Endling(s) 1

“Three bodies is not a problem”

GLIESE 667 CC – EARTH(0x7C0) – KEPPLER 22B – JUPITER (SOL SYSTEM) – E.O.T. (END of TIME)

*

The three body problem is not really a problem. It is for you, and certainly for Gary the bug and his kind. For the Glesian’s its a matter of life and death. For most humans, it’s a math puzzle, a parlor exercise–until/unless some preconditions in the realm of optics and ‘give-a-shit’ are met.

It’s only if/when a species in a stable system learns to see really far and really dim–to truly look/listen. When they earn it. When a species knows enough about the math-magic and the warp-weft of the black above them to conjure tools like telescopes and radio observatories. Then they begin to see exo-planets and dim little goofy trinary star systems like Gliese 667–all the multitudinous and seemingly-easy answers to the three body problem in-the-real and doing-the-thing.

In reality, out on stage in the black velvet void where the spheres dance there is no problem for a planet or a rock or a star, they know the steps well. And when a second or third star stumbles in and kicks a planet in the head or devours it’s neighbor, every one of them left alive dances on with the grim determination of a professional performer.

A long time before you, Gliese 667 was a system of four stars: two dim yellow dwarves and two baby reds, dimmer still. The yellows ate the weakest red, ripped it to shreds and consumed it. Then millions past millions of years, tens of millions, decades-of-millions into billions of years as planets congeal, clump, cool. Gravity kneads smoke and dust and rock to dough and then planets, each star in the trinary with its own full collection of orbiters–super Earths and Venusian hot-houses and even a gas giant.

But the same gravity the twin stars used to kill their sibling was also a tool suitable for casting out their children. They did that, the two yellow stars of Gliese: tossed their children one-by-one into the void. The imperfect ones and the perfectly good planets born at the wrong place-time–each one Hephaestus cast off the mountain, again and again again.

What’s left, at least for long enough to foster a civilization, is a little rocky thing quite a bit bigger than your home: a super Earth populated by a polite and sentient species of might-as-well-be-‘bugs.’ The impending doom wasn’t a surprise, the end-by-ejection of Gliese 667 CC. The threat to the Glesians could have been climate catastrophe or nuclear war or any of a million other gun-under-the-pillow problems that bedevil all life in the multiverse with enough wit to know how tenuous being alive is (for the lone soul and whole tribe alike, always). Gravity. It’s a gravity problem.

On the eve of apocalypse, the Glesians go into their arks five-by-five. Next go the semi-sentient amoeba-mold balls (cows). Then come thousand-legged millipede’s with two faces and ten antennae (dogs). They take crop samples: the not-sentient-but-nutritious slime molds desiccated and preserved and cross sections of the many fungi (edible or industrial or recreational) the Glesians cultivate. Each “ark” is every sentient species’ go-to to weather the end-of-days: a bunker, a hole.

The Glesian ant-farm/bee-hive aesthetic is different than a human bunker or a cephalopod shelter-bore, but the logic is the same: “We’ll dig a deep, safe hole.” We will fill it with food and medicine and all the precious things and all our tools. We will hunker down and let the storm pass. Sometimes, this near universal self-preservation strategy even works. It’s a product of the cultures of the living things that come to be in this multiverse. That’s a dangerous word though: culture.

I’ll tell you what culture is, not as an authority, but an observant man. An individual culture is one of the multitudinous expressions of a thing universally valued by all. Family: you all love your babies and elders (or make the effort to love the difficult bastards fate made you related to). And yeah, a lot of humans, sentient bugs, and octo-people have that ‘eat their young’ tendency or the urge to defenestrate their young out of very high nest in a very high tree or large mushroom (depending on the planet). But by and large, whatever the size or shape or relation (biological or chosen or accidental): a family is a unit of care. It takes many forms. It’s expressed many ways, but a family is always a unit of care. Get it? Every culture is one weird path to the same place. Disagree, I see you doing so vigorously. It’s fine. You’re allowed to be wrong.

And this isn’t about defining words like culture, at least not directly or even really at all. It’s about the yeeting of Gliese 667 CC and the poor little bastard Gliesian’s. This is about the wrong(s) done to/by the them and the havoc and mis-reads it causes on two other worlds just getting their sea legs out in space.

Say Greece. Now say Grecian urn. Say Glesian. There you go.

The Glesians are short, stout, hearty. Slow to anger. Deliberate in the way a people come to be when they a evolve in high-G–when a trip and fall can kill you. Verily, gravity is a function of mass, and Gliese–their Earth/home/hearth is a ‘super Earth.’ More mass, stronger gravity. A few G’s more. How many, I don’t know, I can’t quantify for shit.

On Earth 23.5 degrees of lean makes Winnipeg colder than all a witch’s bits in the winter and Tampa danker than the devil’s gooch in summer–your seasons. The presence of two other stars is the source of the tidal tug that makes Glesian civilization possible and so often threatens to wipe it out (by flood, quake, volcano).

Their world is tidally locked–one face always sun-facing. Cold-ass aimed out at space. It’s too hot on the shine side, too-cold on the ass of the planet. The Glesians live in the twilight ring of always-dawn-and-dusk that runs from north to south pole. Vast cities centered around archologies rise like termite towers out of the clay. They build deep and durable. The planet shimmies and shakes and quakes on the regular. The underground rivers that quench the crops and the bug-people, that same waters that would reek of chlorine bleach to your nose, flood and rage and bubble up to fill cup-valleys. The subtle violence of tidal forces.

I’m always struck by how calm the Glesians appear. I’m certain they’re saying more than I can perceive, singing songs in the key of pheromones’ my nose can’t hear. But their body language is placid. No, it’s more than that. They just “stiff upper lip/mandible” it through whatever life throws at them. And all I feel from Gary’s mind is calm. This little ant-faced guy who looks like he has a moustache. There he is, calm as cucumber in his cell in a bunker, hunkered down and ready to weather the end-of-days.

Gary, the little stoic sits in his bunker-quarters during downtime. Bachelor quarters. He’s a young guy, barely done with an advanced degree and in no hurry to join a quintuple (their family structure). The room is deep rock, rough gouged. Machined but still a cell in an ant farm. He’s doing a puzzle–like a giant busy bee doing a crossword–based on the math you call the “three body problem.”

The Glesians, like you, were smart enough to read the writing on the wall–to know their planet’s orbit was not safe and stable forever. They threw themselves at the problem, unlike you–or at least unlike the humans on my world (0x54).

The Glesian system had a “snuggle”-rock (as the Tardigrades call them): something mix of your/our planet Mercury and a Venusian hot-house in very close and warm by a star or stars. There it is–circling the two yellow dwarves close-and-tight and also the only place you’re likely to find a ‘permanently’ stable orbit in a bi-or-tri-nary star system. The Glesians colonized it.

The shorter-lived-than-thou and tighter-knit (pseudo-telepathy) bugs lived miserable lives for many generations (and still do) on a world whose name translates to something like hell. The pressure would smoosh you paper flat, human. The permanent cyclone winds would whip you off into storms of sulfuric acid.

But the bugs were born on a world that would eat you and yours alive, literafiguratively, and they cope in a way that even a tardigrade could respect. If a giant amoeba-mold didn’t get you the water would–it’s basically chlorine bleach. That’s what drove the bugs to build the bulbous ships that could whether the void between worlds and habitats to withstand the crushing pressure and brutal acid wind of that furnace world: desperation. It drove the Glesians to seed the hell world and every one of the many moons in their system and to make the arks–their species particular approach to Continuity of Society.

Their greatest Glesian minds, brains far bigger and more eloquent than sad-bastard bachelor Gary with his puzzles, had decided and persuaded: they couldn’t stop the yeeting of their homeworld. They could turn the world, the whole of Gliese, into a great ship that might find safe harbor circling another star. What would the people do on that night, that functionally forever night? They’d sleep. Hibernate. And in their dreaming they’d steer the ship in the dark.

It’s a brilliant plan. I’ve never seen a species with the collective-and-genuine cooperative will to pull off such a feat of mega-engineering. Honestly, even the Cephalopods would say “fuck it”, save who they could, and let their home go. The Glesians had the same brutal kill-each-other phase(s) in history as human, octopeople, and most other sentient life, but when their planet’s fate became clear to scholars, and when it was disseminated to the masses, things shifted (politically) pretty quickly. No hive mind. No slavery or slave labor. Just common purpose and a species whose sociability evolved in close-quarters.

Look at this achievement, their last: the ass end of a Bussard Ram-jet. It’s on the cold side of Gliese reaching skyward like a prayer, like Babel. The engine runs just fine, or it will, once they finish it (and in the nick of time too). It’s all the rest–the stuff that sustains life that began to fail the Glesians on their long voyage through the void.

*

Earth(0x7C0) isn’t exactly thriving, but it’s not on fire. They are re-building, which is another way to say they are grieving without saying so. Many aren’t grieving at all, and that’s dangerous.

There’s a cozy little 3-D printed cabin in Vermont, next to the cozy little printed cabin where a very cushy protective detail lives. The retired US President Sydney Sanders flips through the ever-proliferating news networks she keeps adding to her satellite package. Her retired-Fed girlfriend sighs heavily over her coffee-spliff combo. Mal doesn’t talk to Syd during “News Time”, but she’ll passive-aggressively stomp around its borders with huffs and sighs and fidgets that are words barely-contained.

First channel shows the threshers, great filter ships. They gulp sea-water like massive filter feeders. They shit micro-plastic and PFAS free sea water in their wake.

Another channel. Mobile factories march through the wasted places, great domino-monoliths on wiry spider legs. They march and loom and stomp until they find a pile of sufficiently rich refuse. Creaking metal and pneumatic-hisses as the machine droops low and skeletal arms descend from seamless panels. The factory’s clawed hands grab cars, piles of bricks and busted concrete. They snatch at the endless trash pits and ruined roads. And every bit of the dross is fed into that mouth, the maw that glows red with the heat of unseen cutting lasers, blow torches, and pneumatic contraptions that twist and cube and blast and melt. The mobile factory eats debris and shits building materials. Bricks that are impossible tough. Forever tough. Bricks baked so hot, so high-pressure, the microplastic debris in them becomes a dense re-bar. Alloys. Wire. Batteries. The beast draws the power to digest and process-re-process from a Lockhart-Marvin Baby-Fusion and a Shulzie–not big enough to ‘fly’ the factory but there to take the weight off it’s spider legs (to shave a bit of mass).

Syd leans in, turns the volume up to listen to the protestors chant. The cops show up and tussle. The great crouching machine and the tiny people in orange vests that feed it and hold its leash. The great machine sits outside a city reduced to rubble by Abel or maybe the war before (or both).

The protestors call it a grave, and they’re not wrong. And there’s a standoff until a judge says “wait.”

“I appointed that guy!” and Syd snatches Mal’s spliff and hits it hard and cranks the volume: We as a people hear the same call of the modern as the rest of humanity. We set ourselves to the work of rebuilding, as we should. I pray we continue to pound the swords to ploughshares as we rebuild. But we will not “drive our plows through the bones of the dead” literally. We must have a societal discussion, likely a painful one, about how we acknowledge the past and honor our dead and how we got to this moment. And we must have this discussion precisely because of the library-of-Alexendria hole in our own sense of our history we are all, every single human, grappling with.

“Yeah, that’s your kinda guy. Bow tie. Drama queen. Obscure literary romanticism.” You’re speaking during news time, dear. That line is not obscure, and you’re speaking during news time.

The sigh is heavy. Mal blows smoke rings, curls up on the couch as the smoke coils above. Syd flips channels with this crisp gesture of command, like she’s pinching imaginary underlings. The clicker clicks, a mad dash through the brain-rot channels, fewer than there were (and louder now).

Syd lands on the live-feed of Dolores arrival in-person at the UN. The talking heads do what they do: there’s plenty to talk about at the first face-to-face UN General Assembly in years: plenty Dolores related. She inherited Abel’s power. She’s sovereign (on and above their soil, everybody’s). She’s powerful, terrifyingly powerful. She promised to protect humanity, and she did.

Except, for once, someone said ‘humanity’ and meant the whole thing. Dolores has love for the wretched of the earth, the low places, specifically the people that live there. That doesn’t exactly work for those who love flags or money or power-over and nothing else. They really don’t like Dolores.

There are Barrage Balloons–great massive mothership-manufacturies–hovering over huddled masses and Squattersvilles and refugee camps. More of her drone-ships stand guard at all the worlds worst DMZ’s as if to impose peace. It’s been long enough, two decades, for everyone to forget what rail guns and guided missiles actually do aside from look tough and phallic, and the people with yacht-fleet and dragon horde money want to own what they can and burn what they can’t: ‘Dolores has got to go.’

All of Earth(0x7C0)’s “Great cities” took a beating in the war and under Abel’s eye. The most symbolically important in the before times are back and bustling and imposing in whole new ways. The General Assembly, like any event in any rebuilt place is as much an advert or propa-puff piece, and rightly so, for a rebuilt city.

Every story from one of those cities includes the place-as-character–does the full Dog Day After-intro treatment.. Endless montages–and with that all the ways to bury the past or keep it or twist and contort it. And here we see New York eternal–the self-proclaimed capital of the world rebuilt-on-stilts in vast brutalist blocks with engineered vines that clean air and bear fruit. Shade trees on every vast avenue-on-a-plate. Brick reproductions next to brutalist archologies a mile high. The contradiction in motion.

Abel blasted the city and ‘baked-in’ sea-rise put the old city under shallow water. The new thing is a plate on great girder legs that reach down into the bedrock below every drowned-or-drenched borough. Subway trains hang from the bottom on a new transit map (same as the old map, roughly). Vines from Keppler cover and stabilize the structures that stick out of the water like broken teeth. Kelp from our friends out there grows all over the old city and and drinks the oil sheen that oozes out of everything drowned there.

In places, the plate is cut jig-saw to let the remnant tops of the old city’s few remaining buildings through–ivy covered and bottom-flooded great monuments to the past. The structures are stabilized and manicured missing-teeth-become-planters for the purpose of every kind of growing green thing and functional-beautiful fruit gardens.

Syd returns to herself, scratches the sofa arm. “Fuck, your weed is strong.” Thank you, dear. “You smoked this shit for years and carried a gun.” It’s news time dear, your rule.

The news shows the crowds gathered at great distance, it’s a mostly-celebratory spectacle. The UN is back home in New City, New-York. This is the first in-person General Assembly in some time. Heads of state, not lackies or delegates. Enemies-come-frienemies gathered in a re-built city on a plate above a ruin.

The Cephalopod ambassador arrives in the levitating sealed tank surrounded by guards human and mechanical.

“That’s gotta be awful, look how anxious they are.” Mal, you’re talking again. “Sorry” How can you tell? It’s a squid.

Mal takes a long drag and rattles off: “Squid is colloquial pejorative. It’s cephalopod or octoperson, and she is anxious. Tentacle twitches. Confined space, above ground depending on drones and proxies and tech. Look at her eyes sweeping back and forth.” I love you. “I know.”

Dolores arrives. A big armored truck lead-and-followed by two more. Humans and drones in her delegation–even an old Shaky Jake (her personal confidant and advisor. The whole gaggle piles out of the cars and forms a living cordon around the human/AI colossus.

There she is, stepping out of the SUV–the big woman who looks like she’s made of metal (because she is). Every feature of her original body, down to individual hair follicles, are reproduced in the alloy-amalgam of silver-nickle-other. On her body, from her neck to her ankles, text in a thousand languages and alpha-numeric codes swirl, flit and trail. She wears as clothing the words that make her mind(s) function.

“Dee does that to fuck with the intelligence ghouls and your kind. That code-skin.” You can talk but I cant? “Presidential privilege is forever.” Sanders points to the swirling text on Dolores, continues: “We had those phone calls, those ‘fireside chats’ to reassure the hawks and the rich assholes and she admitted she does that–the words and code on her skin–just to mess with the spies and watchers. It’s nonsense.” Yeah I’m aware. “And?” We still had to record it, and analyze it.

Dee stands there, attempting a smile and waving to the crowd. The news cuts to a drone shot, high above. Dolores is two steps from the truck when the excessively large bomb on the truck explodes with excessively devastating results for all near by.

“What? What the fuck! Why? This is the third fucking time.” Syd’s eyes are locked on the screen, reaching blindly for the Fed’s spliff.

Mal passes the president-retired the roach. Smoke choked, she speaks: “Yeah, but like, being blown up has got to take a toll.”

“What do you know?” You’re paranoid. Some people aren’t weed people. “I am weed people. ‘It’s got to take a toll.’ You know something. Do not dodge me.” I’m not dodging you, Syd. “You’re a shitty liar. Mal.” It’s a disability, Syd. “No, it’s a neurotype. I’m not Syd right now. I am also gonna win.” Sydney. My love? “Try again.” President Sanders.

Sydney Sanders sits up strait in the corner of her sofa. She gathers her fuzzy travel blanket around her shoulders, grips her coffee cup. “Correct. You’re going to volunteer everything you know from your previous job about why anyone, ‘us’ included, would hurt Dolores.”

“One woman world power? Cause that part of her little introduction to the world wasn’t menacing at all?”

“Oh fuck you. Humanity had a gun to its head. She aimed it somewhere else.”

“But Dolores kept the gun. She kept a lot of guns.”

“Fuck you.” She’s building more. “Fuck. You.”

Mal keeps going,”Super great orator, like Lincoln or FDR good.” Shows surrender hands. “I know “fuck me.” The old Fed shuffle-stomps to the kitchen to the bottle, two glasses, and the pack of emergency cigarettes on the high shelf behind the coffee mugs.

“There was a working group that spit-balled a few ‘just in case’ plans for, uh, hurting Dolores.” I didn’t fucking order…”Yeah. Well there was a working group.”

Two glasses. Mal lights two cigarettes, passes one and settles in for the long explanation.

*

It’s a miracle the cephalopods ever saw the stars on such a cloudy world. It’s a foundational myth in a lot of their culture(s)–the “how” of their looking to the skies and seeing something that might spark imagination. There are biopics about great thinkers and ambitious octo-people. There are promethean myths. I love the one about the cephalopod with arms so long (a brain so big is the idiom) they reached up and snatched a star out of the sky and used it to fire the first forge at the bottom of their sea.

In the here and the now (relative always relative) a shuttle pod pierces the almost-permanent cloud cover, red hot from re-entry. Any time now, the expected kick and familiar hiss and that stomach lurch when the Lev kicks in. Eight arms should emerge to guide the pod shaped like its makers on a graceful dive at safe speed into the sea on Keppler 22-B.

The levitation-pods should engage any second. Blue, we’ll name her same as her hue because her name is long and must be danced. She is young, but holds high and important rank: diplomat to Dolores. The book of first contact is tattooed in luminescent glyphs up one arm. The book of Dolores, of her effort to know the guardian is written on another. At the end of this trip, and after she eulogizes the Old Timer–the isolationist she butted heads with–she’ll add a personal tattoo story on the under-side of one arm about her frustrating mentor.

She co-led the first contact mission at maybe 100 years old. That’s barely adult. You might call ‘Blue’ a “Wundersquid” (but squid is a pejorative so don’t do that).

Blue is a Cephalopod, one of a dozen floating in a shuttle-pod built by Cephalopods that is shaped roughly like an octo-person. Are we narcissists? She thinks, when the shuttle shimmies hard and shoves her out of her anxiety-denial.

It’s been a while since their free-fall from orbit to atmosphere began and no ‘kick.’ No ‘kick-hiss’ and slow to a safe velocity. The water in the cabin shudders at the turbulence outside and the panicked Cephalo-passengers flick-flicking away. They’ve got eight legs with independent nervous systems. Three languages: vocal, dance, skin pigmentation (and maybe emergent telepathy, but that’s for another story).

It’s like they’ve got nine brains, not really, but they can and do have several conversations at once. The cabin is alive with vibration and voice and sound and the general din of a ship in catastrophic free fall toward an ocean crash-landing.

“It’s a long way down, give the pilots time to work.” She says it in all three languages for emphasis, and for a few forever seconds there’s something like calm in the cabin, but alarms blare and the pilot orders passengers to brace.

Blue ‘breathes’ and shakes out Fuck my life.

What did you say? It’s a kid, small fry across from her., clinging to mom and dad’s suction cups. Mom and dad are reciting an old litany again and again again, eyes closed.

Blue gathers herself, and reaches out to take one of kiddo’s free hands. I said, we are going to be just…

*

EOT

*

It’s a standoff, but heaven’s Feds treat it like a hostage situation. Fed trucks parked on packed ash. More ash falls like snow on a wind that blows from nowhere to nowhere forever. Red-and blue LEDs strobe-flash-repeat and do so again for all time. The light rebounds off the other cop cars and mingles with the high beams blasting at the base of the spire.

A Metatron and Baphomet stand on opposite sides of the spire, each with a bullhorn. They shout conflicting and contradictory commands at the two they’ve got trapped at the tippy-top. They shout these commands when they aren’t swearing oaths at each other in always-dead languages.

There is confusion about just whom is in charge. “All heavens Feds” means angels, G-men and their opposite-but-equal. It’s Thin Men in cheap suits in shoving matches and scuffles and slap fights and beating each other with clubs. It’s chaos.

The Demon laughs at the ants below, two great spliffs hanging from his mouth like fangs. He lights both, passes one to his frienemy–the anxious angel.

“I want to keep a clear head.” It’s medicinal, and you need this in your head to keep it limber.

The spire is the burnt-past carbon remnant of Eye: the little lump of metastasized machine that god smote. The thing stood there like a ship’s mast on Leviathan’s back–grabbing ash the way ice grows on cold ships in bad weather. There it stands–a crinkled blade of grass. A skinny, naked tree struck down half way to heaven. At the top, the altar flat tip-top sits an angel, a demon. Between them is a terra-cotta pot, three earths in some good soil.

Below them, there’s a lot of trouble, and if heaven’s Feds ever figure out who is in charge they’ll rage and they’ll commence with a raid.

*

Three bodies is not a problem. Things in space will orbit or they won’t. They’ll collide or careen off. Three peoples, three species, and all the baggage they bring. That’s the problem and it’s the one at the root of every social problem that’s ever been: trust and how to build it at relativistic speeds and with end-of-days consequences.

*

END CHAPTER ONE.