Some of you readers were disappointed that I failed to explain the nature of the phenomenon that abducted our six heroes into the distant future. So I have decided to describe it here.

Also, since this is presently a topic on my mind, I wanted to experiment with different types of POV (point of view—but any Wattpad reader knows that). So I first thought I would write that story three times, once in third person deep, once in third person omniscient, and once in second person (whatever that is supposed to be). (The latter was out of pure curiosity—I wondered if it is possible to pull that POV off at all.)

But when I started writing, I realized that these POVs are fundamentally different, each one having its strengths and weaknesses. Forcing them all to tell the exact same story would not do them justice. So I changed the whole thing I bit. The three texts below now tell aspects of the same story, but they tell different aspects thereof.

I wonder what you think—if anyone reads these crazy ramblings at all, that is, and is, afterwards, still in a state to comment.

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Third person deep POV

Juan moved his cleaning cloth along the elegant curve of the machine's casing. He more felt than heard the soft hum emanating from it. The stainless steel glistened in the artificial light.

The machine was huge, endless. The physicists called it the accelerator. He just called it the machine.

He loved his work of cleaning, sweeping, and polishing, it felt like a prayer. Tending to the mighty machine in its underground lair was his profession and passion.

He dipped the cloth into the detergent in his bucket, kneading it methodically, then wringing it to remove superfluous liquid.

Repeating his caring strokes along a next part of the casing, he heard people enter the large hall. He looked down at them from his perch, a gangway on a scaffolding erected along a large, cylindrical part of the machine.

The three, one woman and two men, talked loudly, disturbing the church-like, humming atmosphere of the place. He tried to shut out their voices. But as they came closer, their babble resolved into words, making it impossible ignore them.

"But, Professor Twowoods," one of them said. A woman, her scalp of long, brown hair directly below him. "My calculations show..."

"Sorry, Professor," a second one interrupted. His bobbing head carried curly black hair framing a bald spot. "Monica's calculations need major revisions before we can discuss them seriously." He laid a hand on the woman's arm. "Monica, we'll look at your equations later. Come to my office in the afternoon, after lunch."

"But," the woman's voice assumed an unpleasantly shrill note. "It's really urgent. Only a slight increase in the magnetic crossfield might lead to the entanglement of the trajectories of the bosons..."

A sonorous chuckle emanated from the third person, who was obviously the professor. The others fell silent. "Monica, Monica," he said, his voice rich and rumbling. "Entanglement of trajectories ... really? States are entangled, not trajectories. And not only quantum states, but also those other states, the ones that fund our work."

Bald spot laughed at this, it must have been a joke. "You heard what he said, Monica. Don't worry your pretty little head. We'll straighten out your equations this afternoon."

Monica crossed her arms before her chest. "Please, Jake,..." she started, but the two men had already turned away from her and were now headed for the elevator that would take them up to the surface.

Juan shook his head. These physicists! They were always arguing about their weird theories. What did it matter, anyway? All that mattered was the machine.

Juan moved over to the other side of the section he was cleaning, in an attempt to put some distance between himself and the woman who still stood there, muttering to herself. Then he continued polishing the casing until he arrived at a panel carrying a series of levers. Most of them were pointing straight up at the ceiling, like soldiers in a parade. Only one lever was arranged under an angle, directed sideways.

That won't do, Juan thought. He frowned at the deviant lever, which carried a small label with the mysterious letters "MAGN CROSS".

Everything had to be tidy, proper and ordered here. This was science, after all. He seized the offending lever and pushed it upwards until it was neatly aligned with its siblings.

The machine's hum changed slightly, its usually peaceful voice assuming a more morose tone. Oops, it must be trying to tell him something. Well, this might not have been his best idea. He reached for the lever when the light flickered briefly, and then he quickly returned it to its original position.

Third person omniscient POV

While our friends Leona, Steve, Jenny, Rose and Kevin were hiking towards CERN's information pavilion, relentlessly assailed by the downpour from the heavens, they were completely unaware of the events unrolling in the caverns beneath them. The caverns holding the mighty new accelerator ring of the research facility.

Professor Alfred Twowoods entered the subterranean hall that was home to one of the detector stations. He was accompanied by Assistant Professor Jake Watt and that Ph.D. student, a pretty girl whose name he did not remember. She was talking to him, about some theory of hers. That was something people were doing all the time. He did not pay close attention. His mind was on yesterday's dinner, an exquisite châteaubriand in that new restaurant at the lake.

"Listen, um ...", he said, fixing her with his pale blue eyes.

"Monica," she prompted, having heard rumors that he tended to forget everyone's name these days. She smiled at him sweetly in an effort to gain his benevolent attention.

"... Monica", he nodded. "You should definitely discuss your work with ... er ... Jake here." He placed a fatherly arm on the Assistant Professor's shoulder. "But that must wait. Because now, if you would excuse us, we have a meeting for a pre-lunch aperitif over at the French cafeteria—for professorial staff only, I'm afraid." He did look forward to those croissants au jambon they made there.

"But, Professor Twowoods," Monica quickly injected, seeing her chances to show the professor her ideas slipping through her fingers. "My calculations show..."

"Sorry, Professor," Jake Watt said, in an attempt to stem the flood of words he feared were about to pour out of her. "Monica's calculations need major revisions before we can discuss them seriously." He laid a hand on her arm, trying to calm her. "Monica, we'll look at the equations later. Come to my office in the afternoon, after lunch."

"But," Monica objected desperately, "it's really urgent. Only a slight increase in the magnetic crossfield might lead to the entanglement of the trajectories of the bosons..." She knew that entanglement was the Professor's favorite field of study and hoped he would take the bait.

"Monica, Monica." The Professor held up a hand. Secure in the knowledge that he knew everything about entanglement, her few words were proof to him that she did not. "Entanglement of trajectories ... really? States are entangled, not trajectories. And not only quantum states, but also those other states, the ones that fund our work." He felt proud of the pun, they came to him so rarely these days.

Jake Watt suspected that his Professor must have been joking, so he gave a hearty laugh, even though he wasn't sure he really got the point. Then he patted Monica's arm once more. "You heard what he said, Monica. Don't worry your pretty little head. We'll straighten out your equations this afternoon." He turned away and pushed the Professor towards the elevator.

"Please, Jake,..." Monica gazed after the two men, fuming. She knew she was right.

This little scene, which neatly reestablished the venerable pecking order of academia, had a number of significant consequences.

First, Monica started arguing with herself, an activity that would finally lead her to make a decision about her future career and what she would do with that theory of hers.

Second, Juan, the cleaner responsible for this section of the plant, decided to relocate himself to another part of the machine in order to get out of earshot of the woman's mutterings. There, he ran into a series of levers controlling the raw strengths of the various fields that reigned in the particles in the accelerator. One of them controlled the magnetic crossfield. That was the very same field that Monica had recognized to be so crucial. While most of the levers were perfectly aligned upwards, the one for the crossfield was pointing sideways. This rubbed Juan the wrong way—he was a very orderly kind of person. So he decided to give that lever a little nudge to straighten it up.

At the moment he did so, a number of protons idling at relativistic velocities through the accelerator ring happened to hit a nearby target. Thus, they gave rise to a shower of secondary particles. Two of them, of a bosonic nature, hit the now increased magnetic cross field while being unusually close to each other, and their trajectories got entangled. Monica's theory was dead on target.

Now, and not even Monica had grasped this fully, trajectory entanglement is contagious in its nature. Hence, the entanglement quickly spread through the machine around it, weaving all kind of known and unknown particles into a completely new thing of matter, apart from—and yet strangely intertwined with—the universe we know. The thing created in this way quickly grew. It fed on photons, thereby temporarily darkening the world around it. Then, an electromagnetic field in the Gigahertz range happened to hit it at its exact resonance frequency—its sweet spot, you may say. That field was the one emitted by Kevin's mobile phone, up on the surface, when his mom called him.

In mere nanoseconds, the thing centered around that phone. It anchored itself in the matter of the wet field our friends were crossing, forming a sphere around them. The phone's signal generated undamped harmonic oscillations, which made the thing tear the fabric of space and time. A heartbeat within it became centuries outside. When the phone lost contact with its base station, it tuned to a new frequency band, in a desperate yet futile attempt to keep Kevin connected with his mom. Thus, the phone's signal left the thing's resonance, and the thing just plopped, leaving our friends stranded in a world of ruins.

Second person POV (kind of)

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Cc.: [email protected]

Subj.: Meeting yesterday afternoon

Date: 2016-11-05 13:33

Attachment: Scan23584202.pdf

Hey Jake

Yesterday morning, you have offered to help me 'straightening out' my equations. You planned to prove my theory of the entanglement of trajectories to be pure gibberish. But, as you may have been surprised to note, I did not show up. Your little tête-à-tête with me did not happen. As usual, you'll expect an explanation. Well, here it is.

When you first met me, almost a year ago, you perceived me as a student who had just finished her master thesis. Someone who was so thrilled to work at CERN, with beautiful minds, such as yours. You were pleased to have me, pleased to get a grunt doing menial tasks for you in order to earn her Ph.D.—and you did not mind that she was a good-looking grunt.

So you made me do all that work you were too busy to do yourself, such as swapping the 1024 photo-multipliers of detector chamber 3A5, one by one. You didn't have time for that, unfortunately, because you were so busy fawning over good old Professor Twowoods in order to get your paltry assistant professor tenure extended.

And when you realized that your new Ph.D. student did everything you asked her to do, professionally, you went a step further. You wondered how far this would get you. And you got rejected, badly so. That was a shame you found hard to digest. So when I came up with that theory of mine, your oh so beautiful mind refused to give it a chance.

Now, there you were yesterday afternoon, in your tiny cubicle. You were waiting for your student to show up. You felt eager to generously review her work and to explain where she went wrong. But your student did not show up.

And now you get this little rant of an e-mail. In its attachment, you will find a scan of your grunt's letter where she tells CERN that she quits, that she'll look for an employment elsewhere, at a place where her efforts are appreciated.

And, in case you might want to check that theory of trajectory entanglement: You'll notice that it has just—accidentally—been deleted from the server. You'll never know what you have missed there. It was Nobel prize stuff.

Best, and take care not to entangle your trajectories next time.

Monica

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Argh, the last one, second person POV, was hard to do. I think it is typically used it to address you, the reader. Such as: "When you were reading chapters two and three of the book, you frowned. Your scientifically educated mind was crying out for an explanation..." But that seemed even harder to do—in this particular case at least—and potentially offensive; so Jake had to be the unwilling protagonist of the second person POV.

I conclude that I am very unlikely to ever write a book in second person POV. Omniscient has its merits, though. It's a great voice for jokes and sarcasm. But I guess it makes it harder to bind a tie between a reader and a character in that voice—that's easier in third person deep or first person.

That's all, but just for the moment.