Witch photographer

Goth space fairies aren’t bad space fairies. But, they sometimes do bad things.

It would be the very last thing you’d do. To anger a goth space fairy when her wand is alight.

Goth space fairies are not a race of fairies, more a subculture. You’d think that over the billions of billions of years (that’s a billion with a billion zeros) that there’d be an evolution of fairies.

I.e. primitive, simple, cave dwelling, rock bashing fairies to hyper civilised and ultra intelligent fairies with off shoots and dead ends to an evolutionary tree.

Not so.

There are, for sure, primitive fairies only just now crawling out of the mud and peak pinnacle, hyper-evolved fairies, but they all exist at the same time. The same space fairy time. (My time, here, and your time, there, dear reader, are not in any way connected.)

Goth space fairies, though they look to our eyes like the rebellious, punk, death worshipping goths, with Doc Martins, black and purple clothes and silver jewellery, smoking fags and moaning about shit. However, they’re just one of those coincidences that happen with infinite time.

Of course, not all goth space fairies wear black. Some, wear white. I think they’re ghost goth space fairies. But, it’s difficult to get a straight answer out of them. Their conversation, always, always leaves me more puzzled.

Soon, after the beginning of this universe, space fairies set about building primordial black holes. Trillions of billions of millions, each, no bigger than a microscopic part of an electron (see below).

That’s very, very soon after the very, very beginning, when things were still very, very dense. And everything, all the universe, was no bigger than 10 light years in diameter. That’s our star and a handful of nearby stars. From about 1 second after the bang, up to maybe 10 years later, during this primordial fireball, when the universe was only 100,000 light years wide, about the size of our Milky Way. Perhaps, this was the big part of the big bang. Of course, the numbers depend on which fairy you talk to, what they conceive a second to be and how long is a light year, anyway.

Using infernal, complex machinery and mathematical spells, they boil quarks down even smaller. I should remind you, dear reader, a quark is a part of a proton and here on Planet Earth you need your own particle accelerator to see them, albeit, very very briefly. Or, a lift on a fairy spaceship, as a contracted witch photographer. Atoms are made of protons, neutrons and electrons, but atoms, otherwise known as ‘matter’ won’t come along till later.

The fairy machines squash and squish till their victims “pop” and collapse in on themselves. Of course, not the sound “pop” as there’s no sound – no one can hear you scream, in space.

To get a sense of the sheer smallness, a black hole, with the mass of our Planet Earth, would be the size of a pea. Sugar snap or marrowfat, the Earth scientists, are a bit vague on the exact size. But, these, teeny tiny primordial black holes weigh about the same as Mount Everest. And that would be a BIG micro primordial black hole, I’m reliably informed.

So, pick up a pea and see if you can spot Mount Everest on your hand held ‘Planet Pea.’ OK. Now, you have your eye in, see if you can spot a pea on that Mount Everest on Planet Pea? Wow! You’ve good eyes. Or a Hadron Collider in the shed; where you boil your peas?

That light cannot escape from these teeny-tiny black hole monsters, but space fairies and their machines can buzz about like bees on flowers, amazes me. With all the warnings, that I am not to go near these microscopic bottomless pits. And… There’s so many, all over, all around me, trillions of billions of millions being squashed and popped.

Being timeless, dimensionless, locationless, non-corporeal entities. You should ask where space fairies came from. They are, after all, utterly different from anything we understand.

Simply, they are from another universe. First, I’ll explain multiverses…

During the Big Bang, space itself expanded faster than the speed of light, creating bubbles of space-time that eventually became separate universes. One of which we are at home. The others are a little different. Though they are all connected through black hole singularities. Like how bubbles are connected in the foam of your beer.

Out of the millions of billions of zillions of possible universes where matter is a tad different. Where the speed of light is slower or a little bit faster. Where our current understanding of physics varies this way or that. Where E=mc² and all the other equations are a little odd, to our eyes, to our brains and where it would be impossible for our bodies to exist at all — the wrong sort of matter. Our atoms: little itty bitty particles and that fussy Higgs field that gives everything, that needs it, weight. None of the atoms in our comfy slippers fits anywhere but within our particular Goldilocks universe.

No, they’re not from there. Not from any of those universes. Though, they were there, at the Big Bang. Our Big Bang. Shaping, guiding, gardening.

Space fairies are from one of the impossible, incomprehensible, bonkers universes. One of those infinite universes we simply cannot even imagine. Where there is no energy, nor matter. No light, nor time. Where our E=mc² is zero=zero x zero². Where all our clever equations are a jumble of rubbish.

There, they are at home. In their comfy slippers.

At times, during this assignment, I found my head exploding, like a really big inhalation of poppers.

No, not from actual amyl nitrate mixing in from my air supply, but from the sheer mind exploding facts, right here, in front of my eyes. Like fireworks, inside my eyes. Like hot and cold flushes bursting through my heart. Like everything I remember, my dogs, my children, my house and the overgrown lawn and market stall on a rainy Tuesday. Bursting into their constituent molecules, atoms, electrons and the insty bity bits that they’re made of, too, bursting into yet more insty wincy bity bits. And for those utterly tiny, utterly insignificant subatomic particles: muons, gluons, leptons to be here, every single one, now, being forged, cast, moulded, hammered, conjured into existence.

Each and every one. Of my dogs, my children, my lawn, the single raindrop on top of my market stall. Everything we see today, planets, stars, galaxies, is squashed into an even smaller size than a fraction of a fraction of a billionth of an atom. Here, in this fraction of a fraction of a billionth of a second, space fairies are hard at work bringing order to the universe.

I swallow and think, “no shame in being freaked out.”
This is the start of the universe, my universe, after all.