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fenton-bus · 6 years

Text

Sagan's Comet

(a prologue)

∞

2020

If there is a causal relationship between the popularity of Barry Eisenberg's autobiography and the complete loss of journalistic integrity exhibited by the Manhattan press no one acknowledges it. In spaces formerly occupied by actual news, one can now find awed descriptions of the fun way the eighteen year old Portland native verbally decimates the Buzzfeed contributor brave enough to cross the threshold of his lair. Articles dedicated to examining the significance of his hoodie collection (consisting solely of secondary colors) are written with the zest and intensity of individuals delivering the defining information of the age. Between covering Syrian conflicts and Zayn's solo career these adults with journalism degrees they allegedly worked hard for print wild speculation about what Barry's digital watch says about him as a person, maps his evolution from monosyllables to making a Newsweek reporter cry whilst thanking him for the opportunity through her tears, and publishes three thousand word think pieces heavily suggesting that he is the voice of his generation.

Two months into his junior year at Columbia, Barry becomes a meme.

According to the lanky, mustachioed Starbuck's barista (who enjoys all the benefits of tumblr fame for two glorious minutes before he's brought down by an old "problematic" Burning Man post.) he waits in line every other Thursday before his Applied Calc class, and one morning he is informed-with an unfathomable regret-that they are currently out of bran muffins.

Barry allegedly makes a face that defies the descriptive power of the written word.

Skylar totally believes in fate. He was meant to come in that day, despite dancing on the precipice of being fired for coming to work after ingesting some "herbal refreshment". He was meant to get dragged behind the counter to fix the espresso machine, meant to turn around to grab the wrench at the exact moment Barry made That Face. He grabs his phone, snaps a pic and before Todd can offer the dude a blueberry substitute, twelve hundred people have added gross looking block text to Skylar's post. That Face becomes a universal constant just as relevant when describing reactions to sexism (When ur in a patriarchal society ) as it is to receiving troubling medical news (TMW UR DOCTORS ALL: GENITAL WARTS!!!?!1) . Kids aim That Face at unprepared parents in the aisles of Toys R Us. Girls just trying to enjoy happy hour with their besties clock the dudes halfway across the bar with The Face and the "you're the only ten I see" dies in the bros' throats. Tired moms schlepping their kids from one hellish interpretative dance class to another collapse against the seats of their Subaru Foresters and That Face all over the traffic cop worried about his quota and are let on their merry way with a stern warning. After announcing a pop quiz in Applied Calculus Professor Bevens is hit with sixty-two different versions of That Face.

The effect is so powerful\disturbing the professor decides to take lunch in his office that day.

When Mike Wallace asks Dr. Josef Stenberg why we, as a culture, are so fascinated the noted historian and scholar replies that The Face "effortlessly and intrinsically captures the depth of the human experience."

∞

There is a three day period wherein The New York Times makes a genuine attempt at substance before all parties involve realize how difficult it actually is and decide that mining Barry's first two years at MIT for scandal is much more creative use of their time.

The seven article series proves so popular the rate of traffic often causes the site to crash, to the point where the NYT puts an ad for a new head of IT in its own newspaper. (An error brought to their attention by the former IT supervisor as she storms out of their office making two very rude gestures with both of her hands.) The articles come dangerously close to reporting the significance of the solar ray that's currently powering the campus greenhouses and the fifteen classroom\lecture halls running on fossil fuels before remembering it's audience and veering back to the good stuff: in addition to campaigning long and hard to get one of his professors fired, (because the individual is a plaintiff in a current lawsuit his name has been redacted from all documentation in order to protect his identity. In any further documentation he shall be referred to as Mr. S.) Barry starts a (still active) war between the physics and computer science majors, stages a ninety-day sit in at Lanctom Hall and refuses to attend class until the United States converts to the metric system, attends seven out of his ten classes in his pajamas, builds a Death Ray, stages his own funeral, and has regular off-campus lunches with Neil Degrasse-Tyson where (according to an unnamed source) they discuss plans to reanimate Carl Sagan.

The Times receives countless emails from current and former MIT professors the content of which ranges from "Come on guys" to paragraphs of legal jargon, but because facts are annoying and can easily ruin a good time, they only publish one. For Mr. S who is, at this very moment, teaching a remedial chemistry class in a Hoboken public school, seeing his words in print gives him the necessary courage to take out an entire page of the Op Ed column for the sole purpose of calling Barry an "odious, mouth-breathing cretin" (among other, more foul monikers) and insist that his time at MIT is "the most convincing super villain origin story I've ever seen." Buried in the seventh paragraph under piles of incoherent rage is a fairly lucid comparison to Lex Luthor, which all things considered, Barry rather likes.

At six-thirty the following morning,

Don't you have young minds to compromise?

appears in the comments section of Mr. S's article. The user name is something banal and forgettable, but the 25 x 37 armadillo icon is responsible for the overjoyed intern's giggle snort and the frantic search for a 2013 Scientific American article in which Barry mentions that armadillos are often underestimated because of their size and deceptively docile demeanor.

∞

2017

So.

Barry wakes up in Naldo's body, which because he invents time travel when he's fifteen and perfects localized teleportation over summer break his freshman at year at MIT isn't even the weirdest sentence he's ever had to type. It isn't even the strangest thing that happens that year, (that literal prizes goes to Sergey Abermoff a stunningly mediocre marine biologist who wins the Noble Prize for his contributions to Alaskan Puffer Fish research. From March to August Barry is engaged in a furious letter-writing campaign to the Academy because seriously? Dr. Gloria Hernandez discovers and isolates what appears to be a second God particle but generous funds are being allocated to his dad's favorite Red Lobster entree? No.) While he makes a concentrated effort to document his daily experiments, and somewhat less dedicated attempts to record his thoughts about more personal subjects (he objects to the use of the word "personal" in this context because it implies a mutual exclusivity between the personal and the scientific where no such distinction exists, but he digresses) spontaneous ionic transference is apparently unworthy of documentation. Reading through the accounts of the incidents of that spring, scholars and historians alike are surprised to find only the briefest, most perfunctory outline of events.

It's an odd, tangential footnote in most textbooks, and even the larger more expansive biographies tend to refer to it transiently. One of the foremost examples of this phenomenon being Edgar Chen's Event Horizon which glosses over the events in a way Joan Collins of the New York Times calls "whimsically dismissive". Of the archived articles, research papers, essays, books, films, digital recordings and miscellaneous sundries that number in the thousands only two hundred and eighty-six contain references to the events of the spring of 2017. Of that number one hundred and thirty-seven are passing references, eighty-five are footnotes, five are visual references ( two screen grabs, a gif, and two vague scenes in the Cern documentary and the feature film Singularity, all of which are subject to intense and varying interpretation) forty- two are allusions in popular fiction, twelve are auditory, and seventeen are references to supplementary reading material that contain descriptions of the events so vague they border on unintelligible. In chapter four of Jackie Iron's (famed director of the Crabnormal Behavior Octo-thrilogy) tell-all Shellin' Out, Barry writes:

"I've never been fond of the "body-swap" trope. At best it's a cheap device used to create a sense of empathy between two characters possessing diametrically opposing viewpoints. At worst it's a study of the traumatic power of unrelenting body horror, a state of such brutal, paradigm-shifting physical and emotional dissonance that it's difficult to imagine surviving the encounter without constantly testing the tensile strength of reality for the remainder of one's natural life. Why would a writer subject their audience to something so terrible?"

Strangely, Barry's autobiography makes only a passing reference to the event. He glosses over his years at Columbia (there are a few offhand references to a Washington think tank he attends in the summer of 2017) but expands upon graduate school in such unrelenting, excruciating detail that chapters forty-seven through fifty-three are known to make a few students nauseous. The clinical, almost detached narrative prompts Melanie Fung, freshman human interest columnist of the Columbia Daily Spectator, to write: "The text habitually bathes Eisenberg in the soft light of scientific heroism, but the more personal, and possibly, more interesting threads of the narrative are glaringly absent."

It isn't until Jill Suarez publishes The Eisenberg Principle that the personal elements of Barry's life-coming out to his parents, the bullying he experiences in school, the two week period he spends in Renaldo Montoya's body-are recounted in detail.

#space-time found fam #singularity #friendship is magical realism

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