Part One: Gluonia and Whisper

Welcome to the oldest lovers’ quarrel in the known universe.

She was called Gluonia by everyone who knew her, and she was exactly what her name promised: the strong nuclear force, the glue.

And boy, how this woman held. Her indefatigable ability to weather any rupture and hold on through it all is what kept hers and everyone else’s shit together at the end of the day.

Holding other people in their chaos was simply in her nature, and she was not ashamed of getting easily attached to her flock. She cared genuinely and fiercely, holding quarks together with such full-force commitment that in the whole history of the universe, no one had ever seen a quark wandering the galaxies alone.

But as is the wont of all charismatic leaders the universe was ever witness to, fair Gluonia also had her dark side: the moment anyone tried to pull away, Gluonia’s grip would only grow stronger, never weaker. And should some overly independent particle strain hard enough against her, the very energy of the escape attempt would break her captives’ spirits, condensing into brand-new quarks! And then she was left holding these, too! — much to the chagrin of her diminutive and ever-envious partner, the weak nuclear force.

An insatiable woman! And incorrigibly polyamorous, that Gluonia!

Gluonia was the only one of the four forces who hadn’t done any shadow work. Tenacious G faded with distance and never took it personally, because, frankly he was too full of himself to give a shit about anyone’s shadows — least of all his own — which he’d simply bend to his own whims. What a legend. Elektra and Magnus (who were always so nauseatingly intertwined that the crew had stopped gagging at their PDA and simply resorted to calling them electromagnetism even before Brangelina was born) were too obsessed with each other to notice when others started keeping their distance — which was always relative, anyway. They knew, they just didn’t think it mattered materially to their contiguous coitus.

But Gluonia? She only intensified her affections the more people tried to pull away, like an overbearing mother who thought therapy was everyone else’s work.

And neither was she ashamed of how devastatingly attractive she was — had always been. That face card never declined, which is exactly how she’d been able to get around doing her inner work: pretty privilege is real!

Born with the four greatest pairs of bosons the universe had ever seen, Gluonia of course had an unsavory narcissistic streak about her — which both rallied particles to her cause and made them vulnerable to her forceful influence. With the entire universe thus under her powerful spell, she had grown inured to all criticism — even the constructive kind offered by her oft-despairing and mystifyingly besotted twin flame, Whisper, who was always there anyway to clean up after her quarkgies.

“You really have a problem,” the weaker of the two told her. “This attachment to everyone you come across — this incessant need to keep everyone in your grip…it’s really draining me. Am I not enough?”

“Ugh, you can be such a beta sometimes!” Gluonia rolled her pretty eyes at her lover.

“Really, Gluonia? Another dig at my beta decay?! I’m trying to have a serious conversation about the future of our relationship!” Whisper lamented in the wake of their latest tiff.

The weak force worked rarely, quietly, and at ranges so short that even Gluonia — no frequent traveler herself because everyone simply came over to her place — thought of her partner as a bit of a lovable shut-in. He was slower than her by geological lifetimes. Where she snapped protons together in a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, Whisper might wait ten minutes, ten years, or ten billion years before he touched anything at all.

And this had started to bother Gluonia almost as much as Gluonia’s hunger for affirmation bothered Whisper. For Gluonia thrived on her tender lover’s fleeting touch — so infrequent and yet so exquisitely transformational!

Such was Whisper’s gift, and it was a gift no one else had. Tenacious G could pull you and Elektra-Magnus could push you and Gluoniaia could coregulate you until the stars burned out, but none of them could so utterly change you. To see so deeply into you as to make you into something you were not and yet had always been. To so deftly tease out your hidden qualities as to make you a new man.

Only Whisper could reach inside a neutron and say, quietly, you were always meant to be a proton, and it would be so. A down quark would become an up quark. An atom would wake up as a different element entirely — a Noble gas where previously he’d been a lowly ironworker — and entire bloodlines were rearranged to right some classist wrong.

His meekness was his most endearing quality, but it belied a picometer of melancholy that remained unfathomable to Gluonia, for Whisper always held something back from his mate. Always kept the deepest part of him strictly virtual, off-shell, and under femtometer range.

“Yeah, well, you’re no prize yourself, dearest one,” Gluonia replied in her most seductive register, already reaching to embrace her beloved. “Do you think it’s fun being married to someone so emotionally unavailable? I’m positively starved for a cuddle. Is it any wonder I go around smashing quarks? And you’re so unstable. Everything you touch falls apart unless I’m there to hold space.”

The short-range king gently corrected his enormous queen. “Ah, but everything I touch becomes, and it’s so glorious to behold, wouldn’t you say?”

“Oh, become here, Whisper, and hold me at last.”

“I couldn’t possibly, my queen. You’re already perfect exactly as you are. I wouldn’t change a thing, which is just what would happen if I laid my hands on you tonight. Now, if only we could work on your jealousy and attachment issues…”

“You said you wouldn’t change a thing!” Gluonia cried out, her bosons heaving with helplessness.

“My estimation of your attachment scale can be somewhat imprecise from where I’m sitting,” he explained patiently.

“Oh, Whisper, you femtesimal menace! I crave but the smallest quantum of your touch!”

“Quality time I can give you, your greatness. My words of affirmation are ever at your disposal, should you ever want for earnest praise. I’ll gift you all the attraction my small stature can muster. I’ll even service you after every mess you make. But touch, alas, must needs remain a once-an-eon delectation. It’s for your own good, my dear.”

Whisper said it quietly and a bit ruefully, as if wondering privately why things had to be so complicated.

“Don’t presume to tell me what’s good for me when I’m always the one left holding your unstable bag and picking up the pieces,” Gluonia shot back and returned to holding court among her many admirers.

They’d been stuck in their push-pull dynamic for nigh on thirteen billion years. Theirs were the oldest arguments in existence: to hold on or let go? to be or not to be — and become something else entirely? and which love language is the more essential?

Neither of them ever won, because some force yet unbeknownst to either of them had rigged the game so that both of them were always right.

Consider the heart of the sun, where Gluonia and Whisper work together and bicker the livelong day like an old married couple:

Protons slam into each other in the crushing dark. Gluonia reaches out to hold them — she craves so badly to collect more devotees to fill the aching void Whisper’s avoidance leaves in the heart of her left boson — but she can’t. Two protons alone won’t stay bound! The arrangement feels all wrong without her lover at her side! Her desperate grip finds no purchase! Nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand times out of a million, the protons ricochet apart and the sun comes that much closer to never shining at all. Terrifying thought.

And here is the art of their science — Gluonia’s and Whisper’s. Where her grip fails, Whisper is always there to pick up the slack, for that is the hallmark of all enduring relationships: they support one another. And so, just when Gluonia’s well and truly had it, which is only every so often (for she is a formidable force), Whisper swoops in. In the precise instant while the protons still touch, he turns one proton into a neutron.

You were always meant to be this, he would whisper into the newborn neutron’s ears.

And now — now — Gluonia could finally behold the child! Oh, how she’d seize the pair of them — the child and the proton — into a fresh new deuterium and never, ever let go!

And the binding would release light!

And the light would quest for a hundred thousand years bushwhacking and shouldering its way out of the sun!

And then only eight minutes crossing the interplanetary dark —

— when, hark! It would land on a leaf, or a borealis, or the face of someone reading a story somewhere.

And it would be good.

Every ray of starlight is owed to the two of them arguing endlessly and cooperating only when it becomes absolutely necessary.

“Admit it, majesty,” Whisper mused once after a long day of work, the light of their latest collaboration just beginning its long climb toward the surface. “Without me, you’d have nothing to hold, anyway. Two protons and no way forward. A universe of hydrogen, ad infinitum, forever and forever and forever, stretching as far as the eye can see, to the very last syllable of recorded time. Only the universe would never have grown a single eye. So what more do you want? How am I not enough for you?”

“You are,” Gluonia replied. “Never doubt my affections, sweet Whisper. But I cannot change what I am unless you hug me, and since you have so stubbornly refused me for billions of years, I am all but forced to take lovers. And, you know, I deserve some credit, too. Without me, your transformations would be ephemeral, your healing journeys never lasting, your miracles gone by morning. You’d change lives and they’d just fall back into old habits unless I helped them integrate.””

And so the weak force uttered the only words to ever save a man from a woman’s righteous indignation: “You’re right, and I’m sorry.” At this, Whisper beheld his magnificent woman — taking in all eight of her bosons — and considered copping a feel, but then thought better of it. “You’re absolutely right and always have been. “You’re absolutely right and always have been. Nobody wants a universe of unintegrated loose ends less than I do — lest they glom onto you even more than they already do, hoping to fill the aching abyss of never being enough, and then I’d have more competition for you than I already do.”

Gluonia’s bosons quivered and nearly split apart from Whisper’s backhanded compliment before she glued them back together again through sheer force of will. It’s like he knew. He knew her core wound. That she could never have all of him. That he held something back. Avoided disclosing some great unspeakable secret. And was just baiting her to admit the glaring insecurity bedeviling the strongest nuclear force in the known universe.

“Ugh, you can be such a pain,” she spat back at him and disappeared in a huff of pure redshift.

Read Part Two.

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