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Tweak says, "welp"

Rosario Ortiz (

reluciente) wrote in

nevermore_logs,
@ 2021-06-07 00:33:00

WHO Rosario Ortiz and Urania
WHEN Monday morning, June 7
WHERE Rose Centre for Earth and Space, American Museum of Natural History
WHAT Urania is good at zeroing in on the space nerds
WARNINGS Probably none

During undergrad, the Museum of Natural History had become one of Rosario’s favourite study haunts. Most visitors walked right on past the research library on their way to check out the dinosaur skeletons – which, you know, fair – but it was open access to the public, and it was extensive, and usually it was quieter than the on-campus libraries. She could set herself up in a secluded corner with her laptop and a pile of textbooks, the murmur of voices drowned out by the salsa metal blasting in her earphones, and work solidly till almost closing time.

And… well, while getting there didn’t technically require one to cut through the Earth and Space Halls, once you were already in the building, it was barely even a detour.

The Cosmic Pathway was her favourite. It wound its way from the second floor to the ground, a 360-foot ramp circling the massive white sphere of the Hayden Planetarium. A timeline of all existence on a walkable scale, where every footstep sent the viewer rocketing through forty-five million years of time.

She hadn’t been back so much lately. It just didn’t make sense, now she was in med school. Just about every text she needed was in the Health Sciences Library on campus, and it seemed pretty stupid to get the train across town just for the ambiance. But finals were over and the morning was all hers, and with worries about grades preying on her mind, Rosario had returned to her old haven. She took the elevator to the ground floor, weaving through gaggles of tourists and families with shrieking children to find the end of the Pathway.

She always started at the end. The end was the present day, denoted by a single hair encased in glass. Crunch 13.8 billion years into a 360-foot timeline, and that was all the space that 30,000 years of human history got, just a few micrometres. Split off one hundredth of that hair’s width and you had pretty much the entire scientific era.

There was something meditative about taking the Pathway backwards. One step was all it took to leave humanity behind entirely, and then Rosario was walking through the age of dinosaurs, past the Cambrian explosion, the emergence of multicellular lifeforms, the formation of an oxygen-rich atmosphere – Earth itself unspooling while the universe opened up. Rosario closed her eyes for a breath, smiled, and took another step.

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