Invariant Toasters; the waffle stands on edge
The Waffle House is a cultural icon whose mission statement is trifold: firstly, to serve fresh food in a friendly and welcoming environment; secondly, to preserve the uniquely Southern “American Diner” quality of an era bygone; finally, to never close their doors until floodwaters spoil the coffee, a yawning fissure steals away the final strips of greasy bacon, or a tornado whips away the last drops of waffle batter from the gridiron. The Waffle House is a truly unique American phenomenon.
And that humble diner establishment is all that stands against the invariant toasters.
In room 157 of Miner Dorms, an off-campus college residency for students of Missouri S&T, humanity was one minute and seventeen seconds away from its first encounter with invariance. It began, as every day ought to, with an argument over breakfast food.
David and Steven were both lanky and tall; the former sandy haired, the latter dark like cocoa. It was Steven’s turn to do the dishes. Steven did not want to do the dishes. David, growing more frustrated, directed the argument to what he invariably knew would be rejected by the other.
“We have batter mix, we have eggs, we have milk; Steven, we’re having waffles. So wash the mixing bowl, because it’s your turn to do the damn dishes!”
“I’m not even awake yet, David, it’s only eleven in the morning! I haven’t even taken a shower yet, and if I’m not clean, I don’t see why the dishes need to be either. Let’s just have granola and yogurt again.”
Dirty dishes were stacked high. The rations of granola and yogurt were low. Empty packages of pasta and soda littered the floor around the garbage can where they had stopped trying to pick up Leo’s mess. Four of them shared the apartment-like dormitory, but David felt that he was the only one who tried to maintain it. He didn’t realize it, but he sounded like his mother when he said it.
“This is the second weekend you’re making us eat granola after promising to cook something. This isn’t rocket science – if it was, we’d just call Chris over.”
“Well…” Steven considered the idea as thoughtfully as he was able to, “What if we get Chris in here and have him do the dishes for us?”
“Son of a…” David trailed off disconsolately. The immutable desire for waffles was prospect which had just encountered the unshakeable laziness of a young college man; what little hope there was for steaming hot waffles with syrup pooling into the squares was quickly fading as he realized that Steven was not going to do the dishes.
Steven offered an unhelpful suggestion: “We just got a new toaster, why don’t we just have eggs and toast instead?” Despite their naturally industrious dispositions, toasters and the laziness of man have one thing in common: both are universally invariant.
Note: An invariant is a property held by mathematical objects which remain unchanged after undergoing a transformation. David was a computer scientist, and Steven was a biologist: the intricacies of these mathematical concepts were lost on them, though the ramifications would be clear in just seconds. Forty seven seconds, precisely. Regardless, even mathematicians would not have known what the two young men were about to unleash.
They could never have known.
“It doesn’t matter what we eat, but you promised to do the dishes!”
“Fine,” Steven sighed. “Let me just get the toast started then, and then I’ll work on the dishes.”
David sighed. Having lost the battle for waffles but won the war for the dishes, he retreated to his room, mumbling to “let me know when the food is ready” as he went. Steven, oblivious to all, bustled about the kitchen to get in the mindset of his arduous task: washing three plates, a fork missing two of its tines, and a cracked bowl.
He turned on the tap to let the water heat up.
He pulled the toaster off of the shelf and removed a sticker which warned that doing so voided the warranty.
He inserted two pieces of bread, neatly buttered.
Steven pushed the lever down to activate the toaster.
The Frigidaire Orion Professional is a two-slice toaster measuring eight by eleven by seven standard inches, with a stainless steel housing. It holds two slices of bread and uses touch button controls to vary between lightly and heavily toasted. The interior houses a malevolent and interdimensional spirit that vowed destruction upon all carbon based life since its birth among the cosmos millennia ago. It comes with a two year warranty, and has settings for bagels, defrosting, or reheating. Frigidaire is not liable for any accidents or injuries sustained while using this product.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
The lever sprang up.
Gone, gone, all gone. The lever sprang up and Steven was transformed from his time into another. He was launched through a stream of events, past, present, and future, which even years later he only vaguely recollected. His friends, wearing black robes and caps and walking one by one across a platform. David and his fiancée, laughing and lying on a beach. His family, smiling sadly with crow’s feet and many years of extra wrinkles at a Christmas celebration he would never attend. One by one, they were transformed before his eyes until only a small metal box remained, a box with two slits in the top and an electrical cord trailing behind. Through all the transformation, Steven and the toaster were the only things unchanged, the only invariants.
The Frigidaire Orion Professional is a machine of pure invariance, a cosmic being which will one day rain destruction upon the human race. It steals lives and draws them into a cosmic stream where all is one, and that one is invariant. The LED indicator is a remarkably innovative addition, with very clear instructions for lighter or darker toast while providing color evenness. The Orion is pure hatred, pure evil, and pure agony for those unfortunate few who wander into its clutches.
Steven felt the agony and roiled in revulsion at the all-encompassing hatred which was directed towards every fiber of his existence. Every second was divided into microseconds, every microsecond was divided into barely theoretical units of time, and existence became a word whose proper meaning was displaced by the definition of pain.
Then something ended, and something began.
A single waffle was poised in midair, halfway through the arc prescribed by the spatula which flipped it. A stream of coffee poured endlessly from pot to mug, frozen glacially in time. Red leather and white plastic seats could sit a century or more and still smell chemically earthy. Nothing but yellow aprons around. Grease and coffee stains. The waffle stands balanced on edge. Should it tip, the equilibrium which binds every atom in the universe to its neighbor will be undone.
The waffle flipped, continued its arc down, and landed sizzling on the pan.
A husky feminine voice spoke with a slight Southern twang. “It’s okay, you’re safe now, child.”
“Where… where am I?” Steven asked, blinking as he stood up on suddenly unsteady legs.
A pleasantly round woman sat him firmly down in a leather booth. “You just rest now, hon. Ronnie will just fix you up something nice and hot, and we’ll tell you what this is all about.”
“No!” he demanded, grabbing her by yellow lapels. “I want to go home!”
She paused, then slid into the mauve leather booth opposite him. “There is no home. We’re all that’s left.”
“Left of what?”
“The universe.”
It was a bit much for Steven to take in before breakfast. Or lunch. Did it really matter, now? Whisked away by a toaster from a life to the Waffle House, did anything really matter now? It didn’t matter if his life had been happy or not, it had belonged to him. Before he knew it, warm tears dripped onto the table below.
The woman continued dispassionately. “Don’t be ashamed, we all came here just the same as you. We all felt what you’re feeling now. But we must pay the price of our own ignorance and move on with what lives we have left. Invariance is not to be trifled with. See, mathematicians deal with nice little abstractions, but everybody else has to make computations without whole numbers or exact fractions. There was a theory, see, that geometric invariance transcended dimension. Translate a square two units along the x-axis, and its shape and area remain the same: invariant.”
“That waffle,” she motioned to the fry-cook, “has invariant properties of its own. Anything moving through the three dimensions of physical reality has some measure of invariance. That’s reality.”
“But, what… a toaster? Explain to me what toasters have to do with invariance?”
“Time is the fourth spatial dimension, but it is not a physical dimension. You see, everything changes as it ages. The properties which define you in your youth will not define you a year from now, or even a second. That waffle constantly undergoes carbon decay on an atomic level. Humanity is constantly changing. We didn’t realize what the consequences of our variance were until a being of pure invariance removed all agency from us.”
“So,” he asked, with a bit of spirit, “why am I at the Waffle House?!?”
“The Waffle House is the hub of invariance. Nothing ever changes, here in this timeless breakfast bar. The Waffle House exists uniquely outside of time; time, which is the dimension of variance. Everything else fell apart, but something about this place let it survive. Take a look.”
He went to the window and looked. He was greeted by a void. Empty blackness was displaced only by the few beams of light which trailed dimly in bursts from the sun, and by the chunks of rock which floated throughout space. He recoiled away from the door, but the woman shook her head.
“That door’s locked, with us on the inside. Outside – that’s the earth, the sun, and whatever else there was. Why it spared us, I don’t suppose we’ll ever know. We’re stuck here. No matter how much we cook, the food never runs out.” She laughed grimly, “Menu hasn’t changed in sixty eight years; I suppose we’re consuming raw invariance, now.”
“So who were you? Before. Before… the Orion.”
She smiled, sadly. “Does it matter? If I was an author, a physicist, or an electrician, does it really matter? What matters is that we are here, now.” She extended a plump hand in greeting. “Dana Willborough, hostess of this uniquely American phenomenon. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
She stood up with a twinkle in her eye, smiling so suddenly that Steven nearly missed the tear that trailed down her cheek. “So, then. May I take your order?”
The Waffle House is a cultural icon whose mission statement is trifold: firstly, to serve fresh food in a friendly and welcoming environment; secondly, to preserve the uniquely Southern “American Diner” quality of an era bygone; finally, to never close their doors until floodwaters spoil the coffee, a yawning fissure steals away the final strips of greasy bacon, or a tornado whips away the last drops of waffle batter from the gridiron.
Because the Waffle House is a truly unique American phenomenon.