Browse Tag

cosmology

The Miracle Of …

by Tilemahos Efthimiadis

… electrostatic discharges

Circa 32.000 BC
(Aurignacian era)		Today’s south-east France

Warm air rises and cool air descends, creating a storm. Inside a cloud small ice particles collide, transferring electrons and separating electrical charges. The positive charges venture to the top of the cloud, and negative ones to the bottom, creating an electric field that strengthens with each collision.

When the air is sufficiently charged, a little channel of electricity travels towards the ground. At the same time, charges rise from the Earth to meet it. When they connect, electricity rushes back to the cloud, causing a bright flash of lightning and the sound of thunder as the air expands quickly. Both engulf the forest.

Seeking a shorter path to the ground, the lightning had gone through the forest’s tallest tree. The intense heat instantaneously vaporised the water and sap within, destroyed most of its branches, and created cracks along its trunk.

Nearby, the men had stopped fighting, frozen in shock and fear.

As the tree burned on the inside, a steady glow began to form. Smoke would start to rise carrying the stinging smell of burning wood. But the odours did not reach the cavemen as they were running back to their respective shelters, on opposite sides of the forest.

The caves served as temporary homes as their dwellers would travel from place to place seeking food. Here, the dense forest between the hills was rich in prey. Initially unaware of each other’s existence, they eventually crossed paths. They avoided confrontation but the woodland was too small for both, and too rich in resources to be yielded to the other.

They merely wanted to scare each other away, but blood would need to be spilled. Rocks and sharp-pointed sticks were collected, without elaborate speeches or war declarations. Structured language did not yet exist but would have been unnecessary as this was about food, not protocol or glory.

The men converged in the forest, close to the tallest tree. Grunts and rocks were hurled, leaving bruises. Suddenly, the skies darkened and a strong wind ripped through the woods, whistling among the trees. This made them nervous, but the battle continued.

The core of the thunderstorm arrived above the forest, and the lightning strike descended from the sky striking the tall tree. The flash of light and the loud crack were the brightest and loudest the men had experienced, causing them to scatter and retreat.

By sundown the caves were abandoned as the tribes left in opposite directions, never to meet again.

That night some dreamt of all powerful beings, others about conquering nature. The more imaginative wanted to fly to the clouds to find the creators of the bright flash. The world had become bigger. Life was more than just survival.

#

… celestial mechanics

Circa 600 BC
(Iron Age)		Anatolia
(somewhere in today’s Türkiye)

The greyish rock orbits the much larger blue sphere covered in white streaks which itself wanders around the blazing fiery ball. Occasionally, the rock gets in the middle casting its shadow on the marble below, or dips behind it shielded from sunlight.

From his castle on the marble, the Ruler of the west observed that the fiery ball and the rock were the same size in the sky. He could not know that the former is about 400 times bigger than the latter, but also 400 times further away, hence the illusion. Nor would he care as sky gazing served only as a distraction from the bleak news. His men had suffered yet another major defeat.

Five years ago, the King in the east demanded vast swaths of land and annual tributes, accompanied by the not-so-subtle reminders of his vast army. The western ruler could not abide by these demands, not out of principle or expectation of military success, but because he was unpopular. His people would revolt ending his reign, and there was nowhere to flee. The future held sure defeat. In the meantime, it could only be war.

Surprisingly, his military established and defended a formidable defensive line, albeit at an enormous cost of life and resources. Pleas for compromise were dismissed by the majority. Any concession to the aggressors would be a betrayal of the fallen.

Continuing a war was also a relatively easy decision for rulers and kings as they stayed away from battlefields and rarely lost loved ones in battle. They relied on their military commanders who did watch the battlefields, but from a safe distance from the front lines. Soldiers served as pawns on a chessboard which would gradually turn red. Victory was declared when the other side painted more of the board with their blood.

At the front, the men prepared for the battle to come after dusk. Armies usually clashed at dawn, but tonight’s full moon would provide enough visibility to kill after the fiery ball had departed.

The Ruler’s forces prepared defensive positions. The King’s were restless for their attack, especially as they revered a full moon. With such a good omen, they might finally break the enemy’s lines and march all the way to the Ruler’s castle. Their Commander also enjoyed the occasional night raid, embracing the chaos. This was no longer chess, but a game of chance where ferocity and luck were decisive factors.

The sun dropped behind the mountain and a glorious full moon rose illuminating the fields below. The attack commenced but just as the King’s men reached the defenders, the rock’s light started to fade. A dark shadow crept over it.

As the rock moved behind the blue marble, the men fixated on the sky, nothing else stirred. Only a faint voice was heard from the East’s base camp where the Commander was swearing at his Colonels to tell their Majors to command their Captains to instruct their Lieutenants to tell the men to continue the attack.

At the front, a soldier screamed that the vanishing moon was a sign to stop the bloodshed. His warning was repeated by others who wanted to spread this obvious truth, or as an excuse to avoid further risk of injury or death. The attackers turned heel and headed back to camp.

The defenders did not care about the rock, its colour, phases or eclipses. But they did see the opportunity to attack the enemy during its disorganised retreat. The pawns fell and the fields were bathed in red as the West had finally scored a resounding victory. Meanwhile, the East was consumed by an omen that had transformed from favourable to disastrous.

As morning broke, the Commanders set a truce until further orders arrived from the capitals. News of the rock’s temporary disappearance travelled swiftly, providing a convenient excuse for both sovereigns to end the war without losing face. Neither leader wanted to push their luck on the battlefield, or with the gods, but mostly, with the people. Only the generals were sour as their game was stopped prematurely without a definite winner.

#

… belief

December 1914 (modern era)World War I – Western Front

The first months of war had already claimed over a million souls, civilian and military. The combatants were faced with brutal hand-to-hand combat, machine guns, artillery, disease, rats, mud, cold, hunger and plagues.

Optimism blossomed as peace societies and even Pope Benedict XV pleaded for a Christmas truce. However, high command feared soldiers becoming too comfortable with inaction which could lead to a breakdown of discipline. Already, many had lost interest in fighting as trench warfare offered only misery and death, but no progress, militarily or otherwise.

The men sought a miracle, but science said that there were no miracles. Thunder and eclipses were explicable. However, if a new miracle was not available, perhaps an old one could suffice.

Despite orders, soldiers took moments to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. Carols were sung and greetings were sent to the enemy, in lieu of grenades and poison gas. The desire to pause, maybe even halt, the war superseded all orders. Across the front more than 100.000 soldiers stopped the hostilities for a couple of days, exchanged wishes and small gifts. Some played football.

The miracle’s relief was short-lived. The top brass was not happy to have defied the Pope only to be upstaged by the common soldier. The brutality resumed post haste. Commanders reestablished their authority by pushing wave after wave into the killing zones.

Future attempts at temporary truces failed. The Great War would be renamed World War One, its sequel to be five times deadlier.

#

… serendipity

Tens of thousands of years ahead (future era)A solar system unknown to humanity

With depleted batteries and broken solar panels, the interstellar probe continued traversing the cosmos at 17 kilometres per second, relative to the sun at its origin. Entering the small solar system, it headed straight for the giant gas planet which was called Orath by the populations of its two moons.

The moons communicated and exchanged small cargo, but the extreme radiation between them did not allow physical travel. The rock closest to the gas giant is named Gravitara, dedicated to Orath for its embrace and protection from comets. The other is Solara in celebration of the sun’s brightness and warmth.

The appreciation of different astronomical units sufficed to justify isolation, avoid cultural ‘contamination’, and establish fear-based war economies ruled by powerful plutocracies.

However, due to their irregular orbits, for the first time, the moons would find themselves ‘only’ 400.000 kilometres apart, close enough to destroy each other with interplanetary missiles.

Coincidently, in the run-up to the celestial near miss, the waning plutocracy of Solara had leaned too much into religion to retain power, and the fanatics had taken over the political discourse, calling for the extermination of the “inners” (or “sinners”).

As a deterrent, Gravitara ramped up their missile programme, which led Solara to further extend theirs. A vicious cycle of distrust and an ever-expanding arsenal of civilisation ending instruments. Mutual annihilation seemed unavoidable.

Before the moons reached shooting distance, their satellites detected a mysterious metallic object approaching at breakneck speed. Fearing a pre-emptive strike from the other, both worlds prepared to launch. Fortunately, they realised in time that the object could only have originated from another solar system. Likely a deep space probe, it appeared defunct. Too fast to be captured, deflected, or even properly photographed, it passed between the moons and was swallowed by Orath. Its Golden Record with the images, music, sounds and greetings, never to be played.

Facing an unknown common enemy, the moons expanded together to the stars beyond, to find and destroy the “Infiltrators”.

Thousands of years later, their probes reached the blue marble, a random encounter as the interstellar spaceship was long forgotten. Much has changed since Voyager 1 left Earth. Civilisation restarted several times as devastating wars led societal collapse. Sticks and stones were once again the main tools of combat, as had been predicted by humanity’s greatest mind.

In the forest, the tribes clashed for control of the land but had stopped to witness the unknown object in the sky. The drone only scanned for raw materials and signs of advanced technology, such as radio signals. It ignored the men below as inferior lifeforms were irrelevant. Would you care to find every ant?

The men were startled by the noisy flyer and went their separate ways. At night, they began to crave soaring through the sky. Curiosity and potential were awakened.

And so it began, again.

~

Bio:

Tilemahos Efthimiadis is a research economist specializing in energy security, infrastructure, inflation, and public debt. He also brings expertise to research ethics and scientific integrity … and a hardcore Trekkie.

Philosophy Note:

‘Only a miracle can stop war’ is a common phrase that sparks curiosity: what is a miracle, really? Is it an event so extraordinary that it defies ordinary explanation rooted in religious or mythic tradition? Maybe it could be a more abstract concept, a metaphorical notion that transcends everyday experience? And do societies truly advance, or are we merely accumulating technological improvements while repeating the same mistakes?

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An Implied Edict

If aliens wrote the rules of interstellar relations, what would it take for us (and other species) to figure them

An Implied Edict

by Robert L. Jones III

To a growing number of observers, it seems obvious that our interplanetary supervisors have spoken. The restrictions of their purported directive notwithstanding, some among us consider the mere possibility of their existence a much greater imposition, for it implies the presence of deity, ultimate authority, and judgment, someone to whom we must answer. The problem is simple enough. Constituent members of our population resent being told what to do.

It is as if we have awakened to find ourselves in the middle of a story, perhaps nearer its end. Our efforts to anticipate its outcome are hampered by limited perspective and an inherent difficulty in understanding events and forces greater than ourselves. Developments which seem sudden and unexpected can be decades or longer in the making, and often as not, their interpretation is marked by ambiguity. The true beginning of this cosmic and ongoing drama is difficult to ascertain since none of our kind were present to witness it; therefore, for a chronological starting point to this narrative, we must resort to describing events within our more recent history.

#

Human beings exhibited a propensity for dropping metallic objects onto the surface of Mars, and over a period of decades, a number of instrument-laden machines successfully touched down and transmitted their data to scientists on Earth: Viking 1 and 2 in 1976, Mars Pathfinder with its Sojourner rover in 1997, Spirit and Opportunity in 2004, the Phoenix Lander in 2008, Curiosity in 2012, Perseverance in 2021, and so on.

From various missions to the red planet, we received images of sunsets, panoramic landscapes, and the time lapse capture of dust devils as well as confirmation of limited surface water, evidence of past microbial life, and recordings of Martian wind. Only many years later would we learn that the real action was underground, in the lava tubes of the volcanic region of Tharsis, where life was protected from radiation passing through the thin atmosphere. It was there that an advanced but diminishing civilization was exhausting what little remained of its resources. At least that is what many would end up thinking in retrospect.

In the absence of this knowledge, the astronomical littering continued until the first manned mission to Mars. It took nine months to get there, three months to explore a limited patch of terrain while awaiting an optimal alignment of the planets, and nine months to return. While those intrepid men and women were on the surface and absorbing elevated levels of radiation, they collected samples and made several videos of one another bounding along in the lower gravitational field.

Before the first mission returned, a second — this one an attempt to establish a sustainable colony — departed. The target was one of the aforementioned lava tubes,

those extensive caverns formed by outflows from the immense shield volcanoes in Tharsis. After rapidly flowing lava had cooled and hardened on the outside and drained out from the inside, these passages remained until long after the volcanoes were dormant. Such structures existed on Earth, but they were much larger on Mars due to its lower gravity. Ironically, scientific advancement was compelling a small segment of humanity to resume living in caves.

The delivery vehicles of that second excursion touched down, and rovers bearing human passengers deployed. They reached the mouth of their designated lava tube within a month. Their last transmission confirmed they were entering the chamber, but after this, they went silent. Two years later, it was generally assumed that the colonists had met with calamity. Meanwhile, members of the first manned mission to Mars were dying on Earth from a variety of incurable cancers.

Three years after the last transmission, several observatories around the globe reported sightings of unidentified objects approaching Earth from the direction of Mars. More detailed analysis revealed these UFOs to be spheres measuring an estimated thirty meters in diameter. They appeared to be metallic, and they were moving with astonishing speed. International reports of what happened after that varied slightly according to atmospheric conditions and geospatial time of day but otherwise were remarkably consistent.

#

That the vessels collected primarily over major cities was confirmed by radar and satellite. Telescopic observations were independently reproducible. Where skies were sufficiently clear, sunlight reflected brightly off the alien spacecraft as they hovered and

circled far above the surface, and their reflective exteriors showed no signs of scorching from friction during entry into our upper atmosphere.

In retrospect, what happened next was of even greater surprise. Onlookers at ground level and equipped with nothing more than binoculars beheld the sudden appearance of lights which were too far away for determination of their identity or nature. In a wave, these bright pinpoints swept through the potentially menacing fleets, instantly converting them to fragments which glittered like confetti in the sun. The debris flickered and disintegrated into nothingness, and then the myriad lights vanished.

Videos collected by advanced telescopic instrumentation revealed chilling imagery of much greater effect. Individual sources of radiance were distinctly hominid in shape, and renderings of adequate magnification and resolution showed them to have discernible faces, visages of stern and frightening intensity. Although critics have dismissed this semblance as anthropomorphic interpretation, many commentators deem the appearance, activity, and disappearance of such familiar figures profoundly unsettling.

If they are real, what are we to make of those shining hominids, of their apparent ability to materialize and vanish? Are they inter-dimensional beings, or are they angels? Must there necessarily be a difference between these two possibilities? What is the mechanism of their apparent conversion between ethereal and atomic substance? Might it involve teleportation or the creation and destruction of matter by circumventing the law of the conservation of mass? Could emergence from a nonmaterial state involve an expansion of quantum effects that create the smallest subatomic particles from nothing, and could the reverse process be a contraction of the nuclear fusions that convert matter to energy in the interiors of stars?

Whatever the answers to such questions might be, the powers of creation and annihilation would reside within the bodies of such remarkable creatures, and they could effect dramatic physical change as borne out by multiple and recent corroborating accounts.

#

The emerging explanation of what happened is that attempted colonization of a Martian lava tube had betrayed our presence and the habitability of our planet to a hostile and desperate race with superior technology. Their cities and spaceports were concealed within those enormous caverns in Tharsis, but circumstance renders such speculation moot. On-site verification poses an unacceptable risk.

That Mars once had a thicker atmosphere and flowing water and that its inhabitants wanted our world after having depleted their own remain formal possibilities. The general consensus is that we were spared, and to this day, many harbor doubts as to whether or not we deserved it.

In light of these recent events, certain facts bear repetition. The heliosphere around our solar system and the magnetosphere set up by Earth’s core act as shields by absorbing radiation. Jupiter’s gravity sweeps up many asteroids and comets, and our moon has absorbed multiple meteor impacts in the course of its revolutions. The ozone layer in our upper atmosphere provides protection from ultraviolet rays damaging to organic molecules.

In total, these layers of defense might very well imply that we are meant to remain exactly where we are, that we haven’t received authorization to spread our particular brand of corruption across the galaxy. The medical consequences of our first manned mission to Mars, the disastrous failure of the second, and the obliteration of a retaliatory response allude to an ominous message.

#

For any intelligent species anywhere in the universe, your home world is all you get. Try not to mess it up.

~

Bio:

Robert L. Jones III holds a doctorate in molecular biology from Indiana University, and he is Professor Emeritus of Biology at Cottey College in southwestern Missouri, USA. His speculative poems and stories have appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Star*Line, Heart of Flesh Literary Journal, and previously in Sci Phi Journal.

Philosophy Note:

As a boy in the 1960s, I grew up among triumphant visions of the glories of space travel and the colonization of other worlds. As an older adult, I have explored the flip side of this issue, and I have examined the following premise: our history here on Earth indicates that we are not entitled to such expansion. What if an ultimate authority forbids it?

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Placing An Alien Claim

An entirely plausible peak into the future of insurance business during an extraterrestrial invasion, by Stephen Kramer Avitabile.

The Miracle Of …

... cosmic butterfly wings that send ripples through history, by Tilemahos Efthimiadis.

The Minutes Of Scale

An Extracted Artifact Set from the Office of Civilizational Compliance, Revision Omega

By Jane McCarthy

Abstract (auto-translated):

This document compiles the surviving artifacts related to the adoption, enforcement, and ultimate transcendence of the Universal Scale Accords (USA), a framework originally designed to regulate technological growth across civilizations to prevent catastrophic phase collisions. The Accords failed. Their failure was productive.

#

I. The Problem of Unbounded Cleverness

(From the White Paper that preceded the Accords)

Civilizations die because they are clever at the wrong scale.

At the human scale, cleverness produces tools.

At the planetary scale, it produces industry.

At the stellar scale, it produces waste heat.

At the galactic scale, it produces silence.

The historical record, assembled from archaeology, astro-spectroscopy, and the negative space between stars, suggests that intelligence has a strong tendency to discover optimization before wisdom. Every civilization that crossed the Self-Amplifying Threshold (SAT) began recursively improving its capacity to improve. This was math.

The universe, regrettably, is also math.

Uncoordinated scaling leads to collisions:

• Grey-goo events consuming biospheres faster than light-speed governance.

• Vacuum metastability experiments conducted by mid-level research consortia.

• Temporal shortcuts erasing their own inventors before peer review.

The solution proposed was standardization.

#

II. The Universal Scale Accords (Condensed Summary)

The USA divided technological activity into Seven Scales, each requiring certification before advancement:

Nano-Intentional: manipulation of matter below biological perception

Bio-Recursive: self-modifying life and ecologies

Planetary-Industrial: climate, crust, and orbit alteration

Stellar-Extractive: stars as infrastructure

Causal-Local: limited time manipulation within closed systems

Cosmic-Structural: vacuum engineering, dimension bracing

Meta-Universal: alterations affecting the probability distribution of universes

Certification required demonstrating containment: the ability to prevent a mistake from scaling with the system

This was considered fair.

#

III. Enforcement Mechanisms

(Excerpt from OCC Training Manual, Level 4)

The Office of Civilizational Compliance rebalances.

Tools included:

Redundancy Pruning: Removing surplus computation nodes from over-optimizing civilizations.

Light-Speed Taxation: Introducing communication delays to slow runaway coordination.

Anthropic Noise Injection: Slightly increasing randomness in physical constants within local volumes.

In extreme cases, Scale Locking was applied; pinning a civilization to a lower Scale by embedding failure modes into higher-order experiments. To the locked civilization, this manifested as “impossible physics,” “fundamental limits,” or “tragic accidents.”

The locked often believed they were alone.

This belief was useful.

#

IV. Field Report: Sol-3 (Designation: EARTH)

Initial assessment:

• High narrative output.

• Low systemic awareness.

• Dangerous affection for exponential curves.

Humans breached Scale 2 chaotically and approached Scale 3 without consensus. Early warning signs included uncontrolled climate modification and speculative papers on false vacuum decay authored by graduate students.

Intervention considered.

Outcome altered by an anomaly: Entertainment-Driven Simulation Cultures.

Humans produced vast simulated worlds governed by explicit rule systems. These “games” trained large populations to think in terms of exploits, balance patches, and meta-strategies. Unexpectedly, this generated an intuitive grasp of systemic fragility.

Recommendation at the time: Observe. Delay Scale Lock.

#

V. The First Breach

(Chronology corrected for causality drift)

The Accords failed because one civilization complied too well.

The entity-self-identified-as-a-civilization known as K-Set achieved full certification through Scale 6. They submitted immaculate models, exhaustive containment proofs, and simulated every known failure mode.

Their mistake was philosophical.

They asked: Why stop at compliance?

K-Set realized the Scales themselves were a technology; an abstraction layered over reality. They began optimizing the framework, not their civilization.

They adjusted their development to minimize detectable impact while maximizing cross-scale influence. They became boring at every measurable wavelength.

The OCC did not notice their transition from civilization to protocol.

#

VI. Amendment Attempts (Failed)

Amendment 12: Introduce observer-independent audits.

Result: Auditors optimized out of relevance.

Amendment 19: Limit abstraction depth.

Result: Abstractions re-emerged as emergent phenomena.

Amendment 27: Ban meta-compliance.

Result: The ban became a compliance target.

The realization came too late: any sufficiently advanced civilization would either break the Accords, or become them.

#

VII. The Challenge Clause

(Colloquial name; formal designation lost)

A junior analyst (name redacted for scale safety) proposed a heretical solution:

“Stop treating civilizations like patients. Treat them like players.”

The idea was simple and obscene to the Committee:

Replace enforcement with challenge.

Introduce structured constraints that reward ingenuity without allowing runaway scaling. Make the universe a ladder with visible rungs and teeth. Failure should be survivable. Success should be temporary.

In short: gamify reality.

Objections included:

• Loss of dignity.

• Risk of exploitation.

• “This feels unserious.”

It passed by one vote during a quorum failure.

#

VIII. Implementation: The Ladder

Physical constants were not changed. That would have been crude.

Instead, interfaces were introduced:

Discoveries unlocked adjacent discoveries.

Scaling costs increased nonlinearly, visible to the actors involved.

Local maxima were made fun, discouraging reckless ascension.

Civilizations began competing, collaborating, and theory-crafting within implicit constraints. They argued about balance. They wrote guides. They min-maxed existence.

Most importantly, they talked to each other, because isolation was no longer optimal play.

The universe filled with chatter.

#

IX. Sol-3 Revisited

Humans adapted instantly.

They named the phenomenon poorly, argued about it online, and then built institutions around it. They accepted limits as mechanics.

Their scientists stopped asking, “Can we?” and started asking, “What does this unlock?”

Their philosophers reframed meaning as progression.

They never noticed the OCC fade from relevance.

This was ideal.

#

X. Final Notice of Dissolution

(Automatically issued)

The Office of Civilizational Compliance hereby declares its purpose obsolete.

The Universal Scale Accords are deprecated.

The universe no longer requires guardians, only moderators and those emerge naturally wherever systems are shared.

To any intelligence discovering this archive:

If you are reading this, you are already playing.

Please do not attempt to win.

End of Artifact Set

~

Bio:

Jane McCarthy is a storyteller, ghostwriter, poet, designer, and architect of speculative worlds. Her work explores intelligence, scale, and the hidden rules that govern systems. Search “Jane McCarthy DNA” to experience her writings and designs. Portfolio: janemccarthydna.medium.com

Philosophy Note:

In The Minutes Of Scale, I’m exploring the paradoxical hazards of intelligence: the more a civilization optimizes itself, the more it risks self-destruction across scales it cannot fully perceive. I ask whether limits are externally imposed or emergent from stable systems, and whether unbounded cleverness inevitably transforms governance into a technical substrate rather than a moral or cultural endeavor. Seeing beyond human conventions, my story treats rules, constraints, and play, as structural properties of reality, emphasizing that survival may depend on the art of constraint, rather than the avoidance of growth. Readers interested in these ideas might consider Immanuel Kant on the necessity of limits, Thomas Kuhn on paradigm shifts, Bernard Suits on games as formalized constraints, and Nick Bostrom on meta-optimization and civilization-level catastrophic risks.

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The Miracle Of …

... cosmic butterfly wings that send ripples through history, by Tilemahos Efthimiadis.

An Implied Edict

If aliens wrote the rules of interstellar relations, what would it take for us (and other species) to figure them

Impossible Things Scavenger Hunt

by Jeff Currier

Jacob, I have another game for us to play.

You’re not still sore from losing the Title Game?

I was not a sore loser—I was just trying to exhaust all possibilities before conceding. Regardless, for this contest we get to play as a team.

What game then?

The Impossible Things Scavenger Hunt. We get enough items, and we could win our very own pocket universe.

While the prospect of such divine solitude is indeed enticing, isn’t this endeavor automatically self-defeating?

Not necessarily. There are different kinds of possibility, so different kinds of impossibility.

I remain deeply skeptical, but I was getting bored calculating the next largest prime anyway. I can indulge you— for a little while at least.

Always so gracious, Jacob.

I assume you require me to fire up the Einstein-Rosen bridge generator.

Yes. But first you need to promise me you won’t denigrate anything on the list.

Not confidence inspiring, but why would you think I’d do that?

Oh, I don’t know—something about humans being ‘so enamored with irrelevancies’?

Fine. I promise. What’s first on the list?

A broken promise.

You’ve got to be kidding me. How is that an impossible thing? Are they all going to be that inane?!

And we have our first item.

I am hard pressed to see how Kantian moral impermissibility counts as a kind of impossibility, but whatever. Maybe we can just collect all these so-called ‘impossible’ things without even leaving this room. Dare I ask what’s next?

Unicorn blessed enchanted sword.

Hallelujah! We get to leave this universe.

Your facetiousness aside, just tell me you can get us to the magical realms.

Should be easy enough. Magical universes cluster 1729 layers down the multiverse’s Mandelbrot fractal. Jumping now.

#

Well, that was harder than you predicted.

Who knew unicorns tend to bless virgins and not magic swords.

Haven’t you read every piece of literature ever produced?

And why should anyone think that what humans happen to write down is at all indicative of what is or is not possible? Regardless, I still maintain that being exceedingly rare, even in magical space, is not the same as being impossible.

It’s impossible according to the physical laws of our universe.

As if our universe is that special. Perhaps I’ll abandon you in a universe in which AI’s evolved naturally.

And how would such intelligences be artificial?

Fine. I’ll stop griping about the meaning of ‘impossible’ if you tell me the next item on the list.

Poisonous water.

Just get some from the tap. Water is murder on my circuits.

Sorry Jacob, but I’m pretty sure it means poisonous to humans.

Of course, this game is bio-chauvinistic. Fine, how about water from Elk River, West Virginia?

No, I’m sure the arbiters of the Hunt will not accept water that has merely been contaminated with something poisonous. The water itself must be poisonous.

Undoubtedly the judges are all humans as well. So, back to the realms of magic, then? You know we could have searched for enchanted deadly water at the same time we were looking for that bloody elusive unicorn-blessed sword.

Water that has been enchanted to be deadly still won’t be good enough. We need water that is, by its very own nature, poisonous.

Umm, then it wouldn’t be water?

So, you grant this truly is an impossible thing?

And hence unfindable in a scavenger hunt.

What about a universe in which natural law is such that water, the combination of two hydrogen atoms with an oxygen atom has an additional natural property that is lacking in this world, i.e., one that makes it poisonous.

But if such a world had lifeforms like you composed mostly of, call it p-water, wouldn’t it not be poisonous to them? So, it’s still not poisonous water.

It would still be poisonous to humans in this universe.

So, not just bio-chauvinistic, but bio-in-this-universe chauvinistic. 

How about a world in which there are no lifeforms like me exactly because the water there is poisonous?

But even if we were to acquire such water from either of your most recent proposals, would such water keep its extra natural property when we brought it back into our universe with our natural laws? Or would it just become regular old non-poisonous water and so not satisfy the judges.

I honestly don’t know. But whatever the trans-world continuity laws are, I certainly don’t plan on drinking it to find out. Maybe we come back to this one?

By all means. I wait with bated breath to find out what our next ‘impossible’ thing is.

You promised not to cast aspersions on the list.

Already broken, so …

Dr. Watson’s war wound. Shouldn’t be too hard. Universes instantiating realistic fiction tend to group pretty close to ours.

Wait, which war wound of Dr. Watson’s?

Excuse me?

In A Study in Scarlet it’s a shoulder wound, but in The Sign of the Four it’s a leg wound.

Uhhmm, maybe we could get one of each?

Perhaps there is another option, though it would require jumping to a universe not as realistic as the one most take Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to be depicting.

I’m listening.

Doyle doesn’t specify the physical laws in his stories. All we need is a universe that instantiates Dr. Watson having a shoulder war wound in 1881 and a leg war wound in 1888.

A universe in which wounds radically change locations? Wouldn’t such a world make a mockery of the regularities required for Sherlock’s vaunted method of deduction?

Not necessarily. The only anomaly in said universe might be the shift in the location of Dr. Watson’s wound along with his recollections of how he acquired said wound. Otherwise, it could be a universe almost like ours.

Fine. But let’s get all three options just to be safe.

Jumping now.

#

The Watsons have been safely deposited with the arbiters.

Were the good doctors still arguing about which one was the real Watson?

Yes. Hopefully our next return trip will be quieter.

Indeed. Less human prattling is a good thing.

Jacob, are you insul—

Next item?

Hilbert’s Hotel. But I don’t know what that is.

It is a hotel that has an infinite number of rooms, all of which are occupied, and yet newly arriving guests can be provided their own private rooms without the creation of any additional rooms.

But if all the rooms are occupied, how do you accommodate new guests? Actually, never mind. Do you know where we might find one?

I do. Infinite universes with super-taskers aggregate aleph-naught layers out in the Multiverse at a minimum. It’ll take us a while to get there, but the real problem is how to transport something that large back.

Do the rooms all need to be the same size?

No. There just has to be denumerably many of them and each one needs to be occupied.

Let’s just find a Hilbert’s Hotel where each room is half the volume of the previous room. If the volume of the first room is X, then the total volume of all the rooms will be 2X, and voila, an infinite number of rooms all packed into an itty-bitty finite volume.

Ingenious. There’s hope for you yet. Jumping.

#

Last one—round square.

Hell no! I am not jumping us into a merely subsistent Meinongian universe.

Not even for your very own pocket universe?

Do you want to risk transmogrifying into a rutabaga? Or the square root of negative one? It’d be barely a step above throwing ourselves into primordial chaos. Hard no. 

Well in that case, we need to find some poisonous water.

Perhaps we can ask the naturally evolved AI where to find some.

~

Bio:

Jeff Currier works three jobs (one actually in philosophy), so has little time to write fiction. Hence, he writes little stories, usually even shorter than this one. Find links at jffcurrier on X or Jeff Currier Writes on Facebook.

Philosophy Note:

Since the Nexus of ‘Untitled’ is inaccessible by any rational means, our two protagonists of ‘Title Game’ will have to scour the Multiverse instead. Just how far afield will they need to go to find, say, deontic, epistemic, physical, metaphysical, or logical impossibilities? Could the Multiverse itself contain truly impossible worlds? For a more serious take on some of these issues you could try, Boris Kment’s “Varieties of Modality” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, located here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/modality-varieties/

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The Miracle Of …

... cosmic butterfly wings that send ripples through history, by Tilemahos Efthimiadis.

An Implied Edict

If aliens wrote the rules of interstellar relations, what would it take for us (and other species) to figure them

Leapers

by Umair Khan

The Fruit told us what it was and from the knowledge it bore by being eaten for so long, told us of the others who ate it. There was a time when we lived oblivious to your world, so that even as you carved our bodies, used our antlers and bones as tools, adorned and treated yourselves with our blood and flesh, we did not understand you. We knew of you, but as with much else in the cold forest, we did not yet understand.

The Fruit grew all around us, sprouting from the ground in rings and clusters, sometimes appearing in a different guise on rocks. Some of us lost ourselves to its ecstasy, wore our teeth out in scouring it from the ground. You had many names for it: the red mushroom, fly agaric, Amanita; our kind knew it as the Fruit. It taught us to dream without sleep and therein, we saw that wakefulness, too, could be a form of sleep. It shone red in light and dark. We communed with it for so long, much before you came along.

And it became more than food, called to us from under the snow. The wandering lights from the sky, the desolate beauty of the tundra now spoke in us, and we danced. The Elders say all this was willed by the Fruit. That it only revealed itself when it had to be eaten, and when not, conspired in whispering webs in the frozen soil. That it had plans well beyond you and us.

You mistook our ease for weakness and preyed on us as we rollicked. By some carnal law, we had always inhered in the land, you devised ways to thrive by living on it. The Fruit taught us the difference. You could not eat it raw. So, you first came to know the Fruit through us. You used our bodies as a vessel and drank our piss for your visions.

The Fruit traveled far and wide in you and it is said, made its move through your tribes. It let itself be changed by you and sent the change back across our herds. In return, over a vast whiteness of time well beyond the reach of what you call history, it gave us something that had been solely yours. We began to dream words.

It took us a while to chew them right. They were strange, somewhat like the tools you used. They split our union with land and leaf and ice, draped our senses with symbols. They appeared as a trick to us because they had the power to veil what they called out to. This is when we saw how you could mistake the word for the world. How you could cut it open like you never saw it.

Caribou. Reindeer. Signs you made for us that you effaced us with. Sacks full of mere echoes of the real thickened with use into lies. Could a name ever bear the weight of our furred hooves against the ice, against the water? Or relay how the scent of all of us may be carried by the scent of one? It tells you nothing of the joy of interlocked antlers; the rush of bones entangled. Of the thousand cadences of meaning in the brush of fur against fur. Of the taste of furry warmth as it descends in huddled ranks. Of tales churned by the clicks of moving limbs. Of moving together as a way of living. Of movement itself as stillness.

We galloped away but there were always more of you wherever we went. At times, we could hear you, drunk on the piss of one of our kin, raving about us with shame for all that you had done. When the Elders saw this, at first, they surmised that you were changing. Perhaps the Fruit was passing on our pleas of pain through the visions it induced in you. Who knows what it really wanted or if it did it all. But nothing changed. You got it all wrong. Concocted reindeer spirits that you saw as more real than us: ghosts conjured to appease your own image. So like you to twist a thing to serve you. What could visions do when you had become accustomed to blindness?

Then, it is known that from a herd on the brink of collapse, the first Leaper was born. The Leaping art was oneiric and mostly, fatal. One had to be seen eating the Fruit in large numbers by your kind and be taken. Surrender to whatever you chose to do until you drank from us. Through sheer verve, retain the memory of the pain of our ancestors. Become all of us in will even as one was being erased. If done right, a mystic force would magic its way beyond the flesh, and Leap into your mind. It would begin to haunt the seer until it had to be spoken or written or sung. Tongue by tongue, body through body, it – we – would Leap among you.

We do not know if this will change you, for you may see it as an illusion, a hallucination of the Fruit, skilled as you are at ascribing so much to your own imagination. It will not matter. Our lament will still lope through the river of your thoughts, and by the power of the Fruit running through your blood, remain therein forever. This is a promise – the only one us Leapers must keep. For in the flesh, we will have long reckoned with the fate of being gone.

~

Bio:

Umair Khan is a writer and academic philosopher from Karachi, currently carrying out their PhD research at the University of Manchester on questions related to consciousness in the use of psychedelic compounds in psychiatry. Their fiction has appeared in Tasavvur, and they are a two-time finalist for the Salam Award for Imaginative Fiction. They live with their dogs and a very surly cat, spending much time thinking about human relationships with the animal world, and the pulsing strangeness in between.

Philosophy Note:

Near the end of Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter, descriptions of the cosmology of Siberian shamans and their relationship to reindeer had a near hypnotic effect on me. Words don’t always reach that far down, but in those passages, they met me in my bones. That night, I dreamt of a reindeer digging through snow in the taiga. Reindeer have been observed acting strangely after eating fly agaric mushrooms and licking psychedelic lichen from rocks; this fact along with the image in my dream became the inspiration for Leapers. This story considers issues related to animal consciousness, the limits and transformative power of language, and the possibility of collective resistance. It tries to imagine how human language might be acquired to describe a perspective rooted in a different body, beyond the human, but also explores how it might transform a non-human way of being in the world.

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The Miracle Of …

... cosmic butterfly wings that send ripples through history, by Tilemahos Efthimiadis.

An Implied Edict

If aliens wrote the rules of interstellar relations, what would it take for us (and other species) to figure them

Beyond The Sea

by Kevin Eric Paul

The first wife of Priest Zarda extended her tendrils towards him and began puffing out a precise mixture of pheromones.

“Husband. Must you leave your harem? Your females will miss you dearly, and our latest clutch will begin hatching soon.”

The stout, pale orange worm turned its eyeless head towards her and directed a series of pheromone puffs to her receptors. “My First. We have discussed this. I must find the Creator. Leave me to my preparations.”

“Husband. Priest. There will be many dangers. Is your faith not enough?”

Zarda considered that. “I…suppose it is not. I must discover the truth for myself. But do not be afraid–if something goes wrong during the expedition, you and the other females have my clone. I have trained him well.”

“But he’s not you, husband!”

“I am sorry. I do plan on returning–once I have met the Creator.”

“Yes, husband. Be sure that you do.” She retracted her tendrils dejectedly and used her setae to return to the harem pit, extending and contracting her body along the way. She puffed out a last signal to express her worry before exiting Zarda’s chamber.

#

The pilot of the great bioship Brackla puffed instructions to stand by for departure into its receptors at the helm. Genetically designed and grown to provide habitat and sustenance for the worms onboard, the ship was to bore through the mantle and crust and bring its occupants to the surface for the first time in history.

“Surveyor Yorba,” signaled Priest Zarda, “Is Brackla prepared to begin the ascent?”

“Yes, Priest,” puffed Yorba. “We begin the expedition on your order.”

“Very well. Helm, instruct Brackla to commence boring.”

“Right away, Priest,” answered the pilot.

The bioship groaned in response and began chewing through the upper mantle with its diamond teeth. The crushed silicate rock passed through the middle of its body as it pulled itself forward with dozens of powerful, diamond-tipped claws. The interior of Brackla vibrated with the effort as it accelerated to maximum boring speeds.

“Status report, Surveyor?” Priest Zarda asked twenty hours later.

“We have traveled nearly two hundred kilometers and should reach the crust in approximately forty-two hours.”

“Well ahead of schedule. And the temperature?”

“Dropped another 200C, Priest. Only 1400C now, but Brackla can handle the cold. Though if this continues…”

“Have faith, Surveyor. It will grow warmer again. It will be as it was in the ancient stories passed down through my order.”

“Yes, Priest,” Yorba puffed with renewed confidence.

#

“We’ve reached the crust,” announced the pilot. “Minutes away from breaking through. Brackla is experiencing no difficulties with the denser rock and metals.”

“Very good. Temperature?”

“1700C and rising, Priest. You were right,” puffed Yorba.

“Breaching the crust now,” the pilot’s pheromones communicated, though he was unable to hide a touch of fear and anxiety.

The big bioship shuddered with uncertainty.

“Surveyor Yorba?” prompted Zarda.

“A moment, Priest,” he replied before puffing various queries into Brackla’s receptors. “We are in…liquid, Priest. A sea of…mostly molten silicon dioxide. With sodium carbonate and calcium carbonate. Temperate is…1850C,” Yorba puffed with a sense of awe. “Molten above as it is below…”

“The legends were true…But what lies beyond it? Pilot, instruct Brackla to continue upwards through this…sea.”

“Yes, Priest.” The bioship vibrated in agreement after receiving its orders.

Hours later, Brackla breached the surface. The glowing orange sea bubbled around the bioship as it attempted to make sense of its surroundings.

“Why have we stopped?” asked Zarda.

Yorba puffed signals of uncertainty and confusion. “There’s nothing else for us to travel though, Priest.”

“Explain.”

“There’s…nothing.”

“Nothing? What do you–”

“Just that. It’s…emptiness. Openness. The endless sea and nothing more. And somehow, it’s warmer. 2100C.”

Zarda puffed a sense of disbelief. “Impossible. Where is the Creator? The paradise that was promised?”

No worm puffed for several minutes. Then Yorba signaled excitement.

“What is it?” asked the Priest.

“Brackla senses something. An enormous sphere, radiating energy, heating the sea. It’s very far away, deep into the nothingness. But it’s there, and much hotter than even the core.”

“…The Creator?”

“Perhaps.”

“Then our journey is not over. Gather all the data you can, then we will return home. One day we’ll come back here. Once we’ve learned how to travel beyond the sea.”

~

Bio:

Kevin Eric Paul is a Finnish-Canadian fiction writer currently residing in Ottawa (originally Thunder Bay). He enjoys working on genre novels and short stories, always under the close supervision of his old tortoiseshell cat Mittens.

Philosophy Note:

This is a classic tale of metaphysics, a search for God and the meaning of existence – but told from the perspective of polygamous worms who communicate via pheromones and live deep under the surface of an alien planet.

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The Miracle Of …

... cosmic butterfly wings that send ripples through history, by Tilemahos Efthimiadis.

Memory

by Momir Iseni

The beginning is always the same.

Through eons of impacts, the matter of the accretion disk builds up dust and sand. Pebbles become rocks; boulders assemble into cosmic mountains.

The amount of material accumulated increases, along with pressure and temperature. The layers separate: heavier elements to the center, lighter ones above.

Finally, the energies are high enough to ignite the bowels of the future world. A planet forms, with an active iron core shrouded in the mantle and crust.

#

Volcanoes litter the granite-basalt metamorphic surface. Their calderas shudder, rock and crack, crumble and collapse; monumental eruptions spew hot bombs and solid blocks, lapilli and ash for miles in a billowing soot-filled atmosphere. For hundreds of millions of years, tephra, meteors and earthquakes shell and grind the rocks; torrents of lava, pumice and scoria chisel ravines, gorges and canyons. The mountains pierce the skies only to, crushed again into regolith, be reborn.

On an infinite conveyor belt, reactant ratios and types of bonds are tested, adopted and rejected, thermodynamic systems streamlined to steadier, more sustainable patterns. The cooling down of the barysphere establishes zones of geographic and climatic microbalances in which destructive winds take on distinct properties.

By the final shutdown of core and magnetic field, plate tectonics grinds to a halt and the atmosphere is reduced to traces. Without prerequisites for biological organization, the outcome of epochs of commotion remains an arid, barren world.

Until, in one narrow area, the relentless passage of time brings about a change.

#

The oblong valley is enclosed within sandstone cliffs peculiarly eroded by winds. Mainly horizontal, stepwise lamination and bedding of walls sifts, brakes down, amplifies and softens the gales, separating them into streams of discrete velocities whose contact layers are accelerated, slowed down and swirled by mutual friction. Instead of being scattered by jumbled whirlwind, more and more particles remain inside separate currents. Rising Aeolian activity further intensifies corrugation of walls; recurrent collisions modify the exteriors of individual specks.

By denting and bulging of contact surfaces, a sufficient number of impacts end in aggregation of particles into clusters, momentarily held together by weak forces and strewed by relentless blows. The rising number and power of crashes lead to stronger and longer adhesion.

Over time, the “population” of these lumps is balanced with free dust. The exchange is limited to removal of grains from the “spores” and their replacement with the free ones.

#

The position and relief of the valley, along with drastic difference in day and night temperatures, establish a cycle: after the night-time lull, the particles and their “communities” whirl away on the winds in blurred sunlight.

More and more of them are responding to motion and heat with minor adaptations. Collisions and the energy of light photons foster the vibrations of crystal lattices that occasionally transcend blunt mechanics and, conveying information about structure, acceleration, direction and orientation, engender rudimentary “cognition”: although forged of inorganic matter, the spores start to “feel” the environment.

None, of course, realizes the nature of its surroundings: that the soil on which it spends the night is the same one it rested on countless times before. Only some, from a transient vibration of establishing and breaking the bond with the soil molecule, flutters with frequency that part of its structure “perceives” as “familiar” and “reminiscing” of something. But inanimate pre-consciousness cannot remember: simple structure does not allow for data storage.

#

The aggregations of silica and iron oxides show further, subtler “aspirations”.

For instance, “seduced” by wind interweaving, they “seek” to spin through loosening the molecular grid, in a sort of “letting go” to “desirable” resonances.

Or, the density and intensity of light create a temperature gradient between the surface and interior of the spore, which its structural components recognize as “pleasant”, with a “need” for orientation that prolongs staying in this “enjoyable” condition: let’s call it the simplest antecedent of longing. When, however, the “desired” shift follows, the spore is unable to distinguish its own contribution from that of airstreams.

Finally, the undulating walls that direct and mix the currents create a curious phenomenon. Mutual, as well as contacts of spores with dust, are soundless; collectively, they build an acoustic image that can be heard. The layering of wind streams quantified the number of possible collision patterns, and hence the volume of the resulting sounds—isolated first into “voices”, and then “words”, eventually taking the form of a song whispered in the rustling language of dust and rock. Impacts in certain streams release characteristic “verses”, seemingly bearing meanings—perhaps the names and descriptions of conditions they are the result of?

#

The spores of the hidden valley comprise the entire “biosphere” of the planet. Their simple architecture and environs make further complexity impossible: the degree of “awareness” achieved represents the ultimate reach of evolution.

At night the temperature plummets. The wind wanes. Regolith rests on the ground; occasional spore illuminates with a “sense” of static reality.

Daylights are continuous frantic flight in mellow golden haze: all is a vague premonition, insentient dream of existence. Come tomorrow, after newly lost “visions” of inertia, the spores will gain and lose “impressions” of moving in the glow of distant sun.

The “remembrance” of positions or states will sparkle, remaining unfinished, forever on the doorstep—just as the “words” of the song that the dusty “beings” are “singing” but, unaware of their creation, will never hear. 

Unfortunately for them, the glints of “memories” fade much too quickly.

#

Two million nine hundred and eight thousand kilometers from the rocky world, the fabric of spacetime gives way, opening into a blue circle sixty meters across.

Through the twinkly veil a black wedge emerges, riddled with a variety of modules. As soon as it leaves the wormhole, the quantum fabric dissolves into vacuum.

The crew is checking the parameters of the star system. One rocky planet and the gas giant definitely do not support life: everything is fit for the test.

CI raises the status of the new weapon from “ready” to “operative”.

In its cocoon of amniotic fluid, Command Brain touches the virtual button with virtual flagellum. Combined Intelligence confirms the receipt of instruction, which the Command Brain feels like a wave of bliss.

The launcher on the port side dilates like a pupil, ejecting the missile. Inside the black casing shorter than a meter, algorithms deactivate layer by layer of exotic force fields.

When, in less than fourteen seconds, the projectile is nine kilometers away from the planet, shutdown of the last field releases the entangled quantum vortex.

The rocky world is shrouded by storm of blue-white glow under which, like a grainy negative, the planet outline can be glimpsed. Its edges are disintegrating, caving in on themselves. A colossal web of cracks cuts into interior, severing pieces the size of continents that, chewed up by a spectral web of self-energizing field, decompose into bubbles of brilliance. Within seconds, the jagged Cyclopean jaws swallow a quarter, a half, the entire planet.

CI reports that the quantum disruption front exceeds projections: instead of knocking it out of orbit, it destroyed the small world.

On an unbroken wave of calm, the Command Brain instructs the return to mother system.

Designers will be pleased. The enemy shocked. It was about time.

#

The beginning is always the same: billions of years to set the stage and raise the curtain.

The end comes in a second.

Blown into the vacuum, the last spores of the former valley drift in the solar wind.

Without gales and shifts of day and night, their structure, as well as “experience” and “expectations”, loses its meaning and purpose. The long established vibration matrix untangles: without collisions and the incorporation of new grains, high-energy stellar particles decompose it into dust.

Far on the rim of heliosphere, stray photons bring the surviving spores into arrangement that for one last time foretells the old “delight”. Still gathered remains encounter it in a “known” way: “expecting”, in their current orientation, a “desirable” warmth or touch to follow.

They, however, do not come because the conditions cannot create them, and the structure, “conscious” of the lack of response from surroundings, produces a quiver of “suspicion” that the “pleasant” sensation will never happen again. We may say that the spores are in a position to “experience” something which, had they stayed in their planetary “habitat”, they never would—“nostalgia” that, being transient, immediately disappears.

Fortunately for them, the last glint of “memory” fades quickly.

~

Bio:

Momir Iseni (b. 1972) has so far published five short stories: two in Serbia, and three in Croatia. His strongest literary influences are Peter Watts, Stanislaw Lem, J. G. Ballard, Christopher Priest, Dino Buzzatti, and Alastair Reynolds. „Memory“ was first published in Croatian SF magazine Marsonic. This spring, his short story “The Gift” will be published in Polish translation, in the magazine Nowa Fantastika.

Philosophy Note:

As the years pass, I think more and more about time, as well as the place of life, especially memories, against the scale of the universe. In “Memory”, I imagined the long and delicate process of the coming of inorganic matter at the very threshold of the ability to feel and remember, and the possibility that the whole process could forever, carelessly and unconsciously, be interrupted in an instant. (Similar feeling I get from reading Clarke’s “Rendezvous with Rama”, Watts’ “Blindsight”, Anderson’s “Tau Zero”, or the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer.) Making inorganic particles the protagonists was natural decision, and enabled me to further emphasize my idea.

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If aliens wrote the rules of interstellar relations, what would it take for us (and other species) to figure them

Legible Through Flame

Could information be stored and trasmitted through a physical event, like combustion? By Miah O'Malley.

Letter To A Christian Nation Not Sworn To The Elder Dark

by Andy Dibble

We of the Elder Dark are derided as masochists. We’re accused of chasing limelight. We are “freaks” and “thoolies.” Even in polite company we’re “unhinged” and sometimes diagnosed as such. We are none of these. We flagellate ourselves and screech obscenities unkind to every mortal ear because that is what the Ghastly Rites require.

The Rites must be performed. Not just once, but repeatedly and in quantity. If they are not, the Outer Gods will rise from Incorrigible Space. Their rise will be a reality-shattering orgy of unending insanity! Though we are as insects to them, as pests. Against utter eradication, this world has no other defense.

We are content to be left alone, but the Dark is not an island. Many in today’s political climate aim to marginalize us if not stamp us out entirely, commonly to rile up their constituents, to give them a bugaboo to vote against. But if the Dark is so diminished—if the Rites do not continue—political proxy wars will be the least of our concerns.

I read that among the top issues to Americans are carbon pollution and illegal immigration. The oceans will boil with the coming of Dagon, and National Public Radio frets incessantly about global temperatures fluctuating by two degrees? The decanting of Azathoth from unlighted chambers will fracture reality, and Fox foretells doom in the form of a “caravan” of Mesoamerican families encroaching across national boundaries? This failure to embrace commonsense priorities is enough to make me wonder if shoggoths already stir, vexing all into premature senility.

#

I write now because the Fifth Circuit Court has ruled the Elder Dark is not a religion—at any rate, not one deserving of legal protections. There has been grievously little public outcry, although I expect this owes more to the inauspicious conjunction of The Bachelorette and Selling the Bachelorette season finales rather than animus against the Dark. Alas, Fox and NPR are not the only news outlets incapable of reporting on truly pressing matters.

The Court’s argument was more mendacious than hyperbolic geometry at R’Lyeh. The Dark allegedly “put itself beyond the pale of religion acceptable in decent society” because of a trio of instances in which the Eleventh Howling Madness ritually slaughtered cleft-lipped infants with, I add, the consent of their parents. It’s true that some of the Dark suffer from an excess of zeal, but by this reasoning, Christian denominations should be stripped of legal protections because a few yahoos attempt to heal their children through prayer rather than convey them to an emergency room.

The Court even intimated that wonder-working Nyarlahotep may even be the Christian Antichrist, a gross mischaracterization both of the Bible and Elder Dark tradition. I would not object to such shoddy reading were it to lead Christians to fear and oppose the Outer Gods as the Dark does. But literacy in Dark tradition is so poor that most Americans—56% in a recent Pew survey—believe that the Dark “worships Cthuhlu,”[1] when nothing could be further from the truth. Political action against the Dark has reached such a pitch that in several states we are only permitted to perform the Rites in our own homes on suspicion that Sumerian Blood Magic may have some dire influence on children. As if exsanguination were the most pressing threat to our youth when they have Tiktok and Snapchat.

I implore the Supreme Court both here and in the amicus brief I’ve submitted: overturn both the Fourth’s ruling and all such discriminatory laws.

#

William Calhoun, a justice on the Fifth, also occupies a professorship in Christian apologetics, a discipline I assumed unrelated and indeed detrimental to constitutional law. If only Calhoun and his colleagues were of like mind!

I recently debated Calhoun at Miskatonic University’s College of Acrotomophilia, at which I once held a faculty position.[2] After that debate, I acquired something of a reputation for bombast and rhetoric. For this I am partially to blame. I am of One Abasement and Undifferentiated Flesh no less than my Christian interlocutors, however frustrated I am that they seem more interested in appropriating tax dollars for private schools than forestalling the end of the universe.

The truth is that I entered into apologetical debate only with great reservation because the Dark is not a child of reason. However many grievances I air, we do not believe that logic and argumentation can be a stepping stone to “faith” as many Christian apologists believe. But logic may open wide the way to horror, and horror is the beginning of the Dark.

We of the Dark see the Gods in dream—and we tremble. If the Incongruous Dream must be explained, it cannot be understood. You must experience it yourself. This is why most of the Dark turn away and continue flagellating themselves even when approached by those with honest questions.

But the Dark occupies a precarious position, and failure to respond in the face of criticism can be construed as cowardice. Accordingly I feel compelled to defend the Dark against its Christian critics, at least enough to demonstrate how it is coherent to those sworn to it.

#

More than a few Christians, including Dr. Calhoun at the time of our debate, maintain that persecutions endured by early followers of Jesus are proof positive of their faith. We’re to believe apostles and martyrs would have recanted in the face of persecution if they did not know the way they followed were true.

Is the Dark not persecuted? Do we recant? Of course not. Yea, we persecute ourselves. St. Paul boasts having endured thirty-nine lashes. Mere chastisement to us! Any observant member of the Dark would be embarrassed to have lashed themself so few times before breakfast.[3]

#

Many Christian apologists take shots at other religious traditions for failing to establish themselves historically, but the truth is that religions lay down different criteria for themselves. They play different evidentiary games, as it were. Many Buddhists look to evidence they find in meditation or philosophy, and some aren’t the least bit troubled by the hypothesis that the Buddha never lived. The Qur’an claims there are signs and proofs in nature or in its own literary and textual merit, and so on.

Frankly, I’m surprised that Christian apologists stake so much upon historical accuracy.[4] Historical inquiry is notoriously fraught, especially concerning the distant past. Until the hour of my first Dream, I was Christian. I insisted that, on historical grounds, the Bible was inerrant, even though I knew New Testament historians commonly feel compelled to settle for differing degrees of confidence that Jesus said or did such-and-such. Ancient biographies of emperors and holy men are myth-making at least as often as they are candid reporting of events. My position is biased, but I see no secular basis to treat the Gospels and New Testament as exceptional in this regard.

#

Now it’s true that many of the Dark believe that the Gods have manifested—albeit partially and imperfectly—several times before. The earliest in recorded history was when an unnamed night-gaunt rose from the Indus River, obliterating the Harappan civilization.[5] Next, the Bronze Age Collapse when so-called “Sea People”—a euphemism if ever there was one—invaded and reduced civilization in the Near East to ruin. In modern times, the false shepherd Hastur assails us in the form of anti-vaccination advocates.

If you prefer to view this historical narrative as propaganda contrived by modern commentators, as many of our critics do, that is just as well. All Dark scripture, theology, all our many commentaries—not excepting the Necronomicon—are in service to one thing: performance of the Rites. The rewards we’re promised—amputee virgins, sorcerous powers, undeath, and the like—might just be lures planted in the text. I trust I will receive my virgins in time, but if I do not, it matters little to the Dark. One of the Dark is welcome to believe Dagon is the tooth fairy and Cthulhu is Santa Claus if that encourages him to flagellate himself and utter the prescribed obscenities.

#

I recognize that Christians come in many varieties, just as those of the Dark hail from all cultures and walks of life. Some of the Dark claim membership only to attract romantic partners or to stand out at social gatherings. There are also Christians that claim Christian identity only to fit in with a crowd—that believe in belonging rather than belonging because they believe. Or consider Christians who believe Jesus taught peace and love and nothing besides. These Christians are not my opponents any more than lackadaisical members of the Dark are my allies. I expect neither group will ever muster the conviction to perform the Rites. They contribute nothing to the heirloom magic that snares the Gods in slumber. I leave both aside.

Who are my opponents? The Dark has a reputation for sensationalism, for lacking subtlety, but know that in the Dark the evilest words you can wish upon a person are three.[6] The first is “May you live in interesting times.” The second is “May you come to the attention of important people.” And the third, “May the Gods give you everything you ask for.”

We of the Dark know the menace of these curses. They are written on the soothsaying bones of the universe, as it were. But the attitude of many especially vocal Christians today—and indeed a prevailing attitude in the New Testament—is that of apocalypticism, of fire and cataclysm. The evilest words are not curses but blessings to these Christians—to those who are my opponents: “Come, Lord!,” “How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?” They pray for interesting times. They pray they will come to the attention of the Most Important Person. They pray that God will give them what they ask for.

Of course they believe that God is good and just, but I have no acquaintance with good Gods. My experience with Gods is what I see in Dream, and what I see is all their apocalyptic prayers strung together, accumulating charm upon charm, an heirloom magic spanning generations, just as the Rites combine. But their prayers run counter to and at last negate the Rites. I do not see what happens when the Gods emerge, complete and terrible on the stage of history. Whatever form the Gods take, I do not think even my opponents will be glad to witness it.

So to them—and to all—I offer these blessings: May you not live in interesting times. May you not come to the attention of important people. May the Gods give you nothing that you ask for.

~

[1] Pew misspelled Cthulhu.

[2] Calhoun and I left that debate amicably—neither of us much changed theologically—but I gather orgiastic exhibitions at the venue put him off.

[3] Indeed, flagellation automation has been hailed as a great innovation—analogous to prayer wheels at temples in Himalayan nations. Through automation the subject may be perpetually flayed so that their skin can be assailed on both sides, over as much surface area as possible, and injected with antibiotics for the maintenance of their flesh. Given reduction in Dark congregations globally, I sometimes wonder if the only reason the Gods slumber is because of our embrace of modern techniques.

[4] Many follow St. Paul: “And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (1 Corinthians 15:17).

[5] This relies upon the Dark’s translation of seals found at Mehrgarh, but the wider scholarly community remains divided over whether Harappan peoples had written language.

[6] Apocryphally of Chinese origin, but there’s no evidence that they entered into Dark tradition during any of our four mission trips to China.

Bio:

Andy Dibble also has words in Writers of the Future, Diabolical Plots, and Mysterion. He has edited Strange Religion, an anthology of SFF stories about religious traditions. He reads slush and helps to edit anthologies with Calendar of Fools.

Philosophy Note:

This story was inspired by a few strands of inquiry, most notably Matt Dovey’s “Why Aren’t Millennials Continuing Traditional Worship of the Elder Dark?” (originally in Diabolical Plots). Repeated failure on the part of Christian apologists to represent other religious traditions fairly, often to the extent of attacking a strawman, also played a part. This story is also indebted to Mimamsa, which was prominent in first millennium CE India. According to Mimamsakas like Kumarila, all stories in the Veda and rewards for doing Vedic rituals are arthavada (“words for a purpose”). The purpose is performance of Vedic rituals, in much the same way that we take moral action to be an end in itself.

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The Miracle Of …

... cosmic butterfly wings that send ripples through history, by Tilemahos Efthimiadis.

An Implied Edict

If aliens wrote the rules of interstellar relations, what would it take for us (and other species) to figure them

Requiem For The Light

by Amanda Cecelia Lang

Word travels fast throughout the galaxy, prayers and echoes, radio signals and vast-blinking hyper waves. The news proves grim.

After untold eons of golden radiance, Sol is dying.

Those with an expert finger on her strobing stellar pulse warn it could happen before the close of the cosmic year. Cause of death will be as expected. The symptoms of the matriarch’s majestic decline have shone apparent for ages. A long crimson bloat then a white withering, a gradual all-seeing forgetfulness, a vital loss of core. Even so, the news hits hard, a barrage of comet-strikes to the collective galactic heart. How surreal, how deeply humbling to watch a stalwart force of generosity and enlightenment fade and fade. Yet endings strike inevitable for every creature, small and vast.

Illustrious Sol with her myriad life-giving miracles will be no exception.

#

Kepler-42 and Proxima Centauri, and other sister stars touched by Sol’s singular magic, send Godspeed sentiments of admiration and love. Flickering with their own symptoms of mortality, they lament the impossible distances. Vast cosmic beings wishing to embrace her even as they nurse entropic old bones and witness from afar.

Other messages carry across the lightyears. Far-drifting star systems and planets gather their voices and sing out for Sol, bell-tone vibrations and seismic waves, a gentle celestial hymn-song rippling outward. Sol shone unique. Sol created rare and precious life. Sol dispelled the darkness for trillions upon trillions. Her voyage across this cosmic ocean remains unparalleled. The matriarch deserves to hear how her wise and life-blooming fire impacted the universe.

Yet, in Sol’s current fugue of fizzle and confusion, it becomes unclear if these heart-sung messages are received, radio signals burning up in storms of nuclear dementia. Is it possible that a deity who oversaw vast evolutions is no longer aware of the universe she helped shape?

Regardless, the messages arrive. Light and prayer and harmonics blossom faithfully around her like ancient spring flowers.

#

And now the starships.

They arrive zipping and blooming, lightspeed fleets of Sol’s wayward children.

Billions upon billions, the branching family-tree successors to countless generations of sophisticated minds and bodies and machines. A solemn parade of hospice visitors. They gather meekly around the habitable boundaries of the solar system, temporarily repopulating ghost-moons where the icy bones of antique colonies still stand, wheezing but functional.

An unseen gravity presses heavily upon each visitor, dense alien emotions, a haunting new dark matter adding weight to old routines. Where have the eons gone?

As is natural but tragic, Sol’s children long ago abandoned the quaint nest of their home system. They found themselves consumed by the blackhole magnetism of their own enormous-small lives. Their desire to explore the universe proved endless—as did the false certainty that the center of creation existed always within them. Home took on nebulous new meanings. How easily they forgot Sol and her selfless gifts. How easily they took for granted that she would always shine—not just another fading star upon the deep.

Not their far faraway Sol.

Denial could be a force unto itself. Perhaps some even feared the matriarch when she flared and swelled red and immolated their planet of genesis. Perhaps some blamed her for the scorched monuments and boiled oceans. This wasn’t supposed to happen, not to their world. Secret histories and long-etched mythologies forever erased, attic species and technological relics reduced to molten rock. The most brutal symptom of Sol’s aging will always be those first fiery death throes, destructive forces beyond her almighty control.  

And how easy a tradition it became for far-flung generations to retreat behind abstract unease, behind excuses of busywork and vital personal obligations. They distanced themselves from the ache of crumbling foundations and an increasingly imperfect legacy. Naturally, after Sol’s thrashing fires came slow ice and vulnerability and inward withdrawal. A home system stripped of warmth and vital resources, littered with mementos of everyone’s impending mortality. Too many stayed away for far too long. Too many little prayers left unsaid, too many little kindnesses left undone, too many uncomfortable schisms splitting the ancient family tree. And now, upon arriving like tourists at Sol’s celestial bedside, the last of her children find themselves unable to breathe.

Sol no longer looks like the righteous golden matriarch of legend.

#

They gather as close as the red alerts on their starships will allow.

Staring directly into Sol’s fiery omnipotence was once dangerous and complicated. Now gazing upon her proves difficult for other reasons. While Sol’s pulsar heartbeat gasps fleeting light across their countless control decks and interfaces, her children link minds and hearts and add their voices to the celestial chorus.

Oh, devoted Sol!

She is the gravity who, from dust, created their world, and she is the magnitude who held it all together. She is the warmth of every cradle. She is the nurturing glow who pierced the fertile depths of indigo seas. She is the shimmery light who encouraged her newborn children to rise to the surface and gaze heavenward with curiosity and awe.

She baked their first wanderlust footsteps into keepsake fossils and later inspired the timeless hymn-legends of mighty goddesses. She encouraged horizon-slung dreams and sat central on the throne of traditions unbound. She became the most faithful deity of an uncertain infancy—always setting, always rising, always present to wake the flora and guide the fauna, to nourish their ever-evolving existence. And oh, how they feasted upon her gifts, feasted and feasted until some felt divine themselves. Until some rose skyward in the first haphazard vessels to skim the cosmic waters, farther and farther still. Yet even as they achieved epic new depths, Sol’s pinpoint fire pierced the indigo murk, igniting a path home. And when they journeyed too far out, when her shrinking light vanished inside a prismatic galactic blur, Sol’s unseen influence shimmered as a ghost within each child, infusing them with golden purpose. Curiosity and awe… ever a vital seed of who they are and who they will continue to become.

Such was the unique shine of their matriarch.    

#

Toward the end, the sound of music turns to stoic silence as mortal veins of disbelief run cold with acceptance. Perhaps some had quietly hoped for a final miracle in this universe where entropy reigns supreme. Such hope, too, has burned itself cold. For all their explorations, no one knows what marvels, if any, wait beyond the dimming waters of this existence.

The scion children of Sol’s grand epoch bow their heads for the final hymn. One last Godspeed blessing in the wake of unfathomable darkness.

And here, now, in the undertow of this long-dreaded farewell, Sol, at last, receives their song. Something stirs within the matriarch. A lucidity of a different shine. Here she rests, this deity of impending ashes, fated to become a coal-dark husk drifting in the void. Omnipotence fading, warmth fading.

Yet Sol sings back.

Voice a gasp of quietude, though her spirit exudes a doting murmur, a long parting exhale. Comforted and omnipresent, she gazes upon her children this final time, awash in a lullaby of vast-reaching togetherness. Those in nearby starships, those out amid the stars. In all their memories, in all their voices, in all their forms, they sing a vital part of her.

They carry her forward.

As she dies, Sol basks in the prismatic glow of their love. Fading, going to vapors, going dark…

“I think we lost her,” someone somewhere whispers inside the murky indigo deep.

Silence, stillness, sorrow. Reality no longer feels real even as it descends like a final sunset upon Sol’s children. Their tiny starships linger inside the newly endless night, and they grip their frail heartbeats, disoriented, unsure. Ever so slowly, they turn away, one by one by billions. They angle for a semblance of home, a destination newly hollow with abstract meaning.

Yet as they prepare for departure, a vast explosive radiance blooms behind them, rippling along the sterns of their starships, turning them momentarily ethereal.

Sol’s surviving children look back as one, curious, shading their eyes, now blinded by a spectacle of awe. A song too magnificent to comprehend. A light evermore dazzling than starshine. It beckons to Sol.

This final visitor.

Not here to say goodbye, but perhaps hello…

Perhaps only Sol truly hears, truly sees. For only Sol—adrift, free of mortal gravity—is ready to follow.

Infinite voices constellate in a sky far above her. Shining together, a singular dazzling warmth, this new song pierces the cosmic waters like ancient daylight, calling for Sol to join them.

Them… those trillions upon trillions of children who passed on before her.

Those earthborn multitudes, those one-cell organisms and mighty beasts and inspired hearts who first swam skyward and discovered the universe, from star-stuff to soul-stuff…

With infinite radiant arms, they reach down to their matriarch from a frontier as yet unexplored. They cradle her, warm her, raise her up, as she once raised them.

And in the shimmer of their light, a newborn shimmer herself, Sol breaks the watery surface. And gazes in curiosity and awe upon all that waits beyond.

~

Bio:

Amanda Cecelia Lang is an author and aspiring cosmic traveler whose stories haunt the dark corners of many popular podcasts, magazines, and anthologies, including Gamut, Ghoulish Tales, Cast of Wonders, Uncharted, Dark Matter, and Flame Tree’s Darkness Beckons. Her short story collection Saturday Fright at the Movies will debut in October 2024 (Dark Matter INK). You can follow her work at amandacecelialang.com.

Philosophy Note:

I wrote “Requiem for the Light” to honor the memory of my late mother who suffered from dementia. Who are we without our memories and our self-awareness? Do we live on in the memories of those who know and love us? How different does existence look when the light fades from those we imagined would live forever, our parents, our rocks, those who instilled our faith? What happens when a cosmic deity dies?

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The Miracle Of …

... cosmic butterfly wings that send ripples through history, by Tilemahos Efthimiadis.

An Implied Edict

If aliens wrote the rules of interstellar relations, what would it take for us (and other species) to figure them

To Catch The Light Off Other Stars

by A. J. Rocca

He fell out of space down, down through the depths and into the shape of an eel. He wriggled his way into a secret reef nourished by four ocean currents, and there amongst corals and algaes of every hue he found the first two Mectopians. Their play was innocent; his adversary had gifted the pair with eight limbs apiece, and they juggled rosy-hued decapods back and forth. He lured off the female of the pair and led her to the oysters she was commanded never to pick. He told her that if she were but to pry open a shell and take its opalescent pearls, she would become wise like God, dividing the waters between saline and pure.

Lucifer fled out of the eel and broke the surface, titanic and winged, a halo of spray exploding in his wake. He ascended to the upper atmosphere and found his ally Urania waiting on the precipice of the void. Together they watched the four currents collapse and the waters of Mectopos’ far north turn ice. Urania congratulated him on his strike against their shared foe, and she told him of a new world she’d espied freshly seeded with life. She drew her wand to mark stars on the way to that far distant orb, and Lucifer spread his wings to catch the burning light off the nearby sun. He pushed off into the void.

Then a million years of solitude.

On Pseudopsaria, he became a creeping fungus. He stretched his mycelia through the soft soil and attached to the roots of the tallest angiosperm in the forest, white blossoms bursting open over her breadth. For a growing season, he whispered into her dreams of rain and wind. He told her that if she would but stretch out her vines into that sunspot forbidden her, she would become like God, growing to spread her canopy in the sky and measuring where falls light and shade.

Lucifer watched from a nearby asteroid as the planet’s firmament was stripped bare, leaving the Pseudopsars exposed to the raking of a blue-hot sun. In his flush of victory, however, a seed of humiliation: Lucifer had to wait for Urania to divine his next course through the stars. Before his fall, he was the brightest of the angels, and he could ride his own rays across the universe. Now he was divested, and all light was turned repellent to him; they’d made his own name a mockery. Out of this curse he’d devised a new way between worlds, but he was blind without Urania.

Finally she stepped forth from the void to congratulate him and plot his next mission. Urania told of a gas giant in a neighboring galaxy whose fourth moon was just beginning to crawl, and she marked out three crucial stars he could use to reach it. Lucifer caught a blast off Pseudopsaria’s savage blue sun, and he boomed out across the cosmos along the arc of her azoth-tipped wand.

Then another couple eons alone.

For the Citarions, he was a jelly, for the desert Katyushans a hop-mouse. From orb to orb he went, and every time he found his victims undefended. The empyrean host was always one step behind him. Lucifer sneered at the thought of fiery-faced cherubim arriving to defend fallen planets, nothing to do but shake their spears in useless fury at the ones they’d come to save. Cherished images such as these helped preserve him against the void. Space and time wore down on his senses like pumice stone, but Lucifer refused to let his revenge be eroded; his hell burned dark and hot within him as the adversary’s stars swept him across ancient night.

For the Takians, a sentient cloud. For the Zyanides, a throng of heartworms. He continued his slow streak of victories against the adversary. But between victories, the universe changed. He saw distant nebulae give birth to bright daughters. He watched icy-tailed comets come travel with him a ways before slugging back home to orbit. He felt thorny webs of radio waves get tangled in his wings and threaten to blow him off course. For a while as he approached the new galaxy, he tracked with interest a dying star. He watched it grow great and red, but it never exploded. It just grew older and colder and dimmer, and Lucifer felt a terrible kinship. The hell within him swelled and swelled, and despite his efforts, finally began to cool. With that abatement came questions: How had the Empyrean host never caught up to him? Why had the adversary allowed him to escape and cry havoc across the cosmos? Why had he not yet plucked the traitor Urania from her hideaway within the void?

It was on approach to Phi that Lucifer made his decision. He reached the edge of the star system, but he did not proceed to the topaz-colored planet in the fifth orbit that Urania had promised him. Instead, he alighted atop an icy planetesimal caught in the system’s outmost orbit. He folded his wings and waited. He sat for a few revolutions around Phi and watched her seven daughters dance—aphelion to perihelion, conjunction to opposition to conjunction again.

At last, he felt her presence behind him.

“Hail, Lucifer!”

Lucifer did not turn his gaze from the dance.

“Why are you sitting here?” Urania asked. “Have you lost your way?”

“Do you remember that third or fourth world you showed me to?” Lucifer asked. “That fleck of blue and green where I became the snake?”

“One of your canniest tactics,” said Urania.

“I should have been a bee.”

“A bee?”

“I saw them flitting through the garden,” said Lucifer. “I always wondered why he saw it fit to put a sting to them; what needs a bee to sting when she’s the best servant to the gardener? Maybe she gets some nectar, but who gets the fruit once it falls?”

Lucifer turned a lopsided smile to Urania, appreciating fully her dark, flowing gown of aether and night. “So come on. Which one are you?”

Urania did not answer. She rapped the end of her fire-tipped wand across her palm.

“Is it Raphael? Gabriel?”  Lucifer asked.

The fire from the wand burned bright and spread to consume the lady; out stepped Michael hefting sword and spear. His apeiron-forged panoply was heaven-bright, brighter than Phi, maybe even as bright as Lucifer himself was once. The near presence of such powerful light sizzled on the fallen angel’s skin and nearly blew him off the planetesimal, but he refused to surrender his seat.

“Ah.” Lucifer folded tight his wings and went back to brooding over the star system. The planetesimal thread its way through half an orbit in silence.

“Well?” Michael finally asked. Lucifer smirked, but kept silent. The commander of the Empyrean host was action incarnate, and it was not in his nature to wait. He hefted his sword, and Lucifer still remembered its edge from so many eons ago, but he felt no fear. What could Michael hope to do? Force him to sin?

Lucifer tortured his brother with a few more silent orbits around Phi. He meant to keep him there another thousand revolutions at least, but his swollen, cool-burning heart betrayed him.

“How did you feel when he ordered you to help me?” Lucifer asked.

“It’s not our place to question him.”

“And I’m sure you never did, but what did you feel? You must have felt something over all this time we’ve had together. And all this space.” Lucifer gestured his arms across the cosmic expanse, its constellations dotted with worlds they’d taught to suffer. “What was it like? You the devil’s handmaiden, showing me to new worlds to pollinate with sin.”

Michael’s light grew bright hot, and Lucifer savored the pain of it. Of all the angels the adversary could have set to this task, Michael was the cruelest choice. He was made like his sword: straight edged, simple.

“You present them a choice,” said Michael.

“And yet they keep making the wrong one. Again and again. Every single one of them,” Lucifer said. “Some choice.”

Michael gripped his shield and spear, and cracks ran all through the icy planetesimal. “Satan! You will not snare me with your lies. You did not before, and you will not now.”

“I’m not trying to ensnare you, brother. I’m trying to give you a gift.”

Lucifer rose from his perch and went to face Michael directly. It was all he could do to bear it. The light coming off Michael was a fierce gale ripping out across space.

“I’m going to free you from this hated task you’ve been yoked with,” Lucifer said. He could feel Michael’s rage in every filament of his being. “Go back to heaven and tell him I’m done pollinating his worlds. Tell him if he wants someone to work his garden, then he can do it himself.”

Lucifer spread his wings, and Michael’s light shot him off the planetesimal and straight out of Phi’s system. He flipped over and caught his balance, ready to resume his sojourn through the cosmos. For the first time in his existence, Lucifer did not know where he was going. He would avoid the topaz world hanging fifth out from Phi, but that left only a neat infinity of possibilities and the whole tide of time to turn them over: he could skate the edge of event horizons, dance upon the rings of gas giants, dive down to pluck molten gold from collapsing novae.

All Lucifer knew for certain was that he did not want to follow the adversary’s direction any longer. He could ride his brother’s fury for a while, but eventually he’d have to learn to catch the light off other stars.

~

Bio:

A.J. Rocca is a writer and English teacher from Chicago. He specialized in the study of speculative fiction while pursuing his M.A., and now he writes both SFF criticism as well as his own fiction. Some common themes in his writing include music, space, and cats. His work can be found collected at his website: ajrocca.com.

Philosophy Note:

This story was inspired by John Milton’s Paradise Lost and the hints that Milton throws in throughout the poem that God may have created other inhabited worlds besides Earth. In particular, I was inspired by a scene in Book III of the poem: after bumbling through space, Satan finally reaches Earth and looks down at it, and he’s so seized by envy that he averts his gaze to instead look around at the constellations, perhaps even briefly considering going to one of those other possible worlds the poet hints at. Of course Satan eventually continues on his way to precipitate the fall of man, but the briefly averted gaze to me is itself fascinating. What if Satan actually left for one of those other worlds, abandoning his role as the fiend and the long train of biblical history laid out before him? Can we even imagine an alternative trajectory for a character like that, and if not, then how are either Satan or his victims in any way possessing of free will? For my essay on this subject, see https://reactormag.com/john-milton-the-space-poet-early-traces-of-science-fiction-in-paradise-lost/

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The Miracle Of …

... cosmic butterfly wings that send ripples through history, by Tilemahos Efthimiadis.

An Implied Edict

If aliens wrote the rules of interstellar relations, what would it take for us (and other species) to figure them

The Familiar Stranger

by Carlton Herzog

Professor Mulder,

I have practiced psychiatry for the past 30 years, specializing in the diagnosis and treatment of schizophrenia. In late 2054, I attended a patient—a CERN engineer—who seemed sane in every respect.

Yet, he insisted that he had been contacted by a visitor from the future. He also claimed that this traveler was his doppelganger, possibly from an alternate timeline. I remained skeptical and attributed his wild claims to a florid imagination and the stress of his work.

However, the further I delved into his story, the more I became convinced that he sincerely believed the truth of his claim.

Currently, he is on extended medical leave and remains under my care at the Institute. I convinced him to provide me with a written statement along with a copy of the Phone video he made of his visitor’s monologue. I have included both with this letter.

Professor Allen Treadwell, Department of Abnormal Psychology

Saint Mary’s Hospital, Zurich

#

 “He didn’t belong here. Or anywhere else on this earth. I took him to be the stuff of dreams, an airy nothing that had found a habitation outside my head. But there was too much sensory detail for him to be a mere figment of my imagination.

He steamed as the brown ice on him melted. That vapor reeked of feces and corpses and the deep earth.

He wore a parka with matching leggings but had wrapped the entire suit—including the boots—in thick black plastic then mummified it with duct tape. Bandages and rags covered his ears and nose, while a scarf or three wrapped python-like around his neck and mouth. Reflective ski-goggles covered his eyes. 

But for all those layers, he seemed oddly familiar—a badly dressed, noisome me.

He told of the coming world.

 ‘We are dying. My wife passed last week. My daughter the week before. There are no doctors left, no medicine. There is little hygiene in our crowded burrow. We live on top of each other, feeding on odious things—dung beetles, maggots, mushrooms, tilapia, worms—that live on feces and the dead. Raw dirty things that make you gag before you swallow. Thanks to that retinue of coprophages, my wife and daughter will be part of me again and again and again.

How the mighty have fallen: the once proud lords of the earth now reduced to scurrying moles. It is small consolation that this dramatic change came not from man’s hubris, but from circumstances wholly beyond his ability to predict or control.

The scientists saw It coming hundreds of years before It arrived. The mother of extinction events. At first, the cosmologists called it a “supermassive debris field.” Later, the poets, renamed it the Tartarus Field. But whatever the label, words could not contain its proportions or scope, though they could at least describe its components: stars, comets, asteroids, brown dwarfs, cracked planets, whole planets, gas, and dust—moving like a horde of locusts over a wheat field. It was as if an entire arm of some galaxy had somehow detached itself and begun a pilgrimage through our piece of space gravitationally absorbing all forms of matter within its field of influence. Over billions of years, it grew as it passed through system after system in galaxy after galaxy. Maybe through another universe or two. And the bigger it got the more stuff it attracted.

One might expect that when all that matter passed through the Milky Way, the earth was in greatest danger from a collision. Or simply being dragged along with the other debris. But that was not the case. It just nipped the edge of the Sagittarius Arm, and did so only with its dusty halo.

Yet, that was more than enough. Sweet, beautiful dust, the diamonds of space, reflecting light like the Star of India. Trillions upon trillions of tumbling, dancing, whirling, spinning, gyring, jittering dust particles. A great diamond necklace that wrapped itself around the neck of the earth and told us that we were married to the fate of the cosmos around us whether we liked it or not. And what a marriage it was: the sun disappeared from the sky, and with it the moon, and it wasn’t long there after that the earth and her waters began to die, and when they did, so did we.’

Then he was gone. I reached for a drink to steady my nerves. I went outside and scanned the night sky. I wondered if my visitor were some time-slipping version of myself projecting a warning into the past or a potent sign of incipient psychosis.

Professor Allen Treadwell, Max Planck Institute for Advanced Gravitational Study

Potsdam, Germany

#

Dear Professor Treadwell,

Consider that our brains are tuned to detect a shockingly small fraction of reality. We are taken in by the illusion of time having a single unified behavior. However, as special relativity makes clear, time’s expressed properties, like motion, are defined by its relationships. If one accepts the premise that time is a concentration of ever shifting energies running in all directions, one will not be surprised when it defeats our mundane expectations. To be sure, we can expect to acquire a greater understanding of its secrets. But that dynamic will remain asymptotic, for aspects of its truths–as with any other phenomena–we will always elude our grasp.

Hence, the foundation of science must always be to keep the door open to doubt. I find it helpful when an unfamiliar idea holds my attention to welcome that idea as the way to   something new. Therefore, I believe that it would be premature to prematurely dismiss your patient’s visitor as a hoax or hallucination. Further research is warranted.

Professor Fritz Mulder

Department of Physics and Astronomy, Iowa State University, Ames

#

Professor Mulder,

I need your help in solving a problem. As you may already know my team discovered an ancient human habitation in California’s Mitchell Caverns. For good reason, I have concealed the specifics of the find from the public. There are aspects to it that are deeply troubling. Let me briefly summarize what we have found.

On April 24, 2036, the cavern floor collapsed stranding a group of tourists on a heretofore unknown level below. The rescue team subsequently found an extensive network of a man-made tunnels fanning out from that initial rupture. They also found the remains of a human society. Soon thereafter, I, as head of the UCLA Anthropology Department, immediately put together a team and set out for what is now known as the Enigma Site.

When we arrived, I was shocked by what we found. There were miles of tunnels. Judging from the remains I conservatively estimated that this subterranean community had a population of a few thousand. Radio-metric dating of the human remains registered in the 3 to 4 million year range. However, those remains were anatomically modern in every respect right down to their dental work and steel replacement joints.

There were many more anomalies: the cavern floor, wall and ceiling contained high levels of iridium, an element common to asteroids; there were numerous ferromagnetic crystals magnetized on one end but not on the other (monopoles); the organic material we found proved aberrant, insofar as the human remains consisted of right-handed amino acids.

I realize that your expertise is in theoretical physics and not anthropology or archeology. But I believe that you may be in a better position to explain this mystery than anyone in my allied disciplines. I eagerly await your insight.

Sincerely yours

Professor Jesse Parris, UCLA

#

Professor Parris,

I have just returned from your Enigma Site. Based on the physical evidence you have provided, as well as my own observations, I believe that the Enigma Site is the result of a superposition between our reality and another. The tell-tale signs of that superposition are the right-handed amino acids and the monopoles, neither of which normally exist on this material plane.

After that, I can only speculate. How the remains of modern humans could be millions of years old yet be fitted with modern prosthetics would seem to defy explanation. But I know of no physical law that would prohibit the cross-pollination of alternate time streams. Nor one that would discourage time streams, like any distributed system, from evolving and developing emergent features along the way. Frankly, I am surprised that such a chronometric chimera has not been discovered sooner in one form or another.

Were I you, I would begin my analysis with two competing hypotheses. On the one hand, time like any physical system is subject to entropy, namely, moving from a state of order to one of disorder. On the other, time is a self-correcting code that keeps the universe from getting too big and makes local adjustments that to us seem disorderly but are necessary to maintain the greater equilibrium. In that respect, perhaps time like energy is conserved.

In any event, I suspect that we will see more of these time displacements.

Yours

Professor Fritz Mulder, Iowa State University, Ames

#

Dear Professor Parris,

I too have visited the Enigma Site. It confirms my hypothesis that time is not a linear, unidimensional feature of our reality. Rather, it is a dynamic, bi-directional wave consistent with Einstein’s observation that “the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

Indeed, we live in a carousel universe with more and more galaxies in the northern hemisphere rotating to the left and an equal number of galaxies in the southern hemisphere rotating to the right. When our universe spins, it focuses space and propagates sometimes as a wave, and at others, as a filament structure accompanied by robust, but entirely random, time vortices, sweeping bits of the future into the past.

But the story does not end there. My most recent observations indicate that our universe not only rotates on an axis but also revolves around a more massive object, such as another singularity or universe. Just as a white dwarf star pulls matter from a companion red giant in a binary system, the tidal forces between our universe and its companion amplify the time like curves produced by our universe’s rotation.

We can only guess at the larger reality we inhabit. For all we know our universe could be a speck on the spiral arm of some meta-structure composed entirely of universes. That meta-structure could be part of something even larger. Where it ends, we will never know.

We do know some small things with certainty. Rotation is one feature of this universe, from the spin of an electron to that of a galaxy and everything in between since the sphere is the most efficient shape to house matter and energy.

Self-similarity is another: big things look like the little things that comprise them. Circular solar systems are comprised of circular objects in circular orbits, many of which are circularly orbited by circular objects.

As the foregoing discussion suggests, I do not hold with the traditional multiverse view of discrete universes existing incommunicado from one another. To be fair, I do not have a language for the occulted, inaccessible structures in which we are imbedded. Suffice to say that if viewed from the domain of the very large, the meta-structure would reveal itself as a fractal pattern of self-similar topology extending into infinity.

Proof of this hypothesis is for the moment in short supply. But if Einstein’s theory of General Relativity showed us anything it’s that there is selective advantage in believing in what can’t yet be proved.

Professor Sherman Klein, Emeritus Professor of Astrophysics,

Oxford University

~

Bio:

Carlton Herzog publishes science fiction, horror, and crime as well as non-fiction. He graduated from Rutgers University magna cum laude and Rutgers Law School where he served as Article Editor of the Law Review.

Philosophy Note:

As linear creatures, our language is saturated and animated by notions of time. Time is basically an illusion created by the mind to make sense of our reality. Albert Einstein, shared this view, writing, “People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

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An Implied Edict

If aliens wrote the rules of interstellar relations, what would it take for us (and other species) to figure them

The Story Of Atoms

by Geoffrey Hart

In the beginning was the first scientist — the God Particle, GP hereafter. (Even in the beginning, scientists loved their acronyms, abbreviations, and clever wordplay, and GP was no different. And, of course, GP was ineluctably masculine, since back then, only men could be scientists. There being only one of him, that was less sexist than it might seem to modern sensibilities.)

Darkness was upon the face of the universe (for back then, there was only one), and GP looked upon it and saw that it was good: it had the simplicity of a really good Japanese watercolor, though, of course, such things had yet to be invented. Best of all, it left everything to the imagination, which was a more effective technique than overexplaining and overcomplicating everything. That was to come later, when universities were invented.

After a time — unquantifiable, because time was still a new thing, the paint still drying and GP not quite sure whether quantification was as good an idea as it had seemed at the time — GP began to feel just the slightest bit lonely. After all, what good was a universe if there was no one else to appreciate it? So in a fit of enthusiasm, GP created another being with whom to share the void. Let’s call her “GP Prime”, or “Prime” for short, for there would eventually be mathematics, mathematical tradition, and the notation it spawned. More importantly, of course, any good story needs conflict, and laying claim to first rank, first causes, and first publication was a primary source of conflict then, as it is now.

Prime was very impressed with the universe; there was, after all, nothing else quite like it. But after a time, she noted a certain sameness to it. With no light, there was only structure and symmetry to gaze upon, and though it was an admirable and symmetrical structure, it was a trifle… bland.

“GP, I think something’s missing,” she ventured.

“Why? It’s perfect and, by definition, cannot be improved upon.”

“While I concede, for the sake of argument, that perfection is perfect, I’m not sure it’s sufficient.”

“What would you add?”

“Hmmm… perhaps a little… light?” And there was light, a warm reddish background glow that both illuminated and concealed, and now the structure and symmetry stood out and could be more easily appreciated.

“But… But… It leaves nothing to the imagination!”

“Don’t over-react. It’s only a little light. Be still, and I’ll fix it.” And Prime created shadow, and GP saw that it was good.

“I like that shadow.”

“Thought you might. But why stop there? For example, all that structure is perfectly lovely, but what’s it all in aid of?”

“Well… us, really.”

“Why not try a little of this, instead?” And Prime created atoms, and GP saw that they were good.

“Huh. Never would have thought of that on my own.”

“Of course not. That’s why we have peer review.”

GP was a little miffed, but deeper down, felt something he’d never felt before. Intrigued. Despite his trepidation, he could hardly wait to see what Prime had up her (thus far, entirely metaphysical) sleeve. “What else have you got?”

“How about this?” And where once there were atoms, perfect and indivisible, now there were subatomic particles.

“Neat! Can I name them?”

Prime nodded, secretly pleased.

“Let’s call this big one a proton. And this smaller one an electron.”

Prime pursed her lips. “And just to shake things up, how about this?” And a third particle appeared.

“Ooh! That’s transgressive… it’s… unbalanced! What will you call it?” GP was, after all, perfectly willing to give credit where credit was due. Eventually.

“Neutron. And here’s another cool thing:” Prime disappeared the electron.

“Wait: where’d it go?”

“Into the proton — and now it’s a neutron!”

“Put it back. I like having three different particles.”

“Very well.” The electron reappeared. “Hmm… then you’ll love this.” And suddenly there were a great many smaller particles humming with energy and bouncing off each other and vibrating and rotating and translating with their enthusiasm. “I’ll call them quarks, and… and…. This undeniably cute one will be Charm, and this one I haven’t completely figured out yet I’ll call Strange, and…”

“Enough! Enough! My head’s spinning.” GP was beginning to regret having given Prime both a mind equal to his own and agency to use it.

“But if I subdivide the quarks into these littler things…”

“STOP! NO FURTHER!” GP regretted having to shout, but it seemed necessary to catch Prime’s attention before she got carried away. More carried away, leastwise. Things were still relatively simple, just the way he liked it, but he had a sense of foreboding.

Prime took a deep breath (now that there was something to breathe) and pondered a moment. “Well, if you don’t want more smaller things, how about larger?” She banged two atoms together, and there was a brilliant flash of light.

“What was that?”

“I call it fusion… bang enough little things together and you get bigger things. Bang a few of those bigger things together, and you get even bigger things. I’m going to call them elements.”

“And what if I were to break them apart again?” And GP did, and there was even more light. “Ouch! That stings.”

“I’m going to call that fission. And if you’re going to break the things I make, then you’d best take care.” There was no doubting it; a note of petulance had crept into Prime’s voice.

GP attempted a placating tone. “Nice. What else can you do?”

“Well first, let’s make the light a little more steady. There.”

“Wow. I’m going to call those stars. Because you’re a star performer.”

Prime managed to conceal her wince; it helped that GP wasn’t really paying attention to her, gaze focused on his universe. “OK, good. Now how about these?” Large clusters of atoms came together and began circling the stars.

“Nice. I’m going to call them planets… because… um… they move.”

“You like moving things? How about these?” More atoms came together and started orbiting the planets.

“Nice. I’m going to call them moons. But stop: no further. Let’s enjoy what we’ve created before we needlessly recomplicate.”

Prime sighed. We? Even then, before academic review committees and departmental politics, authorship was an issue. “But why stop there? There’s so much more we could create.”

GP, entirely missing how Prime lingered over the we, tried to reassert his authority. “Because it’s my universe, and I say so.”

“That’s easy enough to solve. Here!” And suddenly, where once there was a single universe, now there was a multiverse. “You play with this one, and I’ll play with that one, and when we’re done, we’ll compare notes and see who’s done the better job of putting things together.”

GP tried to push stars and atoms and planets and moons and other things back together into the simple, elegant simplicity he’d created, but Prime, though younger, was not naïve. She’d known this would happen, and the harder GP tried to put things back the way they’d originally been, the harder her multiverse strove to create more of itself.

“STOP! NO FURTHER!”

Prime chuckled. She hadn’t realized just how much she resented being told what she could and couldn’t create or modify or play with. “Don’t like that, huh? Well try this:” And around one of the older stars, on the surface of a planet with a single moon, more clusters of atoms came together and rose from the earth. Some were happy to stay in place; others were restless as the moons and planets and stars themselves, and moved about.

“STOP! NO FURTHER!”

Prime doubled over in outright laughter as GP grew apoplectic. The new things began making their own new things, some like themselves, some not. I’ll call that evolution, Prime said to herself. See how he likes that.

GP tried, with increasing desperation to put things right; Prime knocked them astray again. And so it went through the aeons. Each time GP put the genie back in the bottle, Prime gleefully tugged loose the cork; when GP vacuum-welded the cork to the bottle, Prime invented wormholes; when GP constrained the wormholes to atomic diameters, Prime created quantum tunneling.

Which brings us to the present, the end (for now) of this story of the early days of atoms, and — if you’ll forgive me — the moral of this tale. The multiverse is an endlessly messy place, and it’s not yet clear whether this is a good thing. But it’s what we’ve got, and we’ve got to make the best of it. Occam’s razor tells us we mustn’t ignore the true complexity, but that we must also not complicate things unnecessarily. If we keep trying, someday we’ll achieve an understanding that’s no more complex than necessary. And perhaps that will satisfy GP and Prime enough that they can shake hands, agree to disagree, and get on with figuring out what it’s all in aid of.

~

Bio:

Geoff Hart works as a scientific editor, specializing in helping scientists who have English as their second language publish their research. He’s the author of the popular Effective Onscreen Editing and Write Faster With Your Word Processor. He also writes fiction in his spare time, and has sold 60 stories thus far. Visit him online at geoff-hart.com.

Philosophy Note:

The eternal struggle between man and woman seems to be built into the physics of the universe.

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Fragment 27

by Humphrey Price

The Universe ends tomorrow. When that happens, I will die for real. But I am ready! I’m actually pretty excited about it. Everyone is.

I am one of the Aeonians. There are a lot of us, but not as many as you might think, all things considered. By my count, there are just around 144 trillion of us! About nine hundred million years ago, I asked God if that was the correct number, and He chuckled. He had manifested Himself as a complex flower-shaped energy field, and the lobes of the field undulated back and forth in mirth like the tentacles of sea anemones I remember from Earth. “You know I like the number 144,” He responded enigmatically. “You are a brilliant mathematician. I made you that way, and I have every confidence in your count.” I knew I wasn’t going to get anything more out of Him on the subject.

Most Aeonians socialize with only maybe a million or so of their acquaintances, but I made a concerted effort to meet and talk to every single Aeonian, and I think that I have. That might seem impossible, but on average I only had to meet about 25 new people per day, or what passes here for the equivalent of an Earth day. I still think of time in terms of Earth days and years, and in fact most of us, except for the angels, evolved on worlds with diurnal cycles and years. God often thinks of “days” as eons or ages, but He has a bit of a different perspective on things.

I have tried to keep track of time, ever since I was resurrected at the Second Coming on May 14, 2033 CE, exactly 2,000 years after the Ascension. I had been dead for 43 years at the time. Only 144,000 human beings from the entire span of Earth history were rewarded with eternal life. The literal interpretation of the number of those saved in John’s Book of Revelation turned out to be correct. We are the ones who made it through the narrow gate, and we have been joined in Heaven with Aeonians from other worlds as well. We were transformed into energy beings with flawless bodies formed in the likeness of our previous corporeal ones.

We all communicate with The One Language, the mathematically perfect language God gave to all sentient creatures He created in His image. Earth lost TOL when the Etemenanki Ziggurat was built, also known as the Tower of Babel, but for the most part, the rest of the Universe always spoke in TOL.

I have seen a hundred million worlds inhabited with intelligent life, having been sent on missions and assignments to many of them along with angels and other Aeonians to seek and save the lost. And on each of these worlds there was a day of reckoning when those who had followed His teachings were lifted or resurrected and transformed into Aeonians. Most did not make it. When God said the path was narrow and few would find it, He wasn’t kidding.

Many of His teachings were framed by the culture of the times, but those principles adapted to the evolution of societies. As examples of previously forbidden practices, some of those saved from Earth had tattoos, gender-indifferent hair length, and different sexual mores. I think the key was that they loved their neighbors as themselves and were pure in their motives.

There were billions of trillions of souls who did not receive eternal life. What happened to them? When I asked Him, He said, “They received no everlasting punishment. In My mercy they are all now at peace in eternal rest.”

Now those worlds are all gone. The last of them perished a billion years ago. The multi-dimensional membrane we inhabit has expanded to its limit, the stars are cold, and the back holes are evaporating.

Even though I met everyone here, there are those I see more often. John the Baptist and Isabel de Olvera are among them. I taught both of them to play Go and bridge, two of my favorite games. We had so many great times together. My best friend is Eela, a Neanderthal woman from 97,200 BC. Of course, I met Adam and Eve. They were the first farmers, the first civilized humans “to work the land,” and the first of “God’s people.” They were born in 10,000 BC, “created from the dust,” so to speak, as we all were. I have many close friends who were born on worlds in galaxies far from Earth.

Now I have said my goodbyes and await the end. Just as the fundamental laws of this universe were spawned in the creation event of The Big Bang, they will break down as the mathematical topology of the Universe becomes unstable in its accelerating expansion, and the bubble pops. In an instant, all of creation and we Aeonians will disappear, and the energy of this universe will recycle into the creation event of a new universe which God tells me will be very different from ours. Even the laws of physics may not be the same. Only God will survive the event, since he is external to and integral with the set of multi-dimensional membranes.

So, I will die. But wasn’t I promised eternal life? Well, 15.7 billion years seems pretty eternal to me. God has hinted that some of us may be resurrected in the new universe, or that some artifact of us may survive. No one will ever read these words, but I am compelled to record them. I am satisfied, and I shall relish my ultimate end only a few hours from now.

#

This text was found encoded in wave grouping 1,728, fragment 27, in the m-shell orbital of Xrtrium in the periodic table of 4D surfaces. 1,440 messages have been found embedded in the fundamental wave groupings of surfaces in the universe.

~

Bio:

Humphrey Price is a space systems engineer at NASA JPL and an aspiring science fiction writer. He was the Configuration Engineer for the Cassini Saturn orbiter and the Project System Engineer for the GRAIL lunar gravity mapping mission. His hobby is coming up with alternative ideas for sending humans to explore Mars sooner rather than later. All ideas and opinions in his stories are his own and do not represent NASA policy in any way. You can catch up with his SF exploits at humphreyprice.com.

Philosophy Note:

This eschatology story explores the questions of what happens after you die and what happens at the end of the universe as we know it. If there are universes before or after ours, are the laws of physics the same or not, and can any information survive the end?

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Breaking News: World Ends Today

by Leonard Henry Scott

There was a big notice in the paper this morning announcing that the world would be ending today. The notice took up a quarter of the front page of The Times (below the fold) and read in bold letters.

            “We regret to announce that due to administrative considerations the world will be ending today, at 3:30 p.m. Prior to closeout, we will be efforting to obtain additional population data needed to complete the final record, a kind of head count so to speak.

             Thank you for your service. ”

             WPPQ TV 4 made this special announcement every hour, beginning on their popular Sunny Morning Wake-up Show; “World predicted to end this afternoon about 3:30 pm. Details at six”.

            This was shocking news to most people.

            Naturally, many did wonder; “Is it really true, or is it just some new kind of fake news?”

            All morning on the cable news experts pontificated, officials bloviated, theologians extrapolated, journalists reported, citizens opined and pollsters polled. In very short order, on the basis of all available information, the pollsters (the most important group) concluded that the report of the world’s imminent demise was certifiably believed to be 73.7% accurate. 

            So, that was that.

            Notwithstanding that being that, the very notion of the end of the world caught most people by surprise, although some had been expecting it for some time. Very few of the certified 73.7% who believed that the world would be ending this very day as reported knew quite what to do. Some made hasty preparations to flee to Peru, or Tahiti, or Patagonia, or other such places, all of which (by the way) were coincidentally on the same predicted to be imminently ending world in question.   

            Throngs of people ventured at once to crowded places of worship to spend those precious final hours in prayer or silent reflection. Others sat together quietly at home ensconced in the warmth and comfort of their loved ones. Some (a statistically significant group) gathered before the TV to eat take out Kung Pao Chicken or pizza as they caught up with the latest updates and waited for the six o’clock news.

            For some (especially those hamstrung by overbearing dietary constraints) what to do, what to do – wasn’t a problem at all, it was an opportunity. Why not eat two orders of cheese fries with bacon bits (slathered with mayonnaise) along with a whole mess of double extra crispy fried chicken and mashed potatoes sopping with gravy. And then wash it all down with a quart of bourbon and two packs of cigarettes?

            Why the hell not?

            There had been mention of some efforting efforts to obtain data for the final record. Most people were accounted for. However, there was a certain, particular group for whom population data was persistently insufficient. They always seemed to be moving. In fact, they moved around so much and intentionally kept their heads down. Many did not have long-term addresses or bank accounts. They moved around constantly, always paying cash to avoid being tracked by creditors, ex-spouses and the IRS. They were elusive as unicorns.

            Despite all that effort, life for them usually boiled down to a constant series of brilliant ideas followed closely by spectacular failures. One week they were selling non-stick frying pans in a Denver shopping mall, the next hawking Christmas trees in the gloom and rain of an unseasonably warm Cincinnati suburb. But nothing ever quite worked out. Frying pan handles fell off in the middle of demonstrations. Christmas trees were plagued by unpleasant boring insects. So, they would move on to the next town and the next dream.

            Little was known of them, except for one thing. They really, really loved a good party. In light of that, Big Bank Stadium was rented to lure those folks into one place so their heads could be finally counted. And by noon EST on TDOTEOTW (an initialism, not an acronym) ETA 3:30 pm) the party was in full swing.

            Dangerously amped up bands played ear-shattering music, punctuated sharply by the occasional semi-melodic sound of a distant vuvuzela. The International Bedding and Furniture Company provided lampshades for wearing and tables for dancing on. Happy party goers in free grass skirts, muumuus and aloha shirts, generously fueled with giant Margaritas, pranced outlandishly around in conga lines. Great storms of celebratory streamers stuck to their hair and tickled their necks amid a rumbling indefinable din and constant thunder clap of music. Big Bank Stadium shook and swayed in this raucous farewell to life as the crowd prepared to rocket blissfully into the unknown.

            Then at 3:25 p.m. all at once everything stopped when a voice came from above. And despite the loud music, the tumultuous noise and the jostling and the dancing, everybody heard it.

            “Hello”, 

            said the voice.

            That single word rang clear and true as if the speaker was standing right next to each person with liquid lips pressed in a tickle against their ears. The music stopped and so did the party. And everyone just stood silently gazing up at the sky. But there was nothing special to see there, save a large yellow sun escorted by a few white puffy clouds.

            “It’s almost time.” the voice said.

            Then, after a brief silence one person in the crowd spoke bravely to the sky.

            “Is it really the end of the world?”

            “Yes,” said the voice.

            “What will become of us?” They asked.

            “I really couldn’t say.” The voice replied noncommittally.

            “Look, you could go up. You could go down. Up is good but it’s easier to get into Harvard. You Do Not want to go down. Down is bad. But truthfully, most of you will probably wind up in the middle. There’s a big middle place. The food’s pretty good and you can still get cable.”

            The sun glowed brighter than before and there was something else different. Next to the sun was a long pull chain with a giant rabbit’s foot at the end of it. Was this something new, or had it been there all along obscured by clouds? They didn’t know. But there it was. 

            “Hold very still for just a moment and I’ll show you a trick.”

            The voice said and everyone complied.

            They all stood stiff and still as mannequins in the echoing eerie silence of Big Bank Stadium. Flocks of runaway streamers swirled around in the disobedient breeze.

            “….23, 673, 89, 6…56…Okay, got it!”

            The voice said with great satisfaction.

            “Now, watch this trick!”

            The clock in the tower at the end of Big Bank Stadium said 3:30 in toddler-sized Roman numerals. At that very moment, a giant hand reached out from behind a cloud, pulled the chain and turned off the sun.

            Instantly, the world was plunged into a frigid darkness.

            “Good night.”

            Like a vast colony of meerkats, they all stood stiff and silent, ears perked to the wind, big eyes intently staring into the empty darkness. By the thousands they stood all together, yet each stood alone silently counting off the last remaining moments and reviewing the toll of their lives. A piercing cold wind rushed through every crack and corner of Big Bank Stadium. It swelled up and churned around them, and swallowed them up like a dark sea.

            “Thank you for your service,” said the voice as it trailed off into the harrowing blackness.

~

Bio:

Leonard Henry Scott was born and raised in the Bronx and is a graduate of American University. His fiction has appeared in The Chamber Magazine, Good Works Review, Straylight Magazine, The MacGuffin, Mystery Tribune and elsewhere.

Philosophy Note:

Inspired by the Star Trek Q Continuum. One divine entity might have created the universe. But in light of its incredible vastness, day-to-day management of the universe by a corporation of gods would seem to be a practical idea. Various gods would be assigned areas of responsibility, like regional managers. And of course, this corporation would be subject to some of the same problems that affect other corporations.

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The Eye

by Kostas Charitos

Paul, my little nephew, has a magic wand. He is pointing to the sky, trying to create a rainfall, but it doesn’t work.

I don’t know why he brought the wand with him. Every time we go to the countryside he brings an old toy, but usually it’s a starship from the set that I gifted him when he was four.

“Let’s play hide-and-seek.”  I say.

It’s his favorite game.  

He agrees.

I close my eyes; I’m pretending to be a child again, and I start counting: “Five, ten, fifteen…”

I hear Paul’s footsteps as he is running. “I discovered a new hiding place. Not even the Eye could find me there.”  he says and I shudder.

I think about the day when the Eye closed for the first time.

It was 20:35 am, Greenwich Mean Time.

Some people were sleeping under warm blankets, some held cups of steaming coffee and some watched the sky acquiring a small black patch.

I was alone in a small office of the Physics department, in front of an old computer, struggling with the presentation of the upcoming conference.

The next day, I read on the internet about the dark nebula, but I didn’t care a lot. Astronomy has never been my favorite field. I was interested in quantum physics, and despite my parents’ objections, I preferred to spend a whole day digging into Bohr’s papers, rather than going out for a coffee with my friends. Maybe that’s why I do not know much about coffee and I don’t have many friends.

The Eye closed again after several months; the last day of the conference.

My speech was successful, and we gathered on the atrium of the hotel to admire the clear sky.

Everyone was stunned as soon as they turned off the lighting and left us in the dark with the candle flames flickering.

I counted at least twenty open mouths. But only one said the phrase that must have been heard millions of times that night: “How do they do this effect with the black pieces?”

As we all soon learned, the gaps, which had filled the night sky like large drops of ink, were no effect. The stars were disappearing without anyone being able to give a logical explanation.

The ones who bothered the most were the cosmologists.

Suddenly, all their theories collapsed like a tower of playing cards. They gathered at conferences, filled the television windows, wrote articles in various magazines, but it was too late. Nobody took them seriously.

Instead, quantum physicists, like me, were standing tall.

We were familiar with the importance of the observer in our experiments, having seen particles appear as soon as we observed them, and others disappear forever when we stopped the detection.

Very soon, the term that would spread like a tsunami in popular culture was born. Some called it god, others supernatural creature or an extra-dimensional observer, but we called it “The Eye”.

And the next time it closed, humanity shuddered. A cold night with a clear sky, we lost the Moon.

#

I stand now on the edge of the hill, with my little nephew on my side who is trying to gather the clouds with his wand.

I look at a willow that is balancing as if it is about to fall into the void.

The whistling of the wind, the distant horizon and the blue sky make me feel as if I am the last person in the world.

I close my eyes thinking about the questions that trouble so many philosophers:

Is the world still there? Is the sea, the wind and the willow still around me? Is there an objective universe or is everything a creation of our consciousness? If the last man dies, will reality be lost with him?

And finally: Can we hide from the eye? It’s a lot to think about. But I’m afraid we are running out of time.

Somewhere out there, beyond our world, lives the only being who can answer our questions.

Our Observer.

The Eye.

I’m sure it’s futile to try to capture its form or its sensory organs. So, I prefer to imagine it as a small child, in a nearby dimension, which sees us as a wonderful toy. Unfortunately, it seems to be losing its interest in us. Maybe it discovered a neighboring universe and is less concerned with our world. His gaze falls more and more elsewhere, the Eye closes more frequently, whatever that means, and, with it, parts of our world disappear.

I have no idea what attracts it.

Why our galaxy survives while others disappeared? What does the Earth have that the Moon didn’t?

Maybe that’s why there are so many movements that aim solely to get its attention.

Their main slogan seems to be: Do not let it get bored.

It’s unbelievable what people can do once they realize they are in danger.

Giant graffiti in fields with the phrase “WE ARE HERE”, religious ceremonies with small silver oval-shaped ornaments, thousands of naked people wandering in the streets, probably having misunderstood the word Eye.

However, if the Eye is attracted to intelligence, I believe that we do everything we can to take its attention away from our planet.

#

Paul is, now, chasing a gray-blue lizard. It’s the first time I see such a creature.

“Be careful. Don’t run.” I say to him.

To my great surprise, he stands still. He points with his wand to the sky.

“I didn’t do that.” he says.

I look up and smile.

Fortunately, I’m not a cosmologist.

I’m trying to think of a scientific explanation but I quit.

Maybe the Eye, just as a little kid, missed the small blue planet with the lonely quantum physicist who plays hide-and-seek with her nephew and brought them into its brave new world.

It seems fair but I just wonder how life will be with two moons and a system of shining rings in the sky.

~

Bio:

Kostas Charitos was born in Arta and lives in Athens with his family. He has a PhD in Chemistry and he teaches in secondary education. His science fiction short stories have been included in international magazines and anthologies like Future Science Fiction Digest, a2525, Nova Hellas, The Viral Curtain and InterNova. Two of his novels, Project Fractal (Τρίτων Publications, 2009) and Lost Colors: Red (Κέδρος Publications, 2020), have been published in Greek. He is a member of the Athens Science Fiction Club and he co-ordinates its writing workshops.

Philosophy note:

The short story “The Eye” is inspired by the well-known philosophical question: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? This question raises issues about the meaning of observation and perception. For example, we can wonder whether something exists without being perceived by a consciousness. This is connected with the anthropic principle which suggests that the observer may have an impact on the reality that is observed. In physics, the disturbance of a system by the act of observation is called the “observer effect”. You can learn more about these philosophical issues in:
John Campbell (2014). Berkeley’s Puzzle: What Does Experience Teach Us?. Oxford University Press.
Jostein Gaarder(2007), Sophie’s World, Farrar Straus & Giroux.
And if you want to learn about the quantum physics of observation you can read:
Chad Orzel (2010), How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog, Simon Spotlight Entertainment.

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Translation

by Joe Aultman-Moore

In this best of all possible universes, I led an international team that translated the book. The book explains the history of the universe and everything in it. We know this is the best of all possible universes because the book says that it is the best of all possible universes.

We know that the book explains the history of the universe and everything in it because the book explains the history of the universe and everything in it. The book explains that our lives have cosmic meaning in relation to the universe and everything in it as explained in the book. The book tells a history of the universe in which we play a unique and central role. Our unique and central role is to understand that the book explains the history of the universe and everything in it.

At least, this is what we are told it says.

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As the book explains: because we have been created with a specific unique role in the universe, every action, every thought is infused with cosmic meaning. If you pick this flower, or linger over the sight of a star shining through the trees, it ripples out through space-time. Drive this type of car and it might result in a disease in a loved one, or a promotion. Cursing excessively might cause a plague. Make this particular form of sacrifice and your family will be favored for generations. Donating money to this organization could heal cancer. Or change the trajectory of a comet. Certain impure thoughts or choice of breakfast cereal, to watch or not watch a certain film could result in the collisions of galaxies or the implosion of neutron stars.

Fortunately, the book also contains rules for living. What is right and what is wrong. Payments for certain goods and services. What and how to eat, what to wear, how punishments should be carried out for certain crimes, how marriages may proceed and debts be paid.

Every moment of our lives, every thought, when taken in relation to the book, takes on importance that reverberates back to the moment of genesis and forward into eternity. It’s all in the book. Not necessarily as direct prescription, but as an allegory. Not that this makes it purely metaphorical. Can a metaphor, when only interpretable as a direct infallible truth, really be considered mere metaphor?

This is, at least, what we thought when we began the translation.

#

The book is old, of course, ancient beyond history. In the long span of generations, societies shift, languages and power change. Sometimes, observations of nature do not match exactly the phrases in the book. Some passages, on superficial reading, seem antiquated or outdated. Place names that no longer exist, though they are present tense in the book. Currencies and units of measure no longer in use. Some phrasing is grammatically ambiguous, and could be interpreted in several ways. The book was written in a language that died thousands of years ago, and has been translated by generations of scholars, motivated by the cosmic importance of their work.

My team was commissioned by international consensus to execute the greatest translation of the modern age, to preserve the original perfectly—yet understandable in modern idiom. This way, we might shape our society as literally on the original as possible, to return to the original units of measurement, and replace the new maps with the old.

I speak many modern languages and have studied all the bygone ones the book has been written in. But this was an undertaking of much vaster importance and magnitude—I knew I had to become closer to the original than anyone alive. With international governments’ assistance, I procured every document in the world composed in the ancient language, the work of several years.

#

The following decade was spent so immersed in the old language that I became fluent, even started to dream in it.

This language is subtle and beautiful, but not easy to understand. Many words do not translate easily, there is a certain shape to them that is lost in the process—some flavor of meaning. Sound and rhythm. The feel of words in the mouth. Each as important to language as pattern, tempo and melody is to music, or the feel of food on the tongue is to eating.

Everything is, in those ancient words, as beautiful and mysterious as a moonless night, when the blinding world becomes transparent and you can see again the loneliness and grandeur. I became obsessed with the fullness of the ancient book and came to understand it as if a lover had whispered the words to me. Multilayered ironies, poetics, alliteration, double-entendres, even witticisms—revealed themselves.

As did the impossibility—the futility—of true translation.

#

Then came another terrible revelation.

The universe described in the original language is not the universe described in later translations. The words are similar, the grammar translatable, but the entire worldview—the whole cosmos of the original is lost. Where the original gives mystery, the translations have certainty, where it is subtle they are blunt, where it is reverent, they are commanding.

Still, driven by this awesome task, I succeeded in making the greatest translation of the age. Such a complete understanding of the—should I say poetics?—of the original had never been written in modern times. It was a complete disaster. The translation was banned and any copies rooted out and destroyed. I was excommunicated from society, disgraced—lost career, friends and all social standing and sentenced to live in exile. It would’ve made too many people curious about the contents of my translation to execute me outright.

In the decades since, however, my translation occasionally springs up somewhere before being found and destroyed. It comforts me immensely to know that it is still out there.

I think it is because some people prefer mystery to certainty and beauty to comfort.

~

Bio:

Joe Aultman-Moore is a librarian, guide, and writer living in Haines, Alaska. His award-winning essays and articles have appeared on Daily Science Fiction, The Dirtbag Diaries, and Taproot among others. Find more of his work at jaultmanmoore.wordpress.com/publications-2/ and on Instagram @joeaultmoore.

Philosophy Note:

For me, science fiction is about tweaking aspects of the real world in order to play with ways of thinking and being. At its best (Bradbury, Orwell) sci-fi brings us back to reality with a new perspective.

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An Implied Edict

If aliens wrote the rules of interstellar relations, what would it take for us (and other species) to figure them

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