Quantum Bake-anics

In my young days, my ambition knew no bounds. I had dreams of achieving what the greatest physicists had failed to achieve, of finding the missing link between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Pride whispered to my left I would go down in history books as the father of a new field, joining the ranks of Newton and Einstein along the way; determination whispered to my right nothing was impossible with the right amount of talent. The greatest mysteries of the Universe were bound to reveal themselves before my very eyes one day, enlightening me with their secrets in a sudden and powerful epiphany.

“How can you bake a giant cookie?”

My career sure took a different turn.

“I think you knocked at the wrong door,” I replied, squinting to stare at the twin sisters in my laboratory’s dim amber light.

They must have been in their early twenties, no older. Many times, I had peered through the pink-tinted windows of their shop across the street in the past year. The Sugar & Spice Sisters, as they called themselves, drew commendable crowds for a small town like Gershley Falls. On Valentine’s Day, the morning line up for their bakery went as far as the mayor’s office down Main Street’s cobblestone pavement. Inebriating smells of cocoa and ginger drifted towards my lab from time to time, whenever the Eastern wind resolved to remind me there were scents of happiness that existed beyond my world of gloom.

I was caught off guard when they walked in this morning. Wearing matching pink summer dresses, with their golden hair tied with bows worthy of a wedding bouquet, their sudden irruption into my sacred space made me drop and break a diode over my interferometry apparatus.

“Are you not specialized in eccentric inventions, Dr. Red?” asked the left twin in the softest voice I had ever heard.

“Eccentric?” I said, my skin bright red. “I do ground-breaking scientific work. These ‘inventions’ were made to conduct rigorous experiments.”

Their eyes wandered around the room. There was certainly a fair number of failed setups piled up on my worktables, from broken lasers to cobweb-covered electron spectrometers. These unsuccessful experiments were none of their business, but a glacial wave of shame still washed over me, drowning my ego.

“Our apologies,” said the right twin, honey dripping from every inflection in her tone. “From discussions with neighbors, we were under the impression you made a name for yourself with…”

She paused, searching for her words with the carefulness of a teacher dealing with a delicate pupil.

“…peculiar technology,” she concluded. “Pardon our manners as well, we haven’t even introduced ourselves yet. I’m Sally, and this is Suzy. We own the bakery across the—”

“I know who you are,” I said bluntly. “You two are awfully young to own a business all by yourselves. Are your parents involved at all?”

“We don’t have parents,” said Sally. “They died when we were quite young. We had to hustle quite a bit after high school.”

In spite of the subject’s grim nature, the girls’ cheerfulness did not waver one bit. They stared at me intensely, unwilling to take no for an answer. Deep down inside, a part of me resented them for their success. How could they have achieved so much in so little time, when I had spent my whole life chasing breakthroughs that never came? Life counted many frustrating asymmetries, and this was most definitely one of them.

“I’m sorry for your parents,” I replied half-heartedly. “Looks like you made the best out of difficult circumstances, good for you.”

“Opening our own bakery was a childhood dream,” said Suzy, “and we’re very proud of it. Of course, there are some dreams we have yet to achieve.”

“Franchising, for instance,” said Sally. “We’d like to take our brand national. Of course, we would need something headline-worthy to get some traction. That’s where you come in.”

“We want to bake the biggest cookie in the world,” explained Suzy. “Fifteen meters in diameter. We’ll automatically win the Decker Award for novelty baking, that ought to get us recognition. We have the means for the dough and the chips, all we need is a way to bake it.”

“Like I said, you’re knocking at the wrong door. I don’t manufacture ovens.”

“But you’re a physicist,” said Sally with a snarky smile. “Surely, you must have an idea of how to proceed without having to build a giant oven. Unless it’s beyond your abilities, of course.”

Once again, blood rushed to my face. The little brats thought they could get me to cave in with personal attacks. Me, the ‘town lunatic’ it seemed, a low-life mad inventor who could be tricked into devoting his gifts to laughable, trivial tasks.

“This lab is for serious science,” I said. “Not splashy publicity stunts.”

“You might want to reconsider,” said Sally. “Rumor has it that serious science of yours has brought you little to no notoriety, except for a reputation as an oddity. Our project could do a lot more for you. Do think about it.”

They left my lab before I could throw them out. The nerve they had! Trespassing into my sanctuary of research, only to insult me with their ridiculous proposition. A giant cookie!

***

It came to me in a dream that night, although perhaps it was a nightmare. My body tossed and turned in my bed as my mind drifted into an imaginary land. I was drowning in a plasma of neutrons the size of an ocean. After nearly an hour of fighting for my life, I reached a shore of white sand that felt like a safe haven at first. That was until a giant ball of cookie dough started to chase me down the beach, threatening to roll over me.

I ran with all the might my frail legs were capable of, legs that only had enough muscle capacity to take me to my lab and back in a day. Just when hope had vanished, the silhouette of the apparatus appeared in the distance, like a mirage. The steel panels towered high above me. I ran straight through the circular display, and just as the dough was catching up, the setup activated.

Then I woke up, sweating from head to toe. Was this how epiphanies played out? It certainly wasn’t the great mystery of the Universe I expected…

***

“It is with great pride that we have gathered all of you here today,” said Suzy, addressing the reporters gathered in the town square from a wooden stage built in front of a great big red curtain hanging between the post office and the diner. “We are ready to share with you all a historical moment the likes of which this town has never seen.”

I stood on the right side of the stage along with Sally. My eyes looked straight down, desperately trying to avoid staring into the photographers’ lenses.

“Today,” she continued, “the Sugar & Spice Sisters are taking their next big step towards bringing their culinary skills to a wider audience. One cannot take on the whole country without big ideas.”

She snapped her fingers, and the curtain dropped. A part of me still imagined the curtain would reveal a brand new particle accelerator, or a large-scale radio telescope. Alas, there was no way to hide it now: beyond the curtain was a disk of cookie dough that covered the whole town square, enclosed inside a spherical track along which metallic panels stood upright. Sally took the stage next.

“Using Dr. James Red’s ground-breaking technology, we shall bake today the largest cookie ever baked in the entire world. Dr. Red, please do us the honour.”

Without looking, I pulled out a remote controller from my pocket and pointed it at the device. The panels began to rotate along the tracks at a dizzying speed, creating standing microwaves along the surface of the cookie. In a matter of minutes, the dough turned solid. The cookie had been baked, and the record had been broken.

The whole crowd rejoiced and applauded the twins, while I walked down the stage with weary legs. With every step, my reputation could be heard shattering a little bit more. Never in my life had I been so humiliated and disgraced.

My dimly-lit laboratory welcomed me again, and this time the failed devices that littered my worktables reeked of pity. All these years of research had been in vain. I was officially a loser.

A notification popped up on my phone. The first articles about the event were in, and the top headline caught my attention.

Dr. James Red: Father of Macro-Baking

Before I could even notice, tears trickled down my eyes. Perhaps it wasn’t all lost after all.