The Magnetic Fields of the Whirling Mechanism, Part III

The epigraph in the Kircher exhibit, Valentine Worth, he recognized the name. When he got home, Abrams hunted through his archive of pulp fiction for the bound set of Eerie Tales, a Canadian fantasy monthly published between world wars. Later that night, instead of the next story from Isaac Basheevis Singer's Old Tales from the New World for Ethan's bedtime story he read a Valentine Worth installment from issue 14 of Eerie tales, the story: The Island of Death. The ehxaustive yet lyrical descriptions of the flora and fauna and Abrams' monotone delivery put his 4-year-old to sleep within minutes, but he continued reading aloud, looking for a connection. The story was your stock mad-scientist-plays-god-in-paradise, but seeded, if somewhat artlessly, among the man-eating plants and powder-coat-finish drones, was a strange borgesian conceit. And therein lay the connection to Athanasius Kircher exhibt at the museum. In the heart of the Island of Death lay an impendingly disastrous anomaly, the holy grail of electro-magnetism, a monopole. Magnets have both a south pole and a north pole, thus creating a regulated field. Instead, the monople was steadily gathering mass and strength like a blackhole. Kircher believed that magnetism ruled all aspects of our existence, the invisible strings and knots that linked all our choices and fates, our dreams and desires all given to the pull of magnetism's omnipresent flux aeterna. There are no demons or angels, just points in a field seeking to align and resonate. In the case of the monopole, however, the field can only grow stronger, a juggernaut of influence, nullifying any free will. Valentine's story went further to claim that God is Death and Death is a monopole, entropy is a consequence of this anomaly, all things must decay, subsumed by chaos, our souls eviscerated. All our lives in service to a single anomaly like flotsam reeling in a boundless vortex. This is good stuff, Abrams thought, like a conversation cross milenium and across hemispheres between a Jesuit polymath, Kirchner and Valentine Worth a dime-story writer. This stuff is too good not to use. It would take him several years to cook it all down on the back burner, inbetween Alias and a handful of movie projects. Soon he'd have the specs for a whole new tv series, add some fresh faces, some exotic locales, palm off the whole thing as a work in progress. Who would have thunk that the seeds of an emmy award winning show, adored by critics and fans, were housed in some obscure museum on Venice Blvd. The world is indeed bound with secret knots.