Defying Gravity
Medlock
7:59 p.m. Saturday, August 13, 2050
The Solvay Conference for the Advancement of Physics
Brussels
Medlock couldn’t help but notice that he was watching the world of institutional physics from the back seat yet again. At least this time he was backstage awaiting his introduction as the keynote speaker at their most prestigious conference. This was the same conference that in 1927 produced the most famous photo in scientific history: Dirac, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Bohr, Curie, Lorentz, Planck, Pauli, de Broglie, and the big kahuna himself, Einstein, all in one photo and all formulating the truths of the universe. Now, the guy who a hundred years later had achieved what none of them could – the theory of EV-ER-Y-THING – wasn’t even allowed to put the title of “Physicist” on his nametag, so he put “Fuck you, from your keynote speaker” instead.
“Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen,” the stiff-suited Chairman of the society began. Medlock could just glimpse the scene through a thin break in the curtains at the back of the stage. He had hoped the man would stick to the introduction he had provided him, but with the line “Our speaker tonight is no stranger to controversy, but I’ll ask you to please refrain from …” he knew otherwise. He had also specified that he enter the stage through red velvet traveler curtains opening at the center. Even with the half million dollars The Kite Factory had paid to secure this coveted spot on the final night of their conference, however, the dolts of physicsland had decided against velvet, and against red. Medlock reached out and rubbed the rough black polyester between his silk-gloved fingers and cringed, but he had to put it from his mind. All that mattered now was that he go out and give these people the show of a lifetime.
The lights across the vast ballroom began to dim causing people to scramble to their seats. The place was packed; standing room only with over a thousand physicists, physicist-adjacents, journalists and gawkers, not to mention the millions watching online. His snub by the Nobel committee, and his very public reaction to that reaction in the week since, had become a media circus, helping pique interest and drive up viewership of this event. The audience’s clamor, laughter, and even the hisses from some of them showed they were more than eager to hear from their special guest.
He squinted to confirm that fifty of his pool boys, all dressed in stretch-tight dark blue cotton suits with white pinstripes, lined the walls of the vast room, prepared for their role in the evening’s escapades.
He turned back to see his lead pool boy, Stellen, along the stage’s back wall. The tall, devastatingly handsome and brilliant Swede was lit in the faint glow of his tablet, dressed in the same suit as his friends. Stellen nodded his readiness.
Medlock checked the fit of his headdress one last time, then rubbed his hands together in anticipation.
“Now, please welcome to the stage our keynote speaker for 2050, Mister Brian Medlock.”
The crowd’s response was everything he had hoped for. Loud applause, boos, hisses, hoots of support from his pool boys, and as many shouts of venom from the scientists – a perfectly accurate reflection of the world’s opinion of him. One thing, however, wasn’t quite as he had expected: The curtains did not open.
He waited, the audience settled down into a rumble, with moments of laughter at whatever the Chairman was gesturing, but the curtains still did not move. Stellen stepped up to his side and shot the flashlight from his tablet upward. The problem was immediately clear: These curtains weren’t on a pull. The nincompoops had simply hung them from a rod.
“Fuckers,” Stellen said. He stepped up to pull open the drape manually, then turned back to Medlock and scanned his garish getup up and down. After a moment’s thought and completely unprompted, but to Medlock’s utter delight, the young man stripped down to his briefs. A key trait Medlock looked for in his pool boys was their willingness to be fabulous, even outlandish, and when necessary mostly naked. It was encouraging to see one with such sizable initiative. Stellen had to have anticipated that something like this might happen, because his underwear bore the exact same white silk, silver sequin and rhinestones as Medlock’s outfit.
Following a chef’s kiss from his boss, the lean Stellen swooped his thick blonde hair back and stepped through the curtain. He stood for a long moment in the spotlight on full display to roars of laughter, applause and cheers. He then grabbed the right edge of the drape and pulled the wedge of black wide. The entire crowd gasped at the sight of the supremely fantastic Medlock.
He had enlisted a team of fashion and aerial designers to create his ensemble, which would help make his speech go massively viral. Even more important than the garment, however, were the anti-gravity accouterments under the control of Stellen’s tablet. They’d never rehearsed with his pool boy in only underwear, however, something which Medlock now regretted.
Medlock slowly pranced forward with his arms held out from his sides and with his palms facing the crowd, allowing the broad drape of his glittering sleeves to be fully appreciated. The society’s Chairman, who had remained on stage to greet him, backed away and down to the front row with a stupefied, slightly horrified expression.
He hit his mark and the noise from the audience quieted, allowing the backdrop of wind chime sounds to be heard. He looked down at the monitor of the broadcast which perfectly captured him and his regalia. It was stunning, and something never before attempted. Created from his own sketches in the style of papal vestments, it was anchored by a heavy white silk overcoat interwoven with a pattern of silver sequin and rhinestone. The large silver buttons extending down the front to the floor gave the piece a flamboyant military uniform flair. The brightly lit anti-gravity ring floating above his head hoisted fifty strands of floor-length silver and rhinestone beads which completely encircled him. With every move, the silver balls at their ends chimed a harmonious pentatonic chord of A, B, D, E, and F#, at various octaves. Their ethereal chimes were broken only by the ongoing sounds of awe from the audience. He turned his head slowly from side to side and the clang of the balls transitioned from the pentatonic chord to a multi-octave F, A, G … F, A, G … F, A, G … F, A, G. That was Stellen’s cue.
The chimes ceased, the room fell completely silent, then the crowd gasped and began applauding wildly as the silver balls at the end of the beads fanned upward and outward, rotating the lighted ring at their center behind Medlock’s head like a giant halo. With the silver and rhinestone beads extending like shimmering spokes outward from his head in all directions, the effect was like as many rays of light shooting outward from the sun.
The oohs and aahs settled, and he was ready to begin.
“Thank you for allowing me to pay you money to secure this austere occasion,” he said in a dramatic, empathetic tone, his hands still held plaintively out to his sides. The audience laughed. “To begin, for those of you who still haven’t accepted Persistence and the timeless Fabric as the explanation for all things, I’ve decided to demonstrate its conclusion that time doesn’t really exist by starting with the answers to your Q&A questions, which you will be submitting at the end of my talk.” Laughter and tension. “First up, the answer to your last question.” He withdrew a large index card from his sleeve and read it aloud. “Mister Medlock, does your theory of Persistence really mean my work has been a complete waste of time?” More laughter. “And your next to last question, ‘Is there anything we might do to become less misguided and remedy our insanity.’” More laughter. More groans. “Yes. You should read my newest book, ‘Try Adopting a Plural Pronoun. You Might Get More Done.’” Groans rolled across the crowd at that one, although his pool boys laughed and clapped. “Finally your first question, this coming from your Chairman.” He gave a subtle nod toward the man who was now leaning over to deny it with his neighbors. “‘Mr. Medlock,’” he read again from the card, “‘we’re pleased that the Nobel committee has rejected your attempts to claim the prize in physics.’” Shouts of agreement, laughter and applause, although his pool boys around the perimeter, along with a significant minority of others, booed. “‘Why do you think you lost out, and how does the rejection make you feel?’”
He placed the notecard back into his sleeve and folded his hands neatly in front of him. “I am pleased to have this opportunity to respond officially to the committee’s decision last week to not even consider my candidacy for the Nobel Prize in Physics.”
This was what the audience and the millions watching at home had been waiting for. The grizzled physicists lining the front row were all quite literally on the edge of their seats, with the notable exception of a morbidly obese man whose wheelchair strained to support his massive carcass which was bulging into the center aisle. Honestly, the enormous creature looked like the guy in Monty Python who exploded after eating a ‘wafer-thin’ mint.
“Dunkle materie,” Medlock continued, and waited for that to sink in for the worldwide audience. “Dark matter. That’s what happened, or didn’t, as the case may be.” The audience uttered various sounds of recognition of the controversy, and of his grievance. “For our worldwide viewers, in the 1930s, cosmologists discovered that the gravitational pull inside galaxies was many times more than what they expected based on the observed mass. Physicists at that time, more than a century ago, including many of the people sitting in the front row of this room from the looks of it, knew a mystical substance called dark matter must be present.” The physicists began to get restless. “Try to follow me here, because this gets quite complicated, but it’s dark.” He paused to allow for awkward laughs and rumblings of discomfort. “And lo and behold, you looked, and you never saw it, which was just the proof of existence you had predicted.” Their sour looks of resentment showed the controversy was still fresh. “So that’s how especially all of you in the front row, supposedly the best and brightest of our species, knew dark matter was absolutely, positively, without even a shred of doubt, there. Because it is dark, and we never found it!”
The ancient physicists in the room, the most prestigious of them in the front row, played their parts perfectly with dismissive waves of their hands, boos and shouts of disdain. It was truly remarkable. After nearly twenty years since the team in Hawaii had proven his theory, this group had never accepted the futility, the complete ridiculousness, of their century-old wild goose chase. Dark matter wasn’t there. It had never been there, because it didn’t exist, and he suspected their disgust for him, which was actually a manifestation of their own guilt and shame, would never go away. He used to be put off by their recalcitrance, but now he thrived on it.
Everyone eventually settled back down, and he continued. “The prize was never going to be given to me, even after twenty years of how unwaveringly correct it has proven to be, and even though you knew I deserved it.” That recurring quip drew the expected daggers. “No, the prize would be given instead to whoever either confirmed the presence of dark matter or did away with it once and for all, as long as that person was not me!” The dusty contingent in the room struggled to its feet and sustained its raucous applause for the better part of a minute. Oh, how he loved that they hated him for being right. “I am pleased for Myriam Thompson. She’s more than worthy of the prize for her Thompson Modification of General Relativity.” He looked back and gestured for his assistant to come forward. The crowd showered the Adonis with their support as he walked ahead like a model on a runway. “Stellen, please explain for our viewers at home why Myriam’s work was so important.”
“Certainly. Myriam Thompson used the Cosmic Microwave Background as a proxy for the varying density of the Fabric. She calculated that the gravitational force the Fabric exerts is 17.075 times that of visible mass when averaged across the spatial dimension. Her finding was precisely the amount of gravitation we observe with Einstein’s General Relativity holding true, and without the need for dark matter.”
The audience’s initial surprise was quickly followed by applause. It always astounded people to learn that Medlock's pool boys were not just beautiful, they were also brilliant. “Stellen here is a postdoc in persistence physics at the University of Bologna,” he said to more claps, and his assistant retreated back against the drape. “So dark matter was disproven, and Myriam Thompson won the Nobel.”
Their applause for Myriam was predictable. They liked Myriam. Everyone liked Myriam, and as bad as it was to lose, it hadn’t been nearly as bad as Zhang Wang winning the prize in mathematics a year earlier. At least Thompson proved something real.
“To clear the air once and for all, I am not upset that I did not receive the medal. After all, I did not weigh the medal. I did not measure the medal. And so, therefore, at least according to the arrogant asswipes of the Nobel committee, it might not be a medal at all.” That drew plenty of laughs and some applause. “Oh, and another thing. I don’t need the validation of a bunch of self-absorbed Swedish octogenarians who haven’t come up with a damn thing in their entire pathetic careers.”
To his surprise, a significant number of people stood and cheered, although the elders in front were not among them. The obese man sat sour-faced with his enormous arms folded atop his frontbutt like loaves of moldy ciabatta.
“Now, if you do not mind, I’d like to summarize exactly how I saved our planet.”
Stellen initiated Medlock’s next trick by tapping his tablet and holding the curtain open. Dozens of rectangular aerial blocks, a foot and a half wide by two feet tall by a few inches thick, streamed onto the stage. The shimmering boxes, each lighted in one of a rainbow of colors, lined the rear of the stage and immediately gave the stage much needed showman pizzazz. Their colored surfaces turned into a single digital display with the glowing image of an ancient tome. The cover featured a double-headed eagle in gold leaf holding a crest with the letter M, and the words HOW I DID IT By Brian Medlock.
The smattering of applause among the laughter showed that at least some recognized his little joke. The design was the same as the instructions for reinvigorating dead bodies in Medlock’s favorite comedy, Young Frankenstein.
Each of the floating blocks changed to display its own image of the book, then they streamed past Medlock towards the audience to line up directly over physicists in the front row. These were the exact men and women who had successfully lobbied to prevent him from winning the Nobel, and Medlock took great joy in their expressions of fear and uncertainty as the blocks lowered in front of their faces then held steady just above their laps. All at once, each of the blocks turned on its edge, hinged open, and dumped a physical copy of the book directly onto each of their laps. The books were ten kilos each, so their exclamations of minor injuries were to be expected.
The book that landed on the obese man’s pannus bounced onto the floor. He pulled a grabbing device from his wheelchair’s pouch, extended it, but still failed to seize the book. A sympathetic neighbor placed it next to the ciabatta.
It was time for the final act of his performance.
His arms were again outstretched in true Medlock fashion. He double-checked the placement of his feet, then the fifteen-foot-diameter anti-gravity disc his team had secretly machined into the wood of the stage began to rise, lifting Brian Medlock skyward. Whatever resistance the onlookers may have had to his awesomeness and his penchant for the dramatic vanished as their gasps and awe gave way to an explosion of wild applause.
His liftoff went almost exactly as planned. The disc ascended three feet above the floor and held steady, with the crowd on its feet cheering. He could immediately tell the added weight of his costume, however, had created more instability in the disc than they had seen in rehearsal. He had personally designed the disc to fit that stage, and it was their smallest attempt yet at such a disc, and the smaller the disc the more unstable. He had thought about using an open basket, similar to his design of the Nivola for Archbishop Benincasa in Milan, but that would have eliminated the element of surprise, so a disc it was. He scooched his left foot forward by an inch and his right foot back, which seemed to settle things.
He looked down and smiled with the monitor’s confirmation that the white ring of light emanating from the disc’s edge matched the white of his halo perfectly. Honestly, his appearance was less papal and more resurrected Christ, making it even more fantastic than he’d envisioned.
He began his elevated proclamation with the recitation of the summary page from HOW I DID IT, which he had presented so many times he could have done it in his sleep. The lighted aerial boxes had returned to frame his backdrop in pulsating starbursts of color, which made it even more perfect.
“Thank you for allowing me a moment of … levity,” he said with a little laugh. “Please now turn to the last page of your hymnal.” To their credit most of the physicists did as he asked. The words materialized in a kaleidoscope of colors on the screen as he read. “In summary, following my publication of my theory of Persistence in the mid-20s, and following the validation of that theory with the observation of gravitational tunnels in 2030, building on my superior intuition and the genius material designs of my co-founder Theo Clarendon, on the morning of September 19th, 2039 at 11:42 a.m. and 19 seconds, we successfully shielded the force of Earth’s gravity for the very first time. The winning combination, which you all know as Sam-CAM, was a repelling corrugate of Samarium Cobalt, sandwiching a paper-thin foil of tungsten thorium inside a narrow chamber of argon gas, and the application of microwave pulses at a frequency of 1.11 GigaHertz through the chamber.
“The Kite Factory’s production of anti-gravity skins, in partnership with several other companies and governments around the world, has propagated our invention and has set up the greatest transformation of everyday life in human history. Within the next two years, we will see the elimination of fossil fuel engines, the elimination of automobiles from our streets, and we will have saved more than a million people from traffic deaths.” That inspired a very satisfying round of applause. “Within the next four years, ships, trains and trucks will become obsolete as any parcel, no matter how small or large, will be able to be delivered at almost no cost and no emissions anywhere in the world in just a few hours. Within the next five years, with the help of the recent invention of ambient energy, anti-gravity perpetual power will eliminate the need for all combustion, nuclear and reusable fuel power plants.”
He could tell he had turned the tide with the audience. They could no longer afford to ignore the changes that his theory and his invention had brought.
He waited until their applause had faded to silence. Stellen turned the lighted panels behind him to a gentle blue, and Medlock’s voice lowered to barely above a whisper. “My friends, among all the phenomenal advancements over these last twenty years, the thing that I am proudest of is the impact that my theory and invention are having on the planet, and on our ability to continue to call this place home.” The crowd was now hanging on his every word, and many were getting emotional. “This transformation, the salvation of our beautiful Earth, has been far more immediate and more profound than I could have ever imagined.”
A spark of applause from his pool boys became sustained and grew throughout the crowd, causing his energy to blossom. “Just last month, our atmospheric carbon dioxide dropped for the very first time since the industrial revolution, to just under 500 parts per million.”
The growing applause buoyed him further. “In our lifetimes, except for those of you in the front row, sorry, but in the rest of our lifetimes, we will return to pre-industrial levels – pre-industrial levels – of CO2!”
Stellen used his tablet to steer Medlock’s disc gently towards the crowd. Feeling a faint cramp in his left leg, he bent his knees to lower his center of gravity, and adjusted just in time as the disc shifted. I really should have rehearsed in full costume.
He floated slowly up the center aisle and continued at full blast, “The Amazon is wet, our mountains have snow, and our desserts are full of flowers!” The people, most all of them now his people, were on their feet and cheering loudly.
He settled over the very center of the room, and as he began to rise like a pop star in the middle of a stadium, he proclaimed “I, Brian Medlock, am proud to have saved the planet Earth for all of humanity!”
As he settled halfway up the colossal room’s height, he looked out across the roaring masses with his arms outstretched benevolently. The spotlights were all on him as his battalion of pool boys gathered underneath and all around him.
His disc rotated to face him back toward the front of the room. He folded his hands and nodded at Stellen in preparation for their finale. The young men joined their hands under the glow of the disc, and began to sing an a cappella harmony so glorious that the audience immediately silenced.
Something has changed within me
Something is not the same
I'm through with playing by the rules
Of someone else's game
He had been rehearsing the incomparable centerpiece of the classic musical Wicked, Defying Gravity, with his pool boys for three months. He was ready to show off his own pipes, which had been quite impressive in his youth. He slowly raised his head against the halo’s starburst of silver and rhinestone. He joined in as the lead of his gay men’s chorus.
It's time to try defying gravity
I think I'll try defying gravity
And you can't pull me down
His baritone nailed most of the pitches perfectly, with only a slight bobble here and there, coinciding with the bobbles of his disc. Seeing the balance challenge, Stellen thoughtfully brought the disc down to just five or six feet above the carpet at the front of the center aisle. The disc rotated to face him outward toward all his newfound fans.
His chorus filed up onto the stage as they crescendoed towards one of the greatest finishes in Broadway history. This was it, the final, jubilant stanza. He joined in again, at full throttle, to deliver its soaring finish.
And nobody in all of Oz
The lights, the cameras …
No wizard that there is or was
Everyone on their feet, not a dry eye in the house, a worldwide audience of millions … Here it was. The moment the entire world had been waiting for, that final, iconic, F5 tornadic blast from the most wicked witch the west has ever seen. Even the fatass just below to his left seemed pleased, although why the man was fiddling again with his grabber was mystifying.
The chorus completed their final line to pave his way down this, his, yellow brick road:
Is ever gonna bring me down!
He raised his arms up, looked to the sky, took in a huge breath fully prepared to take his place among Streisand, Lupone and Menzel, and just as the final stratospheric “Ahhhhh” escaped his lips in a pitch-perfect D♭, he was toppled from below.