Monthly Archives: December 2025

Accidental jumper

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The Quantum Sling

Deep beneath the Swiss-French border, Dr. Elias Thorne worked alone in the cavernous halls of CERN. The air hummed with the low thunder of the Large Hadron Collider, humanity’s most extravagant scientific marvel—a ring of superconducting magnets and detectors that had cost billions to build and upgrade. 0 “LARGE” 1 “LARGE”

In his private lab nearby stood towering dilution refrigerators, their golden stages plunging quantum chips to millikelvin temperatures, each unit worth more than most people’s homes. 2 “LARGE” 3 “LARGE”

Elias was obsessed with improbable events. For months he’d run simulations on the lab’s entangled quantum processors, modeling the velocity of the stone David hurled at Goliath—calculating it at roughly 80 mph, a lethal blur from a simple shepherd’s sling.

To keep pace with his endless computations, Elias had abandoned normal sleep. He followed a strict polyphasic schedule: twenty-minute naps every few hours, like cats or dolphins, convinced this fragmented rest was humanity’s ancient, natural way—superior to the artificial eight-hour block forced by electric lights. 6 “LARGE”

One midnight, bleary from another short nap, Elias pushed the experiment too far. He synced the LHC’s next proton collision with a high-energy pulse through the quantum system, hoping to probe entanglement across macroscopic scales.

The collision happened. Detectors screamed. Reality flickered.

A searing blue rift split the air—a quantum portal, unstable and roaring. 4 “LARGE” 5 “LARGE”

Elias was pulled through.

He landed hard on sun-baked earth. Dust rose around him. Two armies stared across a valley: bronze-clad Philistines on one side, ragged Israelites on the other. A nine-foot giant in scaled armor roared defiance. Before him stood a boy—David—with a leather sling and five smooth stones. 7 “LARGE” 8 “LARGE”

David loaded a stone, whirled the sling once, twice. Elias watched in horror and wonder as the projectile launched—its trajectory impossibly perfect, as if guided by quantum probabilities collapsing in the boy’s favor.

The stone struck. Goliath crumpled.

The portal flared behind Elias, yanking him back.

He awoke on the lab floor, alarms blaring, the rift sealed. The data logs showed an anomalous dimension jump—brief contact with a parallel timeline.

From that night on, Elias ditched polyphasic naps. He embraced the old ways instead: first sleep, wakeful midnight reflection, then second sleep. Some mysteries, he decided, weren’t meant for modern shortcuts. And some stones, across any dimension, just needed the right velocity.