text: I have to get something off my chest, and anonymously posting on a subreddit for fictional stories seems like the best way to talk about it without being found out. I *think* that I've taken enough precautions that the government won't find me, but I have no idea what the NSA is actually capable of these days. Truth be told, I'm not really sure if such safeguards are worth the trouble. They may be able to figure out who I am and who my colleagues were anyway, but I'm mostly off the grid at this point, so I won't make it easy to find me. Besides, for all I know, "the event" (as I've taken to calling it) could happen tomorrow. Or a million years from now. I'm not an astrophysicist or a climate scientist, so I have no way of knowing when it will happen. I only know that it will happen, and a general idea of the form it will take. I *am* (or at least, was) a particle accelerator engineer, who specialized in creating and harvesting antimatter. I was the one who developed the mechanism for creating large quantities of heavy antimatter nuclei and capturing them in magnetic containment chambers. That was about a year and a half ago. It was my proudest achievement at the time; perhaps even the thing history would remember me for. Now that I know history has an expiration date, I'm not as enthusiastic as I once was. I can't even publicise the schematics for the remaining time we have. Like everything else, it's been classified at the highest security clearances. Anyone short of POTUS would have trouble accessing them now. To make a long story short, I was able to create macroscopic quantities of anti-iron. My colleagues and I accumulated enough that we had a solid kilogram of the stuff, arranged in a smooth sphere, and let me tell you, taxpayer, it took a heck of a lot of money, time, and energy to do it. Under different circumstances, I might ask myself whether it was worth it in the end. Looking back, I should have known something was amiss when I read papers which suggested that anti-hydrogen atoms absorb multiple low energy photons and emit higher energy photons, the opposite behavior of ordinary matter. I attributed it to a statistical fluke or equipment malfunction. But this anti-iron couldn't be so easily dismissed. For one thing, it glowed, despite the fact that there was no apparent energy source powering it. We tested it with geiger counters, but we couldn't detect any radiation greater than ordinary background doses. We kept it in a vacuum sealed magnetic containment chamber. For those of you who aren't aware, when antimatter and matter collide, both are turned into pure energy by Einstein's famous formula: E= mc2. In practical terms, our sphere of anti-iron would cause an explosion a thousand times greater than a nuclear bomb if it were permitted to contact even the air in the room. Needless to say, handling it was a delicate business. Our first test, we decided, would be to heat the object up using a carefully calibrated symmetric laser array, to see how it behaved at high temperatures. Even before we came to that decision, the anti-iron began to behave strangely. Our instruments told us it was heating up, but its glow didn't noticeably change, even after its temperature rose past red hot. Ultimately, we decided to move forward with the heating experiment, if only because we didn't think our lasers could heat it much more than it already was. I'm embarrassed to admit that the truth didn't dawn on me until after the anti-iron ball was cooking in our oven. I had some time to let my mind wander, and suddenly, it clicked. I had been thinking about Feynman diagrams, which diagram subatomic particle interactions. In particular, they portray anti-matter as moving backward in time. mathematical artifacts, with no bearing in reality, most physicists assumed. They said the same thing about special relativity before Einstein came along. And the more I thought about our sample, the more things started to make sense. The glow we saw wasn't light generated by the anti-iron, but rather the ambient light from the room and the lights above that terminated on its surface. If you were to rewind the process, it would look as if it were absorbing that light, rather than emitting it. And the heating we observed before placing our object in the oven was actually the object cooling down, from it's own reversed perspective! For this object, entropy would *decrease* over time, as opposed to ordinary matter, for which entropy always increases! My thoughts were interrupted by the ding that indicated our oven was done cooking. As I expected, the anti-iron was precisely room temperature, but it was no longer a sphere, the shape an object takes *after* being melted down in a forceless environment... Shortly afterward the men in black came and shut down our experiment. One of my colleagues was so shaken up by the new shape of our anti-iron sample that she insisted that sinking it into the sun wasn't good enough. If we really wanted to be careful, we'd erase it from the universe by dropping it in a black hole. Last I saw her, she was pleading with the government officials to shoot the sample at the nearest one. I got an email from her a year ago, telling me that "operation Monocerotis is a go", which I can only assume means that our sample is now on its way to annihilation. I guess nobody ever told her that black holes are time-reversed white holes. Or that if you connect a white hole in our universe with a black hole in another, you get a wormhole, which allows things to enter our universe from another one. Somewhere out there, a one kilogram, anti-iron statue of a seven-tentacled, six-eyed *thing* is slowly drifting toward a black hole. Before it gets there, it will attach itself in some way or another to another much faster, much more massive anti-matter object also speeding along from the Earth to the black hole. A ship, perhaps, but more likely a missile. A missile with its nose pointing in the direction it came from. And by the time that happens, there will not be the slightest indication that the earth has ever had a collision with anti-matter that shook it to its core. I got an e-mail from a climate scientist friend of mine the other day. He asked where I've been and told me of his latest research. Apparently, none of the existing climate models are predicting the kind of regular exponential increase in temperature we've been seeing. He says if he didn't know any better, it's almost as if he's watching the earth cool in reverse... Thank you for taking the time to read my testimony, and may God have mercy on us all.