Copper
"Think about what I told you and practice hard or you’re going to grow up to be an old grouch like me.”
Across almost every corner of the face of the planet, Copper is only a whisper. The whisper is so faint that you could hardly feel her spark, even if you gave it every bit of attention you could. But there are tiny, quiet, dark, nooks of our world where her whispers blaze into bright green, blue, and bronze fireworks.
There, black, putrid clouds bubble from great chasms that wrap across the navel of the world like a net of chains. In the depths of the ocean, under immense pressure and in total darkness, her spirit sparks to life.
She is fury, pure energy, an electromagnet. Her laughter and the shriek of her raspy voice shake the wall of the rock chimneys that contain her.
She shared the chimneys with Sulfur and Iron. They were both terrifying and powerful beings in their own right, but she grew accustomed to them. Iron was handsome and wise but often cold and quiet. Sulfur on the other hand had a horrifying visage, but a warm, light heart. Over the ages, they became dear friends.
Sulfur always told Copper that he saw himself in her. From his perspective, they both had the power of poison. His acrid odor complemented her astringent taste. He divulged that many of the Elements feared him once he revealed to them his ghastly appearance and cruel powers. He confessed that he hadn't had the best relationship with his father and that he occasionally has to do terrible things. But Copper found the honesty in these confessions endearing and her admiration for him grew.
He told Copper that he wanted to help her learn to control her powers so she didn’t have to make the mistakes he did. In their lessons, she found love for him. His warmth, high spirits, and gregariousness helped bolster hers. He could take so many shapes — crystals, fluid, and air — and used his magic to invent new games to challenge her and help her continue to grow.
It inspired awe and jealousy in her to learn just how far his consciousness extended beyond the vents and chimneys. She waited on bated breath as he told her stories of deep oceans, shallow waters, and even air. The thought thrilled her.
“Okay so there’s places where there’s no water and that’s air, but what about air? Are there places with no air?” Copper asked him excitedly. Her testy voice echoed off the black rock walls of their home. The light of the magma far beneath them glinted off the walls, filling the place with a comfortable warmth.
“I guess that would be space? Yeah, it’s real empty empty up there. For a while at least. I haven’t been, but I’ve heard there’s some pretty far out stuff in space.” There was a moment’s hesitation. “What do you know about where Elements come from?“
“Pretty much nothing. I always imagined I sprung out from the center of the Earth. That’s how it felt to me at least.”
“I learned in school that we all came from stars.”
“What! No way! We came from stars??” Copper bounced with enthusiasm. “What’s a star???”
Sulfur laughed. “Imagine the heat of the chimneys times 10 million. It’s so hot there that elements can actually come together and fuse and make a new heavier one.” He paused a thought for a moment. “Do you see these?” He asked. He was gesturing to his open mouth at his teeth. He didn’t necessarily need to open it. Copper had always wondered about the black lines that leaped across the huge, pale-yellow, crystalline teeth that protruded from his exposed, skinless lower jaw.
“How many do you count?”
“1… 2… 3…” she murmured to herself. “Sixteen!”
“That’s right. Sixteen. I’m element number sixteen. My body got fused from element number 8, Oxygen. Eight plus eight equals sixteen. That’s what happened in that star. My teachers told us this process is called nucleosynthesis.”
“Nuleosycothys?” She tried boldly.
“Nucleosynthesis.”
“Nucleosynthis.”
“Exactly that.” Sulfur smiled broadly.
A vivid memory returned to Copper. Iron sat atop a chimney gazing off into the dark. His legs dangled loosely and his strong jaw rested on his fist. Black marks scored the bones of his spine.
"So Iron is 26?”
Sulfur squinted at her. "Good memory," he said, as much a question as an answer. Yes."
“Where are my lines? Not fair. They look sooo cool!"
Sulfur laughed more. “I don't think you want to be a major element. Besides, I think we should consider ourselves lucky that you are here with us at all. The domains where elements like you can manifest at all are so few and spread so thin. Besides, with regards to markings, I do think you have a little something."
It dawned on Copper. She pulled up her top to reveal her abdomen. A cube of nine small dots bounded by two larger ones were engraved in grey on her bronze flesh. On her lower back, six large dots in a hexagon surrounded by three smaller dots in a larger upside-down triangle. “You mean these things? I’ve always wondered.”
“Haha I’ve wondered myself, and I think it's a numerical shorthand.” He laughed. “Maybe the gods lost their imagination when they were building you.”
“Shut up! Do you think so? So what do you think it means? Is it my number?
“Ah, how do I explain this?” He ran his fingers through his long, grey, millerite hair to remove it from his face. He squinted his bilirubin eyes when he talked. “We’re all made of atoms, you know that right?”
“Duh! I’m named after the Copper atom.”
“Well, you see, like our pieces are atoms, atoms have their own little pieces. An atom has protons, which are little positively charged pieces that rest in the center. Your little electrons that you love so much and give you your power buzz around that center to balance out the charge.” He sat back against the stone wall. “The numbers of these little particles make up a big part of our code. They exert influence on our personalities, like how sturdy or fraught we are. They also influence our relationships and what kind of compounds we can form.”
“I asked what my number is not another chemistry lesson stupid!” He was always trying to make her learn.
“I'm trying to get there! Give me a second. So based on what I’ve learned my guess is that you actually have two numbers. The number on your abdomen is 29, and that corresponds to the number of protons. They also call that your ‘charge number’. But you’ve got a little something extra and special about you. As if we didn’t already know that.” He smiled and winked.
“What is it?!”
“It’s neutrons. You've got extra neutrons. Most of us lighter elements have the same number of neutrons as protons. But most heavier elements don’t. I'm not sure exactly how it works, but I think once the number of protons in the nucleus gets to be pretty high, all of that positive force cause them to start repelling each other and they become unstable. A little extra mass in the form of neutrons helps even things out. You’ve got 34 neutrons and 29 protons. That number on your back is your mass number, sixty three.”
Copper was getting really excited now. Everything was clicking. The numbers whirred through her head. It made too much sense. “Sulfur… 63 is my number … 16 protons plus 16 neutrons is 32, and that’s you... but 32 plus 32 is… 64!! It’s so close to sixty-three. Did I lose a proton? Could you be my dad??”
“You were made by something very different than me. It’s called the S-process if I remember correctly. “S” in that case stands for slow." The final word came out with a drawn-out emphasis. "But I was made in a huge super massive star that grew so big it couldn’t support itself and went kaboom. I think s-process elements get born in stars that aren’t big enough for that and kind of just sputter out slowly.”
Sulfur slowed down as he realized Copper wasn’t receiving the answer she was hoping for. He chewed his upper lip for a moment while he thought about what to say. “It is a funny coincidence though. I don’t know if it’s best we think about it like that but I promise I love you all the same.”
Copper smiled sheepishly but said nothing, gazing off somewhere else. Sulfur must have noticed her embarrassment, he bent down to meet her. His long, gaunt limbs wrapped around her, and his thin robe fluttered to shelter her in his embrace. "I'm not your dad but I do promise to always protect you, Copper.”
“Watch this,” he said, capturing her gaze with a wave of his hand. He took a bony thumb and put it to his forehead, and then down to his palm. “I do this to help me remember promises.” He made the gesture again. “Remember. Your turn.”
Copper made the gesture. “Perfect.” He said. “It’s a promise now.”
“Now your promise in return is that you’re going to show up on time for my lesson tomorrow.” He said teasing. “Are you going out to play on the chimneys again tonight?”
“Yeah. There’s a vent to the south full of all kinds of glittery stuff that I didn’t get to finish exploring.” Her voice was a little bit brighter.
“Well don’t go too far and be careful. And think about what I told you and practice hard or you’re going to grow up to be an old grouch like me.”
Now released, Copper glowed and leaped fearlessly off into the shadows of the rocks beyond their home in the chimneys, as she always did. Sulfur ran his finger along his teeth. Sixteen. “There’s some things that will never change,” he thought.
In some way, she could have blamed it on him. His stories had inspired her. Seas, shallow shores, and stars? How could she resist? The idea began to sound so romantic. Thus her desire to step out from her little home in the chimneys and share her brightness with the rest of the world was seeded.
When Sulfur was away and the moment came for her escape, she summoned all of her strength and tried to remember what she had learned. She reached downward for the tiny tendrils of herself that floated in the warm cracks beneath and slowly wove them together. Once the net was woven wide and deep enough, she began to push her free electrons through it from the surface all the way as far down as she could reach. For epochs, she sat patiently brewing and waiting, imagining the wonders that awaited her outside. Tiny eddies of heat grew into currents, concentrating power beneath her. When she found the power to be suitably warm and buoyant, she made her leap.
She sprung outside the tops of the chimneys, riding a plume of smoke and molten earth. In the haze that lingered, she found herself able to retain her shape. She found her body beautifully well-suited to water. In the right oxidation state, she dissolved effortlessly. If she sorted her electrons right, she could fight the polarity of the water around her and glide anywhere she wanted. The freedom and flow were euphoric. If before inside the rocks her spirit sparkled, it was now a thunderstorm. She cackled as she danced across the sea.
She found the world above was more wonderful than she could have imagined. The view of the chimneys from outside was breathtaking. Towers that scraped upward as far as she could see, reaching up like the broken fingers of a hundred gods clawing for freedom from the earth. She played for months, hours, days, the time didn't make a difference. She explored canyons and mountaintops, fissures and ridges, fingertips and palm.
When she felt the cloud and her presence weakening, she felt she would eventually have to return to her home. In a moment of rest at the edge of her city of rock, something caught her eye. She brought her senses to the tiniest crack on the underside of a stone on the seafloor. There she found a thousand-thousand little pods pockmarking the sheltered rock face.
The presence felt completely alien. Its consciousness, movements, and awareness were so very different from hers. She had seen monomers before, stray amino acids and nucleotides that had fallen to the deep. But the complexity of this thing was mind-boggling. It was like a little machine composed of countless compounds working in tandem, being made and unmade.
Copper had discovered what we humans would one day call life.