*
EOT
*
When the charred remains of the 1990-something sedan fall from space to that space that is outside time, the whole HVAC stack re-convene in the remains of the vehicle. The car (and they) re-form in free fall from the firmament back toward the EOT. A-84 climbs out of the trunk and claws his way back into a back-bench seat that’s rematerialized in time for A-79 to kick her way out of the glove box and pilot the re-constituted car. She drives expertly along perverted geometry while Glenn and Flannel Man drop 2D from the burnt ceiling and re-grow the third D–the one that lets one sit firmly in a seat.
“Not today” and a desperate angel and demon each snag a friendly hand as the vehicle-re-congealed flies past the tip top of the spire on the scorched plain. Just as all forces heavenly and infernal converge–rescue arrives, and all in the car piss off to lay low for a few forevers among the congregants of the Church Ethereal.
The forces that pursued the fugitives are not pleased, but there arrayed on the plain and armed to the teeth and properly gathered for the first time since the first war, they do not fight. They slink off and talk shit (angels and demons) but no (more) blows are thrown. Some among both camps even notice and remark on this minor miracle.
*
Dolores spoke to god, the actual Author of All. I’m not privy to the words exchanged, but I’ll bet her beef with the concept of sacrificial love featured. You want to start a healthy debate at the Church Ethereal? Bring up whether or not Dee’s fate was a blessing or punishment. I’m in the camp that the proof of either is in the result.
The bugs perverted by Gary are Gliesian endlings, last of their kind. But a few centuries later, after the long-lonely-hike to a lonesome star, Dolores last-and-most-mighty-act was to bring the Gliesian’s back. In the same automated factories that produced algae paste, and in the vats where the bugs brewed their funeral beer, that’s where they are re-born–with the residue of their species past already on them.
This is soon after creation/recreation when Dolores is still an active god, if not a wrathful one (never that): she orders them to bring her beer, all the beer that’s left on the planet. And she learns, from the the bottled-archive of dregs and last-drinks of “great bugs” or beloved grandmas and whatever traces of ritual brew are left on-world. The first bugs pour the mourning beer in a shallow pool at the statue’s feet each morning, and by night it’s gone. Dolores learns and in-turn teaches bugs with megaphones and pheromonal-broadcasts.
She instructs them on how to find mana in heaven-holes–preserved rations in bunkers all over the world. Dee teaches her babies how to tend to and spread the amoeba molds and mushrooms and all the creatures she re-creates with the Gliesian machinery. When she tells her bugs to “be fruitful and multiply” they quintupple up and do the necessaries with great vigor.
If you stand in the shrine and contemplate Dee, you could be forgiven for believing she is the statue, standing like a sad eyed Venus, arms out but not splayed. There’s no “suffering Christ” in her, but the weight she carried on Earth and brought to Gliese is in the eyes and the set of the shoulders. If you limit your vision to Dolores, she is the epitome of sacrifice-for-love and a tragic figure and perhaps she was punished by god or at least cursed. I choose to read her in the trees, mushrooms and the rivers that reek of bleach on a world with seasons that rotates in a perfect orbit around a lonely star. Fomalhaut. Say Foe, Ma, Low. There you go.
The babel-tower engine crumbled to a weathered mound and Dolores no longer speaks out of any tech, but she’s written all over the world. The ecology would still literafiguratively eat a human live, but by Gliesian standards, it’s quite gentle. No tidal tug of three stars. Calamity is no-longer synonymous with Tuesday. Today’s Gliesian’s still practice the funeral right to biologically-remember the dead as they mourn. They still care mightily for the living. And if Dee’s words are as open to re/mis/translation and bad-faith vandal interpretation as any other gospel, they’re the foundation of a Gliesian culture where every bug gets a plate before any bug gets seconds. Amen.
*
EARTH(S)
*
I was born in 1984, last year the Tigers won the series: “He don’t wanna walk you” and they win it all on a walk off. What’s different from your Earth and most places is the World War in ’89. On our Earth, Rona came around 2010 and fell on a badly wounded world, and that was all she wrote.
From high orbit, Earth(0x7C0) looks a lot like my home before it died. No, that’s a compliment. It’s the “Blue Marble” but the color of the seas is ‘off’ and the familiar shorelines look chewed by high seas. Don’t see much ice at the poles. For every bright and blinking city night side, there is a corresponding scar on the Earth visible as such in daylight.
But the guns are gone, all the big ones. Like their friends the Cephalopods, the humans of Earth(0x7C0) remember how to fight–they just remember the cost, and wisely choose not to. They’ve got oceans to clean and a long list of PFAS to trap-capture and secure long-term. They’ve got mouths to feed and mines to sniff out and roads to dig. They’ve buried their dead, but grief is work, long work.
There are friends 640 light years away, and every day time eats that distance a little shorter. I wish the humans that lived through this moment could see their home a century from now.
There will be great gleaming cities on Earth the silver-blue-prismatic hue of Keppler’s most astounding alloy to-date. Ishmael will man the just-in-case guns and run counter-invasion protocols as needed, but the place is peaceful. Oh there’s shit-talk, and human politics in the era of full bellies will be baroque. The people of Earth(0x7C0) will still fight with words, but the stakes aren’t population-ending. There will be no enemies, for that long moment..
Above, as below, humanity will rebuild. The human ships will still look like toys, but graceful ones. FTL telescopes and every kind of observatory-sensor-et-cetera see signs of life. There’s talk of sending a ship to one of these many-past-many populated worlds with a message of “greetings and salutations.”
*
PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF KEPPLER (K22 B)
*
It’s a miracle we ever saw the stars. Blue is peeking from beneath still waters above the capital city. Dawn. There’s the mingled light of bioluminescent algae and the city in the waters below. Above, a rare break in the clouds lets dawn peek through.
She lingers a long while, lost in thought and lets the sun climb on a shaft of light to warm the water.
Narrative now: it is that ‘century later.’ It is a full hundred years after the Second Velvet Revolution, the re-affirmation of Keppler’s beautifully-bland utopia. A whole hundred since the Gliesian hive tried to incorporate Earth and friendship was reaffirmed by rendering aid.
Blue begins her descent toward the city and the People’s Hall, certain of what she’ll say when she speaks and uncertain of the how-of-it–the steps of dance half-composed in her brain. It’s “in the bag” as the human’s say, but she feels like she owes the moment in which she lives her best effort.
I’ve got Cinema brains. Slang term, pejorative for the one’s that lose themselves a bit too-much in human media and start imposing narrative expectations on life. But sometimes, if probability (god’s cousin) is kind, sentient beings are blessed with the wisdom to see the momentous moment(s) in which they live. That’s why Blue is shaking–nerves she hasn’t felt in what feels like forever.
From the silt we came, and to the sea we will return. Speaker Blue dances again in the place they do the people’s business. Or if you prefer: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. But in that brief time between? We are the raw matter of universe come to contemplate itself, bricks come conscious to think about the cathedral. She let’s that moment hang and approaches the edge of the audience to continue: We know, we know for a fact, that we are not alone and that there are many, many more neighbors waiting to know and be known. Why not say hello?
She’s asking a question she knows the answer to, it’s just the passion of the plea to do what they’re going to do is emotionally electric. The cephalopeople of Keppler are ready to team up with Earth and explore. The People’s Republic of Keppler does vote to formalize the Alliance with Earth for mutual-aid, defense, and peaceful exploration.
*
Michigan long after every ‘after action.’ When the dead rest and most of the mines are gone. When the air is clean and the soil is good. There’s a grave in a clearing where a wood used to be, where a wood will be again. The skies above are absolutely rotten with stars and shuttle pods and fireflies doing their flit-flick call for something-like-love.
There was a little cabin or cottage, some kind of doomsday prepper’s hide away. Until one day, long ago, the little shack just up and left–got up and walked away. The shelter stood up on great steel girder chicken legs and ran away, taking its occupant with it to her eternal-as-she-wanted reward.
*
That cabin, where the cupboards are always full and the weed jar plentiful, Jack’s place. She runs, Wild as she wants to be, forever-past-forever across the packed ash at the End of Time. She roams from pool-of-light to pool-of-light, from lonely liminal to the same again-forever. She’s looking for the adjacent world, the one in the multiverse where events happen almost as they did on Earth(0x7C0)–where there is a Jonah to save. She plans to pull him out of the belly of Leviathan, run away and roam with him, and she doesn’t care that it can’t be done.
*
When your time is done, if you are still a ‘you’, go find the burnt grove at the End of Time. Make your way to the Church Ethereal proper and enter that space like an ant colony beneath god’s scorched garden (one of them). Don’t take we narrator’s word(s) as more-than-gospel. Ask the congregants to run a little hermeneutics on this saga, and you’ll likely come to the same conclusion we did: that the whole thing stinks of the divine plan and the infuriating combination of inscrutability and ineffability that flows from the Author of All that Is.
Its like the time the Monkey King ran faster than a meteor out into space to race past all the spheres, his speed impossible, he reached the edge of all things to take a delightfully disrespectful piss on the pillars at the edge of everything. You know how that ended: little fella found himself pissing on god’s hand.
I read this, the whole roiling cosmic cauldron, as more King Lear. No, you are not a king (even if you are one, you aren’t). I read god as wandering like Lear, listening to fools and pining for ‘good old days’ that never were and trying to save a kingdom he already killed. That’s probably too bleak.
So I’ll step back from what everything ‘means’ to what we know actually happened: the angel’s theft delivered the Locust as a test that two planets passed. The third, Earth, has a lot of oil and PFAS leached into her dirt, and in the right light or the wrong light, those stains look just the same as Locust ichor from where I’m standing. The end of that Earth, and by extension all of everything that was or will ever be, is indeterminate.
We know that god gave two beings born-mortal the blessing of authorship, if only for a time, and they did the small but mighty thing of saving their respective worlds. We know that no force, from the firmament or buried below the dirt, is stronger than the god that wandered off, but we know that we are the raw matter of creation come to contemplate itself. What we write isn’t as powerful as what god penned before they abandoned us, it just isn’t. But our words flow and play and flit with all the other ephemeral and metaphysical bits of the multiverse.
Every time we talk or write or dance or smell or think loudly at an-other and they understand even a word or a shimmy? We’ve wrought minor miracle of communication. We’ve done a thing divine as it is mighty. In god’s absence may we pray and talk and dance and argue. In god’s absence may we learn, as HVAC urges and the Guardian taught us, to answer our own prayers. Amen.