Mantha: A (Slightly) Nerdish Ghost Story.

There's the world we all live in, where things make sense: you jump off a roof and hit the ground; you throw a football and someone catches it (unless, alas, you're Tony Romo); planets revolve smoothly around suns, matter has volume and impenetrability, and no two things can occupy the same space. It's intuitive.

And then there's the subatomic world, where a whole lot doesn't make sense. Granted, you could say that we all live in the subatomic world as well, and that's true, kind of. It may be better to say that we live in spite of it. Just as the devil is in the details, the crazy is in the tiny. Things can most certainly occupy the same space at the same time. A thing can head opposite directions at the same time. Hell, a thing can effectively go back in time.

And it's this devil in the details that may put the ghost in the machine. Recently, the concept of quantum entanglement - Einstein's "Spooky action at a distance" - was validated in The Netherlands. To put it in layman's terms (because that's what I am), one thing can instantaneously affect another thing that it is entangled with - even if that other thing is light-years across the universe. That idea has some very far reaching implications, such as the fact that the universal light-speed limit may be somehow broken, and it as well may augur major advancements in travel, communication, cryptology, and even human consciousness and understanding.

It also may make some supernatural things quite natural. Just sayin'.

A Note on Mantha

Do you enjoy the writings of Dan Simmons? Do you, as do I, see him as a master who sits at the intersection of storytelling and scientific expository? Do you yearn for someone of magnificent talent and knowledge to pick up the baton of the Hyperion universe and run with it again? Good! Because so do I and this ain't it.

Rather, I present here the wistful daydreams of a non-author besotted by a character from that universe; a non-author who saw redeeming qualities in a galactic scourge; a non-author who quietly thinks that maybe she got the short end of The Shrike. Imagine, dear reader, how you could benefit mankind if you could phase shift, morph your face into a terrifying sneer, bite through a steel pipe, and see with radar. Now imagine how popular you'd be at school.
Because there remains the quiet little hope that maybe Radamanth was just misunderstood. Maybe Mantha is a cosmic reimagining of almost perfect evil from a piker who couldn't leave well enough alone. Or maybe she's nothing at all like her and not even remotely connected. A quantum entity would be many things at the same time, after all.

So thanks to anyone who zaps a tuppence this way to read this little yarn. Who knows? If you think the story has legs, and you're a real author, maybe we could further this little tale a bit. Go forth and read the Hyperion Cantos, and then get back to me. Maybe it's the latent fanboy in me, but I cannot understand why there aren't entire little cottage industries and spin-offs centered around this amazing book.