Prologue:
This is the residue of the reconstructed record of a very specific Specific Intersection that began on Earth(18BEB4FA). If you know basic hex that’s a ‘cursed’ designation, and those worlds are tagged for pre-emptive corrective action. Those worlds are to be blessed at the aggregate level. And if the machine that does god’s work in their absence is mediocre to the point of incompetence (it is). The machine does what it was clearly commanded to do quite well (if rigidly and predictably and without grace or imagination): rigs the odds in favor of these worlds, these universes. God’s mediocre machine really pours the ‘blessings juice’ on the little sentient things clinging to all the little rocks like lichen and all the little beings gliding above and swimming below all the seas.
Give the broken thing credit where it’s due: god’s machine keeps receipts. There are whole boreholes at the archive at the End of Time devoted to the worlds in the universe(s) where the machine dutifully rigs the odds (for the multiverse runs on probability). Those archives are complete and intelligible, relatively-always-relatively, and as such are more likely to draw born-mortal visitors like the Parson, A(0x20B).*
It was evening in the universe-of-universes. Late fall in the multiverse, god’s garden of gardens. This is the time when the stars drink all the fuel and only ember-glow. A time when Hubble is not constant, spring-taut, bow pulled, rubber band about to snap. When the pendulum hangs frozen for a half second or a billion years or both before everything collapse-deflates. All-that-is sad-sags back to the point where all began. Big crunch. Newton’s cradle cadence, marching band precision. There will be another big bang, but not for a long-past-long dull, monotonous epoch-of-epochs. And even then, after that moment of cold silence when the lights are back on in the ‘sky’ above the plains at the EOT. Even once the firmament is fully lit, there won’t be shit to do. What’s a universe-of-universes without luminous matter and life? Do you know how long it takes the universe, all of them in god’s garden, to go from hot hydrogen to anything but hot hydrogen, let alone a planet with something living on or in it? I don’t know either, but it’s a long-past-long time in an un-place where time has little to no meaning beyond energy without intention, let alone direction of physical law (firm or fluid).
It was one such cosmic autumn when/unwhen the Parson A(0x20B) left the Church Ethereal on a grim pilgrimage. She had seen the lights go out a few times and weathered long cosmic winters, but she felt in her bones that this one might well be her last. She’d grow cold, wander off and find an ash dune to snuggle with. She’d just lay down and desiccate–the final-and-actual end for those that cheat death. She dreamed her desiccation with disturbing regularity. The feeling of doom got so heavy and ever present, it permeated whatever they breathe in the little ant’s nest under a burnt tree where the church hides and thrives. And nobody seemed to perceive the doom cloud but the Parson and the wife. Ahh, the wife. That wonderful woman who was a social butterfly that made the You-You church function in life and helped build and sustain the Church Ethereal in whatever comes after life for weirdos. She has a name, the Parson’s wife, and I’m sure it’s lovely. This scribe has never seen such an important figure only-ever referenced as a spouse. We conclude it is a function of inaccurate and incomplete records.
The Parson’s wife, we’ll call her Anne as placeholder, saw something looming in the eyes of the wife she knew well-past-well and loved in equal gargantuan measure. Moody. Brooding. Perma-stoned. Anne who was a Parson’s wife expected to see certain things in her person’s eyes. Dread and doom were not among them. Anne knew the weight that the parson carried: that of waiting here to flourish. The Parson’s wife knew that her partner was alive and alight with some divine light in the garden’s growing season, when there were many-past-many new congregants to guide and help and comfort. Anne remembered that it was the dim season end of bang-to-crunch cycle, when the flock has learned to tend to itself that her wife felt adrift. The Parson’s wife resolved herself to sit with worry while her Preacher took a long journey that she couldn’t/wouldn’t explain.
She sought inspiration, that was the half lie the Parson sold the congregants and her wife. She said she needed materials. Archival materials for sermon notes, that she’d “be back with a banger, I promise. Smooches.” Indeed the Parson A(0x20B) needed inspiration, badly. One does not cross the ash casually, and this is what worried her wife. One doesn’t pop out for a quick walk on the parched packed ash. There are people, humans and many other beings that persist past mortality on the plain-past-time and beneath/above the universe. These beings that live scattered among the skeletons of lonely liminal places, beneath the staircases and transit stations and roadside dives our footfalls push to the plain, they do their living by only ever moving with a purpose–a path. To be lost on the packed ash plain or to wander the Great Wastes is to be lost.
Parson parsed the path between the skeletons of places we pass through in life. Parson did perceive the salt-shaker small library-bores. With a great deal of weed and woo-woo, the preacher adjusted her proportions to that of a mote so that she might fall into a hole chosen at random. It’s gorgeous, the library, when your eyes adjust to the float lamps and fae-flicking stewards and distorting proportions. Escher stairs to Borges stacks. Not dead quiet, not quite. There is the white-noise hiss of pens scritching paper, the clack of the odd typewriter, archivists and scribes weeping, the last two sounds coming in bursts and at random intervals. Place smells that burnt flint of old books, the dead-mushroom paper-restored ozone-tones of books that were first beat-to-shit then restore-reshelved and loved late-life.
The library, the bore-hole like a well forever deep. It’s not circular, but a polygon outlined in little straight-shelves. A polygon so vast it appears a circle barely pixelated–catwalks crosshatched across it at odd not-possible angles. The parson walk-skitter-hopped her way to a shelf that might as well be half-way down the forever-hole. There, she grabbed a book and swatted away a firefly flicking steward–the little fae thing chattering in a sub-dialect of language half dead (even on a speaker’s tongue).
She found the story. The one less wanted than needed. The story that was medicine. The old kind, the remedy that hurts to let you know its working. The story was about Jonah, not the muscled man with the trauma and the unrequited crush on Dolores (and Jack). Different world. Different Jonah: the skinny one with the -tism who dies of the disease we don’t say out loud. The one who played god for less than a half of an instant one beautiful spring day. Jonah(18BEB4FA) from the Earth with the same designation.
Now, she thought she’d found a simple sermon: “before you go get that vengeance, dig two holes.” It’s a good-un, even has a ‘vengeance belongs to the Lord’ angle for the ones that actually and for true fear god (wherever they wandered off to).
Nothing simple about the story of Earth(18BEB4FA). It’s a Book of Job wrapped in a Lot’s wife, and the ones who recorded the story’s facts completely botched the hermeneutics on that story’s flavor. And so the Parson A(0x20B), being an A-series mortal, literafiguratively me (that is literally and figuratively), did precisely what I and all A-series do: put her best nana-chain on her spectacles, grabbed snacks and hydration and her finest weed blend(s), and set to work. She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her big old shnozz, my beautiful beak on another person’s face. She made a post-it scroll and tested re-tested every pen. The Parson set her chair just right and fell into a research-hole deeper than the endless library. The preacher fell so deep, spent so long in the hole, she learned to speak with the stewards. Had them ferrying texts from else-and-everywhere to her and her sermon.
This is what she looked like for an age and then some, for some lump of time no poetry can encompass: she appeared to me as if she played a piano. She did nothing but read and write, but what the parson did was compose and re-compose on a typewriter airlifted to her by a team of stewards. She took the time to unravel Ariadne’s thread and in the archive of archives the Parson came alive again–if only because she had a path, a vector, a proper puzzle.
Official records call Earth(18BEB4FA) a bland utopia predicated on a grand act of voluntary and consensual sacrificial love some centuries after Jonah’s death. A narrative that reeked of bullshit (if not brimstone). But all meta-data on the day to days of this particular iteration of the little blue marble that orbits Sol included fragmented references to a hex designation, a shelf, a bore-hole library of Babel that should not exist (or no longer does). Every record after skinny little Jonah’s death has a parenthetical with a fragment of the address of another world.
The Parson grabbed her pack and gathered provisions. She asked a friendly steward to keep her book pile as she left it, and set out across the packed ash at the End of Time with half-a-path, a portion of a destination. Barring a minor miracle. The Parson A(0x20B) was doomed.
* Archivist’s note: As this scribe has noted, repeatedly, this is a serious problem. We in archives are misrepresenting the multiverse to the only people who give enough of a hoot about it to visit the archives. 90 percent of archival material viewed/circulated relates to the worlds The Machine that Does in God’s Absence has been explicitly instructed to bless. These worlds are rife with Specific Intersections and other temporal phenomenon (and all the divine/infernal/HVAC interference that comes with). These worlds are misrepresenting our understanding of the odds of anything happening in god’s garden. Worse, god’s garden, the multiverse, the pomegranate, whatever you want to call it–runs on probability. Observation effects outcome. Those most responsible for picking up the slack of god’s mediocre machine might be, along with that machine, skewing outcomes in the multiverse simply by observing them.