Browse Tag

Time

The Calendar Of Babel

by Richard Lau

I can’t tell you when it happened for reasons that will soon become obvious. But I can tell you what and why.

The great armies of the world lined up like chess pieces off of the western and eastern shores of a small island in the Arctic Ocean. The island itself was a harmless wildlife sanctuary administered by the country of Russia. However, the isolated isle also had the misfortune of sitting at 179 degrees longitude and straddling the International Date Line (IDL).

The island’s Russian name of “Wrangel” seemed oddly appropriate as powerful nations and their less-powerful but no less determined allies tried to “wrangle” control of the IDL from their perceived opponents.

With travel circumnavigating the globe, it had long been accepted that crossing the IDL in an eastbound direction decreased the calendar date by one day; crossing the IDL westward advanced the date by the same amount.

Most of the world’s population believed, if giving the matter any more thought than mere acceptance, that the IDL was defined and protected by international agreement or legally binding treaty. Quite to the contrary, the demarcation largely existed through mutual goodwill, non-imposed cooperation, and loose agreement.

Nations on both sides of the line and even those straddling it had historically shifted a day forward or back depending on purely political, economic, and religious whims. And some, as a matter of mere convenience or contemporary preference, had even switched back.

The result was that the IDL actually zigzagged rather than following strictly and straightly along the 180th meridian. It might be better to think of the IDL as something fluid rather than a solid, inviolate line, more as a balloon reacting to the tug of an impatient child or swayed by a current wind of favor.

So, it was neither new nor novel when the United States proclaimed itself the only remaining Super Power and suggested reversing the current measuring units of the IDL.

The official patriotic notice declared “As the United States of America is the most advanced nation in the world, it makes no sense for it to always be a day behind the other countries. We create the future, so we should be in the future. It’s as simple as that.”

China, who was regaining prominence on the global stage disagreed. “This is yet another example of American imperialism and aggression. Why disrupt the schedules and clocks of the world just to satisfy the selfish ego of one nation with a reputation of bullying and going rogue?”

As a sanction and a buffer, China proposed thickening the IDL by 30 degrees on the US side of the dateline, putting said country two hours further back into the past. By the current IDL standard, every 15 degrees of longitude on either side of the IDL resulted in an adjustment of one hour, an addition or subtraction depending upon the direction travelled.

Russia agreed with China, as long as one minute was added to each country for every degree of latitude north of the equator. China, which lay significantly above the equator, appreciated the additional amount of time but disliked the greater gain the plan provided to its more northern neighbor.

Tensions grew as more and more countries got involved in defining their own time zones, especially those in the Southern hemisphere led by Australia and Ecuador, who felt offended at being left out of the Russian plan. Others, with economic, financial, and historical ties to the U.S. were torn between retaining favor by siding with the proposed IDL reversal and struggling with the temporal temptation of setting their own clocks to the beats of their own independent wants and needs.

Even inside the United States, divisions arose. Arizona, which never accepted Daylight Saving Time, gleefully changed its clocks by two hours in an effort to spend even more daylight. California, its more progressive neighbor to the west, adjusted its own clocks by three hours to counteract Arizona’s “overspending.” The federal government was asked to resolve the conflict, but Congress was on its newly minted holiday “New New Year’s Day,” which occurred anytime politics got too contentious. New New Year’s Day happened to fall on an almost daily basis, much to the delight of the fireworks industry.

The Protestant versus Catholic rivalry was reignited as England returned to the Julian calendar and took back the eleven days it had lost. The rousing slogan of “God Save the King and the Eleven!” was chanted throughout the British kingdom. In response, Pope Gregory XIX considered an entirely new calendar with Saturdays being replaced with an early start to Sunday to allow more time for masses and services. Orthodox Jews weren’t happy about the Papal proposal and immediately ended their Decembers with a seven-day extension of the 24th, in spite of the confusion about what to do with the menorah candles during some years.

Many religious followers could not help but see the temporal turbulence as a similar situation to the Tower of Babel. As the story went, a long time ago a united human race spoke a single language and had the hubris to overstep its bounds by building a tower so tall that it touched the Heavens. As punishment, the Lord sowed confusion by giving populations different languages and scattering them across the world. In trying to bend and corrupt Time to their own selfish uses, humankind had reaped the Calendar of Babel.

The Secretary-General of the United Nations pleaded for a peaceful and orderly solution that was fair to all humanity. His request was immediately dismissed by invested critics who pointed out that the unfortunate man was born on February 29, and in spite of his esteemed position, one who possessed a mere sixteen birthdays had no standing or enough experience to tell mature nations what to do.

The UN then issued a heartfelt plea to Italy, who at the time, appeared to be the most influential nation to remain neutral. However, it was soon revealed that the reason for Italy’s silence was not neutrality, but a secret and severe back-dating return to the 15th century, to re-celebrate the glory days of its Rinascimento.

As the telephone, much less the Internet, hadn’t been invented yet, all calls and e-mails remained unanswered. All communication was handled through handwritten correspondence, but this method was slow in delivery and deciphering, for the only individuals who still retained the skill of cursive were monks and doctors. To make matters worse, the Italians honored one of the greatest thinkers of the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci, by focusing on writing backwards, which only led to more confusion and difficulty in translation.

With each locality defining its own measurement of time within their borders, the world economy quickly collapsed. How could anyone enact any financial transactions when one or both parties were either away for a newly defined weekend, enjoying a good extended night’s rest, or celebrating a holiday?

No one could really say how long the chaos reigned once the tick-tock genie had been released from Pandora’s bottle. For some countries, it was only a matter of seconds. For others, centuries had passed. Scientists could only say that the Doomsday Clock had advanced closer to midnight, but whose midnight remained the big question.

In Belgium, where the government had redefined “quarterly” to mean “twice weekly,” the editorial team of a speculative philosophy journal ironically found themselves without any time at all. Looking at their insurmountable mountain of submissions, they yelled, “Enough is enough!” The rest of the world agreed.

The problem was not what to do but how to do it. By now, the world’s citizens had tired of the resulting and continuous confusion and frustration. Countries were willing to sacrifice their special time delineations for peace of mind and stability among people and nations. They agreed that the prior IDL guidelines were ideal, but how to return to them without any particular nation losing face for its embarrassing behavior?

Everyone was going in circles, and yet, perhaps, that was the solution.

It was revealed that a new space station, built and launched by a technology billionaire, was still running on the old calendar and showed that a little more than 30 days had passed under the new time regime. All of the nations informally agreed to sync with the time and date of the space station clock under the old IDL standard. But how to erase the recent period of blunders?

Travelling at about five miles per second, the station orbited the Earth sixteen times in a twenty-four-hour period. The astronauts aboard the station changed its trajectory to cross over the still unmodified IDL in an eastward direction. In 48 hours, they had successfully set the calendar back 32 days, to the time before the United States had originally issued its IDL proclamation.

But bad ideas die hard, and soon the idea of manipulating the IDL and its time zones came up again. However, this time better, wiser, and more experienced heads prevailed. They decided to table the issue until the next day. And so on. And so on.

~

Bio:

Richard Lau is an award-winning writer who is published in magazines, newspapers, and anthologies, as well as in the high-tech industry and online.

Philosophy Note:

n these divisive times of war and political turmoil, it seems that humankind cannot agree on anything–except a standardized measurement of time. But what if that fell away as well?

You might be interested in

First Do No (Temporal) Harm

Why Doc Brown Should Secretly Destroy the DeLorean

by Jimmy Alfonso Licon

If I could turn back time
If I could find a way
I’d take back those words that have hurt you
And you’d stay

— Cher

Introduction

The astonishing popularity of the Back to the Future franchise is likely explained partially by the involvement of time travel—an endlessly fascinating topic to people from various walks of life. Who doesn’t want to travel back in time to change the past for the better? Though there is no doubt about the imagined upsides of time travel, there are major downsides too. Imagine that someone traveled into the past to change the outcome of World War 2. The results could be catastrophic as Marty McFly discovered this when he nearly erased himself and his siblings from time by unwittingly interfering with the romance between his would-be parents.

The dangers and pitfalls of changing the past are recognized by Doc Brown in Back to the Future Part II upon discovering that Marty and Doc Browns’ timeline was altered for the worse (e.g., George McFly is murdered) by Biff using the time machine to change the past for his own gain. This event forced Doc Brown to realize that ‘time travel can be misused and why the time machine must be destroyed.’

The aim here is to explain why Doc Brown is right, even more than he knows. Luckily, though changing the past is possible in the fictional world of Back to the Future, it is logically impossible in the real world due to a temporal paradox[1] colloquially known as the grandfather paradox. That is the focus of the next section.

What is the Grandfather Paradox?

The grandfather paradox is an obstacle to anyone traveling back into the past to change it, even if they owned a fully operational time machine. Begin with a simple example. Suppose that Marty wants to kill his grandfather. He decides that his best chance to do so, undetected by other family members, would be to kill his grandfather in the past. After traveling back in time, Marty exits the time machine to find his teenage grandfather alone and vulnerable. Here we pause to ask a simple question: can Marty kill his grandfather? No. Despite the fact that Marty has a time machine, travelled back in time, and that his teenage grandfather is alone and susceptible to a sneak attack, Marty will fail. The explanation is what philosophers call the grandfather paradox. If Marty killed his grandfather, before he met Marty’s grandmother, then there never would have been an opportunity for his grandfather and grandmother to meet, fall in love, and have the children who would become Marty’s parents. In that scenario, Marty would never have existed, and so wouldn’t be able to kill anyone. As the philosopher, David Lewis, explains,

Tim cannot kill Grandfather. Grandfather lived, so to kill him would be to change the past. […] Either the events of 1921 timelessly do include Tim’s killing of Grandfather, or else they timelessly don’t. We may be tempted to speak of the “original” 1921 that lies in Tim’s personal past, many years before his birth, in which Grandfather lived; and of the “new” 1921 in which Tim now finds himself waiting in ambush to kill Grandfather. […] If Tim did not kill Grandfather in the “original” 1921, then if he does kill Grandfather in the “new” 1921, he must both kill and not kill Grandfather in 1921[2].

The point is that changing the past results in a contradiction, just like it would be contradictory to believe that it is raining and that it is not raining at the same time. Both claims cannot be true. Unfortunately for Marty, Doc Brown, and the unwitting residents of Hill Valley (under Biff’s reign), this same temporal logic doesn’t apply to the fictional world of Back to the Future, where changing the past looks possible. One such character, Biff, changes the past, to benefit himself, in Back to the Future Part II: once old Biff realizes that Doc Brown’s DeLorean is a time machine, he steals it and travels to the past with a copy of a sports almanac to help his younger self cheat at sports betting. Young Biff then uses the temporally displaced almanac to place winning bets on sporting events whose outcome he already knows.

In the actual world, old Biff would have been prevented from altering the past to his benefit by the logic of the grandfather paradox: older Biff travels back in time to give younger Biff a copy of a sports almanac from the future. Young Biff then places winning bets on sporting events using the almanac. As young Biff ages into older Biff, he realizes that he must travel back into the past to give young Biff a copy of the sport almanac without which young Biff wouldn’t know what sports team to bet on. Herein lies a dilemma: either young Biff lacks a copy of the sports almanac—thereby giving older Biff a reason to travel back into the past and to deliver it to his younger self – or he has a copy. On the first option, an explanation is lacking for how it is older Biff became rich using the sports almanac he doesn’t yet have. Either that, or, on the second option: young Biff already owns a copy of the temporally displaced sports almanac and used it to place bets that made older Biff rich. Here we still need to explain how younger Biff had a copy of the almanac before older Biff left the future to give it to him, because it originated from older Biff traveling back into the past from the future. Either option is results in temporal contradictions without hope of resolution.

As Biff altering the past and the sports almanac example illustrate: the ability to change the past could result in a temporal catastrophe. The next section elaborates.

A Temporal Can of Worms

In many ways, it is good that the grandfather paradox blocks us in the real world from changing the past. Why? Temporal change could easily be weaponized. The ability to radically alter the past would dwarf the destructive power of nuclear and biochemical weapons. Imagine that disgruntled Nazis, upon losing WWII, decided to build a time machine that would allow them to alter past events, especially the outcome of the war. Suppose that Ludwig traveled back in time—armed with information gained after the war—to warn the German high command of an invasion from the Allies such that the Germans could repel the attack, altering the outcome of the war. Such a machine would likely be the most powerful weapon known to humanity. There would be a strong temptation to use such a machine for evil.

Here it must be conceded that a time machine that allowed one to alter the past could be used for the good too. As an example, compare how George McFly and Biff interact at the start of Back to the Future, and their relationship at the end of the movie: at the start, Biff is George’s boss and regularly abuses, bullies, and takes advantage of him. George lacks the guts and courage to stand up for himself, and Biff lacks the fear and respect for George to treat him with dignity and decency; whereas, by the end of the movie, George is Biff’s boss, and that Biff treats the entire McFly family respectfully. This is an example where Marty altering the past improves the lives of the McFly family. It is accurate to say that the DeLorean has the power to change the past for the worse and for the better, and it could even be used to reverse bad changes to the past. If so, then, why should Doc Brown secretly destroy the DeLorean? We explain in the next section.

The Case for Destroying the DeLorean

If the DeLorean could be used to change the past, then it could be used to do so for the better or for the worse—in fact, both good and bad changes to the past happen in the first two Back to the Future movies. So, then, why does Doc Brown have a moral duty to secretly destroy the DeLorean. There are a couple reasons to dismantle it, despite the good that could be accomplished with it in the Back to the Future fictional universe.

The first reason is that doing good and doing bad are not morally equivalent. Consider that, like with medical doctors, we intuitively have a stronger moral duty to not harm others or make them worse off than we do to better their lives or benefit them. As moral philosophers, Gerald Harrison and Julian Tanner, explain,

[There is] an interesting asymmetry between preventing someone coming to harm, and benefiting someone. Intuitively, it is far more important to prevent causing and/or allowing harm to befall others than it is to positively benefit others[3].

Suppose that Doctor Jack only has time to perform one surgery despite two people needing an operation: Robert, who needs to have nasal passages expanded to make it easier to breathe, and Destiny, who is waiting on a facelift. Clearly, Doctor Jack has a stronger obligation to operate on Robert than to operate on Destiny for the simple reason that without surgery, Robert is likely to die of heart failure, a stroke, or something as bad. Intuitively, we have a greater moral duty to prevent causing or allowing harm to befall others, than we do to positively benefit others. And so, Jack has a stronger moral duty to Robert than he does to Destiny.

The same reasoning applies to the issue of what to do with the DeLorean: since it could just as easily be used to do good as to do evil, Doc Brown (and Marty, to a lesser degree) has a stronger moral duty to destroy the DeLorean such that it cannot be used to make people worse off than he does to allow it to exist to improve people’s lives. There are, of course, many avenues by which one could use the DeLorean to improve the lives of others, but allowing it to exist such that one could improve the lives of others by altering the past is to take a risk that someone could steal the DeLorean to do evil. So, because one could just as easily use the time machine to do good as they could to do evil, it follows from the asymmetry between the stronger duty to prevent causing harm and the weaker duty to positively benefit someone that one has a duty to destroy the DeLorean.

There is second reason that the DeLorean should be destroyed: even with the best of intentions, it is too easy to make a mistake that render the past (and the present and future) worse off than it would have otherwise been without intervention. To put the point differently: because one has a stronger duty to avoid causing or allowing harm to others than to positively benefit others, they should avoid interventions that are likely to cause harm to others, even when the intervention is done by someone with the best of intentions.

A scene from Star Trek: Voyager nicely illustrates this difficulty,

CHAKOTAY: Component 37329, a rogue comet. About eight months ago, Voyager made a course correction to avoid the comet. According to my calculations, it led to our entering Krenim space.

ANNORAX: The solution, then, would be to erase that comet from history.

CHAKOTAY: Exactly. Voyager would have stayed on its course and bypassed Krenim space altogether.

ANNORAX: Sounds simple enough. Conduct a simulation.

CHAKOTAY: Temporal incursion in progress. What happened?

ANNORAX: Had you actually eradicated that comet, all life within fifty light years would never have existed. Congratulations, you almost wiped out eight thousand civilizations.

CHAKOTAY: I didn’t consider the entire history of the comet.

ANNORAX: Four billion years ago, fragments from that comet impacted a planet. Hydrocarbons from those fragments gave rise to several species of plant life, which in turn sustained more complex organisms. Ultimately several space-faring civilizations evolved and colonized the entire sector.

CHAKOTAY: By erasing the comet I altered all evolution in this region.

ANNORAX: Past, present and future. They exist as one. They breathe together. You’re not the only person to make this mistake. When I first constructed this weapon ship, I turned it against our greatest enemy, the Rilnar. The result was miraculous. With the Rilnar gone from history, my people, in an instant, became powerful again. But there were problems. A rare disease broke out among our colonies. Within a year, fifty million were dead. I had failed to realize that the Rilnar had introduced a crucial antibody into the Krenim genome, and my weapon had eliminated that antibody as well.

CHAKOTAY: And you’ve been trying to undo that damage ever since. But each time you pull out a new thread, another one begins to unravel.

ANNORAX: You can’t imagine the burden of memory that I carry. Thousands of worlds, billions of lives, gone, brought back, gone again. I try to rationalize the loss. They’re not really being destroyed, because they never existed. Sometimes I can almost convince myself[4].

Clearly, Annorax has mixed intentions: restoring one’s people and culture looks like a noble goal, but not when at the expense of thousands of other civilizations. The point of the scene, though, is to illustrate that even with the best of intentions, changing the past for the better is a task too easy to get wrong. This is because the past is so interwoven with the present and the future through a complicated mix of causes and effects that is hard to predict and anticipate. This is partly because our knowledge of the world is socially distributed across individuals, communities, and events[5].

To illustrate just how socially interconnected our knowledge of the world is, consider a simple fact: you (as an individual) do not know how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich[6]. ‘Of course I do!’, you might object—but that objection misses the point. The claim here is not that one lacks the knowledge of how to assemble a sandwich comprised of bread, peanut butter, and jelly. Instead, the point is that in a more fundamental sense, you lack the knowledge needed to make the bread, peanut butter, and jelly. There are many ingredients needed to make the bread alone: one would need to know how to domesticate wheat, how to design and manufacture farm equipment to grow and harvest the wheat, and how to produce fertilizer. Just think about the many inputs required to produce the rubber that comprises the tires on the tractor needed to harvest wheat. And that is just some of the stuff one would need to know to make the bread, not to mention the other steps needed to produce the jelly and peanut butter. If something as simple as knowing how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is too complicated for any single individual, then changing the past for the better would be an ever more challenging task that, even with good intentions, one could easily make worse. Doc Brown is clearly brilliant, but changing the past for the better is likely beyond even his abilities. There are thus good reasons to destroy the DeLorean before it can be used for evil. But why should Doc Brown do so secretly, and remove any evidence of its existence? That is the topic of our final section.

Why Doc Brown Must Secretly Destroy the DeLorean

We established a case for Doc Brown having a moral obligation to destroy the DeLorean to prevent it falling into the wrong hands. However, there still remains the issue of why Doc Brown has an obligation to go about it secretly. Simply destroying the DeLorean, without removing evidence that a time machine exists, would seemingly be sufficient for Doc Brown to discharge his moral duty not to inflict on, or facilitate others inflicting harm, on innocent individuals, right?

Not quite. The issue here is that if Doc Brown destroys the DeLorean, but the evidence of its time traveling abilities remains, then such evidence is what engineers call a proof-of-concept: a working prototype that demonstrates the validity of the underlying theory. One might draw up plans for a new combustion engine, for example, but only find investors once one has built a prototype to show that the plans work in the real world.

Indeed, the Hill Valley Mall scene—early in Back to the Future—is itself an example of a proof-of-concept. Even though, by Doc Brown’s own admission, he invented the flux capacitor—the key component for time travel—decades prior, he wasn’t able to build a test model (aka a proof-of-concept) until the mall scene. Here is the salient exchange between Doc Brown and Marty,

DOC: He’s [Einstein the dog] fine, and he’s completely unaware that anything happened. As far as he’s concerned the trip was instantaneous. That’s why Einstein’s watch is exactly one minute behind mine. He skipped over that minute to instantly arrive at this moment in time. Come here, I’ll show you how it works. First, you turn the time circuits on. This readout tell you where you’re going, this one tells you where you are, this one tells you where you were. You input the destination time on this keypad. Say, you wanna see the signing of the declaration of independence, or witness the birth or Christ. Here’s a red-letter date in the history of science, November 5, 1955. Yes, of course, November 5, 1955.

MARTY: What, I don’t get what happened.

DOC: That was the day I invented time travel. I remember it vividly. I was standing on the edge of my toilet hanging a clock, the porcelain was wet, I slipped, hit my head on the edge of the sink. And when I came to I had a revelation, a picture, a picture in my head, a picture of this. This is what makes time travel possible. The flux capacitor[7].

At this juncture, one may wonder why evidence of a proof-of-concept should be destroyed, e.g. destroying the video tape that Marty and Doc Brown made at the Hill Valley Mall. The reason is simple: proof-of-concept is something that would increase the confidence of those to invest and explore time travel technology due to the demonstration by Doc Brown and Marty. And a boost in confidence, by bad individuals, in the ability of technology to allow one to travel to the past to change it would increase the likelihood that someone would spend the time and money to invent a time machine of their own. Of course, this could happen anyway—it would be hard to control technological innovations. However, allowing the DeLorean to exist potentially enables would be temporal wrongdoers. So, Doc Brown is right (more than he knows) to conclude that due to the potential for abuse, the DeLorean should be destroyed.

[1] Jimmy Alfonso Licon (2015). The Time Shuffling Machine and Metaphysical Fatalism. Think 14 (41): 57-68.

[2] David Lewis (1976). Paradoxes of Time Travel. American Philosophical Quarterly 13 (2): 145-152, p. 148.

[3] Gerald Harrison and Julia Tanner (2011). Better Not to Have Children. Think 10 (27): 113-121, p. 18.

[4] Star Trek: Voyager (1997). Year of Hell, Parts I & II (Season 4, Episodes 8 and 9).

[5] Fredrich A. Hayek (1945). The Use of Knowledge in Society. The American Economic Review 35 (4): 519-530.

[6] Leonard E. Read (1964). I, Pencil. In Leonard E. Read (author), Anything That’s Peaceful: The Case for the Free Market. Foundation for Economic Education, pg. 136-143.

[7] Back to the Future (1985). Universal Pictures.

~

Bio:

Jimmy Alfonso Licon is a philosophy professor at Arizona State University with research interests in ethics, AI, and political economy. He teaches classes like bioethics and philosophy of time, and wants his own time machine.

You might be interested in

Mercy INC.

Will you be among the 3% that succeed? By Anthony Lechner.

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?

You might be interested in

Between Scylla And Charybdis

by Dexter McLeod

The twin singularities are forever circling, forever falling. Beneath me, above me—their shadows are heaving, and roiling, and churning.

I look out of the crystalline metal wall as one gravitational silhouette marries the other, blotting out both hemispheres of my view. As above me, it is so below. For several breaths, the stars are gone. We are now between two nevers. Two nothings. Two everythings.

Jolan Trae, the man in the cell across from me, always laughs when he sees me tense up during these convergences. He always notices because I always do it. Or, maybe, I always do it because he always notices. And always will. Here in the Lemniscate, our prison, cause and effect no longer belong to us. Or to time. Or to, one wonders, even gods—if such things exist. Inside the Lemniscate, tomorrow and yesterday don’t matter. Have never mattered. Will never matter.

I exhale when we pass out of the double shadow, as I always do. The stars return, spilling back into the horizon as the dual globes recede. Through the hull I can see the coiling, writhing spine of the prison as it moves in a perfect figure eight, like an infinity symbol. A cosmic snake eating its own tail. Its individual compartments move like a stellar train millions of miles long, whose tracks make an orbit around and between the two black holes. Our keepers. Our wardens.

Their official designations are useless to most of us. The pair were discovered by Nylerian astronomers half-a-million years ago. Their number system was base 60, and they assigned some sexagesimal code in place of a proper name.

Jolan calls them Scylla and Charybdis, great mythical monsters, between which safety is on a knife’s edge. He fancies himself a scholar, which suits the crimes that imprisoned him. A destroyer of libraries, a burner of books. He stole histories and stories of a dozen civilizations, saving a copy, for a price.

But we thank him. Knowing the names of things is strangely important to us, with so little to occupy our minds. He laughs to himself, calling us Ixion, or Sisyphus, or Tantalus, though he keeps that riddle to himself.

When I was a child, a neighbor had a pet tarm chained to a stake in the yard. It was a beautiful pure bred Calusian. I still remember it, running around the yard with its blue and orange fur, bright yellow antennae streaming behind it like ribbons. But it grew testy as it aged, discerning the extent of freedom afforded by the chain. A circular rut formed in the grass as it toiled and worried and strained against the stake.

We’re like that tarm, but we have gouged a furrow in spacetime, and not in muddy soil. In the Lemniscate, the dual gravities distort the flow of past, present, and future. They bunch together, like too many people huddled beneath an umbrella. Instead of rain, the singularities swallow their accretion disks, and vomit particle fountains—burning rivers pouring from frozen gyres.

I wonder sometimes if we can be seen by astronomy hobbyists in the star system next door. Are we a Möbius strip in their sky, a belt cinched tightly around two starving galaxy eaters? A lopsided infinity symbol, bolded at one end, and italicized at the other? As the hull ionizes when we pass near the particle geysers streaming up from their poles, do we form an incandescent analemma they can see? Does their news announce a particularly bright lightshow on clear evenings—a hellish aurora to be seen from their porches, and their skyscrapers, and their yachts? Are we a serpentine morning star?

Kheenen Du, the man two cells down, insists he helped design the math this place runs upon. The calculations are his, he claims. He mapped the nested and intertwined fractals that ascend and descend through the boundless continuum and back again, looping in on themselves as if some cosmic gods were sewing into the same stitch over and over, tugging and tightening at the knot of time.

He won’t say why they sentenced him here, only some grumblings about knowing too much. It makes sense, I suppose. Didn’t the silver Klibbin emperors of Darsec, and the Trelochian underqueens of Unmure, and the First Dynasty Egyptian pharaohs of Sol each seal the workers beneath their entombed rulers? Just to keep the palace secrets of their ladies and lords for all eternity? Perhaps he is such.

As we spin and twist between Scylla and Charybdis, I know they are evaporating. Nothing, not even this hell, lasts forever. With infinitesimal slowness, the singularities are bleeding—radiating a quantum of themselves into black space a particle at a time. Not a river, but a trickle, flowing like an estuary into an ocean of permanent night. It will not be quick, but it will happen. One day they will exhale their last and wink out into nothingness, leaving only escaping x-rays and a quivering of the quantum foam. Not the banging gravity waves of their making, but the whimpers of their decay.

I am struck by this oddity. What are we prisoners to these bottomless wells of gravity? And yet, I am vertiginously perched between them, waiting for their death. I am a carrion bird circling above a wounded, three-antlered lerra deep in a ravine, braying for a mother who cannot help it. A falcon outliving its falconer, slouching towards infinity.

I will live long enough to see the constellations contorted and deformed by time, only to see them slowly reassemble as the eons flicker by, and then rewind.

As we move back into the umbra for yet another loop, my cell is thrown again into darkness. The stars are leaving now. We’re falling towards the convergence: an infernal Lagrange point, a divine asymptote. I know it’s coming. Have always known. Will always know. Can never not know.

The twin singularities are forever circling, forever falling. Beneath me, above me—their shadows are heaving, and roiling, and churning.

~

Bio:

Dexter McLeod resides in western Kentucky, where he writes in the darker shades of Southern Gothic, folk and cosmic horror, science fiction, and the New Weird. His work has been included in Air and Nothingness Press‘ dark fairy tale themed anthology, Upon a Thrice Time; in Dark Moon Books’ Horror Library Volume 8 anthology; in several volumes of British publisher Hawk & Cleaver‘s award-winning horror and science fiction series, The Other Stories; and in Wight Christmas, a holiday-themed horror anthology from Canadian publisher TDotSpec. Visit linktr.ee/dextermcleod to connect with him online.

Philosophy Note:

My inspiration for this story deals with how complexity scales with civilization. From a futurism standpoint, I wondered about how a distant future humanity with greater technology would continue to overengineer the more mundane systems we already use. Carceral systems would seem to be an area our future selves would likely continue to scale upward, and as our structures become megastructures, I wondered what a prison in the distant future might look like. Philosophers along these lines have imagined penitentiary-style megastructures, like panopticons, but so much of our modern carceral state is less about watching or reforming prisoners and more about forgetting or containing them. This story considers how that might continue when compounded with deep time.

You might be interested in

Last Man

by Peter Roberts

It’s been two weeks now since I saw anybody else. I can’t stand it anymore. The loneliness is getting to me. Even when there were only a handful of us left I didn’t feel isolated. Now there is no one to talk to, no one to reassure me that I’m doing the right thing – no one else at all. It’s too much to bear. So despite all my doubts and misgivings, I have no real choice but to follow the crowd into that supposedly wonderful future.

Of course, the idea always held a certain appeal: Migrate to the future, full of technological marvels, solutions to all our problems, cures for all our ailments and infirmities. Be part of a better, more perfect world, an eternity of political stability and prosperity, with peace, justice for all, maybe even immortality.

It all sounded good, but I’m a realist (pessimist, my friends would say), so I wasn’t buying it. I’m cautious, distrustful: I prefer the known to the unknown, the comfortable to the challenging. And one thing I do know is that, when people are involved, something is bound to go wrong. Whether through war, environmental calamity, cultural conflict, or economic collapse, we surely will find some way to screw up the future.

So I resolved to stay put in the present. And, at first, I wasn’t the only one. A substantial number of us stayed behind. Life was pretty great for a while. With so few people and so much stuff, we could all have almost anything we desired. And since nearly all production and most services are automated these days, an occasional bit of maintenance was all that was needed to keep everything running. Mostly, we didn’t have to do anything we didn’t want to do. Talk about a life of luxury!

But eventually our numbers started to dwindle. One person would miss friends or relatives too much, another would worry that they really were missing out on something wonderful, and soon enough they too had departed for the future.

And as more people left, the whole process accelerated. That’s the damned thing about the pseudo-Tipler time portal – it’s a one-way trip: once you go to the future, you can’t come back.

As I said, I can’t stand being the last one anymore. So it has to be either suicide or the future, and since death seems like the greater unknown, I guess I’m off to the future, however bad it may be.

#

Echoes are everywhere as I step through the doors of the transport chamber. The interior is huge, big enough to accommodate ten thousand people at once – it was mass migration at first, and the devices were too expensive to allow very many to be built, so each one is monumental. It’s a little overwhelming, intimidating even, for just one person.

Enough procrastination. Might as well get it over with. All I have to do is push the red button, everything else is automatic. So . . . here goes.

#

The only thing that dazzles me as I step out is sunlight. No wondrous city, no flying cars, and no one to greet me. Damn it. I knew it. I knew something would go wrong with the future, that’s why I didn’t want to go.

But it doesn’t look like the aftermath of a disaster. In fact, it looks lush and green, in some ways quite pleasant. It just doesn’t look like the future. And I wonder where everyone is. What happened to them? Should I be worried? After all, worry is what comes naturally to me.

I can’t figure out anything else to do, so I start walking.

Soon enough, I notice smoke rising between some trees in the distance. This looks promising, so I walk towards the smoke, eventually coming upon a rather primitive village – mud streets, log buildings, and everything dirty, and rather smelly, too.

A young man notices my presence and ambles towards me, an odd sort of scowl on his face.

“So, another eager, hopeful pilgrim, about to have his hopes dashed.”

“More reluctant than eager. But I couldn’t stand the loneliness of being the only person around, so here I am, despite my trepidations.”

“So that is it. We had a bunch of ideas about what went wrong, but mostly we’ve been converging on the theory you represent. That would seem to settle it.”

“Wait, I don’t get it. What do I represent?”

“You’re the last one out of the pool. Nobody left. A thousand years without humans. No one to maintain basic infrastructure, let alone make the breakthroughs that would have led to that bright and shining future we all expected. A thousand years for all the lights to burn out, all the buildings to crumble and corrode. A thousand years for nature to push back into all those places we’d pushed it out of, for wilderness to take over again. No food or shelter when we arrived. No way to prevent the violence or control the epidemics. So those few of us who managed to survive the initial chaos had no choice but to start over from the absolute beginning. We went to the future, but we might as well have gone to the past – the distant past.

“Some folks worried that, true to our history, over a thousand years we might really mess things up, create a disaster just by being ourselves. We created a disaster all right. But this time the disaster was our absence.”

~

Bio:

Peter Roberts is a mathematically educated poet who sometimes writes fiction. He has been contributing to various magazines and journals, online & off, for more than 45 years. See his slightly dated personal page, god-and-country.info/personal.html, where you can find links to lists of all his published poems & stories, if you look carefully. Some may find the rest of the website interesting as well.

Philosophy Note:

This story began with the thought that the classic Time Travel Paradox might not apply with one-way, irreversible forward movement in time. It soon became apparent, however, that there could still be unintended consequences, especially if people followed typical human self-centered morality. Ultimately, if everyone wins, no one wins — and in this instance, everyone loses.

You might be interested in

The Time-Traveller’s Lament

by David Stevens

The clan of homo heidelbergensis tutted and bobbed and swayed as Fred approached their hearth, but he was not concerned. As always, he was careful to stay on the other side of their fire. He told himself that they had grown used to his appearances. If he thought about it, however, he could not be certain of the chronological order of any given visit. He did not think about it. Nor did he ponder that he – with his stumpy homo sapiens sapiens legs, tiny teeth, and unimpressive browridge –  might not appear a threat to them.

Plus, he always brought food. “Don’t ask where I got these from, fellas,” he called as he threw bones over the fire. The fellas of course did not respond, but chomped down, so Fred soon heard cracking, followed by the sucking of marrow.

Fred stalked up and down on his side of the flames. “I think I may be finished with it all. I have intervened in history 168 times. I’m worn out. I don’t physically age when interacting with the Temporomobile™, but it’s been 200 years! And I’m only 37!

“Sure, I’ve had breaks – 200 years is a long time. Coming back here, that’s not a break, that’s the default for the re-set, but other stuff. Spa-days. Weeks. Months. Take some time to think. To not think. To chill. Can you blame me?

“I was wiped out. You get it. You’re down at the stream, washing the auroch grease and swamp mud out of your hair, and a sabre-tooth appears with his big, you know, teeth, and you gotta run, and you leave the babies behind, and the sabre-tooth is happy with that, but you’re not! You’re not as emotionally evolved as a 21st century romance writer, but you’re hominids, you have feelings, you don’t like your babies being eaten, but what are you gonna do? You’re not a bad parent, you’re not a bad person-oid. There was no choice.

“Louisa was dead. Hit by a car. But it did not have to be final. I had a choice.

“People made all of the usual noises – you’re still young; it was meant to be; there are plenty of fish in the sea; she wasn’t as smart as you …

“I was already close to the breakthrough. I worked. Constantly. Day and night. I have a montage of it back in the machine. And I did it. I built the Temporomobile™. I set the dial to the fateful time, and dragged her out of the way of the car just in the nick of … well, you know.

“I wept joyous tears – she was alive and in my arms. She was shocked at her near miss, and shaking, and … stepped straight in front of a speeding truck.”

Fred’s monologue continued. He did not pause to wonder whether he had survived his first encounter with the clan because in his chronologically jumbled travels, they had already met him. Similarly, he did not contemplate whether he had survived their first encounter with him, because he arrived with the overconfidence and bonhomie of long-term, strangely tolerated, weird neighbour.

The homo heidelbergensis clan gnawed on the bones, amongst their evening activities: hearth-tending; mutual grooming (and associated insect-eating); mating, sometimes before, sometimes after the mutual grooming; toolmaking; and keeping watch for night-dangers.    

“I ran to the machine, reversed the temporal flow, and this time after rescuing her, I took her into the house and made her a nice cup of tea.

“Which seemed to do the trick. Except later that day, two blocks away, she was struck and killed by the same make of car that killed her the first time.

“My instinct was to go further back, and remove that automobile company from existence, but of course, nobody wants to be Bradbury’s dinosaur hunter – well, they might, I hunted a dinosaur on one of my breaks, great fun. I digress. I had no idea what ripples that might start, how much I might change.

“I went back and forth, fixing things, but sooner or later the universe sprung back into shape, and – boing – she was struck by a car.

“There was nothing for it. I had to amend her mother, so that she would be stricter in raising Louisa and imprint upon her the danger of the automobile!

“I spent much of her mother’s childhood driving crazily by and narrowly missing her. There were one or two unfortunate incidents, but I erased those almost immediately.

“It seemed to work. Louisa was more timid, and she and her mother jumped at loud noises, but she was alive, my love was alive! And stayed alive.

“For three months.

“The next time, she was struck by a bicycle messenger travelling at speed, hit her head, and was gone.

“I studied Louisa more carefully. I discovered a slight astigmatism in one eye. She had not been seeing these speeding objects properly.

“I couldn’t figure how to accidentally carry out delicate eye surgery on a juvenile Louisa without being caught out.

“However, I traced the imperfection back 80 years, to a something-great-grandmother.

“Fortunately, the woman had died in childbirth, so had made no contribution other than an unfortunate genetic one. So, I once again travelled backwards; removed her from the picture; and substituted another something-great-grandmother.

“Oh, do not judge me harshly. I arranged an inheritance for something-great-grandma, so she never felt compelled to marry to avoid starvation, and died childless and happy at the age of 110.

“I took no chances. I surreptitiously arranged for Louisa to have acrobatic, dance and martial arts lessons in childhood, so that she was fit and nimble and particularly good at jumping out of the way.

“This final time. I was there. The car passed harmlessly. She crossed the street – in tighter fitting clothes than I remembered, showing a more muscular build from her lessons. The truck sped by immediately afterwards, unnoticed. I noticed the delightful lift at the tip of Louisa’s nose was gone – no doubt another genetic contribution from the substituted great-granny. It was a price I was willing to pay.

“Around a corner, a motorbike mounted the footpath, knocking pedestrians flying. Louisa sprung a grand jeté, leaping over the bike without a care. Ha! My investments were paying off. I was scared too, of course. What might the universe throw next at our love?

“With an extended step, Louisa avoided an open manhole. She then ducked as though in a silent movie, avoiding a timber shouldered by a spinning labourer.

“There was a loud snap above us. Worker’s hoisting an iron safe to a top-floor business had misjudged its weight, and the lifting rope had broken. The safe plummeted to earth.

“It was no bother to Louisa. She dived into a forward roll, grabbed a small child on the way, and tumbled them both to safety!

“Take that, universe, I thought, and punched the air in triumph. Louisa deposited the child, turned to an opening door, and froze. A young woman of Celtic background – long wavy red hair, creamy skin with a spray of freckles – stepped out. Colpo di fulmine! They froze for a moment, then fell into each other’s arms, their lips locked in a passionate kiss.

“The universe laughed its arse off at me as I watched love at first sight. What are you going to do now, Fred?, it asked, braying food from its lips as it chewed up my heart.

“That’s it, fellas. That’s the story. I’ve given up. The universe hates us. If you ever work out language, after the sabre-tooth gobbles up your babies, don’t bother to ask “why?’. It was just meant to be. And the reason is.” This bit he punctuated with foot stomps. “Everything. Is. Shit.”

The clan had looked up. They tutted and bobbed and swayed a little more frantically than before.

“Except maybe. I don’t know. Is it a nature or nurture thing? Maybe Louisa swings both ways, and I just never realised because, you know, she died and all. Should I go back and give it one last shot? Just one more? Get in before the Irish chick?”

The clan had moved the babies and old folk behind rocks and into crevices. Spears and stone axes were raised.

The guttural rumble was deeper and louder than Fred would have predicted. It triggered the most primal fear response.

“I don’t want to look. There’s one behind me, isn’t there?”

It was messy. It was swift-ish, but not swift enough for Fred. Still, the sabre-tooth was happy, and left the clan alone, dragging Fred’s corpse into the darkness.

A few days later, Fred appeared and began tossing bones again. None present wondered if this was a slightly younger Fred, throwing his own chewed femur and broken rib cage that he had collected while strolling past.

“Don’t ask where I got these from, fellas.”

~

Bio:

David Stevens usually lives in Sydney, Australia, with his wife and those of his children who have not yet figured out the locks. He is the author of twenty five (now twenty six!) published stories, largely speculative, sometimes experimental, which have appeared among other places in Crossed Genres, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, Pseudopod, and most recently in Vastarien Literary Journal, Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, and the anthology Prolescaryet. He blogs at davidstevens.info.

Philosophy Note:

The simplest time-travelling stories, if they rise above action and romance, are often wish-fulfillment with a dash of Amazing! The most sophisticated are often extended melancholic broodings upon history and the human condition. Mixed somewhere in there is a spectrum of approaches to technical questions, such as avoiding temporal paradoxes, and serious historical counterfactuals.
With Fred and his homo heidelbergensis audience, I was more concerned to lightheartedly and briefly touch on a range of other points: if science and technology takes us down a path, we will follow it regardless, and ascribe moral neutrality to that path; the pernicious idea that “acceptance” is for losers, for those who give up, as though an unreflective and overwhelming focus on a goal is not monomaniacal; the notion that if we work hard enough, we can achieve anything, and tied in with that, our recent return to the idea of science as an individualistic endeavour, and grudging “admiration” for high-tech heroes (cough, Ebon Tusk); and finally unexamined interference with the free will of others.

You might be interested in

Sacrificial Copy

On the existential horror of hitting CTRL+C repeatedly, by Tommy Blanchard. Tommy Blanchard. Tommy Blanchard. Tommy....

Read Only

by John Holbo

“It had been the mental stutter.”

– R.A. Lafferty, Slow Tuesday Night

#

The waitress read Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments while the customer pondered the lunch menu. The waitress opened her eyes. The customer was taking a second. She closed her eyes and read Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit. Now, she felt, she appreciated the irony.

“When in a written examination young people are given four hours to write the paper, it makes no difference whether the individual finishes ahead of time or uses the whole time. Here, then, the task is one thing and time something else. But when time itself is the task, it is a defect to finish ahead of time. Suppose a person is given the task of entertaining himself for one day and by noon is already finished with the entertainment—then his speed would indeed be of no merit. So it is also when life is the task. To be finished with life before life is finished with one is not to finish the task at all.”

Kierkegaard would have hated 2048. No one who reads his works with understanding doubts it for a second. Of course, never before have so many readers read his works—truly, deeply, and with understanding. Of course, ‘the task’ is a bit different today.

The customer was ready. That leviathan of philosophy slipped into depths behind the waitress’s eyes, subsiding heavily into the vast, brief ocean of her mind.

“I’ll have the grilled pseudosalmon. With a Greek side. And just water.”

While the waitress tapped it in the customer blinked three times, read three by the neo-popular 19th Century ‘sensation’ novelist, Mary Elizabeth Braddon: Lady Audley’s Secret, Aurora Floyd and Circe. “The cold-blooded assassination of which a coquette is capable.” And, in that first, throwing her first husband down the well! Setting fire to the hotel! Too bad the author had only written eighty-four novels.

“Alright, we’ll have that out in a jiff!”

#

The analytic breakthrough by Lin, Gurney, Gupta and Tomás, in 2026, concerned what has come to be known as the Broca-Wernicke gyroidal super-synthesis. Reading comprehension in the brain was not theoretically modelled by these researchers, nor has it been since. No, there will always be more mystery than mastery here. (‘Pebbles on the beach,’ Newton says of our knowledge of the universe. Our mind is a universe. We play on its beach.) But certain brain regions were, for the first time, well-mapped enough, their function surmised closely enough, to allow for the interventions that followed. Damage, typically due to stroke, resulting in aphasic incapacity, could be treated by therapy. There was a drug to be taken together with a new digital implant. But it was the unexpected effect of drug, plus implant, on normal, unimpaired individuals that revolutionized the entertainment industry and continues to alter culture and society in ways we scarcely understand today and can even less certainly anticipate for tomorrow.

It became possible to ‘read’ ‘plaintext’ of almost any length, in the blink of an eye, with comprehension. Only ‘naturalplain’—though these texts can be of a semi-technical and quite semantically dense quality. Mathematical and otherwise highly technical notation—complex formulae—have proven less amenable. But as with any pharmaceutical or therapy, the effect is variable across individuals. Some can read and understand Hegel in an instant—but not calculus. For a few it is the opposite. Some will never understand either Hegel or calculus.

Individual variation aside, the impact has been tremendous. Adoption of the new technology was rapid, comparable to that of cell phones for an earlier generation. By 2038, 70% of the US population had received ‘biblimstim’ implants via safe, reversible outpatient brain surgery, often performed at Amazon neighborhood clinics.

The visual image can no longer compete. Video is dead. Videogames seek to evolve into—or devolve back into—text-based games, so far with little success. Pornography is sought in literary longform. Direct import of image files hits bandwidth constraints, plus—more impenetrably—what researchers refer to as ‘the occipital funnel’. Reading comprehension has no such speed limit. Why Johnny Can’t NOT Read, by MIT linguist and cognitive scientist Gary Ng, is a popular, if speculative, evolutionary psychology account, purporting to explain how a latent capacity to read War and Peace in under a second, more than 100,000 years before Tolstoy was born, kept our hominid ancestors alive on the veldt.

 Other popular titles compete: The Bible Brain Code; The Potboiler Perplex: Why Great Brains & Great Books Go Great Together; From Brocca’s Region to Area 51: The Written Plot Against Humanity; and the more folksy-contrarian Don’t Read This Book! There are hundreds. Nearly everyone has read absolutely all of them. They’re books.

Whatever the explanation, the fact remains nothing can compete, for aesthetic satisfaction, with the comprehensive thrill and impact of, say, a good old, Victorian triple-decker, in an instant.

It’s no good ‘lectiostimming’, instead, a lot of short works, queued up. The mind registers and approves unity. Barreling through an anthology is tumbling downstairs mentally.

The supply of extant long-form books in suitable styles is, naturally, constrained, relative to consumption at such unprecedented rates. It was at first believed AI’s, trained up on some suitable target corpus, could make up the deficit, meet demand. Neural nets duly hauled in shoals and shoals of thick novels, Victorian novels, Russian novels, Stephen King novels, Barbara Cartland novels, multi-volume Thomistic and German speculative philosophies, history, biography, memoir, travelogue. Less favored in the eyes of the reading public, but viable: ancient poetic epics, popular science, political analysis, so long as it’s long.

It was believed the ordinary reader would soon browse and wander, happily, the AI-generated equivalent of Borges’ library, sampling, not infinite books—not quite!—but as many long reads, in any genre you like, as a human life contains blinks.

But it was not to be. There is something in even the most sophisticated AI-composed book that the normal human brain revolts at. Every AI product reveals its uncanny valley. Astringent, ersatz hint of machine-learning. This is the ‘aspartame effect’. Weeding out ‘homernods’, as these are also known, exceeds machine-learning capacities—nor can humans help. No one can quite put their mental finger on it.

 A few readers profess to like that sort of thing—AI-written fiction, that is. Generally, these readers are ‘on the spectrum’. There has been talk of treating the problem, then, from the other end, by mass induction of autism, permanently or reversibly, for a para-posthumanist, post-scarcity reading experience. But for now, the neurotypical mind needs human authors.

In schools, results are good, though the need to ensure students have reading assignments long enough to hold their interest has entailed shifts. Some students are prescribed medicine for ASHD—attention surplus hypoactivity disorder and dysalexia. Basically, the inability to do anything but read books.

In academic philosophy no one doesn’t work on Hegel, resulting in profound shifts in intellectual fashion in a few short years. Most college kids want to major in English literature, with a focus on the 19th Century novel. When asked what they want to do when they grow up, young Americans say, as their great-grandfathers did, “I want to write the next great American novel.”

The effect on social media of the cultural lurch to ‘megalobiliocephalomania’, as it was jokingly dismissed, until it was no joke, has been apocalyptic. Twitter died, proverbial canary in the coalmine of the brain’s reading regions—although there was its odd, fluttering death throe; desperate shift from the old, familiar 240 character maximum to a 240,000 character minimum. The ‘teratweet’ never took off.

Instagram still has a few old family photos. TikTok is old-fashioned as a grandfather clock. Facebook limps along, cajoling its dwindling user-base to contribute to hoped-for multi-author, multivolume fanfic patchworks to be shared and liked. Ad revenue has collapsed. Who spares a glance at any ad less than 500-pages long?

The fear, for a time, was novel sorts of data breach. By law, companies and governments must now store all personal data in brain-unreadable file formats that cannot be mass-machine-transcribed into brain-readable text format. So far, this wall has held. More positively, it has become impossible to conceal things in formerly written-to-be-unread EULAs. Some readers read all the EULAs ever written, in a row, on a dare. The law is a different business today. Everyone understands the law far better than anyone has ever understood it before. Political discourse has grown civilized. The ‘news cycle’ is, at once, too swift, yet too slow, to beguile us. Citizens settle for having highly informed debates about longstanding issues, typically based on exhaustive policy white papers and long books carefully blinked over beforehand by everyone on all sides.

The real economy shrinks every year. Just over 50% of employed adult Americans work main jobs as ‘mid-list author’. “The middle-class is the mid-list in Middle America on Main Street.” Politicians say things like that. But fewer adults are employed. Few say it is a terrible way to go, economically, however.

But some do say it is a bad sign that new novels are always about life before.

For mostly what has changed is life. Just life. What we formerly considered as such was the business between blinks. ‘Between the blinks.’ A phrase, formerly senseless, now semi-derisive. Going to work, kissing the spouse goodbye at the door, a simple meal, shared conversations, watching the children play. All this goes on. But such ‘moments’ cannot but seem a long, slow-flowing dream, between burst of life, when, for the blink of an eye, something is happening—really happening. Something to read.

~

Bio:

John Holbo is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the National University of Singapore, where his favourite course is “Philosophy and Science Fiction”. He was runner-up in the Sci Phi Journal’s APA Philosophy Through Fiction Competition, in 2017, for “Morality Tale”. He is author and illustrator of the webcomic “On Beyond Zarathustra” and is co-author and illustrator, with Belle Waring, of Reason and Persuasion: Three Dialogues by Plato.

Philosophy Note:

“Read Only” may be thought-experimental commentary on the waitress’ Kierkegaard quote, which urges ‘becoming subjective’ by underscoring the potential absurdity of taking anything but ‘oneself’ as ‘the task’. One might be done too soon. But can that be the concern? And/or the story may be a thought-experiment about what bothers us about ‘experience machines’. We assume the fatally tempting ones will boast the highest resolution video. Then again, in the 1700’s there was moral panic about the epidemic spread of novel-reading. Everything new is old again.

You might be interested in

Fractal Gods Of Minuscule Things

by Ramez Yoakeim

After three unsparing days, she conceded defeat and called it quits. On her way to the car, she fought off yet another hypnagogic episode but dismissed the risks. Distracted teens and droopy-eyed semitrailer drivers posed little risk to the likes of her. It would take considerably more than a highway pile-up to dispatch a goddess.

The ill-timed collapse of a magnetar into a blackhole, perhaps, or the tumult of a galactic merger. Events unleashing energies too vast for a goddess to sidestep with deft navigation of quantum states in superposition alone.

Not unlike all the roads untaken, collapsing the quantum uncertainty banished undesired outcomes to other universes. Or perhaps the goddess, by virtue of her choices, translocated from one universe to the next. Which, in essence, was all the divine power any god possessed.

From greenlights like a string of verdant pearls extending to the horizon to other vehicles simultaneously exiting the highway to clear her path. Not the sort of occurrence that could provide proof-positive of the supernatural or her divinity, but that was precisely the point. How else could a pantheon walk among mortals unnoticed?

That was until she lapsed into a microsleep at the wheel. A goddess she might have been, but only while conscious.

Whether through chance, or the benign intervention of a fellow deity, the goddess snapped awake barely in time to avert disaster and wisely proceeded to the nearest motel: a two-star serviceable concrete edifice with faded, threadbare carpets and stale linen.

What she had not expected was how elusive sleep would then prove to be.

Instead of the slumber of the dead she longed for, she found herself passing in and out of a trance-like state of semi-consciousness, roused by stray beams of vehicles’ headlights in the carpark, or the scuffing of footsteps and barely suppressed giggles in the corridor outside her room.

A couple in the throes of the rapturous copulation of strangers. A crying infant unsettled by its very existence. Two men arguing in slurred incomplete sentences. The auditory conflict of late-night televangelists competing with home-shopping steals, and the oft censored affray of promiscuous kin on decades-old broadcasts of reality distortions. Too much bass vibrating the furniture without hinting at a melody. Dripping taps and flushing toilets and buzzing light bulbs on the precipice of long-overdue oblivion.

At some level, she was cognizant as she wished away every intrusion as it occurred, yet not lucid enough to contemplate the path through the dense strata of quantum states her wishes described. An endless stream of excised universes ensued until, at last, there remained nothing to obviate, and the goddess slumbered.

#

She roused reborn. Ablutions followed, and dressing and composition. Only then did she note the deathly quiet.

She pulled the curtain to find only a starless night outside, fathomless darkness that transformed the smudged windowpane into a blurry mirror.

She ran and flung open the door, only to find another room where a corridor had been. The covers lay half-spilled onto stained carpets identical to her own.

Glancing behind, she found the side door into the adjoining room open and a familiar silhouette cast in shadows through the doorframe. She retreated and let the door’s mechanical closer pull it shut. Both doors thudded sealed at the same time. Braided sheets, relocated bathroom mirrors, and hurled remote controls eliminated any doubt.

After, the goddess sat on the edge of the unmade bed and surveyed her new universe with a small tilt of her head. Devoid of uncertainty, there remained nothing to collapse through selective observation. Only a state of perfect determinism from which no escape remained; her godhood defanged.

Did she obliterate the multiverse or excised herself out of it? The distinction mattered little when her wishes ceased to be commands.

She raged for a time, and cried, and raged, then stilled. There remained copious water and power, a perpetual busy tone and a jukebox of looping television shows, an inexhaustible minibar packed with peanuts, pretzels, chocolates, booze, tiny cereal boxes that defied emptying, and coffee sachets and creamers with forever resealing foils.

Stultified, the goddess slumbered and awoke to a bedside clock that never changed. She could set it to any time she desired; the change lasting only until she glanced away. An eternal reminder of the moment when her divine irritation consumed existence and ended time.

What meaning had time when nothing ever changed?

She let her mind wander and roam unrestrained, fighting to stay sane, until she noticed something new unfolding before her eyes. A miniature universe she fashioned unaware in a droplet of water on the bedside table.

In its infinitesimal depth, a fierce brightness flashed, forcing the goddess to avert her eyes. By the time the purple pinprick afterimage faded, the new universe twinkled with the birth of uncounted stars. She watched, entranced, as leftover matter coalesced and cooled, and seemingly instantly teeming life erupted throughout the vast universe of a water droplet.

Beings on a trillion worlds crawled out of primordial oozes and pondered their creator, gazing unseeingly at her through the surface tension membrane.

Her heart swelled with joy, and she resolved to benevolence. She would leave her accidental creations be to lead whatever lives brought them contentment. She would only ever intervene in small ways. Measured acts of divine providence to right the scales or set proper what went askew, but only ever with grace.

The goddess sat back, sustained herself up with a pack of perpetually replenished double-roasted lightly-salted peanuts, and watched innumerable consciousnesses coerce the minuscule universe with the prayers of a new creation. She laughed at their foibles, and cried at their loss, and set to wondering if countless deities sat, like her, on creaking beds in telescoping motel rooms varying only in scale and orientation and watched their creations while telling themselves that they only ever intervened for good. Is that all that the multiverse is, the penance of exiled gods?

~

Bio:

An engineer and consummate problem solver, Ramez Yoakeim’s work harkens back to the darker side of speculative fiction classics, marred only by the occasional utopia. Find out more about Ramez and his fiction at yoakeim.com.

You might be interested in

The Last Engine

by Aaron Emmel

Thin clouds of ionized gas expand across the void like exhaled breath from long ago when we still had lungs, streamers fading between the dead galaxies. We jump from one gravity well to the next, the enormous black holes that have devoured the sky, the ancient white dwarfs and neutron stars that are all that remain of the last suns. We are testing our final engine, tracing its repeaters across trillions of light years, because we will have only one chance. If there is a mistake, no one will be left to correct it. This engine is the largest and most complicated structure ever conceived.

At least in this universe, which is the only universe we can ever know.

For millennia we follow the filaments of our design across an eternally darkening night. While we survey and confirm we also build simulations from our records and relive our pasts. We visit the ruins of our last terrestrial civilizations. We decant ourselves into flesh and walk beneath constellations drawn by a dazzling abundance of photons. In one of our oldest memories, we hover in machines of metal at the edge of a galaxy above a black dwarf that we calculated was once the sun of our home system. We wonder if our ancestors roamed the ice-brittle worlds that still circle it.

And now it is time. To stoke the last fires, to ignite the chain reaction that will tear through what remains of this universe and collapse all that exists into a point that will give birth to a new cosmos on the other side, ordered and pristine, filled with possibility, a doorway we cannot enter, a universe we can never reach. Wait too long, and not enough energy will remain to turn the engine on. Then there will be nothing left but to fight to keep our thoughts from splintering into confusion as our cognitive processes slow and we succumb to the cold.

We were immortal, once, but when universes die, even immortality ends.

As long as we had the engine to build, we had purpose. We dismantled and reassembled planets, wove fields to channel and redirect dark energy, while light dimmed around us, and we knew that consciousness still mattered. Now, at the end, there is only one thing left to do.

The trigger waits for our final act.

A chorus within us begs us to stop. Surely, it pleads, we can risk waiting a few millennia longer. Once the engine spins, twisting space-time around itself, it cannot be undone, and when this universe ends its information can never be retrieved again. Can’t we return to our memories before they are lost to oblivion?

Walking on two legs over firm earth beneath red and yellow suns. The first time we harnessed the full energy of a star. The first times we abandoned our clumsy bodies for the interstellar web—all that information, all we have learned. Surely, there is time before we light the last fire. Surely, it’s worth cutting it close.

~

Bio:

Aaron’s stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. Thanks to the patience of his wonderful wife, and despite the impatience of his wonderful children, Aaron also writes essays, graphic novels and interactive fiction. Find him online at www.aaronemmel.com.

You might be interested in

Yesterearth’s Morrow

by Ádám Gerencsér

Singapore Straits Times – 1st July 1947

Readers with any interest in current affairs will scarcely need reminding that today is the first anniversary of the appearance of those strange phenomena that marked the gradual unravelling of time as a constant and steadfast quantity, the steady progression of which all previous generations could rely on so safely as to take it for granted. This view is now considered obsolete, and rightly so, but it bears repeating how nigh impossible that would have seemed just over a year ago. Over the course of the past twelve months, thanks to the rapid advances of modern science and skilful observations made by vessels of the Royal Navy, we have gained a better understanding of the new role that the International Date Line has come to play.

I have taken the liberty to compose this recollection and offer it to our esteemed editor on account of my rather immediate proximity to the longitude in question. Not only as correspondent of the Straits Times in the Crown Colony of Fiji, documenting both momentous and provincial events as they unfold, but also as a simple resident who experiences daily the disturbing effects that still have the ability to startle as much as they did at their initial onset.

It started on the 1st of July 1946 (or the 30th of June, depending on one’s whereabouts) east of the Marshall Islands and gradually spread north and south thereof, fanning out like elongated ripples along the date meridian. Within a brief period that could not have taken more than a week, or two at the most, we found ourselves confronted with a novel and hitherto unimaginable reality: anyone crossing the international date line roughly along the 180° longitude eastwards no longer cuts across a mere imaginary division, but finds himself an additional day further in the past, or rather, on a past incarnation of the Earth that is now independent of the present. The traveller may than engage in any form of interaction with the inhabitants of that past world, a Yesterearth so to speak, without perturbing in any way the future time he had left behind. After interfering with the events on the other side of the date line, one may return to the present by simply retracing his journey and realise that nothing has changed on account of their actions, other than the fact that time has moved on during their absence. On their subsequent visit to the world of two days past, however, they will notice that their interlocutors remember them well enough and any seeds of future consequence they had planted there have come to fruition.

A world map based on Mercator’s projection distorts the proportions of the surface areas of the continents, by making landmasses at extreme southerly and northerly latitudes, such as Antarctica or Greenland, appear much larger than their actual size would merit compared, for instance, with Africa. So, when we wish to achieve a more proportional representation, we divide the map into equidistant segments that are thicker towards the Equator and thinner at the poles, as if peeling the skin off an orange, and lay it out flat. Our hypothetical map now stretches from Alaska in the West to Siberia in the East, and we know that, just as the gaps between segments of the Earth’s ‘skin’ are imaginary, the edge of the map is no true boundary, but in fact loops around and connects to the opposite end. Thus, in the world as we had known it until 1946, it was not possible to stray off the map of the globe, since a resolute straight line would take one around in circles, returning to the self-same point with each circumnavigation.

That, alas, is no longer the case. Beyond the eastern margin of our map lies the western edge of someone else’s. Of course, in a manner of speaking, our world is still round, and we may be so bold as to argue with some conviction that our present time is unique and one of a kind. For it has become evidently clear that while ships and aeroplanes making their way over the surface of all preceding Earths may travel both backwards by crossing the dateline eastwards and also forward in our direction by traversing the same line due west, the same is not true for vessels in our time. We can regress by two days on the passage from Suva to Samoa, but we may not proceed into our future, as it were, giving us the impression that we stand at the pinnacle of time’s arrow. That is to say, the future is not yet existent, or certainly not accessible, until we unlock it day by day as we stride forward in tune with our calendars.

Being first among equals (and some in the colonial administration would indeed dispute even that proposition), our position brings great opportunities, but also imposes significant responsibility upon our statesmen. The lives of nations and empires now unfold in an entirely separate manner on all contiguous Earths, and the next general election back in the British Isles, to be held in 1950, might yield wildly different results in our continuity compared to the Earth of the day before yesterday. It is therefore eminently possible that the cabinet of our Empire might find itself at loggerheads with the British government elected in our immediate temporal neighbourhood. In fact, His Majesty of today might disagree with policies that are received approvingly by His Majesty of two days ago. The fact is that the political realities of life in the Dominion will inevitably develop very differently across every successive Earth each two further days down the line.

Your correspondent here admits to having made an involuntary, yet naïve attempt at bridging the date meridian and exploring some of the strangeness of the most immediate past just east of his stationment. In the spring I had received a telegraph dispatched by my former self from the world of two days ago. It had been transmitted to Samoa, which by itself was no mean feat, as communications across the Pacific have become impossible lest one was interested in sending messages across time. Telegraphs and mail to one’s contemporaries from an island west of the date line to another speck of dry land just east thereof have to ferry westwards around the entire globe, rendering a journey that formerly took less than a day into a voyage of Magellanic proportions. It is therefore incomparably easier to reach the French Polynesia of the day before than that of today. Laborious as it may be, the telegraph drafted by the man who is my equivalent in the neighbouring past was delivered by the post boat that makes the weekly crossing from Samoa. Without indulging in the tedious details of our exchange, which was hampered by delays caused by both dimensions of time and space, suffice it to say that our correspondence was short-lived and we finally agreed never to meet in person, but to live out our respective lives to the best of our conscience and abilities.

Not all contact is, however, this consensual. One hears all kinds of anecdote around the archipelago and beyond: of people trying to find their near-contemporary selves and bring them back voluntarily or otherwise to share their work or exchange places with them, of investors travelling back and forth with the intention of effecting parallel financial transactions and reaping the same profits several times, or of bereaved families striving to find their loved ones killed in accidents on a previous Earth where the same accident has not yet occurred and might never happen. The world market in commodities and resources has become confusing and at times almost untenable, and prices across near-past worlds may fluctuate in an unsustainable manner due to a potentially inexhaustible supply of material from across the datelines, while for the same reason scarcity may beset another globe. It is not unthinkable that in the future, some catastrophe or another great war could send millions of refugees fleeing to the next available future or past Earth.

On an encouraging note, one must not forget that there are those enterprising spirits who see Yesterearth’s developments as the opening of a new, endless horizon, the gateway to the exploration of the past – and not just one, but countless possible pasts. As far as we can ascertain, endeavours to traverse a long succession of datelines near the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, where distances are smaller but travel is unhindered by excessively cold climate, are limited only by the durability of the mode of transportation, the ability to procure fuel and, ultimately, by the life span of the traveller. We can only hope that our relative advantage of chronological primacy shields us from the worst excesses of the chaotic insecurity that must eventually arise on Earths further in the past, which are flanked on both sides by another world each two days ahead or behind them. Although news of full scale inter-temporal war have yet to be reported from anywhere, it is not inconceivable that one day the menacing powers of barbaric despotism and fascist banditry, which the valiant Allies so gallantly fought to defeat in this our last Great War, rear their ugly heads from the depths of the past and gather enough tenacity to conquer hundreds of planets up the chain to the present day, growing in strength and ferocity with each new acquisition. Should that day come, we do hope that our past compatriots would send warnings across the dateline well in advance, fully trusting in the brotherhood of free nations holding together steadfast even across several zones of time. And rest assured that the Royal Navy would be first to do its duty in the defence of Singapore, Malaya and the Crown Colonies dispersed throughout the East – whether in our time or that of Yesterearth. For we will surely not hesitate to deliver a pre-emptive strike across the meridian, for King and country, should a menace arise from the Pacific of a bygone day!

~

You might be interested in

Burrowing Through the Body of God

by Rich Larson

When the slaveship arrived, we thought we were saved. We had been adrift for days in the Big Black, absorbing radiation from a catastrophic reactor failure, slipping further and further away from the trade route. The chances of another ship coming across us were infinitesimally small, so the arrival was like seeing an angel appear.

Some of us thought it was a hallucination, in no small part because the ship defied all geometry. It seemed to bloom and shimmer like a slick of oil, concentric globes of translucent material swelling and dwindling in counterpoint, flanges unfurling and disappearing. Only the most basic features of a starship were recognizable — an engine, a heat radiator, a solar sail — but these were distorted, cartoonish impressions meant not to function but to communicate familiarity.

The slaveship enveloped our craft and in a sense digested it: I watched the alloy hull dissolve like a painting around us even as our ambient temperature and atmosphere in the hold, where we were huddled by the life support system, changed not an iota. It was clear that our rescuers were no known race. In our desperation, bodies sick from the radiation and minds bending under the crushing void, we did not question our salvation.

The hold fell away and we found ourselves in a softer darkness. The walls seemed to creep away from our touch, expanding as we slowly explored our new environs. Light appeared in the form of glowing silver ribbons that slipped in and out of the walls like eels through black water. I recall the wonder on our illuminated faces. The hierarchy of our crew seemed to crumble there; we were remade as equals by the novelty of our situation.

Eventually we became aware of another presence there in the dark, an eighth shadow added to our seven, who shuffled about with us but did not speak. Normally this would engender fear or alarm, but I remember neither. This figure never approached the silver lights, or perhaps the silver lights never approached them, and so they remained unseen. My impression from their movements was that they were slowly remembering how to walk.

“You are welcome here,” they said. “I recall my humanity.”

“Who are you?” I asked, though I was not the captain — this much of the hierarchy I remember.

“I am your host,” they said, “because I recall my humanity. The damage to your cells has been repaired. Follow me now.”

They walked in a particular direction and we followed, still absorbing their words, guessing at their truth. I know now that the radiation had indeed been scrubbed swiftly and effortlessly from our DNA, but in the moment it was difficult to believe — as was the claim of our host to humanity.

Suddenly what I had thought to be a corridor unfolded in all directions into a vast hall, and overhead we were struck by a vision that remains near indescribable, even after untold eons spent beneath it. The rush of forms and colors defied the eye. Geometric patterns, red, blue, red-blue-green, branched and evolved and were subsumed by others in an instant; wheels of raw-flesh pink and gunmetal gray interlocked like cogs; beads of pure white light split and collided and finally exploded.

But any visualizer can simulate chaos. The most unnerving element of this display was its oscillation between chaos and order. I could feel intent and then abandon, concentration and then madness. I knew that my senses were ill-equipped to experience anything but the tiniest fraction of this vista, and even with that knowledge deep and heavy in my bones, I was overwhelmed.

“You are seeing what you may think of as time,” our host said. “Do not be afraid. We are sheltered from it.”

I looked at our host then, and I was afraid, if briefly. They had recalled their humanity, but not well. In the illumination of the maelstrom above us, I saw that they were composed of disparate parts: a slice of leg, a jagged bit of torso, a piece of skull with teeth below it, a drifting arm. These parts were wired together by a dark filament and moved in concert as if they were a body entire.

“Where are we?” one of us asked.

“We are burrowing,” our host said, teeth orbiting beneath their skull. “Our ship was created to navigate these cracks in time. We expose ourselves to the arbiter only when necessary.”

A bell sounded, though later we likened the noise to a baying animal, and the hall was filled with a multiplicity of beings. I saw a scattering of the known races, but far more unknown, some recognizably biological, others composed of metals or gases or silicates. I tried to guess at the ship’s original creators, but it was fruitless. I have since decided that they are not represented when the bell bays, or perhaps never existed.

The beings formed a pair of lines, and it was in watching this assuming of order that I first tasted our captivity. I could sense that they were cowed, that they dreaded what was to come. At the end of the hall, where the floor narrowed to a knifepoint, there was a high plynth.

“Choose one among you,” the host said.

I do not know why I was chosen, or if I chose it for myself, but somehow I was distanced from my companions and began walking toward the plynth. The host walked with me, though only one gnarled foot touched the floor.

“We are sheltered from time and entropy,” the host said. “But we are also fuelled by them. For this reason we must always seek new passengers.”

I did not understand anything except that I was going to be sacrificed in the stead of my companions, and in that moment it seemed a noble thing. The host produced a shred of shifting color, kin to the maelstrom over our heads, and handed it to me. It moved like an amorphous animal in my arms. At first it seemed to be a bird, pecking at the skin of my wrists, and then a hissing cat I could barely hold. My mind was making it so, for it was neither.

I cradled time and entropy in my arms as I walked the blossoming steps of the plynth. At the top I was surprised to encounter dirt — true soil, not the accumulation of dead skin found even in space. I had not seen true soil since childhood, and it seemed most out of place here. With invisible palms pressing against my spine, I lay down in the dirt.

Above me, the maelstrom parted and I saw the Big Black, a shard of space dotted with distant stars. Then the animal in my arms began to consume me. I was paralyzed, watching the hand nearest my face wrinkle with age. My veins bulged; brown spots welled up on my skin as it creased and sagged. The bones jutted up like bridges. I began to decay.

Across from me, beyond my mummified hand, I saw a skeleton rising out of the dirt beside me, uncovered as if by a desert wind. I stared into the cracked and empty sockets of its eyes and knew that it was my skeleton being reconstituted. I clutched at its clawed hand even as my own hand lost its last shred of papery yellow skin. The pain was beyond pain, screaming its rage in every scrubbed cell of my body.

On the altar before the stars, I realized my companions and I would live forever. As of this moment, the anguish has not abated.

~

Bio:

Rich Larson was born in Galmi, Niger, has lived in Canada, USA, and Spain, and is now based in Prague, Czech Republic. He is the author of the novel Annex and the collection Tomorrow Factory, which contains some of the best of his 150+ published stories. His work has been translated into Polish, Czech, Bulgarian, Portuguese, French, Italian, Vietnamese, Chinese and Japanese. Find free fiction and support his work at patreon.com/richlarson.

You might be interested in