JFWCM Chapter 12

Relativistic Bubbles

Relativistic Bubbles

“Excuse me, coming through!”

Jiang Wan’yuan squeezed through the corridor, carrying a stack of sketchbooks, the spring sunlight dancing on her hair through the branches of the jacaranda trees. Turning the corner of the stairwell, she saw Yi Shang standing in front of the senior year (1) class, her white shirt buttoned to the top, wiping the doorknob with an alcohol wipe.

“Morning, Xiao Shang!” Jiang Wan’yuan nudged open the door of the neighboring art studio with her shoulder. “Today’s physics class is about celestial motion, right?”

Yi Shang’s fingertips paused. Her deep gray pupils scanned the whispering crowd in the hallway. Since the Zijin Mountain Astronomical Observatory incident last week, on their first day back at school, they discovered that all the newspaper clippings about meteor showers had disappeared from the school history museum.

“Jiang Wan’yuan,” she tossed the wipe precisely into the trash can, “there’s acrylic paint on your skirt hem.”

As the class bell rang, the electronic screen in the physics lab suddenly flickered. Yi Shang stood by the podium, adjusting the oscilloscope. In the cold white light, faint blue star trails were vaguely visible on the inside of her wrist. When Teacher Lin spoke about Kepler’s laws, the planetary motion diagram on the screen suddenly twisted into a spiral.

“Yi Shang,” Teacher Lin pushed up his glasses, “come up and solve this orbital equation.”

The moment the chalk touched the blackboard, the air in the entire classroom rippled. Jiang Wan’yuan slipped in through the back door just in time to see formula symbols wandering across the dark green blackboard like shooting stars. Yi Shang’s pen tip hovered above the γ symbol, and a flock of startled pigeons suddenly flew past the window.

“You need to use the chaos coefficient here.” Jiang Wan’yuan drew an arc in the air with fingers stained with cobalt blue paint. In the instant the students in the front row turned to look, Yi Shang had already written the last line of the calculation, and the chalk snapped in two.

During lunch break, Jiang Wan’yuan uncovered the canvas in the art studio. The unfinished star map was spontaneously bleeding colors, ultramarine paint winding into vortices on the linen. She pulled out a chocolate star from her pocket and found infinitesimal formulas appearing on the gold foil wrapper.

“Found it.” Yi Shang’s voice floated in from the transom window. She stood under the phoenix tree with a stack of “The Astrophysical Journal” in her arms, dappled in scattered sunlight. “Professor Zhang just emailed to say that the observatory has received new gravitational wave signals.”

The easel suddenly vibrated, and Jiang Wan’yuan reached out to hold the trembling palette. Olive green and alizarin crimson automatically mixed into a nebula color she had never seen before, and at that moment, the radio station suddenly began playing the school anthem from twenty years ago—the very song they had heard in the meteor shower.

“To the roof.” Yi Shang’s fingernails dug into the journal’s title page, where a 1957 Soviet satellite orbital map was printed. “Now.”

Behind the rusty iron door, they saw the starlight from the night before flowing across the cement floor. The paper stars flying out of Jiang Wan’yuan’s backpack suspended themselves into the zodiac constellations, while Yi Shang untied her ponytail, and strands of light, like quantum clouds, shimmered in her hair. As they both reached out to touch the Orion paper star, the glass windows of the entire teaching building began to resonate.

“Look!” A cry came from downstairs.

The boys playing basketball were looking up at the roof, the figures of two girls flickering in the midday sun, like shattered prisms projected onto the clouds. And beneath their feet, deep within the foundations of the entire Linxi First High School, the century-old planetarium suddenly began to rotate.

Jiang Wan’yuan smiled and tossed the last paper star into the air. “Do you think the inscription on the cornerstone in the principal’s safe might just describe this scene?”

Yi Shang lowered her head and straightened her wind-blown collar, but paused when she caught sight of her cuff—it was stained with a speck of stardust that did not belong to Earth, emitting an iridescence through the Oxford cloth that only they could see.

By the time Yi Shang had pulled the curtains of the infirmary tightly closed, Jiang Wan’yuan was applying an ice pack to her feverish temples. The stellar resonance on the roof had exhausted them, and the electronic clock in the school infirmary now read 13:14, a number that had been flashing for twenty minutes.

“Teacher Lin’s watch stopped at the same time,” Yi Shang said suddenly. She was using tweezers to pick up the stardust from her cuff, the iridescent particles undergoing Brownian motion in the glass petri dish. “That’s the third time.”

Jiang Wan’yuan sat up, her plaster-cast-like left leg suddenly movable. She lifted the hem of the white coat and found miniature star maps appearing on her knee. “Looks like we’re trapped in a time fold.” She used a cotton swab dipped in iodine to connect a track on the skin’s star map. “See, this is the flight path of Apollo 16 in 1972.”

Footsteps suddenly came from the corridor. Yi Shang quickly hid the petri dish in her school uniform pocket, and Jiang Wan’yuan grabbed the medical record and pretended to write. When the door was pushed open, they smelled a strong scent of jacaranda – the flower that should bloom in May was now sprouting branches like mad outside the window.

“We meet again.” The dean stood at the door, holding a bronze celestial globe. The twenty-eight constellations engraved on the instrument’s surface were seeping a pale golden liquid. “Can you explain why the surveillance cameras caught you two… planting flowers on the roof?”

Jiang Wan’yuan’s paintbrush slipped from her fingers, splattering peacock blue stardust on the tile floor. Yi Shang noticed that the liquid in the cracks of the celestial globe had the exact same iridescent frequency as the stardust on her cuff.

“We are preparing a star display for the cultural festival,” Yi Shang lied without changing her expression, quickly tapping Morse code behind her back. Jiang Wan’yuan understood and held up her sketchbook, which somehow had a complete diagram of the solar corona on it.

The dean narrowed his eyes, and the celestial globe suddenly emitted a piercing buzz. The raindrops on the glass window began to flow backward, and the numbers on the electronic watch on Jiang Wan’yuan’s wrist were frantically counting down. When Yi Shang felt the paper stars in her pocket begin to heat up, the eye exercises music suddenly began to play on the radio.

“Back to class before the end of lunch break.” The dean turned and left, the golden liquid on the bronze condensing into a Pleiades pattern on the threshold.

The setting sun stretched Yi Shang’s shadow between the relativity formulas on the blackboard. She was on duty wiping the blackboard, but the chalk dust was strangely suspended in the shape of a spiral arm of the Milky Way. Teacher Lin’s lesson plan was spread out on the podium, with the same star map as the one on Jiang Wan’yuan’s knee drawn in the blank spaces.

Yi Shang stared at the suspended chalk Milky Way, and suddenly reached out and flicked one of the “star particles”. The spiral arm made of chalk dust suddenly accelerated, projecting the school calendar of 1923 onto the blackboard—the year Linxi First High School installed the underground planetarium.

“Found it.” She aligned Teacher Lin’s lesson plan with the light and shadow, and the star map on the yellowed pages perfectly overlapped with the chalk Milky Way, revealing a string of binary code. Suddenly, the sound of a shutter came from the back door of the classroom, and three girls holding up their phones fled in disarray. The latest hot post on the school forum was flashing on their screens: “The Secret Ritual of the Ice Queen—Exclusive Look at Yi Shang’s Mysterious After-School Activities.”

Jiang Wan’yuan kicked open the transom window of the art room and climbed in, just in time to see Yi Shang doing rapid calculations in the code light spots. Twilight enveloped them through the stained glass window, and DNA-like star marks appeared behind Yi Shang’s ears.

“The forum is blowing up.” Jiang Wan’yuan pressed an iced lemon tea against her friend’s forehead. “Someone said we’re having a quantum physics confession on the roof.”

Yi Shang’s pen tip punctured the draft paper. “It’s worse than that.” She pulled up the surveillance footage on her phone—the physics lab, which should have been empty, automatically turned on its lights at three in the morning, and the same formula was repeatedly written on the blackboard until it was mysteriously erased before dawn.

Jiang Wan’yuan suddenly pressed her temples, her pupils shimmering with starlight. She grabbed a charcoal pencil and did a quick sketch on the wall, the lines spontaneously forming the scene in the surveillance video. “Look at this gesture of erasing the blackboard…” She quickly outlined the silhouette of a phantom arm, “It’s Teacher Lin’s habit when he was young.”

The entire teaching building suddenly trembled. Yi Shang rushed to the window and saw a pale golden mist seeping out of the entrance to the underground garage, the direction of the secret chamber of the century-old planetarium. The evening breeze brought the scent of jacaranda, but with the special odor of 1970s aerospace metal.

As the chalk dust fell back into the blackboard trough, Yi Shang sealed the last iridescent stardust into a glass tube. The setting sun passed through the classroom’s quantum cloud model, plating a layer of gold on Jiang Wan’yuan’s newly cut short hair—which still bore the scorched marks of time travel.

“The chaos coefficient has returned to zero.” Yi Shang embedded the glass tube into the star map on the blackboard newspaper, and the paper stars that were originally still suddenly began to revolve. Jiang Wan’yuan looked up with a paintbrush in her mouth and saw the lemon slices in her water glass refracting the light and shadow of the 1923 school badge.

The back door was suddenly kicked open, and a male student holding a basketball froze in place. The post “Unveiling the Rooftop Incident” was still displayed on his phone screen, but he now saw the two senior students who were rumored to have created the holographic projection: the hem of Yi Shang’s white coat moved without any wind, and Jiang Wan’yuan’s sketchbook was automatically generating his star chart.

“S-sorry!” The male student fled in panic, and a 3D-printed model of the bronze celestial globe fell out of his pocket. Jiang Wan’yuan hooked the model with her toe, and the familiar golden liquid seeped out from between the cracks of the twenty-eight constellations.

Yi Shang pushed up her slipping glasses. “Number 23.” She opened the list of school history elective courses and put a checkmark after the latest skipping record, “Down 37.5% from last week.”

As dusk deepened, they found Teacher Lin’s fountain pen left on the podium. The CA-1970-π symbol engraved on the pen cap was heating up. The moment Jiang Wan’yuan touched it with her acrylic-stained fingertips, the entire classroom suddenly rained chocolate wrappers folded into stars.

“The time loop is complete.” Yi Shang caught a star with Morse code written on it—the one she had just folded three hours ago.

As the last ray of sunset swept across the nebula graffiti that Jiang Wan’yuan had painted on the window glass, the two turned to look at the back wall of the classroom at the same time—where a countdown appeared that only they could see: 87 days, 3 hours, and 14 minutes until the next gravitational wave anomaly.

Jiang Wan’yuan flicked the last lemon seed into the cosmic trash can. “Next time, it should be during the school anniversary, right?”

Yi Shang, who was watering the alien moss in the pot, nodded lightly upon hearing this. When their shadows overlapped into an ∞ symbol on the relativity formula wall, the school anthem from twenty years ago suddenly played on the radio station.