I’ve been thinking about someone who’s been on my mind for a while. And the thing is that they’re not always there. They drift on the shores of my consciousness like ocean tides rising and lowering. It’s been years since we last saw or spoke to each other in person, yet their presence is still felt at times as if they never disappeared.
I live my life pretending like nothing ever happened. One marathon, two apartments, and three years working corporate later: I should be happy with what I’ve accomplished so far in life. But am I?
Truthfully, I am reasonably happy. I don’t have the life that I completely desire just yet, but I also don’t have too much to complain, politics aside. I keep to myself within the fog of time, a place I can’t seem to travel through without having to look at my watch. The numbers only seem to go up, never in the direction where my mind often wanders in search of smaller pieces of yesterday. I know little as to where I’ll end up.
These recent thoughts had me wonder about how love is such a strange feeling to grasp. It’s an emotion that most of us desire but don’t completely understand. It’s the opposite of hate which lingers in the shadows of tormented souls starved of love. It’s the emotion that often gets the most attention in popular media. I’m not sorry for listening to Maroon 5 in 2025.
Nevertheless, recent reflections on love has left me to structure my future drafts around love and quantum mechanics, the science of how really tiny subatomic particles behave. In my research, I was fascinated by quantum entanglement and how two entangled particles can affect each others’ behavior, regardless of distance.
Say, for example, if I flip a coin and it lands on heads. Naturally, the other side will be tails, unless if your coin is whack and the US Mint turned you into an overnight lottery winner.
Similarly, if a particle “flipped” heads on Earth, you’d automatically assume that the other entangled particle is “tails”, regardless of where it is in the universe. However, unlike the coin analogy, which only describes a single coin, we’re describing about two entangled particles that are both head and tails until their quantum state is measured. Once measured, or “observed”, the quantum state collapses into two distinct ones, one head and one tails.
Now, I’m still learning about the science behind this magic wizardry, so I may be wrong in my description of quantum mechanics in a nutshell, but this is roughly the best way to introduce how it works and my intentions to include it into The Fifth Star.
I tie the idea of quantum entanglement to love and how it may relate to the story that is loosely based around concepts in quantum physics. If entanglement allows particles to affect each other, regardless of distance or time, then something similar may be said about love. For example, how often does the person who loves you the most think about you? They may either be thinking about you right now or not. You may think about them when they’re thinking about you or not. Either case, it is lovely to think about someone when you know that they are thinking about you.
But the one thing that I came to realize is that some connections are stronger than others where departure may eventually result in lingering feelings for that other person that never truly go away. That’s the kind of emotion that I wish to carry that to my story across the various relationships explored in The Fifth Star. I’d like to imagine that love, too, is somehow a product of entanglement that can be measured and felt.
Since this sci-fi novel will pertain to themes of freedom and love, I am looking to create a story that does little explaining, in terms of science, so others can feel something. I wish to feed everyone the love felt in this story, not the made up science that, if I’m being clear, is borderline mystic yet plausible.
When relating the themes of freedom to love, I say that living in total freedom can be lonely. Living in total security can be suffocating. Attempting to balance the two requires a level of understanding that is often inaccurate and misunderstood. When it scales to a large city, like Neochi, some may try to measure and control it. But there are those who won’t let such a brutal event unfold without consequences.
Love is often the symptom this often unexplainable yet closely felt thing that bonds humans together regardless of distance or time. Sometimes, it hurts. Love can be painful and repel those who may not wish to accept it. But when the emotional resonance is just right, it’s the most potent drug in the universe. Maybe it’s the antidote that people need to be reminded of in a world obsessed by making it “safer”.
