The Giant

What if the solar systems were atoms and the universe was actually the combination of many such atoms which created individual cells of a Giant? What if the stars were the powerhouses, the nuclei?

So what would that make us?

Energy from our sun or a star, in general, came from a chain of fusion reactions of Hydrogen atoms - the smallest elemental atom of the universe.

So does this mean we are really living inside life?

Thus thought Doris.

She was a chemist, who had read about the rudimentary basics of chemistry and now lived as a chemist in a pharmacy, engaging in selling of therapeutic drugs to patients. The thing about her was that, though she was bored to death doing the same monotonous job of dispensing medicine everyday, she wouldn't leave the job because, firstly, she needed the money, and secondly, she loved to write. This job allowed her to pay her bills and left her with enough time to write.

Even though she loved to write, her writing was far from excellent. She hoped to someday achieve the great powers of storytelling. But till then, she had decided that she would simply write. She had attempted to publish a novel she had written when she was twenty years old, but all her attempts were jilted. She had been demoralized for a while, but soon picked up her courage to start again.

One day, all of a sudden, something kept bothering her.

Outside of a window, she saw a little kitten was hopping after a sparrow which flew away.

The church bell, which had not been working for a while, gonged at 12 noon.

A man and his lover were holding hands and walking in the street, too busy to be looking anywhere else.

And these were what stopped Doris on her tracks.

Because she knew what would happen next.

She flipped through whatever she had written yesterday. Everything had turned into reality. But just then, she screamed at the man.

"Watch out!" Doris called.

The man and his girlfriend paused and looked at her quizzically, wondering if she was mad.

A bee buzzed in front of them.

"Watch out from the..." Doris's voice trailed away.

It didn't happen.

The bee did not sting the man, he didn't suffer an anaphylactic shock, the girlfriend did not rush in to buy syringe and ampoules of adrenaline, hydrocortisone and antihistaminic on her advice.

The man did not need to be resuscitated.

The bee buzzed for a while, before leaving them.

"I am sorry," Doris said, half heartedly.

They walked away.

Two incidents later did Doris realize that whatever she wrote would happen to occur but there was a catch - they would occur only if she didn't interfere.

But that didn't mean she could alter the physics of the world, because she had tried, and failed.

Nor could she make absurd things happen.

Only short excerpts from her writing would come to occur- and she didn't know which ones would.

So she mixed absurd things with plausible ones, experimenting with her writing.

It had become a hobby for her.

She also saw that if she included herself in an anecdote, it might not occur.

Reality can be gruelling. Reality can be mysterious, it can elude you. Reality can be taxing. Reality can be...magic, maybe?

So one day, she tried to change the reality in her life.

Doris wrote, "Doris shook her head and did not report at ten am, the time at which the owner of the pharmacy insisted she be there by. Instead, she walked by the pharmacy and over to the small shop selling tickets for the lottery. She bought the one which had 709 written on it. Two days later, she found she had won fifty thousand dollars."

Yet, nothing happened the next day.

So then she repeated the passage, but instead of buying the ticket herself, she wrote that a man bought a ticket, which slipped out from his pocket without him seeing it, and she picked it up, without seeing the number on it. Two days later, the number which won the lottery was announced. Turned out, Doris won, as she saw the winning number only after it won.

Two days later, Doris became the owner of fifty thousand dollars.

She quit her job and decided to focus on her writing.

One day, as she was walking by the florist's shop to buy carnations, she met a man with spectacles, so occupied with reading that he bumped into her.

Looking at her, he blushed and offered his apologies before leaving.

Out of the corner of her eyes, she saw him reading "Jane Eyre and other classics - treatise to womanly virtues and empowerment through love". This piqued her curiosity.

Later she reached home and searched for the article in the internet.

Out of the blue, Doris would sometimes bump into the man.

After the first two or three times, the man acknowledged her with a nod.

The fourth time this happened, (without Doris writing about him) Doris introduced herself politely to the man. She got to know he was actually a physicist.

The fifth time, the man asked her out for coffee and she happily agreed.

"Why do you so frequently go to the flower shop?" Doris asked curiously.

"My wife used to get carnations everyday when she was alive. I keep up the habit," he said.

"I am sorry," Doris said awkwardly.

"It's been five years," he said, reminiscing a past that seemed not too long ago.

After a while, still awkwardly, Doris said, "You were reading a book on Jane Eyre."

"I love reading classics. They move me so," he said.

"Dr. Kaplan, it was nice to meet you this fine day, but I must go..." Doris said.

He was mildly surprised at the sudden goodbye but he nodded.

When Doris reached home, she wrote for the first time about Dr. Kaplan.

Soon they would meet at times and chat.

But Doris found herself falling for the gentle man.

She would ask him questions on physics. He would get a glint in his eyes, explaining things to her.

She would not understand most of the things he said, but she loved to see him explain things so passionately.

She wondered if he would ever love her like that, just as passionately. She blushed the next instant.

Doris waited for a day. A year in her life was probably a day in the Giant's, she mused.

Sooner rather than later, Kaplan proposed.

Doris happily accepted.

On the morning of her wedding, she wore the best white dress she had.

She wondered if the carnations reminded him of his deceased wife.

He had said they looked good on her though...

To new beginnings, Doris thought, smiling.

As she entered the room where her mother stood (whom she had not seen for a year), she felt unease again. Like the first time her writing had come alive.

Her mother and she walked toward the house on the other side of the road when her mother, who was behind her, shrieked.

A truck almost ran her over.

For a split second, Doris couldn't move. She HAD written about a truck crossing over, but it hadn't hit anything.

For the next split second, Doris pushed her mother away.

But she was hit.

How? She thought.

Why... why today, the day of her marriage?

Again, in a split second she realized something.

She was wrong. The catch in reality was - one thing would happen striking off the previous one - and thus, she could make something real by thinking the next thing, mentally overwriting the previous thing she wrote. She had thought she was going to be hit, and she was hit, overwriting what she had written previously.

The neural cell circuit discharged electricity in the form of an idea. I don't have to die. I will just go into a coma, maybe for a year or two.

Just as the neural circuit stabilized her comatose state, a thought arose with clarity...

Perhaps the universe is inside of me. Am I the Giant?

Wait for me for two days, Will Kaplan. For a year for the small ones is equivalent to a day to the Giant. I will be back.

Even though things were uncertain, what she did not know was, Kaplan would find her notes and would compute the days required for her to be back through physics.

They would marry and have kids.

And then, Kaplan would hypothesize the Giant theory.