I am in the 5-Coffins. It’s my room about the size of 5 coffins, which has been my home for the past 5 years. The name is a pun, like the 4-Seasons hotel of the good old days. My room is about a mile under the city of Sacramento. It’s not a prison; I actually volunteered to be here. My name is Robert Mildred Bischoff; you can call me Robbie.

The 5-Coffins is a lab affiliated to the California State University in Sacramento, built in collaboration with Stanford University’s SLAC Linear accelerator lab. A 2-billion dollar endowment from Factorial Inc is what enabled this lab for the Gravity-Identification Project. The money hardly makes a dent in the company’s revenue. Factorial is only the most powerful company in the world, with interests in pretty much everything; from search engines, to cars, spaceships, and mercenary drones-for-hire, all of which run on those engines. Since they build so many things that fly, I bet this “gift” to the university is somehow connected to their business plan for the next century.

The lab is stocked with the state-of-the-art equipment to detect and track Gravitons. What are Gravitons you ask? Since you most probably are no physicist, I will state this in the most basic terms possible. Gravitons are sub-atomic particles that, theoreticians have claimed exist and cause gravity. No one has seen or detected them. Why might they exist then, you ask? Because the math says they do. If no one has found them yet, it’s because people are not smart enough to build devices that could sense them. So yes, 5 years ago I thought I was smart enough, and made a career choice to sit in a dungeon deep underground. I was going to be the next Einstein.

There is a simple reason the lab is buried so deep. The ground beneath Sacramento is perfect, as it sits at the edge of two tectonic plates. Access to the earth’s core is far easier here. But I suspect they put the lab out here in the middle of nowhere, because no one comes here anymore.  It’s the year 2022, and the 20-year drought has decimated the west coast. If I went up to the ground level, all I would see are duststorms and rusted railroad tracks; no people. I don’t venture out much though; I have sometimes gone months without seeing the sun.

I have a hammock in a corner, right above the toilet. No cellular network or even a phone line down here. The tiniest electro-magnetic energy or radiation could skew the results. So, like in the 20th century, I actually keep lots of books down here. I have read a lot about everything. I don’t walk or even move for hours when I run the experiments. Movement causes static to build up, which introduces noise and ruins my experiments. The ability to sit motionless for hours turned out to be a valuable skill very soon, as you will see in a few podcasts.

I sit around watching 20 monitors all day and night. That is all I do. The sensors that sit deep in the earth’s core send out electromagnetic signals, which show up on the screens. I am looking for spikes in the signals, and so far there have been none.

Now I feel like Sisyphus. Like him, I am cursed with a never-ending task. Sisyphus had to move a boulder up a mountain for eternity, and I have to look for shy particles. You have caught me at a pivotal moment in my life.  I am done. I hate this work; if I spent another second watching these darn monitors, I will lose it. So, I am going to take the elevator up to civilization, jump into my wheezy 2010 Ford Explorer, and race down the dirt-covered highway to my advisor’s office. Once I barge into his office, I am going to tell him this:

“John. You have been an understanding advisor all these years. But if I did this anymore, I will give up on a career in science and become a big rig driver. I need to clear my head. So I am taking some time off, and I don’t know when I am coming back.”

What am I going to do after that, you ask?

All I can tell you is what John Muir once said, “The Mountains are calling, and I must go.”