Solid
Author: Ruby Zehnder
Dord was burning at both ends.
“Quit flaming so much,” his mother warned. “You’re gonna go solid.”
Dord ignored her. He was young and full of energy. And besides, this whole solid thing. It was just something old flamers made up to scare the young.
He decided to kick it up a notch. Just because he could.
He started spewing photons. Yellow-blue-indigo-ultraviolet-X-rays-gamma rays. He was excitable enough to reach all the high states, and he didn’t care if his parents thought it was dangerous. Dord was feeling so cocky that he decided to go for the big one. Plasma burning. Star level energy consumption. Sure he had heard rumors about the E=mc-squared equilibrium. But that was all just hypothetical crap. All the philosophical garbage about flaming out and tearing a hole in space and being sucked in by a gravity sink was ridiculous. Imagine a Masshole that trapped you into spatial dimensions. Everyone knew that energy states could never exist at such low temps. You’d have to reach temperatures in the minus 273 degrees Kelvin range to get trapped. Oooh, he was so scared. What a joke. Not in this universe. Mass was just theoretical. It couldn’t possibly exist. Besides, it felt so good to just burn it up.
“Dord, stop plasma burning. You’ll start a proton-proton chain. You’ll go solid,” his mother warned again more loudly.
But, of course, he ignored her as he pushed up his consumption.
“Ahhh…” Dord exclaimed as he reached the plasma state and felt the power of a fusion reaction pulsing through his being. So this is how it feels to be a star. He had read about star beings. They only existed for millions of years before they depleted their energy and went solid.
But so what. Being a star – was totally worth it.
The Past
365tomorrows launched August 1st, 2005 with the lofty goal of providing a new story every day for a year. We’ve been on the wire ever since. Our stories are a mix of those lovingly hand crafted by a talented pool of staff writers, and select stories received by submission.
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