Marton Kispal

by Márton Kispál

Welcome, Chosen Ones!

You are here because your faith has been tested and found sufficient to behold the corpse of God. This hall is neither temple nor museum: it is the mortar that holds Creation itself together. Therefore, we ask you to express your devotion in silence and not step into the areas marked with red tape.

The body before you is the result of a sacred mummification process performed by the Apostles. As the Catechism explains, God, fearing the approach of death, told the history of His Axioms into a dictaphone: thus on certain labels you will see headphone pictograms, and we recommend you listen to the archival recordings attached to them. For our hearing-impaired visitors, we provide text versions. We believe that His words will complete the experience.

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Label 1: Left Patella

Description: The skin dried amber-yellow onto the left kneecap like parchment. Near the femur, a three-millimeter-deep irregular scar is visible: the first Axiom. Our pathologist confirmed the wound was inflicted with a dull kitchen knife, not the precise scalpel God used for later Axioms.

Audio note: “I was seven when I invented gravity. It happened by accident, since all I wanted was for my ball not to float away from our yard. My mother, of course, was occupied with greater concerns: as that day, without any warning, the Sun simply did not rise. On the radio they chattered about the end of the world and eternal darkness. By noon the priests declared a fast, and by evening millions gathered at Pilgrims’ Square. For nothing. The world remained as it was, without a Sun to light it. But other strange things happened too: there was my ball, and then the milk didn’t flow nicely into the glass when mother poured it, but spread through the air, its drops like pearls. I got so excited by all this that sleep barely came to my eyes, so I woke mother to hum to me in the moonlight. She hummed, and finally I fell asleep. [sigh]

The next day the sunrise failed again, and everything else floated, too. I woke to find myself hovering near the ceiling, my blanket a few meters below. I screamed, to which mother floated over, pulling and pushing herself forward with experienced movements. She didn’t understand what had gotten into me. I told her in vain that this is how astronauts go around in space – she just looked at me puzzled. She thought I was joking.

She escorted me to school – on the way there everyone floated too, oh yes, grabbing onto railings and poles to propel themselves forward, as if this had always been the order of things – where they then taught me that the universe is a tiny bubble, most of which is filled by Earth. I fled sobbing. Now I would have accepted the previous day with all its weirdness, because then at least everyone else knew something was wrong, too. I wanted to wake up.

But I wasn’t asleep, and in fact, after that I experienced eight Shifts in rapid succession.

Shift. A simple word with terrifying power. The world reformed itself every time. Suddenly mother was gone, too, then the Sun blazed again, but with the greenish hue of phosphor, then came worlds populated by statues, one after another. Neither my clothing stayed with me, nor my home, nor anyone. Only my body and my memories. I was an anchor in chaos. Why me specifically, I couldn’t know. I lived long, and though I researched a thousand things, I found no answer to this riddle.

Mother sometimes returned – once as a physicist, though she’d been a thread factory worker before, other times as a stranger, or a crystal-creature, or a light-being – and she suggested I keep a journal once I told her this world was not my own, that I just drifted; but of course my journal also disappeared at the next Shift, and now again I was orphaned, living inside an asteroid, among prehistoric reptiles and turquoise cycads.

The idea still wormed its way inside my head. I alone slipped through all this – so what would happen when I grow old and cannot even recall what once was? Memories are like mist. I felt it my duty to become a chronicler, since others flickered in and out of existence randomly.

I was chasing my ball through a world where surface gravity again did not exist when I slammed into a rock. I scraped my skin. This moment was my Newtonian apple, my Archimedean bathtub. I realized I had to use my body.

[rising breeze, trill of wind chimes]

I took a knife and carved into my knee the only command I craved: fall. The pain was sharp, not leaving me till the next Shift. But from then on, things no longer floated away. They fell toward the ground, as I remembered them to do before.”

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Label 5: Thorax

Description: The chest is dominated by a rough, mangled scar. Unlike the geometric scratches, scarred ligatures, and carved equations covering the limbs, this wound was not inflicted by God, but by Satan. The scar tissue is black, a remnant of a healing-inhibiting curse.

Audio note: “After describing the coefficient of friction, I became greedy. By then I’d long realized that pain is the currency of reality itself. If I used ink, the Axioms wore off within a week. If I gave my blood, they remained. My veins became like black runes, my bones calcified into fractal forms. On worse days, even breathing hurt.

But I had to continue.

I invented and recorded many laws in those times. I wore on my calf the eternal truth of 1+1=2; on my wrist the universal gas constant; along my spine the limit of light speed. Thermodynamics was a bigger task: the resulting purulent inflammation forced me to lay for months. It was as if the equation required my body’s heat to function. The description of sound waves left me half-deaf, and I dreaded the day when the science of photons would demand my eyesight.

Under the effect of my running blood and tearing flesh, the Shifts finally began to ease. Cities grew in my footsteps, foliage whispered, Earth glided in elliptical orbit. I forced the universe to accept my rules, and the language of these rules was mathematics.

At thirty, people gathered around me. They saw what took others much more time. They were trembling refugees who grasped that it was because of me that their homes wouldn’t turn to vapor from another cosmic sneeze; astronomers and alchemists who filled the roles of masons and carpenters to rebuild my childhood home. My body still served as a pedestal – but I trusted them enough to lie beneath their scalpel. Among them was Him. A priest, a knight of the Infinite Church. Lean man, skin like polished marble, his voice a tinkling stream.

He wormed into my innermost circles, and entertained tired pilgrims at my dinner table with anecdotes. Often we kept vigil until dawn, and even then it didn’t seem words would run out from our mouths. I thought of him as my friend, the only one who saw not a living totem in me, but the trembling man beneath the scars. However, he secretly worshipped the power of the Shifts. He believed stability was a prison, and me the warden.

[pause filled by the rumble of a distant storm]

He attacked me in the thick of night, while I lay fevered from the laws of fluid dynamics. He didn’t want to kill me, oh no… He had a more wicked deed in mind. With his blade he targeted my chest. He tried to carve an entropy function into my flesh that would have overthrown everything.

I howled as the knife ran to my sternum. Not only my body hurt, but the entire universe. I felt as the atomic bonds loosened in my house’s walls, as the horizon trembled at the possibility of chaos.

Finally my followers pulled him off me. My heroic Apostles! He laughed as they dragged him away. After I recovered, I visited him in prison – because that’s indeed where he ended up, drawing the shackle to himself – and I tried to return him to the righteous path. You were so useful, I explained to him, the faithful drink up your words! To this he replied I’d do well never to let him out, then, because he’d end up turning everyone against me. It’s not fair that the universe works exactly as one person wants. I suspected we’d end up here, so I had my answer ready: I am not merely one person – but the only one capable of creating order through my pain. So what does this authorize me to? Doesn’t fate wish me to become God? At this he only laughed again. He boasted that he’d still achieved something: my scar will forever remind me that order is merely a thin membrane over chaos. In this I must grant him truth.”

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Label 18: Eyelids

Description: The final and most harrowing piece of the body. God’s eyelids were sutured with surgical precision, then a dense, fractal-like weave of symbols was burned onto them with laser, according to legend. This is the Seal of Objective Realism.

Audio note: “I grew tired. No intact surface remained on me where I could write Axioms. And I confess, I’m afraid… afraid to move on. To fall asleep forever. I fear for myself, and I fear for you too, dear Apostles. [coughing]

Because what happens when Providence closes its eyes? I am the clasp in the universe, my consciousness the glue. My body crumbles, and Chaos knows this. It’s sneaking at the foot of my bed, waiting for my heart to skip, to reclaim what is its own.

I have room for one law only on my body. With this I must close the remaining loopholes that could open a path for Chaos again. One final law… the ultimate Axiom. It will consume my remaining strength as I’ve suspected for a long time. It’s a miracle I’ve endured the pain this long.

If I die, the world must keep turning. I must sever the cord binding me to creation: things must exist even when I’m not looking at them, moreover, when no one else is looking at them.

But I choose the precise moment myself. I passed you the plans already. Guard them, and I beg you, don’t pity me, have the strength to do what must be done.

[quiet sobbing, stifled prayer]

Although… there’s one more thing. One final riddle. A secret I’ve carried with me until now.

Did I succeed in recreating that old world? The one I was born into, the one I could call my own until age seven? In details I’m surely mistaken. After all, I could have forgotten so much! Sometimes I could only work from a memory of a memory of a memory, or from the impressions of some half-dream of the dawn – who knows, maybe I smuggled more from my imagination into the physical laws than I’d dare admit even to myself. If I remembered the colour of the sky wrong, then your horizon is mere falsehood. Perhaps the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter wasn’t originally an irrational constant at all, but some exact number, and thus every arc you see is an imperfect, fragmentary replica…

And even if I chained everything down precisely at the cost of tearing my flesh, if the very last atom is in its place, if the gears click and tick the same melody… the question still remains. Did I succeed?

Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore. This world belongs to you now. Enjoy it as I once did. Yours is the dawn, I’ve hewn it for you from my own body.

I am ready. You may begin the suturing.”

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Bio:

Márton Kispál is a product designer and father from Hungary. Writing fiction is his way of digesting personal dilemmas and abstract scientific concepts that keep him awake at night: for this reason, most of his works are science fiction or fantasy, with some ‘slice of life’ ramblings here and there. He has never finished a novel (those projects have almost finished him, though) but published two dozen short stories in genre magazines and anthologies.

Philosophy Note:

Inspired by Meillassoux’s hyper-chaos idea, I built an inverted creation myth where physical laws are merely temporary accidents, leading to an ontological nightmare of the contingent. My protagonist is the sole anchor, a gifted kid carving order into this hyper-mess through the medium of his own physical pain. He reinvents every branch of science in search of his original, seemingly stable home universe, eventually sacrificing himself to birth an objective reality that exists independent of any perceiving mind. This also serves as an allusion to Brahmanic consciousness. Finally, I sprinkled the conclusion with the good old Ship of Theseus paradox, because why not? I propose the question: if this universe was recreated with 100% accuracy, would it be the same entity or merely a copy? And ultimately, does the distinction even matter?