*
KEPPLER 22B
*
Bleep. Bleep. Deet-deet. Bleep. Pause. Bleep. Bleep. The medical device monitor beat repeats complete with new tweets and high hat tics from the blood pressure monitor on the very tip of one of Blue’s remaining tentacles.
I’m alive. That is Blue’s first thought. Banal, I know. She’ll laugh about that fact later, much later. Before most beings die, or ‘almost’, or ‘half-die’ they think that moment will give them insight, right? You’ll see god and they’ll give you the answers and you’ll bring them back, and if you can’t? You’ll return with a knowing smile and carry peace or some kinda hippy dippy shit. That’s what every kind of sentient I’ve seen thinks a near-death does to you.
None of that shit happens. If there is illumination, it is profane and don’t come back with you. Some portion of you will fall back into your body and you will be so very fucking grateful for that wreck you inhabit and every breath you rasp, or drag over your gills, that you don’t really care to carry grand ideas. Not in that moment. Then, the whole world collapses to the harsh clinical lighting. Everything is in the kelp forest in the window waving to the transcontinental current. It’s the scratchy-ass, wonderfully uncomfortable hospital bedding (whatever the planet).
That’s where Blue is: re-learning to feel. Re-learning to corporeal (it’s a verb in this context). She can wiggle the right leg with the BP sensor. She can reach for the call button.
Two doctors cross four arms each in front of them. Both are mindful of their fidgets. They can’t look Blue in the eyes. They’re acting like somebody died. “I lost an arm, yes?” She speaks it aloud, the question-statement.
Two arms, actually. The doctors dance the phrase, hushed, curt. Clinical. “Ok. There was a little girl.” It may take a long time to adjust. To recover, in so much as one can. “On the shuttle, a little girl with her parents. What happened to Kiddo?” What? We’re in the middle of our explanation. Why would you interrupt, patient? Cognitive delay and speech issues. Processing seems to be the issue here. Indeed. Patient also ignores social cues. I concur.
“I’m processing just fine. I’m alive. Six-legged and alive. The child, what happened to the child on the shuttle?” I’m sorry, miss. No child survived the crash. And when Blue, devastated, just sort of ‘goes away’ to wherever it is we go when we cannot hear another word. Her doctors do, of course, note this as further evidence of cognitive delay and damage.
GLIESE–INTERSTELLAR SPACE
*
The journey is long-past-long, longer still for Gliesians–they’re a short lived species.
With a lot of veggies, luck, clean living and medical care a cephalopod can live a thousand Solar years. A human can dodge death for a century-plus. A Glesian over 40 Earth years old had a ‘good run’, and breaking half-century is automatic “honored elder.”
The Glesian Odyssey began when British sailors were boiling the vitamins out of their food on Earth(0x7C0), and Gary would not live to honored-elder-age. Gary would do what he did his whole little bug life: fuck up and be oblivious to it. I’ve reviewed his records, love the guy. That’s a lie, I tried hard to love Gary. I really did. He had very good intentions, always.
But Gary was a lonely bastard long before the Gliesian’s went to sleep. And while that’s ok, he never did a damn thing to make himself worth being around. That’s the real reason no one ever invited him to a Quintuple–and all the sexy adventures followed by wholesome labor rearing baby bugs. He realizes that, finally and tragically in his last lonely moments. The only companion Gary had ever truly had was the machine, the living computer that pilots the planet-ship Gliese. The same creature that had spent years doing it’s best to eat him. He might’ve laughed at the timing of the epiphany if he still had the strength to laugh. He’s gassed, gazing at the ceiling as a tendril-tentical of the living computer drags him by one of six legs toward it–toward hell and hundreds of years of un-death.
The hungry and deviously curious computer pins him to the wall next to all the other living and mechanical components. On the wall like an entomology display, fungal tendrils wound tight round the body like solder locking surface mounts to a vast dried-mushroom circuit board the size of some sports field. There he would persist in un-death, living nightmare as the machine consumed and integrated his body and mind over a span of time no Gliesian consciousness had ever experienced or conceived of.
His waking nightmare would come to consume and integrate everybody, every bug on Gliese, in an all consuming circuit of fungus and resin and bug flesh and metal.
*
MUCH EARLIER
*
I’m capable. I’m smart. I’ve got this. Gary leaves a trail of self-affirmation on his trek to the sleeper pods in his shelter. I’m capable. I’m smart. I’ve got this.
We all know Gary does not “got this.” He’s got a long list of half-learned trades and talents part-cultivated. Life’s a journey and his road is just a cul-de-sac. He’s a lonely bastard, and I have love for the benevolent lonely bastards out in the multiverse and fractal-beyond.
But that ain’t Gary. He’s a fuckup. It’s not that he fails. It’s ok to fail. He just ‘gets some on everyone else’ purely figuratively. He drags shit across everybody else’s carpets, as you’ll soon see.
He wanted to live, and I can’t blame Gary for that. To be fair, you don’t know which of your friends-and-kin might go feral in a survival situation (or maybe you do, or maybe it’s you).
I saw a lot of people do a lot of things out of their character when the lights went out on my world. That’s not Gary, he just became more himself.
He had a ‘slight-of-hand’ phase and a ‘lock-picking/urban exploration’ phase in college. This was before his ‘briefly incarcerated for trespassing’ phase and before he committed to wearing an interesting hat in an effort to get potential mates to notice him. We’ll call that his chapeau era.
The pheromones are thick in a cloud around the remains, scattered on a dozen floors, of a dozen locked doors between himself and his assigned sleeper pod. Supply closets and tool supplies. Food provisions, but more than that the special celebratory feasts saved for “wake up day” and beyond. All the good drugs. The best drugs. Gary got into everything.
If he were half as gifted as he thought, his hands a tenth as graceful as he believed or his wits an eighth as sharp, Gary might have succeeded right here and done minimal harm. He might have had a nice snack. He may have found a way to open his sleeper-pod without damaging life support for a hive’s worth of his fellow bugs.
Instead, he so-damaged the life support systems of a whole hive that he effectively killed a town–not all at once, but by infection. The stinking pheromonal cloud of “Success!” still hangs in the air around every lock-circuit he butchered. It lasted a long while in the dead hive, too.
Everything about the Gliesian ship is precisely planned and serves a purpose. Encounters with bad space weather or engine damage? They have a game plan for any kind of weather their telescopes have ever seen. Catastrophic failure of nearly half the planet’s pods and systems? The ship can lose half its population, power, operational capacity and still function–so rugged is bug engineering. The greatest Glesian minds planned for all of these catastrophes and more, but they could not plan for Gary.
There’s a blind spot, always, in the design and conception of all things–even-and-especially well crafted things. The enormity of the task: taking a planet of sleeping bugs on a voyage between the stars, called a complex machine out of the collective bug imagination. But there are always limits to imagination. Nobody planned for Gary–for his particular flavor of blithe, “I’m killin’ it!” anti-social chuckle-fuckery.
There he is, crouched in front of another locked door cutting his swath of destruction and whistling a jaunty tune. He’s on his way to the control room. The main control room, where the sentient-fungal computer steers the ship and keeps the bugs alive-asleep and dreaming pleasantly. If he’d bothered to read the warnings on the inside of the hermetically sealed panels he keeps prying open willy-nilly, even one of them, I wonder if he would have changed his plans. Accepted his fate. Taken one for the team. Maybe minimized his damage?
Rugged construction. Capacitors (thermal and electric). The Glesians are clever and brilliant, especially for such short lived critters. But perhaps the best tech the bugs got is this: an organic resin that can bridge the gap between living structures and mechanical circuits–the integration of already-integrated-circuits and mushrooms. It’s absolutely brilliant, and it’s vulnerable to germs. Gary gave a planet a virus, blithely, for he did not know he had it and the germ was harmless (to him).
Every time Gary succeeds in breaking a lock, he contaminates a living part of a vast and precise living machine. Every panel he pries open, for simple survival’s sake or pure nosey-ness, introduces germs and infection into the sensitive circulatory system that keeps Gliese alive.
*
EARTH(0x7C0), MICHIGAN
*
Jack dreams again. Vividly, and for the first time in decades, pleasantly.
She still scavenges for bits of whimsy of precious (not really need) to get her steps. And in her free time, after she’s looked at and appropriately touched the stash of food in her prepper-stocked larder (to affirm and reaffirm it is real). When she has calmed her body and mind, she does solder and assemble a machine devised by something divine. Jack follows instructions handed to her in dreams by an entity she will later claim is god.
I’m building god’s machine. That’s the text she sent to Jonah. Nothing after for months, even when he called, and called, and called. Then a short: yes. Come help. Phone was on silent. Sorry. to his request to come and see (and maybe help).
The drive in the truck that smells like French fries is long. He finds a familiar pirate radio station and follows the Huron for a long while, too long. When he finally turns on the GPS to correct his recorrection of his dead-reckoning of direction. Re-routing. “Goddamn you, machine. God. Damn. You.” I didn’t quite understand that. You want me to call Norene? “No! Just. Navigate. Jack’s house. No freeways.” Finding the shortest route past Jacksonville Florida. “God. Why have you forsaken me?” Re-routing to avoid highways and toll-roads. “I am not going to Florida. I hate you, machine. I hate you so much.”
Satellites are back and tech works, reliably even, but everything gets glitchy and weird by the forest on a grid–the Civilian Conservation Corps forest. Someone tore a hole here 13 Earths wide on an adjacent world. Things are soft. Permeable, and probably in a way they shouldn’t be, not every Earth, but on some indeterminate adjacent number of them.
Static slip-hisses in and holds the door for odd radio anomalies between and under radio stations. The country music heartbreak crooning gives way to an old East German number station. A bell tolls for somebody, and Jonah’s inner ear tells him he’s upside down.
“I trust my instruments” He says to no one. He stares straight ahead and when his speed reads 70, get-the-fuck-out-of-Dodge flooring, engine screaming, the truck seems held. Driving in sand, wheel won’t obey his command. He can’t even curse, peanut-butter mouth-slow.
Prismatic figures and flat 2-D sprites move free and-fast in Jonah’s peripheral vision. Road forever road tunnel vision twist pulled eternal.
On the radio a woman laughs; on the radio a woman cries. In the distortion the two sound the same. Jonah thinks to himself that he must decide which she is doing though he dooms her either way. If he decides she’s crying, the joyful woman collapse vanishes away. If he decides radio woman is laughing, he’s taken her grieving from her.
He tries to hear nothing for a long time.
*
KEPPLER 22B
*
Blue knew enough to know recovery and life beyond would be rough, she knows her people well enough to want some distance from her kin. That, and like many of her generation, she is fond of humans. The fondness only grew when artistic expectations met edge-of-disaster reality. I’m saying the art really upped their expectations for who humanity was, and when we underwhelmed? The young cephalopods who like your Chuck Berry and your hip hop and the movie where the guy goes on a quest for justice rampage over his puppy, they came to love you more.
Blue knew it would be rough, but not like this. No one visits face to face. It’s as if she is contagious. It’s as if they fear their own limbs would shrivel and fall off. I’ll reach through this phone and rip your arms off if you dismiss me one more…
Her messages are rebuffed. “Take more time.” “Heal.” “We’ve got this.” She recuperates and rests and meets the stir crazy that pounces on people who ‘don’t ever stop.’ Blue takes long swims in the kelp forest, using the lattice ‘hand’ holds at first, finding her stride.
She won’t be sprinting any time soon, and her gait appears odd. She knows it. It makes her self conscious. She’s chomping at the bit to ‘do’. She’s ready to work. Blue is a public servant. Politician. Diplomat. She’s got technical training in the family trade (metallurgy). She’s a trained astronaut.
“Take more time.” “Heal.” “We’ve got this.” on repeat a whole week. That’s when the messages start to pour in from Earth. The news of Blue’s shuttle crash took its FTL flight along the filament highway between the worlds, ran it’s way around Earth(0x7C0) and back. “Get well sun!” cards held up by elementary school children she visited in Australia. Formal diplomatic versions of the same “be well” message from most nations, even the land locked ones.
The story hits the news. Blue is between ‘walks’ in the kelp garden, floating on a hospital ‘bed’ she does not feel she needs. The underwater television is mounted same place as it would be in an Earth hospital: too high, too small, too loud and she talks back to it, as she always does.
“In a touching outpouring of support…” Thanks Chad, thanks Czech Republic. “the people of Earth delivered exhortations of health and well being to Speaker Blue” and it’s that stiff, emotionally distant (but oddly passionate) respectful cultural vibe of state media on Keppler. The news broadcast is all of the above until it’s not.
“Some have expressed concern..” Sounds like human tabloid bullshit. “…discussion of cognitive impairment at such a…” I’ll cognitively impair you, you fucking hack! And a nurse comes in, and it’s a lot of negotiating to keep the teevee on. Look it’s about me, this is my work and I need to see this.
You’re supposed to be resting and recuperating. Nurse, he just sort of floats in front of the teevee moving and juking as Blue tries to operate the remote and turn up the volume. If it pisses you off, maybe don’t watch it? Do I need to get the doctor’s opinion?
Dude, Nurse Ratchet, move your ass. His eyes narrow. The nurse gets the human cultural reference and skulks away, shushing Blue and threatening to tattle to the docs as he goes.
The tail end of the report suggests she, Blue, is on the sidelines of everything. The two arms she lost were the two tattooed–the appendages covered in glyphs that told her life-as-tale, as part of her people’s history. Body stories are common. Those glyphs are an honor. Yes, the stories are written elsewhere, but that’s not the point. The living record on the one who did the things is gone.
Blue clicks off the teevee and sits a long time feeling like a living ghost.
*
Borrow my vision that you might zoom out. Leave the building and fly the eye-cinematic-almost god’s eye. Up through the kelp forest and past all the tall buildings twisted-crustacean looking things and the lights, always the lights on the populated worlds. Up out of the ocean. Ghost-glows beneath the waves, circular patterns, arteries linking them. Through the clouds and up past the orbital platforms and stations and cargo ports. Past the ships with graceful aspect of a wasp or a squid and the chunkier human things.
There is a gate in space at the edge of the system. A ring. Powered by fusion and predicated upon science it’s makers half-comprehend. From the ring, sixteen pillars of light pour slowly, by photon standards, toward a singular point. And where the magic happens, I know not, and don’t ask me how, but that point is a knot and the foundation of the Filament. There is a near identical, but clunkier and chunkier human-built twin ring with a mirror knot. Rope light between the two worlds. Straight-line-shortcut.
The ring-station anchors hold the space-highway open. They skirt the laws of physics to nudge Oort cloud objects out of the road. Once on the highway proper, the Filament bends the laws to make the rest of reality see a ship or a signal as having little-or-no mass. A trip or a call between Keppler 22B and Earth(0x7C0)that took years, then months, then weeks now takes days.
‘Time annihilates distance’, right? But if you drove a time machine (I do, or maybe I’m the time machine and it’s just a damn fine car). If you drove a time machine, and you swung round to take Yogi Berra out to the filament. If you drove all night from Earth to Keppler at speeds-past-C ,reckless as that might be, you’d get there at ‘sunrise’. You and Yogi would arrive in time for him to tell you a sad truth: you didn’t need to leave Earth(0x7C0 or any other) to know his famous quip traveled.
Perfect worlds aren’t. The saying flew faster than you. Don’t take that as nihilism. Hopelessness can be contagious. The impossibility of hitting the capital-U-topia spot doesn’t invalidate the ‘good fight’ or the ‘good work’ of making things better (no matter your number of legs or how you speak/stink/dance).
It’s just that another cliché-for-a-reason haunted the people of Keppler 22B: “You can’t kill an idea!” And when the idea we want to live is the utopian dream? We get all sappy and romantic about it. When the idea that won’t die is one of the worst ones? Woe to thee that forgets that every truism cuts both ways, whom those bells toll for, or that the angel of history is so often weeping.
Follow the cinematic eye all the way back through the thick clouds of Keppler and down-past-down to the bottom of the sea. There is a bar, a ‘smoky room’ where heavier-than-water booze pools in floor dugouts. Cephalopods squeeze viscous, jellied drugs sacred and profane (mostly profane) from what might-as-well be toothpaste tubes into the cocktail pools or over their gills or straight down their throats.
There’s a stage that’s the closest thing to a well lit space in the dark dive bar. There, a fine looking and valuptuous octo-woman slide-stretch-shimmies rhythmically on a pole to a song dank-and-sleezy in the background. The colors of her skin shift and suggest innuendos, dirty talk in color-speak flick-written and fading to the beat. Camera pans to the corner.
Dark. Corner booth dark. Shadows are wrapping paper for villains. A tentacle from the void pulls a snack to it’s maw, and another arm snags a Keppler shot glass–sealed, they squeeze their oily, jellied fuck-you-up juice from water-proof contraptions.
A face emerges: a cephalopod, old and scarred and missing an arm and blind in one marbled eye leans over the bowl and wafts booze-water up to mix with whatever else he huffed and gassed and “drank.” That one, he loves to “drink”–to call his intoxicant consumption “drinking.” Cephalopods love human derived slang. Even this guy, and it’s quite ironic that he would.
He hates you, reader. If you’re human the old Maroon octopus hates you simply for existing. I’m assuming you’re human reading this text in a human ‘tongue’, long before this novella’s translation to smell or shimmy or liquid light.
That’s what we’ll call him: “Maroon” for his name is a long and complicated dance, and this author is lazy–gloriously lazy. The turd traitor’s name is tedious. No. He is Maroon. The traitor. The racist. The war monger.
We should have encouraged the monkeys to continue doing precisely what they were doing. “But the culture…” Sarcastically from his companion. Maroon and Co-Conspirator. They share a laugh.
Maroon makes the rhetorical move all racists make in conversation with those they want to turn and entangle. He gives we human ‘devils’ our ‘due’: some of the music is lovely, and I’m fond of Shakespeare, but they make their best art when they’re most occupied with murdering each other. It’s true! Let them do what they do best, and most. We’ll listen when it’s interesting. But no this…” and Maroon makes a ‘hand gesture’–two arms clasped, a handshake. It’s as if he can’t speak the sound for ‘peace’ and ‘human’ in the same sentence.
The other, the isolationist, “I don’t like the speed of it. I don’t like their vulgarity or their pushiness. We will forget ourselves. We will drown in dry landers. I regret supporting the tether, I truly do.”
After tomorrow, that may not be such a problem. Maroon turns from his co-conspirator back to the stage and the curvy girl languid spinning in the salty-boozed liquid at the bottom of an alien sea. He holds up a tentacle like “shush” gesture at the nervous villain’s million questions. All I need from you is to help cast the blame where it truly belongs. Can we count on you, can your people count on you?
*
3-D-FIRMAMENT (AKA OUTER SPACE); EOT (END OF TIME)
*
The car circled for a time, a long time past anything the mortal hands that built the thing could even conceive of. A 1990 something silver sedan did heavenly donuts in the empty firmament. You may think search patterns are best broken down by grid, but this is not the case in space with irregular or irrational geometry. This is a hole in space.
No, not that kind, no black hole. It’s a void, not empty space, but the absence of space. No light passes through it or gravity-lenses-around it. Negative space. And the ‘art kids’ are the closest to understanding what that actually-and-truly means.
This is the absence-of-space that is/isn’t, the gap in the firmament left when the soul-sick angel stole the Earth. This is the hole that held the Earth and Keppler and Gliese before those grubby hurried hands snatched two-too-many worlds to try and ‘save’ them.
Irony of ironies, and the vanity too: when the angel snatched the Earth(s) from the night sky and ran to the End of Time to grab the pot and the good dirt he doomed himself and maybe the worlds too–literafiguratively. Literally: the sad soul-sick bastard didn’t notice the Locust larva in the soil he took. Figuratively: he claimed authority awful close to god’s authorship over three worlds.
You can believe what you’d like and blasphemy is great (it’s good fun). God gives zero fucks about it. You can cuss god out and call them an old omnipotent cur, and they’ll love you in the so-distant-it-don’t-seem-to-matter way they always did. God gets it. Catharsis is necessary, as is screaming into the void. They do it too, god howls into the black and we live upon the luminous echo.
You can have a heart full of hubris, claim yourself above god–all exalted and shit. It’s a bad look, and personally I think it’s bad luck. What you can’t do is the hubris. Hubris is a verb here. You can’t take on god’s role. You can’t claim to be god, and to try is to invite a smiting. It’s always the Old Testament somewhere.
But god didn’t punish the angel, and now the demons and the G-men and all heaven’s feds demand that vengeful rite alike–they insist upon punishment in god’s absence. I find myself wondering who precisely is the one doing the hubris: the thieving angel or the Feds. God blessed the angel’s theft, Eye saw it. Or maybe that was judgement deferred and wrapped in a wait-and-see. I don’t fucking know why any divine being does any goddamn thing. They’re inscrutable. If it weren’t for the boring predictability of G-men the whole thing, the whole multiverse-arrangement would have already fallen to ash (or so the G-men say).
Impasse. Hostage situation. Standoff, bunch of divine feds looking constipated and unsure who to fight (each other or the two atop the spire).
*
HVAC. You call us when heaven’s machinery don’t work. We won’t hear, but we’ll answer anyway.
“That’s not a thing. We don’t do that. Do we do that?” The woman in aviators with the nose, my nose, the schnozz of every A-series mortal in the multiverse
“We don’t really have a slogan.” We should make one.
Three other voices in unison: “No.”
We ferry prayers said in the dead of night from vents and ducts and gutters to, if not the almighty, the incredibly mediocre machine that does divine work in god’s unending absence.
“We’re couriers and fixers.” Brief and strong, I like it. “Thank you.”
Brevity is the soul of… “Glenn, please shut the fuck up.”
An HVAC man in 1990-something silver sedan that’s traveled time. She’s a fuckin hero ship, bona-fide. The greatest American car ever made. Durable as a Soviet aircraft and an order of magnitude safer to operate. Indefatigable. All-kinds big-ass words for badass.
“If you love this car so much, why don’t you fuck it?” That was kinda mean. “He’s too high to drive” and the woman in the body armor over jammies spills coffee on the console as she crawl-wrestles her way from back seat to front in the crowded car floating in forever night. The other HVAC-beings lean the seat back to wrestle the biting and kicking A(84) out of the driver’s seat and Glenn physically restrains him in the back.
God, you’re strong. “Thank you”
“Glenn, punch him if he continues to use that narrator voice.” Ok
“Glenn, don’t listen to her.” See, I’m getting conflicting instructions, and I don’t know how I feel about that or how to proceed.
Listen to me Glenn. “No, please do not listen to him.”
The witch behind the wheel stomps on the accelerator. The machine and the thing that animates it, Vicky, growl and respond. Speed presses all deep in the seats and the floor trash flies.
Flannel Man sitting shotgun begins the holy hotbox–the smoke that shields the minds from contortion in both space and time. Contrarotating spliffs in cockpit while the driver jabs the buttons demanding the right music for the moment she breaks C. The ride leaves a trail of Fast Radio Bursts in its trail till she finds the right tune.
The Sedan streaks across a thousand skies in populated space, diving fast from the firmament to the firm-packed ash plain at the End of Time. Some peoples, the ones with tech, see a ship. The one’s still into sky-worship see a minor god writing verses across the sky.
She approaches C and sees the plain at the End of Time–endless ash outside-of-and-encompassing-all. The standoff looks like a bullseye from above–target painted by LED cop-lights freaking red-and-blue on seizure repeat. Driver’s aim is correct. She catches the same jagged path, the after-burnt aether from god’s smite lightning. The force that made the spire burnt some part of space forever, and the car found and followed that groove, bowling ball rolling. Speakers screaming, car is bumping when the two in the front declare themselves “Badminton Champions.” Car crosses the event horizon top of the Terra Cotta pot, and that’s that.
Below, every G-man see’s lightning strike the spire. They misinterpret. The demons taunt wag their bits. The Metatron takes to his bullhorn: “What did we learn? Thank you God for your presence, and the mighty lesson you just taught these perverts.” And all the bland ass angels golf clap and cheer.
Up top, the fugitives rush to tend to the pot, to see to the soil. The thing infernal and the divine creature instantly sprint to the vessel they care for. The angel and the demon put out the flames and see that the world’s are still breathing. It’s a mundane miracle when their kind cooperate genuinely and for constructive purpose–to do something good. But nobody notices in the clamor. Just like nobody noticed the Locust larva in the soil.
I’ve connived and schemed and bribed to see just a bit of the sublime geometry that ties and unties space. I’ve sat outside time until I could learn to see shapes that would have liquified my mortal brain, but I can’t square this circle. God had to know the Locust larva sat in that soil, lurking. Didn’t they? Locusts are weak outside of time. Contained.
In space they find worlds and strike. Sometimes they fall to Earth, or some hearth like it, soft and gentle. Other Locusts strike like dinosaur killers–extinction events twice. They burrow deep. Tendril up. They eat, grow, warp. Profane and consume, repeat.
When the thing re-emerges Millenia later, the Locust is a planet-ender that kills what it can’t consume and shits its many larva into space–elsewhere and else when to begin the nightmare again and again-again. It’s a mountain monster, a maw with an asshole and an implied brain and little else. Hunger and greed incarnate, with flesh born rotten and leaking an ichor that corrupts. Exponential spread in space and time and once, a long time before me, they came from outside god’s text to nearly write over every last word of it.
I’ve watched the three worlds: Earth, Gliese, Keppler. I’ve seen miracles mighty and mundane sustain the things that live on all three. Why the intervention divine, why would god show themselves (if only for a moment), just to torch three worlds in the cruelest way possible? Help me understand this, god.
*
END ENDLING(S) 3