Diarmuid Breatnach

(Reading time: 3 mins.)

I am engaged in an extermination war and I’m not winning.

It’s against those tiny brown fruit flies. Apparently they live by consuming bits of fruit and other vegetable stuff. But no matter how much I seal kitchen refuse and fruit into bags, large of small, they still fly around and around, annoying me. Deliberately taunting me.

Since I seal the bags, what do they live on? Just the faintest of smells is enough for the little f…ers, it seems! And I use the term advisedly. They are renowned fast breeders and an adult female fruit fly can lay up to 2,000 eggs on the surface of anything that’s moist and rotting.

Within 30 hours, tiny maggots hatch and start to eat the decayed food. Within 2 days, they’re all grown up and ready to mate, too! Luckily a fruit fly only lives 8 to 15 days – but still.

With such a fast turnaround, they’ve been used for genetic experiments, with even a flightless subspecies developed for the purpose.

Unfortunately, the ones at my place are all fully able to fly. And sometimes not just around me but flying right at me, inches away from my eyes. Do you know how difficult it is to kill something tiny mere centimetres away from your eyes? I really, really hate them.

I could spray them with insecticide, or course but that would mean poisoning my living space environment. I use anti-bacterial surface cleaner spray instead, hopefully less toxic for me. I know it’s less toxic for them also but it does slow them down or stick them to the wall so I get them.

Sometimes.

When they’re at a good distance for me to focus, I reach out really fast and smack my two hands together on them. Success rate? About one in ten. And even then, sometimes, when I open my hands, the little f..ker flies away, apparently unharmed and no doubt fly-sniggering.

But what about all those times I know for certain I caught one, open my hands and … nothing there. It’s not like I missed it because I didn’t see it fly away and it is nowhere to be seen. Except a few seconds later, it reappears – from nowhere.

Of course, it can’t appear from nowhere, not really.

So where did it go? Obviously, into an alternate universe and then back out to laugh at me. You don’t believe in alternate universes? Well a lot of physicists treat the subject with great seriousness and even think they might conform to quantum theory.

Don’t ask me to explain quantum theory but the multiple universes theory has to do with time and space or something. And we do know that time is objective (we’re getting older) but also subjective, as we experience when we sit through an interview or a haranguing from a partner.

Anyway, my war with the fruit flies continues. But what is their alternate universe like and why do they come back into mine? No fruit there? No oxygen? Really clever (but not quite quick enough) spiders?

I’m engrossed by the possibilities. Maybe there’s no cops or other fascists there.

So, I talked to this tech geek I know and he’s working on designing a micro-micro video camera. When he has it developed, we’ll trap some of those irritating flies, attach the micro-camera to one, threaten it until it jumps into the next universe and catch it when it returns.

Then, remove the camera and download the film.

What will we see? Who knows. Wonders, perhaps. But maybe only a giant hand swatting at the camera carrier as the fly dodges and shifts-universes back into this one.

End.