“The blaze of crimson light from the tube told its own story and was a sight to dwell upon”
- Morris Travers, co-discoverer of neon
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Of course, to explain how we got here, this passionate encounter in the laboratory, we'll have to go back several billion years. There was a sun. There was the heat. An endless ocean of helium and hydrogen flows back and forth. Protons batter each other, simple atoms in brilliant excitement, as games of chance play out in the plasma. A few particles fuse for an instant, a little heavier, before splintering into pieces. Even fewer manage to stay, a new element born stable, a new resonance of state. And so they climb up a ladder by countless strikes, gaining weight, until finally we appear, a touch of newborn neon in the flux.
Time passes. Our host begins to cool slightly, running out of fuel, unable to push back against its own titanic matter, resist its gravity. And then, a contraction, a sudden gasp. The sun sucks inward for a second, deep into its center. Only to explode, to nova. A great wave throws us far into the unknown, spreads us through the void. As the energy dissipates, we wait again, drifting in the cold. Vast molecular clouds swirl like mist, spin in the emptiness, until we feel something pulling us in, a force calling us to a whole. A system slowly clusters, another star growing in its center. But there’s more this time. Other forms come into focus. And we, the neon, join as well. Dust gathers into a grain, a clump. Spheres build from each other, boulders enlarge into planetesimal bodies. We impact. We fragment. But finally we balance, reach equilibrium. A planet forms at last.
Gasses emerge to cover the earth, a fragile atmosphere where we wander again. We watch the oceans rise below us, the continents glide with their slow-motion shifts. The air becomes clearer. A blush of green spreads across the earth. Fields give way to forests we explore, part of the wind rippling over newly tailored leaves. Creatures begin to crawl, walk, run, and we enter their lungs, riding out on the power of their expelled breath. A blink, then cities. In London, we pass by a laboratory and find ourselves trapped, contained in a glass tube. The temperature drops, and the air hardens into liquid, into a solid state. As we’re slowly warmed, the other elements boil before us, get siphoned off. Once again we gather, but now, there’s something new. A concentration we’ve never known, a distillation of self. A switch flips and current enters us. Electrons flood and our true color appears. We reveal our red essence to the room.
