I will die on this planet.
It is a fate I cannot escape. I know this now with a certainty that defies any law which the universe had conjured up. My body aches and the angry expulsions of an alien sun bathe me, surround me, cook me even as I crawl away from the crashed cruiser.
I had left the wreckage behind. There was nothing I could salvage, no one I could save. The crew is dead. My captain a piece of mashed meat thrown against the frontal view port. The bastard shouldn't have been so careless. He should have… hell, we had all been careless. Careless since first we crawled out of the primordial soup and had our single-celled asses eaten.
We had waded across the stars to find this planet. Hope was what drove us, the promise of alien technology what propelled us. But greed what ultimately undid us. We had traversed for nearly two years, got into fights, made friends again. Living in confined space with other people for days that blend into weeks and months and years certainly wasn't all good and splendid and shit. But that’s not really what’s important right now…
We had send probes, lots of probes. From Earth, from back home. We had scattered them all across our fine ass galaxy and found it empty. Well, almost empty. One of our mechanical marvels came back to us. It just… appeared – floating in the middle of Washington square. According to its logs, it had found a world. An alien world. A world with intelligent life. Up to that point, our philosophers postulated – what most hoped to be a rather humorous attempt of sarcasm rather than a reflection of the truth – that the assured way of knowing there’s intelligent life out there, is that none of it had tried to make contact with us. But whoever these bastards who sent back the probe were, they sure as hell knew how to travel. And not just how to jump over distances, but instantly appear.
Initially we had no real idea if that’s how the probe ended up back on our planet, but it sure as fuck looked that way. It was simply there. Instantly.
I was the first man sent near it. Of course, humans beings humans, most of us thought it was a bomb. A nuke. An extinction-event propellant that will extinguish all our lives in a matter of seconds. But what the probe carried was quite something else than a bomb. It carried something miraculous. It bore proof. It bore a star-map – among other things – so detailed and inlaid with data, that it took me and my team of scientist a year to devise a mathematical language with which to begin the process of decoding and revealing the truth. Then another year of just waiting for the computer to do its thing. But what a year. I was chauffeured around everywhere. I was like a trophy, even though most of my collages did all the work. I was like Neil Armstrong, only better, awesomer. You didn't hear about Neil finding intelligent life on the Moon, now did you? My attempts to give more credit to my team were met with milky responses. After all, I was the first to make ‘contact’ with an alien. Or at least touched something that an alien had also presumably touched. Revered, I became somewhat of a hero.
If only they could see me now, trapped on an alien world, squabbling in my own piss.
The map was not all that the probe came back with. On its magnetic storage systems was something I struggled to decipher at first. I had to develop a special branch of code specifically tailored for that section of the encrypted data. Whatever was still on it, it was the last thing to be extracted and only revealed itself after all the rest had been deciphered.
Another year. And after my work was complete, the sphere vibrated. Sensing shit was about to go down (literally), I had picked up my stuff and got the hell out of there. A lethal radiation leak shattered and collapsed my entire lab. None of us knew just what the hell had happened and thought the sphere had surely been destroyed, when something remarkable took place. The thing burned like a sun. For almost a week, on the very outskirts of Las Vegas where our lab was situated, there stood a second sunrise. The sphere shone so brightly and so hot, that it melted all the material which had collapsed on top of it. The desert underneath it was fused into glass, only further adding to the spectacle.
Again–as it is in human nature–most believed the end was nigh and that the sphere would eventually explode. A tiny supernova on the very surface of our planet. But something else happened. The sphere had somehow merged with me, non-locally, streaming liquid data into my mind, possessing my hands. I wrote down a whole apartment block worth of code and helped develop the first FTL drive, its core functionality derived from those very equations. Thank fucking Christ smart people exist on our world – smarter than me, if I’m completely honest. Because thanks to their help, we were able to make increased sense of my scribblings. A space-folding device was built promptly and it wasn’t long until we began to follow the instructions laid out for us by the sphere. The object had become useless after that, devoid of information and relevance. Everything needed to build the ship itself was contained within the information-stream. From the alloys needed and how to go about constructing them, positioning them, to the composition of elements required for the engine core, even the damn seat arrangements had been included. Building the actual craft took less time that deciphering the message.
Initially, I was not happy about the government’s selection of people to accompany me on our first voyage. Naturally, the ship itself had to be extensively tested to make sure it actually worked as intended. Being alien technology, it functioned beyond any efficiency we could duplicate using anything on our small little world. Cold fusion? Zero point energy? This thing didn’t work on any of those concepts. As a matter of fact, it downright pissed on them, threw them to the winds. Its systems seemed to break the nature of reality and recreate a new universe in a sphere around the craft. Convenient to say the least. All the more reason I was surprised when the thing began to malfunction as we had entered the orbit of this new planet. The space-rock we were summoned to supposedly had a piece of alien technology, a conduit of some kind. The information regarding the device was vague, only its location precisely mapped. Of course, again, being the inquisitive creatures that we are, we simply had to go and take a look. What awaited us was exactly the opposite of what we had expected.
The world was a wasteland. A wasteland I now crawled over. My legs would not obey me. They didn’t even hurt, and I knew they had been shattered along with my spine. I could hear bone crunching with every single drag over the pebbled-surface. Pain and more pain. The wish to die, all of those tings. Every now and again, I looked at the dark sun. It burned hot, but wasn’t bright, looked to have expanded to a size that had surely devoured a few planets on its way. Now the one I crawled over was next. I had kept a digital compass close, but the thing was useless, spun in circles.
My last act before our engines coughed out completely and plunged us into planetary entry, had been to project where our landing, or should I say crash, will take us. It read a few clicks away from where the object of our trip to this planet was supposedly waiting. Something at least...
I still remembered the tremors, the fear, the screams as we spliced through the atmosphere and came tumbling down onto this world. I had been told the people sent along with me were experienced pilots and cosmonauts. I had never checked their records. Some did in fact look like they were, took our descend and inevitable death with stoic detachment.
“Fate calls,” one of them even said. But some screamed like little girls as they strapped themselves in their chair. The captain just gripped the handles of his control-couch and closed his eyes. Fatalist bastard.
I don’t know what it was that had saved me. Perhaps the design of the chairs, perhaps the inertia fields collapsed in some places, but were preserved in a small bubble around me, who the fuck knows. I do not presume to understand why I had been spared. Yet now, as the horizon stretched before me, bare and straight as a solid ocean, I wished I had died as well. At least then I would have been spared the torture of having to drag my broken body towards what I could only presume was the right way.
“You were spared for a reason,” I told myself.
“What reason might that be? To die in a
fire? Which is exactly what’ll happen if this heat continues. I’ll be cooked alive.”
“The artifact will save you.”
“You place too much fate in the thing. Too much hope in a hopeless situation.”
It may come as a surprise to some to hear me talking to myself. But when you spend days alone, cooked up and working in a lab, you tend to develop a special kind of relationship with yourself. You have arguments and debates with yourself, you entertain yourself, and you occasionally pop into the bathroom with a certain spicy magazine to release some of that tension through other means than just work. It’s not a glorious existence, but let me tell you something about being consumed by a passion. It does just that, it consumes you. At times it gives you just enough time to breathe after you get up in the morning, a breath before you end up solving problems you didn’t even know you could grapple as you collapsed into your bed, couch, the floor, wherever.
My current predicament, however, appeared to be an unsolvable one. Yet the problem is so simple, so rudimentary and basic it unnerves me to the core that I cannot do anything about it. The problem is survival. But on an alien world? Well… that was a whole different beast to tackle. I knew I had mere hours left, it was just so damn hot. I halted for a minute and noticed something on the far horizon.
I squinted my eyes, the sun’s red pulsing ahead of me. I could see the mesh comprising the star’s outer layer, the smaller, hotter sun beneath the surface shifting and rearranging like magnetized liquid. I looked back at the object in the distance. It was black, utterly black. Dark and shimmering against the glare of the dark-red sun behind it.
“Now you’re fucked,” I said.
“It’s just the artifact,” I tried to convince myself.
“It’s coming closer.”
It grew in my vision, expanded.
I waited. The air began to buzz. My ears popped.
“You realize this is it, don’t you?”
“Shut up,” I spat.
The thing floating was a box. A big, apartment block sized box. It shrouded me in its shadow as it stopped above me. Monolithic in its size, the thing didn’t bob up or down, it didn’t move sideways, it did nothing but float in space and rape my ears with its incisive, subsonic growls. My hands began to shake, my mouth dropped. Yet I wasn’t afraid, at least not as much as I perhaps should have been. That is, until the thing started talking. Its words were clipped, the voice that came out so expansive, it felt like I could stand on the other side of the world and still hear it. The small pebbles around me shook, dust plumed the soil. The clipped nature of the grumbling voice was strange in the sense that I could distinguish but a few words. Slowly, however, almost as though the thing was reading my mind, I began to understand the rearranging words, the adjustments in sentence structure and composition, all to the point where I began to understand what it was saying. I wish I had never understood it. For the meaning of its words bound my thoughts with fear.
“I have come to destroy you,” it claimed.
“Fine!” I shouted back, scared shitless but shouting my lungs out anyway. “I’m dead then. Just end me. Do it!”
I wished it wouldn’t. No matter how much pain I knew still awaited me. No matter how many hours I shall lay, dying. None of that mattered right now, right then as I faced the prospect of my immediate demise, it didn’t matter. The end of existence? It suddenly felt like there was so much left for me to experience, so much left to learn and absorb, to see, to hear, taste and feel.
The box didn’t move. It felt like it was staring at me, looking and trying to figure out just what kind of an idiot doesn’t want to live.
“You desire death?” it rumbled. The soil reeked with its words, their rumble exciting a stench from the dirt as thought a million men had died and were buried just inches below the dehydrated crust.
I didn’t speak at first, lost in the process of thinking about what I actually wanted.
“You don’t want to die,” I said out loud, despite myself.
“I know I don’t, but what else is there?” I answered.
“There is life,” the thing above me added. “Even upon this barren world. There. Is. Life.”
“What are you?” I asked. “Are you an object?”
“No.”
“A being trapped within an object?”
“No.”
“A god?”
“No.”
“Then what are you?”
“I am All. I am the universe in its true form.”
“I don’t understand. What does that even mean?” I asked.
“Come,” it willed. “I shall show it to you.”
“In case you haven’t noticed,” I said, “I’m having a bit of a difficulty with the ‘coming’ part.”
There was a crackle and a terrible pain in my spine, shooting up from the base of my bone structure to the very tip of my head. Time lost its meaning to me as everything I knew and everything in existence was pain. Sharp, dull, never-ending, forever pain. But just as it seemed reality had been debased into me arching my back and yelling out, screaming, the pain subsided and a feeling of relief washed over me. I cried out what had probably been the last bit of moisture left in my body.
“Rise,” the earth shook.
I got to my feet, the monolith inches above my head. I could feel the prickling of its discharge, an electrified aura that surrounded it making my hairs stand on edge. The wobble of it, like a coil constantly recharging, choked the air and spun like clockwork. Wuuum wuuuumm wuuuumm wuuummm... The sound was irritating, everywhere, timeless and inescapable. If I tried to dispel or lessen it by pressing my hands to my ears, it was even worse, then felt like it wasn’t just out there, disrupting the molecules of air, but had nested inside of me, in my head, throbbing.
“There’s nothing on this world,” I said. “No greenery or shrubs, no ocean. How am I breathing? Why have we detected oxygen when flying over this space-rock?”
“There is air because I will it to be.”
“I wish I could understand what you mean,” I said. “How does anything will something into existence?
“The mind of your species is unique,” it said, as though that was supposed to answer anything. “It is unique in its incapability to imagine anything outside its frame of reference. Everything you see, everything you do is imprinted upon you. There are no truly new thoughts which come out of you, through you, save those of the most abstract nature. Yet even those are regurgitated, processed, repackaged, accessed through the collective subconscious. You are the most unoriginal species in the galaxy. Yet in your unoriginality, is the key to everything. You produce variations upon variations of variations. This is indeed the very reflection of how you were created, the process you call evolution, the folding and enfolding of space and time into things that can, eventually, interact with space-time itself, see it, examine it, marvel in it. I, on the other hand, am the original thought. The first and the only. I do not possess appendages to will things into existence. I do what you would call ‘think’, and thing become.”
“Impossible,” I murmured.
“Look. See. Proof,” it said and the whole planet shifted as though someone had flipped a switch on a cosmic television. The barren landscape waved into an endless field of green and lush grass, the sky turned from a sickly yellow to a bright blue. Moisture clotted into clouds and hung in the air. I inhaled a deep breath, basking in its freshness and pleasantry. It smelled of fresh soil near the forest.
“How can you do this?” I asked as we walked ahead, towards a strange spire on the horizon. I had only just noticed the structure as the heat-haze disappeared and I could see far off into the distance.
“How does one explain the process of thinking to an animal? How does one begin such an interaction?”
“I–“
“Your mind thinks one step at a time,” the box interrupted me. “You process your thinking only by using one a time thought-symbols. Whether these are words or projections, ab
stract ideas, all come one by one. They may merge into a fuzz where there are too many and you lose focus, yet still, always, you will think a single thought in a single moment. I think all. Everything. All at once. Every single movement of an atom, every impossible nuance of every quantum. I shape the cosmic foam. I do not move, I move the space around me.”
I had many question to ask, but couldn’t word them in a way that would make them sound worth asking. There was one question, however, which I simply had to ask. A question that had hung on the proverbial thread of humankind’s existence since the beginning of its thinking processes.
“How did you come into existence?” I asked at length. It felt like asking a god who had made it.
There was a pause. “I am existence. I am the core out of which all reality is emanating from.”
“You cannot just say things like that and expect me to understand. In my head, everything has a beginning and an end, just like human lives. Flickers of existence and then we die. But you? When did you come to be and when will you die?”
“I am forever.”
I was beginning to lose my patience. I sighed as I walked ahead, the box following me.
The spiraling structure in the distance slowly grew. Its impossible scale was mirrored by the equal impossibility of the monolith above me. I began to distinguish the contours of the structure’s shape, the curvature of its design. It was like a concaved needle the size of a mountain, refractive like quicksilver, smooth like the surface of a distant moon.
“What does that even mean? That you’re forever? Don’t you have a beginning, an end?” I asked.
“I have a beginning, Richard Bain, you are it.”
It was at that point I truly lost the ability to follow what the thing was trying to tell me. I staggered for a moment and the box halted as well.
“Please explain this to me, just, please, try and make sense. Plain words. Simple speech. I beg you.”
The spiral was nearly upon us, climbing the skies and wounding it with its sharpness. “I am fate,” said the box. “I am the very manifestation of it, jumping through time. This event has happened millions of times before. You asked me if I have a beginning and an end. I do, but also do not. The process of decay afflicts all things in this universe, some of us decay slower, some of you decay faster. Flickers of existence, as you said. In a strange, paradoxical loop, I have become bound to you, to your consciousness. It is the only thing which never decays, but simply jumps through states, through different energy cycles. I need consciousness to exist. I am you, Richard Bain, and you are me. We are admixed, like alloy, through time and space. The tower before you defies explanation, it is my womb. You have a term for it which simplifies it. Time machine.”
“I don’t understand. You are traveling back in time and repeating the process of your own birth over and over again?”
“Yes. It is the only way I can survive.”
“Why don’t you just go back in time again, instead of–“
“I know what you would ask. That I should go back and stay in that time. But I too suffer from decay. It is a slow process for me, yet does happen.”
“I see,” I said, even thought I really didn’t.
“And it will happen an infinite many times more. It has to happen. Right until I discover why it is happening. So you see, my existence is much like the human existence.”
“And if I refuse?” I asked.
“You will die on this planet.”
“Seriously? That’s your answer?” I asked. “You bring me here for this ultimatum?”
“The decision is simple. Live what is left of your pathetic life on this planet, or become one with the universe, the mind of the universe. A living god. The decision is nothing. Wrap your mind around it and you shall see it is a non-brainer, as you would say.”
“What will become of me?”
“You will be what you are, but you will be more than what you are now.”
“You say this process has been going on for a while, why?”
“No matter how long I ponder, no matter what I attempt, I cannot find a means to do this differently. Perhaps in your cycle – as I am reborn through you again – you shall be able to do things differently.”
I had become tired of listening to the box. I was intrigued, appalled, afraid, glad, sad and a myriad of other emotions all at the same time. I turned back at the thing as I walked into a brightly lid entrance of the spire and said, “You know, perhaps being able to think only one thought at a time is a good thing. Because if thoughts were like emotions and you could think a multitude of them all at once, I’m not even sure I could keep up.” I smiled.
“A last question,” I said. “Why me?”
“Why not you?” it asked. “You were selected randomly out of all the being in the universe. There is a process of selection, one needs appropriate cognitive skills, but ultimately, the selection is random. If it were any other being who was selected, he would have asked the very same thing, thought it to be an equal impossibility that he should be chosen out of all the beings in existence.”
“But why are you doing this?”
“I will die. I cannot sleep. More than anything, I wish I could,” said the blackbox, floating behind me, its sound gyrating off the inner-walls of the spire, the sound splitting my head as my eyes adjusted to the glare inside, revealed the interior to me. The insides stood devoid of life and substance. Hollow and empty save a circular device in the distant middle of the structure.
“This is the universal cycle and I am the mind of god, my thoughts resonating through eleven dimensional hyperspace. I root out into the omniverse where all realities and multiverses come together into a unified field of existence.”
I was only half listening now. To become a god? To shape reality? What was it like, I wondered. I had to know.
I walked over to the central sphere and could see the outline of my body receding, could no longer see where my body ended and the air began. My surroundings became not saturated with light, but were light. I felt like I was threading upon the surface of the sun. I knew what will happen, knew what should happen. In an instant of unified thought, I became one with all that will be and all that has been. Something, however, still gnawed at me. A problem, a thought. I had no idea where I’ll end up. Will I remember anything? Would I even need to remember? If I believed in reincarnation, I knew this would be exactly what I’d think if I knew my rebirth was forthcoming. A distant moment remained to me. A moment wherein I still knew what I had been. I blinked for the last time as I was flung to all the far out placed and all the places in between them, I was everywhere, everything, all at the same time. The speed of my journey flayed the meat of my flesh and left my bones between dimensions, until I became nothing more than a thought, a spark igniting the universe into existence.
I made worlds, I crafted suns, I swam within black holes and made galaxies, then shattered them again. I watched species rise and fall, make war upon one another. Until after a time, I couldn’t even tell if what they did was what I had willed into existence, or had a mind of their own. I later discovered they all streamed through me, but were independent of me. They were tiny cogs in the grand machine, programs within a program. I was merely the source. The universal code. Most of the time I just watched, observed – did nothing. Sometimes, I walked amongst them as one of