Sample Chapter: The Question That Started Everything
On the day the universe started acting strange,
Anna was thinking about how long a minute
really was.
Not the kind of “one Mississippi, two Mississippi”
minute her classmates used when they had to line up,
but the precise kind: sixty seconds, each one made of
smaller and smaller slices you could, in theory, divide
forever if your pencil and patience were sharp enough.
She sat in the back seat of the car, chin on her fist,
watching houses and fields slide by as her dad drove
them home. The winter sky over Minnesota was a
pale, cold blue, a color so clean it felt like a sheet of
graph paper stretched across the whole world.
“Hey, Anna,” Dad said, breaking the comfortable
silence. “Can I give you a puzzle?”
She blinked out of her thoughts and watched his
reflection in the rearview mirror. His eyes had that
sparkle, the one they always got when he was about to
drop something fascinating into her brain.
“Yes,” she said. “Obviously.”
He laughed. “Okay. Imagine this: light, like from
the sun or a flashlight, takes one full year to travel
from our house to your school.”
Anna frowned instantly. “That’s wrong.”
“I know,” he said. “In real life, it’s wrong. This is a
pretend universe. In this universe, light takes one full
year just to get from our driveway, to the school’s front
door.”
She leaned back, letting the picture settle into her
mind. A year. For light. Just to reach her school. The
building was only five minutes away here in Dundas.
She knew that because she’d timed it. Many times.
Silently. With great satisfaction.
“So in this pretend universe,” she said slowly, “the
school is one light-year away.”
There was a tiny pause, and she saw his eyes flick up
in the mirror again, pleasantly surprised. “Exactly,” he
said. “One light-year.”
Light-year. The distance light travels in a year. One
of her favorite words, because it packed two ideas into
one, time folded into distance like a secret.
“Now,” Dad continued, “in that same pretend
universe, the Twin Cities are still a forty-five minute
drive from home, just like they are now. Same car.
Same roads. Same you.”
Anna pictured the route, passing Northfield signs,
fields, then highways, then the slow thickening of
buildings as Minneapolis–St. Paul got closer. About
nine times farther than school.
“So,” Dad said, “here’s the puzzle. If light takes one
year to get from our house to your school, and you
drive to the Twin Cities in one year, what does that say
about how fast you’re going?”
Anna stared out the window, but her eyes no longer
saw the snowy fields. Her thoughts stretched out in
every direction.
School: 1 light-year away, taking light 1 year.
Twin Cities: 9 times farther, 9 light-years.
Her trip: Twin Cities in 1 year.
Her brain supplied the math without asking for paper.
Speed of light in this universe: 1 light-year per year.
Her speed: 9 light-years per year.
Nine times faster.
“I’d be going faster than light,” she said.
Dad didn’t answer right away. When he did, his
voice was soft and proud. “Yeah,” he said. “You would.”