properly, I would have to repeat its elements twice and array them in a symmetrical pattern about Schrobear #75's axis, but this would be repetitive and so I will provide his dream in this single version.

In his dream, Schrobear #75 was given a name and spoken about in Dutch, a gutteral language that seems to be almost all vowels. Because he had no ears, he could not hear clearly, but the sound waves in which his name was embedded were caught in the harrow of hairs on his body and he heard the words, albeit indistinctly. Schrobear’s name came from a famous fiction in quantum physics, Schroedinger’s cat. The cat posited by the Austrian physicist, Erwin Schroedinger, is a paradox that illustrates quantum superposition. In the world with which we are familiar, macroscopic objects occupy distinct spaces and can be relied upon to remain where placed except when compelled into motion. Motion, itself, is subject to Newtonian laws and the moving object, a cat, for instance, can be reliably tracked in space on the basis of the forces to which it is subject. But in realm of extremely tiny things, the notion of "object" undergoes a strange metamorphosis. Very small things, for instance, atomic particles, don’t occupy a single location – instead, their presence is defined by statistical equations that tell us where they might be located, but acknowledge a range of other locations extending throughout the entire universe where they also could be lurking. And, indeed, before certain types of measurements are taken, the particle’s existence is superposed – that is, the particle is conceived as existing in all such locations simultaneously. Measurement induces what is called decoherence – that is, collapses the probability function into a single location in space-time where the object can be located. Macroscopic systems, not subject to quantum effects, are thought to be always decoherent because of the multitude of factors impinging upon the object and binding it to a cartesian location, a place that can be graphed in terms of dimensional space and time. Schroedinger’s cat describes a mythical animal that remains in superposition –that is, in an infinite number of places and conditions – until it is observed by human eyes. According to the paradox, the famous cat is both dead and alive until someone sees it – once, the cat is measured by the human eye, that is, said to be in specific place, the animal ceases to be both dead and alive as the system collapses into either one of the two existential possibilities – the cat having been simultaneously dead and alive before we look at it, now is either dead or alive.

Schrobear #75 was nourished to act as a actual, living surrogate for Schroedinger’s famous cat. He had been selected for his resilience the way astronauts are chosen for their adventures – his role was to ride a quantum oscillator and, thereby, be in two places at one time. Scientists had constructed a tiny membrane of silicon nitride, a film only eight times the width of a DNA molecule. A silica crystal polished as a mirror was placed as a target in the center of the microscopic fleck of silicon nitride and the assemblage itself was fused into a quadrangle of flexible supporting fibers. This structure, cradling the membrane with its mirror target at its center, was built to oscillate. When set in motion, the membrane wiggled like gelatine, a tremor that could be induced by a laser-coherent stream of photons. If the membrane were set in motion, oscillating like a tiny trampoline, by photons of one wave-length, a subsequent burst of different wave-length photons, shot against the silicon mirror, would send the silicon nitride platform into superposition – in other words, nudged by two jets of photons at different wave-lengths (that is having different energy) the membrane could be made to oscillate at two separate superposed frequencies. In this state, the membrane is a quantum oscillator, demonstrating superposition. The experiment, although relatively easy to describe in principle, is difficult to perform – the quantum oscillator has to kept from decoherent factors that would collapse the system and destroy its superposition. Practically, this meant that the quantum oscillator had to be isolated in a chamber without impinging air or gas molecules and kept at a fixed temperature very close to absolute zero. The only impulse allowed to act upon the oscillator would be the variable wave-length photon streams emitted by a laser. Ordinary light, which is decoherent (that is, a melange of wave-lengths) would also have to be excluded from the vacuum chamber where the oscillator was mounted. The plan, therefore, was to load Schrobear #75 onto the oscillator’s membrane, evacuate air and exclude light from the experimental chamber and, then, cool the system to a few degrees above absolute zero. Then, the membrane would be nudged into superposition by coherent beams of photons from a laser aimed at the mirror on the oscillator. Schrobear #75 was perfect for the experiment – the conditions in the experimental chamber that would be lethal to almost all other forms of life would not affect him in the short term.

Schrobear #75 felt the signals impinging upon him lessening. His vents and ducts closed. He was no longer hungry even in his dreams. Blackness funneled into him through the columns of his eyes. Duration ceased. Then, a word was spoken. The word was like thunder: LET THERE BE LIGHT! He trembled at the command. Again lightning flashed and the words of thunder rumbled again. His bristles quivered and he was suddenly hungry but not only inside but also outside. He was hungry both within and without and his hunger was beyond him extending to the edge of existence and, also, concentrated at his center. He felt that the dispersal of his hunger threatened to tear him apart but there was really nothing to rend because he was already everywhere and nowhere. Then, everything flattened. He fell through layers of himself into himself.

Schrobear #75 was in wetness. He felt the locks of his carapace come apart and he was free from constraint. In the microscope, the technician noted that Schrobear #75 evacuated particles in his rectum while shedding his skin. He left the little heap of debris behind him, a heap of discarded garments, and ambled along on his little rigid legs, eating nematodes like popcorn.