Inside a Reno taxi driver, atoms. Inside atoms, protons. A billion billion billion times smaller than the taxi driver, a photon flees a proton like a sprig of lightning. Surrounding that proton, the taxi driver’s cerebral cortex, electrified by that proton’s photon, realizes today’s the taxi driver’s son’s birthday. The taxi driver reaches up to straighten the black and white photo of him holding his son in a go-kart, his son’s tiny hands gripping the steering wheel, his own legs wrapping around the boy, feeling for the brakes. The memory causes the taxi driver to tap his brakes, which squeal sonic vibrations into the speckled night air.
At that instant on a London cubicle farm, the click squeak swivel surrounding the son’s forty-fourth floor desk reminds the son of a birthday go-kart skid. The rear of the go-kart swung round and round, ejecting him from his father’s lap like a proton’s photon but a billion billion billion times larger, making two far-flung strangers in an expanding world, making light years between galaxies in an inflating universe, expanding, only expanding.
