This is a thing I wrote for an AP Physics assignment in 11th grade, starring my classmates. The assignment was to incorporate vocabulary from class into some kind of story. I dunno, I still enjoy it. Names of my classmates changed for privacy yadda yadda yadda.
To Kill a Velociraptor
by Sean [surname redacted. you're not gettin' that information so easily, buckaroo. --Ed.]
Submitted for AP Physics 1
As Charles’s van careened around the corner, a bomb from one of the helicopters dropped squarely on a police car behind him, blowing it to smithereens and causing bits of shrapnel to rain on the roof. Ted screamed.
“Shut up! Do you want the velociraptor to wake up? They know how to pick locks, you know,” Charles shouted.
“We are all going to die,” mumbled Ted. Charles snorted and floored the gas pedal. The van accelerated to a velocity that made Ted want to throw up.
“Why did you even want to steal those velociraptors, anyway? I think the government really wanted to keep them.”
“Huh? Why wouldn’t I want to steal them?” Charles stared at Ted for a moment. This seemed a very obvious thing to Charles that Ted could not comprehend. Ted buried his face in his hands.
“Hey, do you want to put on some music?” Charles asked.
“What? No, I —” Just then, the van collided with a small child. The collision was not completely elastic, and some kinetic energy was converted into deforming the front end of the van. The momentum of the van-child system was conserved, however, and some of the van’s momentum was transferred to the child, who flew through the air with projectile motion, forming the path of a parabola before colliding again with a helicopter, causing it to explode. The van continued forward.
“Cool,” said Charles.
“Cool!?” cried Ted. “You just killed that kid! And — and plus all those guys in the helicopter!”
“They have parachutes,” replied Charles, calmly. “Air resistance will save them by countering the gravitational force.”
But, strangely enough, this did not happen. They dropped to the ground with the same acceleration as everyone else — roughly 9.8 meters per second per second.
“Weird.” Charles said, and then shrugged.
Whether or not Ted had said anything in response to this Charles never found out, because at that moment came a deafening screech from the back of the van, followed by the unmistakable sound of an irate velociraptor attempting to pick the lock of an industrial-grade holding pen using a paperclip it had found on the floor.
“That sounds an awful lot like the unmistakable sound of an irate velociraptor attempting to pick the lock of an industrial-grade holding pen using a paperclip it had found on the floor,” said Charles.
“We are all going to die,” said Ted.
“You said that already. That’s the second time today. I’ve been counting! Hey, do you think —”
“Look at the road when you’re driving!”
They were well outside the city limits now, and they were approaching a large dropoff ahead. The roads here were less well-maintained than those in the city. Charles applied a torque on the steering wheel, causing it to rotate counterclockwise about its axis. While doing this, he made sure to hold the steering wheel as far from the middle as possible to increase the lever arm, so he could get more torque using the same applied force. The van turned sharply. Due to Ted’s inertia, he was thrown against the side of the van. They were now making their way around the side of a cliff on a narrow road, with nothing but a flimsy wire fence separating them from a dizzying drop.
“Jeez, dude, don’t turn like that! We could start skidding or something!” Ted rubbed his head.
“Relax,” Charles replied. “I did the calculations. The force of static friction should act as the centripetal force in this situation thus keeping us moving in uniform circular motion as long as we do not exceed the speed of 26 meters per second.“
“The speedometer says we’re going 102 kilometers per hour.”
“Hmm…in meters per second that should be…” he took out his TI-Nspire CX II graphing calculator, keeping an eye on the road ahead of him. “About…28 meters per second. Uh oh.”
The van started to slide. Their linear momentum in the forward direction caused them to go on a path tangential to the curve of the road. There was a force of kinetic friction that made them decelerate slightly, but that was not enough to keep them from tumbling over the edge. There was a great screech of indignation from the velociraptor and a crunch as the van uprooted the fence and they were in free-fall.
“You know, it’s times like these that really make me question my decisions,” Charles said thoughtfully.
“I never thought I’d go out like this,” Ted mumbled.
Charles turned to look at Ted.
“How did you think you were going to…”
Ted thought about it for a moment. Time seemed to slow down…but Ted shook his head. That’s impossible, he told himself. That doesn’t agree with the laws of physics. Yet they seemed to be approaching the ground more and more slowly… It’s just my subjective time slowing down during a near-death experience, he thought. I learned about that in AP Psychology. A flaw of biological processes. Nothing special. Biology is messy. Physics is flawless.
The moments passed like molasses. Ted spoke.
“I dunno. I guess I never really thought about it. A fade to black, a solitary ship sailing off into a fog of darkness…I don’t know. Certainly not like this, not this — concrete. Not this mechanical.”
“And yet, there’s the ground, approaching us with the acceleration of the Earth’s gravitational field, as dictated by the Earth’s mass and the universal gravitational constant.”
At these words, Ted paused for a moment. Something seemed to unravel itself slightly in his mind.
“Why do you…do that?” he asked, cautiously.
“Do what?”
“Talk in those, like, super scientific terms. The acceleration and gravitational field and all that.”
“I…” Charles started, but then stopped. “I’m not sure.” He was silent. After a moment, his eyes widened. He started to speak.
“What if…nah, it can’t be.”
Ted seemed to anticipate what he was going to say. He nodded his head, as if to prod Charles on.
“What if it was, though?” Ted looked at Charles, scared and bright-eyed. “Just think about it…no! Think about yourself! Who are you?”
Charles looked taken aback. “Who am I? But…”
“Come on, what’s the last thing I remember?”
“The last thing I remember?” Charles was bewildered. “Well, we were driving with the velociraptor —”
“No, no, before that!”
Charles struggled. The velociraptor growled and scuffled with the floor. Finally the reply came, trembling.
“We…were in AP Physics. Ms. Victoria was telling us about some…project we had to do. We had to write some kind of story using…a whole bunch of physics terms.”
“Don’t you think it’s weird? One moment we’re in a classroom, the next we’re in this…whole thing —”
“Oh my God, you’re right.”
They fell silent with horror and stared ahead. The ground continued to stare back at them through the windshield. Charles ventured to speak.
“If this all really is some story that someone in our class made up, then —”
“Who wrote it?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I don’t think Meg or David would write about us two, so that leaves either Sean or Tom.”
“It’s Sean, then. He writes about dinosaurs a lot.”
“Probably, yeah.” Ted closed his eyes, rubbed his temples. The velociraptor was getting more and more agitated. “Is he playing some kind of sick joke? Because I don’t think killing your friends to demonstrate physics concepts is a very funny thing to do.”
Charles did not answer. He sat there, in the driver’s seat, motionless as the van was motionless, his brain chugging.
“I don’t think we’re going to die…yet,” he said slowly.
Ted opened his eyes. “What makes you say that?”
“Well, all the events that’ve happened so far have been perfectly constructed to demonstrate some element of physics we learned about in class, right? And so far we’ve seen —” Charles counted on his fingers — “kinematics, collisions, energy, momentum, torque, forces, uniform circular motion, and…gravity. Right?”
“Yeah, so?”
“He hasn’t touched simple harmonic motion. He’s going to have to keep us alive for at least a little while longer if he wants to include that.”
Ted slapped a hand to his forehead.
“Oh my goodness — the wire fence!”
Charles nodded vigorously. “Which means that…”
“Time wasn’t slowing down. We were.”
“So…”
They looked at each other.
Ted opened his mouth. Charles did so as well. They counted down together.
“Three…”
“Two…”
“One…”
The van was still, completely still.
Then it began to move backwards. Slowly, but with growing speed. Soon, they were practically hurtling upwards. The velociraptor’s screeches increased in volume. Ted looked at Charles. Charles looked at Ted. They grinned at each other. Then, all of a sudden, they were whooping and laughing.
“Simple harmonic motion!” Ted shouted giddily as they flew through the air. “As we went off the cliff, we wrapped ourselves with the wire fence — and as we fell the system’s gravitational potential energy was converted into kinetic energy, which was then converted into elastic potential energy in the fence, equal to one half times times the spring constant times displacement squared!”
“And now, due to the restoring force of the spring — or rather, the fence — we are accelerating upwards at a rate of the square of the angular frequency times the amplitude of motion times the sine of the product of angular frequency and time!” Charles threw himself back in his seat, face flushed and radiant, smiling triumphantly.
Their reverie faded after a few moments, however. Though neither spoke, Ted knew they were thinking the same thing. Charles was the first to put it in speech.
“Does this mean…we die now?”
Ted didn’t move.
“I don’t know, I really don’t,” he sighed. “What would he be proving?”
“I dunno. We pretty much covered everything we learned this year.”
The van reached its peak height and started to move downwards towards the point of equilibrium again.
“Wait! What just happened?”
“We reached peak height,” Charles replied dejectedly. “We’re going down again. This is simple harmonic motion, remember? We’ll come up again, and go back down, and come up, and go down and up and —”
“No! No, that’s not it. Did you notice that the peak height was nowhere near as high as the height from which we fell?”
“I guess. Why?”
Ted stared at Charles. “Don’t you see? He’s trying to make a point about damped harmonic motion!”
Realization dawned upon Charles.
“Damped harmonic motion,” Charles said, with awe. “So we’ll eventually come to a stop at the equilibrium point, right? So we won’t have to die! It’s a happy ending for us! And the helicopters won’t even come for us, because Sean doesn’t need them for the story any more!”
“Exactly! Anything he doesn’t need for demonstrating some physics concept will just …disappear…” Ted faltered. Something in his expression unnerved Charles to his core.
“What? What is it?”
Ted did not reply. Instead, a loud metallic shriek came from behind them — the sound of an industrial-grade holding pen being pushed open. Charles suddenly had an idea of what was going through Ted’s brain, and he was horrified.
“No, you’re not thinking…”
Ted still said nothing, rooted to the spot with terror. The velociraptor growled.
“What possible use could he have for a velociraptor?!” Charles cried desperately. “Why would he keep this thing around, other than for cruel sadism? To give us a horrible, gruesome death for his fun?! This isn’t education any more, this is — this is sick fantasy! I should have known that he would do this, have us die in the end, he loves that sort of thing! But at least education is a noble pursuit — I will not die for — this!”
“Young’s modulus,” Ted whispered, his words barely audible. “Equal to stress over strain.”
“Young’s — what? We never talked about that in class!”
“We did. Once. Young’s modulus is a parameter for describing the deformation of objects under pressure. He’s going to demonstrate its application by describing the deformations of — of our bodies under the pressure of the velociraptor’s jaws.” Ted thought the oscillation was going to make him sick. Charles was wide-eyed.
The velociraptor approached, slowly.
“But why would he do that?” Charles demanded. “It’s not even on the AP exam! What purpose would mentioning this fulfill? Why would —”
“I don’t know!” Ted shouted in frustration and grabbed Charles. “How are we supposed to know? We’re just useless pawns in this story, we can’t know the full picture! Don’t you get it? Everything is up to the writer! Haven’t you noticed that we’re not even talking like we normally do? Because it’s written that way!” At this, he banged his fist on the dashboard. The velociraptor growled and approached closer.
Charles stayed silent for a moment. Then —
“Well, I’m not taking it.”
Ted raised an eyebrow.
“We have no choice.”
“Only if we keep thinking we have no choice. We have to…we have to leave the van. I know how we can escape.”
“Leave the van? B-but…”
“Listen to me! As long as we continue to exist, he will try to kill us. With basic physics. The only way to escape this fate is to take the physics outside of what we’ve learned so far. He can’t touch us there.”
Ted sniffed. “What do you propose?”
“We open the doors and jump out. We take control. I think you know what you need to do.”
Charles opened the door on his side and motioned for Ted to do the same. The velociraptor came closer and closer and grew louder and louder. Ted felt like crying, but steadied himself. He forced opened the door on his side.
“Ready?”
Ted took a deep breath, and nodded. They counted together.
“Three…”
The velociraptor lunged forward.
“Two…”
They shut their eyes tight.
“One…”
They fell.
This is what Charles chanted to himself as he fell.
My name is Charles Liao. I am a real human being. There are no gods in this existence but me. Nobody controls my fate but me. Sean is nobody but my classmate. He has his life, and I have mine. There is no story.
This is what Ted chanted to himself as he fell.
My name is Ted Tso. I am a real human being. I am scared for my life. I do not know what is happening but I trust Charles fully. There is no story.
Ted opened his eyes. He felt a weight on his back and turned his head around. He was wearing a jetpack.
He yelled to Charles over the roar of the wind. Charles yelled back. He was also wearing one.
“It worked!”
Ted activated the jetpack. Charles activated his. Immediately they shot up at a massive speed. In a few seconds, the van and everything had disappeared.
“It’s all gone! All of it,” Ted shouted. “We’re high and dry!”
“Not quite yet…we have to clear the pull of the Earth! He might try to kill us using orbital mechanics or something!”
As they were speaking, they were leaving the atmosphere. From their behind came a satellite with a high tangential speed and thus high angular momentum. If it collided with them, it would impart a large force on them, as the impulse-momentum theorem dictates that if a collision lasts for a smaller amount time then the opposing forces of the two colliding objects on each other will be larger.
This satellite did not collide with them, however, because Charles had noticed it and had motioned for Ted to get out of the way. They changed their direction, narrowly avoiding the satellite.
Another satellite with high tangential speed approached them. They dodged it. Yet another with a massive angular momentum approached them. They avoided it once again. They avoided every satellite that went their way. Finally, they made it outside low-Earth orbit and continued to move away from the Earth. It was dark, so dark — save for the blinding light of the Sun that hung in the void like a naval mine.
“What do we do now?” asked Ted.
“We keep accelerating. It’s too dangerous out, even at these speeds. The contents of our lessons still apply even way out here.”
“All right, that’s — hey, we’re in space! How come I can still hear you? And how come we’re not dying of asphyxiation? Or cold?”
Charles thought about it for a few seconds and said, “Not in the curriculum, I guess. They removed waves from the curriculum this year, so maybe that’s why we can still hear each other. And thermodynamics…I think that’s AP Physics 2. Beyond our scope.”
With that, he shot off with an even higher acceleration. For the first time, Ted noticed a small display attached to the jetpack. It read thus:
0.01% the speed of light
He suddenly realized what Charles’s plan was and marveled at his ingenuity. He caught up to him.
“Hey, do you —” but Ted was suddenly cut off. The thing that cut him off was a loud, all-too-familiar screeching sound. Directly behind them.
“Oh, no.”
Charles paused, then shrieked, “For goodness’ sake, let’s go!”
They moved with renewed speed. Ted watched the display increase bit by bit. He didn’t dare look behind him. His heartbeats came quickly, one after another.
Charles cursed next to him. “Zero point two percent…come on! Faster!”
The screeching behind them was getting ever so loud. Ted felt lightheaded.
“One percent! That’s one percent now! We’re getting faster!”
Though the vector of Ted’s acceleration was undoubtedly in the forward direction, he felt directionless. It was quite strange, he thought, to move at such unimaginable speed and have nothing to show for it — no buildings zipping by, no blurring of vision — just darkness. Only the uncomfortable pressure he felt from the acceleration of the jetpack gave him any sense of his motion.
“Five percent! Getting close!”
The noise was unbearable. Ted felt like his head was a Globe of Death at a circus, a half-dozen motorcyclists zipping around the inside of his skull.
“Ten percent!”
For the first time, Ted twisted around to look behind him. He knew what he would see. What he saw there was the angel of death. There was his velociraptor, a massive, screaming, overwhelming presence, actually driving the van through the utter void of space, with its jaws extended through the broken windshield — jaws capable of exerting 25,000 Newtons of crushing force onto the soft pile of flesh that Ted inhabited. This was how he was going to die. This was —
“Ted! Snap out of it! Don’t look back!” Charles yelled over the cacophony. “Fifteen percent!”
Ted forced his eyes away from that awful sight. I have control, he told himself firmly. He shuddered. It was getting closer, he could feel it.
“Twenty percent!”
Around this time was when he started to feel strange — at least, stranger than he had been feeling, which was considerably strange. His mind felt like a ship sluggishly pushing its way through honey. He was vaguely aware of the fact that he was moving at speeds incomprehensible to any human being…but the universe was so still, so still.
The velociraptor continued to screech.
“Thirty percent! Any minute now!”
He could sense the velociraptor’s jaws snapping at him, each time accompanied by a sickening clack as those horrible teeth connected. With each clack Ted reminded himself that he had control, and that it was up to him to save himself. They continued to accelerate, ephemeral darts in a screaming void punctuated by the terrible noise of teeth meeting teeth.
“Forty percent!”
Was it just him, or were the clacks becoming less frequent? He dared to turn around again. His heart skipped a few beats. The velociraptor was farther away, and it seemed to be…wavering. Whatever that meant. He turned back and moved forward with new resolve. There is no story. He does not die today.
They crossed impossible distances in the time it took Ted to blink. The time it took Ted to blink was an eternity. One eternity passed, then another. Each atom in his body was a mountain and each atom in each mountain was an hour.
After an eternity of eternities of eternities came the cry:
“Fifty percent — hey, It’s gone!”
“Gone?!”
Ted craned his neck backwards. Everything was nothing, as far as he could see. He heard nothing, too — their jetpacks were silent. They were utterly alone. Two sparks in unknowing oblivion…Ted had a sudden urge to grab tight onto Charles.
“I don’t know when we’ll be truly safe,” said Charles next to him. “He’s definitely uncomfortable with making things go at this speed, but he might try again.”
Ted found it really hard to keep in mind that they were truly moving at fifty percent the speed of light. Sixty percent now.
He managed a few words.
“What happens when we actually get to lightspeed?”
When he spoke, his words were immediately smothered by the silence. He wondered if he had said anything at all. An unsteady confirmation came in Charles’s reply.
“I’m not sure. I really don’t know if it’s even possible.” Charles’s words, like Ted’s, fell swiftly and left silence like a cannonball impacting earth.
“Oh.” He fell silent. The silence was worse than the screeching. “What are we going to…do? After everything?”
“I’m not sure,” Charles said again. He added, “But that’s the beauty of it, isn’t it? It’s not spelled out for us any more. We’re totally free. We’ll just see what happens, I guess.”
Seventy five percent.
“Oh, one thing,” Charles said suddenly. “If we travel at the speed of light, it’ll be totally dark. You won’t see me, or the Sun, or the stars or anything. Light can’t keep up with us.”
This made Ted shiver.
Eighty percent. The passage of time was a total mess and Ted tried not to think about it.
“I’m scared.”
Charles sighed. “I’m scared too. The price of freedom.” He laughed sardonically. “Better than living in a box. Better than being free-body diagrammed by a perverse puppet-master.”
“I know. But — total unknowingness. It’s…”
“A fade to black. A solitary ship sailing into a fog of darkness.”
“What?”
“You said that earlier. In the van.”
“Oh.” The van was eternities upon eternities ago.
Ninety percent, said the display.
“Ninety percent,” said Charles. “You better grab on to me. I don’t want to lose hold of you when we…go blind. If we go blind. Then I would really be lost.”
Ted extended his arm, clasped Charles’s.
“What’s going to happen?” Ted asked desperately.
Charles laughed. “Who knows? Ninety five percent! We’ll soon find out!”
Ted took a deep breath and steadied himself. He looked at Charles. Charles looked at him. At any rate, he was glad that it was Charles next to him, and that it was with Charles whom he was to plunge into the unknown.
Ted opened his mouth. Charles did so as well. They counted up together.
“Ninety seven…”
Everything was shaking. Ted was shaking, anyway.
“Ninety eight…”
Ted tightened his grip on Charles’s arm.
“Ninety nine…”
They squeezed their eyes shut.
* * *
Actually, I don’t know what happens next. We never learned about special relativity in AP Physics 1.