Paul Boltzmann

by Paul Boltzmann

A nightmarish gasp broke the buzzing sound from the cold neon lights on the ceiling. Frank looked around, realizing that he was in a hospital bed, in a pristine, sanitised medical room, connected to life support equipment. His breath was stabilising from the shock of the awakening, while his brain started wondering for how long he has been asleep. He was alone, but still alive.  

Suddenly, three strangers in military uniforms filed in through an automatic door, eagerly surrounding Frank around his bed. “You are finally awake!” exclaimed an enthusiastic officer while reaching for his penlight to test the patient’s pupillary reflexes. Their unexpected presence in the room bothered Frank more than the intense white flash in his eyes.

“Where am I?”

“You are on the Interplanetary Space Freighter Frontiers” explained the most decorated one among the three. “We are the officers in charge of command ops. We intercepted a distress signal from your vessel, and our support agents have found you inside a cryogenic capsule. It saddens me to inform you that you are the sole crew member found alive”.

“We have found several signs of struggle over the corpses of your former crewmates: traumas from blunt objects, cuts and bruises likely from non-military equipment and tools” the third officer added.  “It appears that a violent conflict had erupted among the staff, possibly an internal revolt. It would be very helpful to understand what happened aboard your vessel, but first we thought that you have not had any solid food for a long time, perhaps you’d have appetite for a light meal?” A metal tray was offered to Frank, with three slices of bread and a glass of water on it.

“We had some disagreements, let’s put it this way”. Circumstances still felt too unfamiliar for Frank to further explain what happened on his spaceship. Despite the good intentions of his rescuers, he had developed a distrust towards sympathetic behaviour, and decided to test their real nature through a simple question, by raising a slice of bread: “What is this?”

The three officers looked at each other with a surprised stare, and one hesitated to whisper an insecure reply to the unusual question. “Bread?”

This apparently superficial answer brought Frank deep feelings of joy and reassurance. “Yes! Bread! Finally! This is bread! This is simply bread, and there is no need to further debate on this!”

Frank’s overproportionate reaction left the rescuers clearly puzzled, who grabbed the opportunity to ask some follow-up questions: “You must be tired and confused right now, and you definitely need more rest for a complete physical and mental recovery, but we would really be thankful if you could briefly explain us what happened on your vessel, so as to inform our headquarters and be adequately prepared to address any potential threats to our mission”.

“We… we were no longer able to state the obvious…” explained Frank while looking at his food. “It was a contagious bias. It led to confusion, false accusations, anger and bursts of violence that quickly spiralled out of control”.

The senior officers insisted on digging further. “Was it due to a bug in the communication system?” “Perhaps it was corrupted AI? Did you install the latest firmware of Sagittarius^©?” “How about a neurological disorder? I wonder if such syndromes can spread from airborne pathogens?” “Maybe the crew got infected by a brain parasite? Were you hosting alien lifeforms on your vessel?” The barrage of questions overwhelmed Frank, who was unable to contain their inquisitive enthusiasm.

“No, no, there were no clear causes that I am aware of. It was just… a divisive environment. We were strictly following guidelines aimed at preserving unity among crew members, to have tact and promote inclusiveness in our daily communication. But somehow these good intentions led to disagreements in semantics that dismantled our cohesion, to the point that we could not reach an agreement without arguing or fighting, even about the nature of the most basic, elementary concepts, for example that this slice of bread is just bread”.

“Well, it is a slice of bread”. The correction made by one officer about the difference between the part in relation to a whole made Frank suddenly uneasy.

“Actually, that is not even bread, if we define bread as a baked food product made of flour, yeast and water. The Frontiers is not equipped with hydroponics capacities, so the food that we consume here is assembled from 3D-printing carbohydrate, amino acids and synthetic fibres”.

“Perhaps the most appropriate expression in this context would be that you are holding a slice of machine-made food that resembles common bread” suggested one of them, with a half-smile that hinted at a feeling of pride for coming up with a brilliant idea to such an insidious problem.

“What are you implying when you say common bread?” Another officer raised his voice, triggered by a potentially offensive use that can be derived from that specific adjective. “We work for a federation of planets, each with its own distinct biomass production and culinary tradition. I have the feeling that an improper use of the word “common” carried the implication that the food production obtained by exploiting Maillard chemical reactions in human-populated environments is superior to other form of nourishment generated by other biosystems.”

“You are absolutely correct, officer, my deepest apologies for such a blunder. Then maybe we could define this food as a slice of machine-made, spongy, gluten-based nourishment surrounded by a baked crust that would be used as a supplement to bread, based on the equipment available on board of our vessel.”

The third officer gasped at such an outlandish suggestion: “Excuse me, colleague, but I suffer from non-celiac gluten sensitivity, are you implying that the gluten-free alternatives are not equivalent to the slice of baked nourishment we have just served to our guest?”

“But is the crust baked or 3D-printed? And could “spongy” be considered derisive of the habitat of our Neptunian colleagues?”

“Oh bloody hell! Why everything nowadays has to be about the feelings of Neptunians?”

“Watch your language, colleague! And do not question the importance of xeno-sensitivity! We are the command ops officers, we lead by example!”

Tear drops crossed the hollow, bearded cheeks of the rescued passenger, as the heated exchange between the three officers on the definition of bread has completely diverted their attention for providing medical assistance to Frank. Despite this, he was confused about the source of such a sudden melancholy.

Most likely it was resignation – he sensed that this pointless discussion was a first step towards disaster. But he felt also something else, an itch that bothered him. It was not a somatic irritation caused by the limpness of his body after being motionless for an undefined amount of time, but more like a tingle in his brain, an inaccessible area inside his cranium that required physical scratching to have a feeling of relief.

Because a critical voice inside him whispered in this ears that indeed the use of qualifiers to identify parts of a whole was the most appropriate approach to define the substance of an object in line with the scientific criteria that command officers must follow, but his three counterparts were completely ignoring guidelines to explain abstractions to visitors. To be precise, though, Frank was not technically a visitor, but an official crew member of a space vessel of the Federation which was no longer operative.

The debate was now in Frank’s brain, and hence in his soul. One side of his personality was desperately advocating for letting this go, screaming “No!” frantically and repeatedly. But another voice was more subtle, insidious, passively aggressive, encouraging for rationality, reason and sensibility, because a clearer and correct communication ultimately helps everybody in a workplace, do it not?

Two words came out of Frank’s mouth, halting the discussion between the three officers in front of him.

“Well… actually…”

#

Three earth-years later, the military Spaceship Fury of Orion was scouting the orbit of Kepler-675 b when a signal alerted the Communication Officer of the Command Ops.  

“Captain, we have intercepted a distress signal from an allied vessel”.

“Which one?”

“The Space Freighter Frontiers, Captain”.

~

Bio:

Paul Boltzmann is a guy from South of Italy who enjoys science, fantasy, comedy and of course science-fiction. “Paul” because “Paolo” always gets confused with “Pablo” or “Paulo” and that annoys him quite a lot, and “Boltzmann” in honour of Ludwig Boltzmann, who introduced statistical concepts to physics in the study of the kinetics of gases in the 19th century. But also because it sounds like his last name, but the German variation is much cooler.

Philosophy Note:

This story is a personal tribute to one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century, George Carlin, who I consider the GOAT (although he would have hated this acronym). George, I don’t know if your sharp consciousness is still somewhere in this cosmos, but you have no idea of how much you are still relevant today, and I am sure that in a thousand years it will still be “Bad for Ya”.