#writing #fiction #school

Emit

Note 02/26/2026: I wrote this for my final English Class in CC. I remember taking AP English Lang (and before that, Lit) in highschool. It was by far my favourite class I’ve ever had: The teacher was engaging, passionate, and positioned uniquely to teach a curriculum that was both necessary and interesting. During class it felt like everyone was friends, and there was a casual tone even during instruction. People would butt-in as needed to ask questions or to make a joke, and yet returned to formality as required. I think the advanced placement of the class also meant that everyone who was there was there because they wanted to; No one had any desire to protest or goof off, they were there to learn. It really was one of those special classes. I don’t mean to boast, but within that class I was good at writing. I scored a perfect 100% in that class and on the final exam, and while writing the words flowed with ease and confidence.

Come college, and despite my grades, I was forced to take an English class, where the bar was set at forming complete paragraphs and properly citing MLA sources. It was a low blow, and I walked into that class every week with a chip on my shoulder, feeling I had been robbed.

Come the end of class we had a final assignment to simply write whatever we wanted. I turned this in last minute, based on the premise of the Tachyon, a particle hypothesized to travel faster than the speed of light. If it did so, there are ways to think about it where causality itself can be violated, and things can happen before their cause. This was effectively a story about the implications of that.

It follows a woman buying a ‘Tachyon gun’ and murdering someone. She is then arrested and streamlines her process through the courts by confessing to everything, which her lawyer finds frustrating and the Judge indicative of her psychopathy. And yet when the verdict is about to be determined she is found innocent, seeing as the victim was dead before she even fired the gun. She is then let of scott free, before being murdered in retaliation by a Tachyon gun herself.

The story itself is kinda funny. I was probably high when I wrote it, given that the main character’s name is Mary Jane. I thought I was hot shit, and I’m pretty sure I directly ripped off some lines from The Stranger (and then had the gall to refer to it in the footnotes). This is even funnier because The Stranger was one of the stories we covered in my high school class, and I likely included a reference here to symbolize some sort of higher consideration to that class over the college one, which I considered trivial and below me.

Lastly, I have no idea if the science nor the footnotes within are accurate, and I have no desire to critique them. I ended up getting an A on this paper for originality. Read at your discretion.

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Part I

Mary was a seemingly normal person. Normal except for the fact that she had a strong abhorrence for one of her colleagues, Jane. She abhorred her so much in fact, that she wished Jane would be wiped off the face of the planet. It was not this murderous, fanatical repugnance that separated her from the “norm”, no; Every person on Earth feels compelled to murder at least once in their lives. Her aberrance came from her ability to admit that fact to herself and make it her most immediate goal. Mary wanted Jane dead.

It is not, and most likely will never be, known why Mary hated Jane so. Trying to find out why only raises more questions: Does Jane hate Mary? Why not just ignore her instead of taking such extreme measures? Why not just talk behind her back to ostracize her socially like a normal person? Why not murder someone else? Why does anyone do anything? Who even is Mary? Who is Jane? Why do their names put together form a slang-term for a currently federally illegal yet state regulated recreational/medicinal drug? Why do I care? What we do know is that if Mary hadn’t decided on her goal, this story would have been decidedly shorter.

Mary’s contempt didn’t limit itself like most people’s. A normal person would have been fine with simple murder. But Mary wouldn’t settle for anything less than the complete removal of Jane from this physical world. She wanted no body for a funeral, nor ash for an urn. If Mary could find a way to remove Jane’s memory from the psyche of every human being alive, including herself, she would have done so. Yet without such power, she settled on the comparatively simple goal of her disintegration into mere atoms.

Mary thought long and hard for a good way to enact her goal. She considered a knife a bit too barbaric, further removed from the pool of options considering Mary was scared of blood (which would seem like an easy barrier to cross when you consider what Mary was trying to do, but for some people there are lines they won’t cross). This also ruled out all other weapons designed to puncture, bludgeon, blow up, etc. Mary considered a flamethrower, but sadly they were illegal in her state and she wasn’t about to break any laws—-she considered herself an upstanding, law-abiding citizen. Feeling defeated, she was about to give up her murderous goal until she happened to glance upon an advertisement in the local paper:

For sale: Tachyon gun, never used.

The advertisement was only six words, but those six words represented a possibility that resonated beyond their syntaxical and basic meaning. Intrigued, she called the number below the ad and an older man picked up the phone. He sounded like he had a slight cold.

“Hello?”

“Whaddya want?”

“I’m calling about the tachyon gun, I saw the ad in the newspaper.”

“The what?”

“It was an ad for a tachy-”

“Oh, yea yea. Tachyon gun got it. If you’re looking to buy now is the time because they are flying off the shelves. We only have three left and I’m not sure if and when we’ll get any more.”

“Yes I would like to buy one, but I have a few questions first, if that is okay.”

“Sure sure but I’m a busy guy so make it quick.”

“This ‘tachyon’ gun, how does it work exactly?”

“Lady, you never heard of a gun before? If so, I don’t think this product is for you. You point the business end at your target and boom, dunzo.”

“I know what a gun is, I’m asking what separates this from a normal gun, like one that shoots bullets.”

“This one shoots bullets too lady, I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“Normal bullets? Like lead?”

“What? No. It’s a tachyon gun. It shoots tachyon bullets.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“You know what a tachyon is?”

“If I knew what a tachyon was, why would I be saying I don’t know what it means?”

“Sheesh okay, I’m not a scientist so pardon my layman’s explanation, but it’s basically a particle that moves faster than the speed of light. It’s really fast, like a ferrari.”

“Is this some sort of scam? You can’t go faster than the speed of light. You don’t have to be a scientist to realize that.”

“Um no, you’re wrong. See it’s impossible to go the speed of light. You can go under the speed of light and you can speed up until you just get to the speed of light, like 999% of the way there. But there isn’t anything that says you can’t go over the speed of light if you’re already faster than it¹.”

“I see. What will this tachyon gun do to a person if I shoot someone with it?”

“Aaaah aaah! Don’t say that, stop talking! I don’t wanna know what you’re using it for. I am NOT being held legally liable again. That being said, if you were to hypothetically test this product on some sort of organic matter, it would shoot through said material at a speed faster than the speed of light, utterly decimating the surrounding area. The atoms in a 3 meter radius of the shot would be decimated, and your target would be converted into a cloud of radiation.”

“Besides that, would it leave any residue? Any trace?”

The man laughed, “Honey, this thing doesn’t even leave atoms. The immensity of the energy shooting out of this awesome weapon turns your target into the building blocks of atoms. Using this to shoot someone—or something—is like trying to break apart your legos with a flamethrower.”

Mary thought in silence for a while, before finally declaring,”I’ll take it.”

Part II

The tachyon gun came in an unmarked and slightly damaged cardboard box aptly marked “fragile” on all sides with water damaged stickers. It was held together with painters tape, which was already showing signs of peeling off. Mary opened the box and found the tachyon gun in a ziplock back, which smelled faintly yet distinctly of cashews. It took the basic form of a pistol with dozens of small fins protruding from the barrel, presumably radiator fins, and had lots of lights and diodes covering it. A satellite disk came out of the barrel of the gun, presumably to channel the tachyons forward. Not that Mary’s explanations to herself were reassuring in the slightest. She was no scientist and she was doubting whether the science fiction weapon before her even worked. Yet, she wouldn’t know until she tried it out.

A few days later Mary found herself at a park where she knew Jane frequented. She walked around the park looking for Jane to no avail. After 10 minutes of looking Mary was going to give up and try another day but spotted Jane in the distance. She took a few steps towards Jane, who hadn’t spotted her and didn’t move. Jane was still some distance away. The sun began to burn Mary’s cheeks, and she felt drops of sweat gathering on her eyebrows. Mary’s forehead hurt, and all her veins were throbbing at once beneath the skin. She took a step, just one step forward. And this time, without getting up from the park bench she was sitting on, Jane noticed Mary and greeted her pleasantly. All Mary could feel were the cymbals of the sun clashing against her forehead and, indistinctly, the dazzling spear still leaping up off the tachyon gun which Mary now held in front of her. Its beam was like a red-hot blade gnawing at her eyelashes and gouging out her stinging eyes. Then everything shook… The sky seemed to be splitting from end to end and raining down sheets of flame. Mary’s being went tense and she tightened her grip on the gun. The trigger gave, she felt the underside of the taped up butt and it was there, in that silence, that it all started. Mary realized she had destroyed the balance of the day and the pleasant noise of the beach where she had been content. Mary stared at the disembodied cloud of particles which dissipated into nothing but a crater. It was like giving one sharp knock at the door of unhappiness².

Part III

Mary found herself sitting in front of a jury in a courtroom. She was in a cage, like a dog. Or perhaps any other type of animal which might be dangerous enough to merit a cage—maybe a lion. A lion was much cooler than a dog.

Mary found herself like a lion sitting in a cage in front of a jury in a courtroom. She was here because she had confessed to killing her colleague Jane Doe in cold blood. She showed no regret for her actions and, like a salmon after having completed its lifecycle after traveling up a river to its birthspot, simply gave up and let nature take her, or in this case the nature of due process of law. It wasn’t that Mary wanted to be locked up forever or perhaps even executed for her crimes, it was more that she had no desire to avoid it either. To her, it seemed like little effort to just go along with the whole spiel. When the police questioned her, asking, “Did you kill Jane Doe?” she simply responded, “I guess so”. And the rest is history.

The trial seemed like it would be fairly speedy. The Prosecution had their statement of guilt and the defendant was in full compliance. The Prosecution began their opening statements.

“Ladies and Gentleman of the Jury, before you stands a woman on trial for the murder of one Jane Doe. Jane was murdered in Greene Park on the 30th of Febuary at 12:13 AM. Mary, where were you at 12:13 AM on the 30th of February?”

Mary rose to the podium, “I was at Greene Park.”

“And is it true that you saw Jane Doe when you were there during your visit?”

“Yes.”

“I see. And, if I may ask, what was your intention upon going to this park at this time?”

“I went to the park because I knew Jane went there around noon some days. I wanted to kill her.”

Mary’s lawyer, who had been sitting in silent disapproval, quickly rose to speak. “Objection your honor! My client is not required to answer these questions!”

The judge banged his gavel on the table. “Order! Order! Objection denied. Prosecution please proceed.”

The Prosecutor straightened his tie and smiled. In his cunning he looked like a devil. “Thank you, your honor. Now we have shown witnesses to the murder who have testified under oath that they saw Mary reveal a weapon which she used to end Jane Doe’s life. Cameras in the area, while not in themselves high enough quality to act as sound evidence supporting this claim, help to corroborate the claim that Mary was there, showing her entering and leaving the park at 12:03 and 12:20 respectively. I would also like to present the suspected weapon used in the murder. Please bring out item number one.”

A police officer stepped forward with a bag labeled evidence and pulled the tachyon gun from it and then set it down on the table. The members of the jury all leaned in to stare at the fascinating device.

The Prosecutor once again looked towards Mary. “Is this the weapon you brought to kill Jane Doe?”

“Yes.”

The Prosecutor turned towards the jury. He seemed like an actor, relishing in the aura of the stage and the eyes of a captive audience. Considering the stakes that a person’s life was on the line, he seemed to be enjoying this. “If this is not enough evidence, we also have audio evidence of the suspect buying the weapon from an online arms dealer, also showing intent to use it to cause harm to a living being.” The Prosecutor went over to a tape recorder to play the tape but just then Mary’s lawyer once again stood up to object.

“Objection! Your honor, this evidence proves nothing and is irrelevant to the trial. I demand it be dismissed from consideration in this case.”

The Judge grumbled. “Objection denied. Last warning sir, do not interrupt again. Prosecution please continue.” The tape then began to play and after finishing a collective gasp went out throughout the courtroom. It seemed at that moment that Mary’s fate had been sealed.

The Prosecution once again spoke. “This is all the evidence I have for you in proving Mary’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. I have shown you testimonies from dozens of people, including the suspect on trial themselves mind you, that she did indeed murder Jane Doe. Her lack of morality or any emotional remorse whatsoever in the recollection of these events brings me to demand the person before you be punished to the full extent of the law. In the pursuit of the sanctity and security of our democracy and basic liberties, this person poses a great and ultimate threat against us by refusing to abide by even the most sacred of rules. I demand her put to death.

The courtroom erupted into chaos. The jury began arguing with each other and the Prosecutor and Defendant against each other. Mary sat in silence through it all. Eventually the guards managed to quell everyone and cordon them back to their seats. The Judge began to speak again.

“Now, does the Defense have anything to say in response?”

The Defendant rose to the stage and turned around to look at the jury.

“Members of the jury. Do not be afraid of me. I do not want you to think, given the mountain of evidence against me and my client, that my only successful methods of convincing you that the person before me is innocent is through deceit and lying. For even with everything that has been said, there is still one irrefutable fact that confirms my client’s innocence beyond a shadow of a doubt.”

There was a murmur among the jury, which the Defendant let play out to much effect. When it became silent again he began speaking. “The Prosecution has proven that my client intended to cause the death of Jane Doe. They purchased a device for such a purpose, and went to the park with the intent of such a purpose. Yet there is no physical way in which my clients actions directly and chronologically lead to the death of Jane Doe.”

Once again there was a murmur about the Jury. “Allow me to present Dr. Gillentzon, a Professor of advanced physics at Jillen University.”

The Professor, a short statured man with glasses made his way to the podium and sat nervously. While one would consider a Professor to be good in front of an audience, Gillentzon was clearly nervous.

“Now Professor, can you describe the nature of the weapon in which Mary purchased?”

Dr. Gillentzon began speaking. Upon talking, of a similar tone in which he might teach a lecture in a classroom, his nervousness seemed to fade completely and he regained his composure. “ Thank you. Now Mary bought a weapon known as a tachyon gun. It is a weapon that fires a tachyon, a particle moving faster than the speed of light. This weapon, which has been independently verified and tested, shoots projectiles moving at four times the speed of light, also known as four times “c”—”c” being the speed of light.”

The Prosecutor, now his turn to be frustrated with the current procession, stood up. “Objection! Your honor, this physics lesson is not relevant to the case.”

Gillentzon shot him a glare. “You will see how it is relevant if you’d let me finish.” The Prosecutor ignored him and simply looked at the Judge for validation. The Judge told the Professor to continue.

“Now, the particles emitted from Mary’s gun move at roughly four feet per nanosecond. This approximation does not induce a loss of generality for the sake of the analogy. Mary was forty feet away from Jane, and so her particles hit Jane after four seconds, killing her instantly.” The Prosecutor stood up once again. “So you admit that she killed Jane?”

“I did not admit any such thing. I merely said that the particle or “bullet”, upon contact with Jane’s body, caused her death. This adds no new information to the case. We already know the victim is dead. Now please, stop interrupting me.”

The Prosecutor sat down once again. He looked like a child who just had his toy taken away.

“Since the bullet passes 40 feet at four feet per nanosecond. The whole event happened in less than 4 nanoseconds. Such a timeframe is imperceptible except with the most sensitive scientific equipment. We can deduce from this that the two events, the firing and the hit, are separated by 10 nanoseconds. Yet if we describe such an event from the reference of half of the speed of light, which is perfectly valid from a scientific perspective, we find that the two events are separated not by 10 nanoseconds, but by -15.5. At the instant Mary pulled the trigger, Jane had been dead for 15.5 nanoseconds. By this logic, the shot happened before Mary even pulled the trigger.”

The Jury and Gallery broke into a torrent of chaos even more extreme than the last. The guards, clearly annoyed by the constant violence, were quick to subdue the crowd this time. When all was silent, the Judge spoke once more.

“Members of the court, given the recent turn of events in the case and the new evidence presented, I have decided to reconvene at a later date at the concession of both the Prosecution and Defendant, so that they may be able to better formulate their arguments in the context of this new evidence. It is our goal, as defenders of the law, to uphold the law, and make a decision confirming whether the person before us is truly innocent or guilty. Anything less seeks only to jeopardize our system as it stands, and with our current information I have deemed the results of this case inconclusive until more information can be gathered.”

Part IV

Mary’s trial had been effectively on hold for the better part of the year. What started out as an important yet relatively straightforward trial had spiraled chaotically into a matter of discussion among the public and experts in fields of nearly every category. The idea that a person might not be in control of their own actions due to the absolute laws of physics brought skeptics, defenders, and deniers out of the woodworks from all aspects of life. Some people truly ascribed themselves to the physics at play. Others, disturbed by the implications, merely denied it to preserve their way of thinking. The Catholic church was the first major organization to respond directly to the trial. Merely days after the trial, after some deliberation, they denied the results of the tachyon murder, stating:

“To God, all moments of time are present in their immediacy. In his divinity God stands absolute and above all, not just in physicality but in the embodiment of all laws themselves. While man was created as a rational being, given the dignity of control over his own actions, this does not deny the predestination for all beings as decided by God in his supremacy. It is merely the nature of humanity for his predestination to be always hidden over the horizon. The nature of the Church’s statement is due to the usage of a weapon which seeks to expose the raw power of God, while circumventing his will. No mortal has the power to control their will except in what has already been decided already in God’s infinite divine wisdom. The only action for which a mortal holds over themselves is the capacity in which they devote themselves to the lord. Those involved in this plot against all that is holy represent the greatest circumvention against the divine. For this they will be denied by man, and punished by both nature and God.”

The result of this statement mass support to the church, others equal in size in opposition. The Church seemingly denied science, yet for the sake of its ideals it took opposition to science and so denied it as directly contrarian to God and Catholicism. Other religions soon took a similar stance on the issue. They found the new perspectives science brought to be, for a lack of better words, a bit of a “damper” on their activities. If free will is unimportant, then what reason are all my gullable bovine followers to have for praying and donating to some god three times a day? These religions felt threatened by the sudden lack of faith among the masses. They tried desperately to hold control over people but every day more and more people lost faith in the churches and left to find something else to devote themselves to, perhaps pottery.

Some, just as dumb as before they had left, found the term science confusing and ended up joining the Church of Scientology which in only a few months doubled their numbers, from a meager twelve people to twenty four.

Eventually, some not-so-dumb individual thought to himself, “Well if God is all-encompassing, then shouldn’t we just adapt our vision of God to fit the science as we learn it, instead of adapting the im-malleable facts of science to God?”. This man, aptly named Elron Hubbard, formed a new religion named the Church of Orange, named after something quite spectacular Elron assured followers, yet the origins eluded him since he formed them at the zenith of an acid trip. The Church of Orange later went to become the main religion of the western world, quickly becoming the de facto religion of the United States. With its influence, they were able to free Mary from her imprisonment as she was pronounced not guilty, on the claims that she had broken now law in that her intent of action did not directly lead to a person’s death chronologically, even though they were still physically connected.

Mary served as a spokesperson and ambassador for the Church of Orange, giving speeches on the nature of science and its play into our world. She even legislated to have a law passed that would be able to prosecute people for murder or assault in the use of tachyon guns in the future, which ended up passing under bipartisan approval. The religions of the old world slowly faded from public eye and mainstream control, though the members who stayed proportionally made up for the lack of support from leaving members with increasingly fanatical and zealous devotion. One of these members went on the murder Mary with a tachyon gun out of hate for destroying their world. Mary didn’t care though, because she was dead before it even hit her.

Footnotes

1. Mass limits the speed of a particle to less than the speed of light. The less mass an object has the faster it can go. A neutrino for example can travel at near the speed of light, traveling at almost 186,000 miles per second. (Speed of light, c = 186,000 miles per second). A tachyon, though theorized to exist, has never actually been observed in our current realm of science but would always travel at faster than the speed of light. It is proven according to current theories of relativity that nothing can go the speed of light if it has mass. A tachyon, though, has a mass something similar to the square root of -1, or i. This, while not being physically possible, still has implications in reality considering that even though i is not physically expressible, it can still be used to calculate sin and cosine waves, which is required for even the basic occurrences of cellular waves, radio waves, and brain signals. The speed of a massless particle can be expressed as x = c. The speed of a particle with mass can be expressed as a < c > b, with a representing a positive mass particle and b representing a theoretical “imaginary” mass particle. ↩

2. See The Stranger Part 1 Ending ↩