Prompt: “murder”

        ...We are laboring under the idea that the true scale can only be inferred, not directly measured. After all- coincidentally- what’s her father’s surname? Laplace. And her mother’s maiden name? Hawking.

        Jokes aside. Here is an omnibus of our findings for your review. Hopefully you and your crew will find them useful… and if they aren’t, then, well, start picking gods. Or somesuch…

        To begin:

It was actually Ms. Park who approached us first, in March, shortly after transferring to the bioresearch department as a TA under professor Saotome. She was rather apprehensive about it, purely due to the nature of the issue (as you are probably already aware) but eventually researcher Grant was able to convince her to speak freely… and putting it to paper (well, rather, email) now, it just seems plainly absurd.

She was dealing… IS dealing… with a problem unique to her, and uninvolved completely with ARKA’s bioresearch laboratory, which broadens the depth of absurdity, because, forgive my conjecture, is there any way a woman could, under ANY circumstances, have a bust size of over 200 centimetres- 6.5 feet?

Nobody thought so, but, apparently, anything is possible once you cross the border from the Union.

Her issue wasn’t necessarily that her bust WAS 200 centimeters. The issue was that, in January, it was 150 centimetres, and it was beginning to cause problems. Her conversation with Grant revealed a host of problems… spine and back pain, difficulty sleeping, general irritation, as to be expected. The kicker, as you can tell, is the 50 centimetres of growth in just about two months. Just how on Earth is something like that possible?

Her labs came back perfectly normal. Grant suggested we have her take a drug test, which came back completely and utterly clear. Additionally, we had a third-party laboratory test any of the milk she produced for being anomalous. Nothing at all surfaced.

And that was in March.

It began to seem exponential.

April: 230cm.

May: 280cm.

June: 330cm.

July: 400cm.

It was at this point she well and truly was unable to leave her apartment.

She called Grant to complain- well, not necessarily complain, she’s not a complainer. More to… vent? About the state of things. Grant relayed to us that she had to have one of her friends bring her food, water, her phone. Grant remembers hearing Park describe her bust as, collectively, about the size of her mattress. Which she could no longer use.

(This friend also allegedly was tasked with helping Park express. This claim holds water, but apparently that did nothing at all to slow the growth.)

August: 500cm.

September: 650cm.

October: 790cm, and because I know some of you are from the Union, that’s about 25 feet.

And it was then that Grant and the rest of us suggested we “relocate” her. Park happily agreed as long as she was to be taken care of. And, of course, we have been (to some extent which you will read later).

ARKA has its fair share of small warehouses in the Union, where Park’s family is at (whether or not she’s even remotely TOLD her family is beyond me). To get her out of her apartment was a feat I applaud ARKA’s subcontractors for. It took a week: framers, electricians, structural engineers. They had to near-completely dismantle her apartment- poor woman couldn’t relax during it- gut it down to the studs and then get RID of the studs, install I-beams to support the structure of the building (which Park was negatively impacting). And even then, in that week that it took, it got very slightly worse, enough so that the engineers’ initial calculations were off by enough to make it painful.

Would you believe that they had to rent a truck and trailer? (Don’t worry; it was a UAV Marksman with a hauling capacity of over a tonne.)

The warehouse was in Idaho, southwest of Idaho City/Route 21. It was aboveground, maybe the size of a hangar, a very nondescript building. It was actually a pleasant drive up until earlier this month. I used to get a coffee in the city before driving to the site.

I miss that coffee. I suspect a lot of other people will, too. If they’re not suffocated.

The reality is this… the situation became incredibly dire in January of this year (she herself was aware of this). The warehouse stopped being sufficient. Measurements stopped being sufficient. Idaho City stopped being Idaho City and was instead a tract of land utterly obliterated by former TA Park’s bust.

It will only sound ridiculous if you are blind or stupid. I mean that honestly.

…Well, it was Idaho City and Boise and, really, a good part of southeastern Idaho. And then it got more dire.

Do you know how large the Union is? It is about 10 square kilometers in size. Do you know how long it took TA Park to outgrow the entire Union?

I don’t. Do you know why I don’t? Because I went to bed in Burns, Oregon, and I didn’t even have time to process the situation before I was completely smothered in darkness when I wasn’t even looking. (Did you know that the underground metro infrastructure of the Union is 1. Very sturdy and 2. Has free wi-fi?)

And here we come to a sort of resolution, but only a temporary one, and I think it’s because ARKA’s executives realised the direness of the situation and didn’t want their facilities damaged. That warehouse alone was millions of dollars.

And the damages to pay to the Union, of course. What little of it was left.

Researcher Nazarenko was actually the one to suggest a sort of absurd spacetime compression method. ARKA’s computer sciences department is capable of incredible greatness, but even I didn’t think it would be possible to do what they did. How they even managed to roll out a prototype in such short manner is equally incredible.

If only they’d thought of it before Canada went, too.

“Dire” quickly became a baseless word to throw around, lacked the weight. More like- apocalyptic.

The compression method worked briefly- BRIEFLY- and for about two days we thought we could take a deep breath and figure out what in the nine hells to do from there.

Those two days were the shortest two days of my life.

I’ll tell you why my email address changed. It changed because our computer infrastructure was flattened; ARKA was flattened. Europe was flattened. Asia was flattened. The entirety of planet Earth, the pale blue dot, was completely consumed, crushed into what I can only imagine is microscopic dust and quarks, hidden in hundreds of thousands of maybe MILLIONS of kilometers of what is undeniably TA Park’s bust.

I’m not kidding. Look out the damned window, march into my quarters, and tell me to my face that I’m kidding. I dare you.

The only reason I have any service at all is because of the satellite system we have with us. Which has not proved much help as to where exactly we ARE in the first place.

Well, we’re inside of her bust. I know that much but I don’t know where that is relative to anything else. Where SHE is, the woman herself, is completely beyond me. I can’t imagine that she has died… or else the scenery would look a bit different.

Space is a vacuum. I personally am laboring under the assumption that she has usurped that vacuum.

If that sounds ridiculous I want you to imagine for a moment being me. I, out of sheer curiosity, attempted to ping a location for our Orpheus probe this morning. It was last pinged to be around J0313-1806. That is the farthest known quasar that we as a human species have observed.

“Error: unexpected system shutdown.”

Now, what could that possibly mean to you under these circumstances? I’ll be crass, now. The fact is that TA Park’s absurdly large… tits… have reached farther than our most distant probe, which sat at the bounds of the observable universe.

I don’t think it even exists anymore. The observable universe. I’m being a pessimist, I know. But I really can’t believe that she stopped there. Before that it was the big bang, and then whatever other… well, otherworlds, dimensions, whatever the hell, lie beyond that border. And I think she surpassed it. Do you want to know why? Because I received this message this morning. I’ll just copy-paste it directly.

“FROM: ???

TO: iminov@AORD.org

Researcher Iminov.

This is Sung-Hyun.

Do you know of the unit of measurement, solar masses?

The black hole at the center of the Milky Way was about 4 solar masses.

You and your crew are stuck under the pressure of a googolplex of solar mass.

How do I know? I know because I simply know.

I don’t know how long the Pocatello will hold up. I don’t think for very much longer.

But you won’t have to worry about feeling anything. You’ll be crushed instantly. The Earth was crushed instantly. The Moon was crushed instantly. The entire Solar System was devoured by my boobs in a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second. You won’t even have time to process being swallowed up.

You can look forward to that.

Until then- I have news for you.

Space WAS cold. And now I’m very, very warm.

Do you know what might have happened to me? I know, simply because I KNOW. I feel it.

I think I’ve accidentally created a quasar.

Do you know what can’t escape from a quasar? Light. And do you know what that means? Nothing else can escape, either. You and your colleagues are trapped on the Pocatello until the sheer, infinite, reality-crushing weight of my bust completely obliterates you.

Thanks for trying, anyway.”

I think she’s taunting us. This is absolutely infuriating. But what can we do? We’re all botanists and structural engineers, one of us is a former cart jockey. We know nothing. We have nothing (aside from a farming area to provide rations). We ARE nothing. In the face of TA Park, we are utterly useless. This is why I’m emailing your crew. Just to see if I can get a response, since I think most of you are theoretical physicists.

It’s only something metaphysical that will help in this situation. Nazarenov taught me that… for 48 hours.

So ends my plea. You’re literally our only lifeline. If you can’t help, NOTHING can. And I mean that entirely seriously… NOTHING.

She MADE A QUASAR, after all.

Cheers and best wishes,

Researcher Marianne Bolton

…

        FROM: ???

Hello Marianne. Nice to hear from you.

        Unfortunately, the crew of the McCall succumbed to me recently. I don’t know how recently. All I know is that I felt a squirming and a collapse and then Researcher DeVry stopped responding to my messages. They’re very sensitive, you know. Which is how I could tell when the Oort belt and Orpheus and the walls of the universe collapsed.

        …I think I can feel the Pocatello collapsing, too. It’s not my fault. I liked you, Marianne. You were always nice. But I can’t prevent what’s coming. Neither can you! Clearly you’ve realised that much.

        I’ll let you in on something interesting. If you “are” everything… what’s preventing you from “creating” everything? To what rules am I beholden, exactly? If the observable universe has since ceased to exist, leaving my incomprehensibly massive bust, what’s to say I can’t make something new?

        The only reason I’ve recived your message is that you are, functionally, me. You are a speck of microscopic dust, a nanogstrom of a quark that exists entirely surrounded by me. You are meaningless. The Pocatello is meaningless. Things like ARKA, the Union, borders and countries and brands and money and food and water and light and gods and religion and numbers mean utterly nothing.

        They mean nothing because I am everything.

        They exist only because we remember them.

        They will exist only because I remember them.

        You are going to die, Marianne. You and your crew in the Pocatello are going to instantaneously suffocate from the mind-warping bars of pressure exerted on you by my hypertits. You’ll feel nothing. You’ll see nothing. You’ll blink and you’ll be gone.

        You mean nothing because I am everything.

        You’ll exist only as a memory. The Pocatello will exist only as a memory.

        And then, what else will be?

        Me. Sung-Hyun Park. I am no longer a person. I am no longer the woman who studied under the late Professor Saotome. I am no longer the TA who helped with the kannite project. I am no longer the daughter of middle-class Idahoans.

        Who am I?

        REPLY TO: ???

        God. I suppose.

        You win. I lose.

        FROM: ???

        That’s right.

Now you understand.

…

        Sung-Hyun Park wakes up in her apartment bed.

        Infinite possibilities burn.

She is multitudes.

She is nothing.

She is Everything.

She is God.

        And her bust is a pathetic 130 centimetres.