Episode 1: “As Above, So Below”
“We can tell you what; we can tell you when.” The phrase ‘pick one’ is unspoken-implied at the end of the Archivist credo. That’s the ‘where’ of this report: Archives. EOT would be the ‘when’ of it (if such words applied after all the tomorrows were gone, used up, done).
Archives as place-unplace buried in plain site beneath the functionally-endless flat ash plain(s) equal-opposite from which emanate the universe and its ever proliferating iterations in the firmament between. Each plain buries a copper projection plate–a slab itself carried atop the back of Leviathan. Bless the bifurcated whale for lugging on her back the machinery that makes god’s garden grow. One whale, two bodies, swimming through the fractal. Carrying the multiverse in all of its horrid glory between. There on the plain (both of them) at an ever-shifting and difficult-as-shit to locate location are some little bitty holes in an ever growing salt-shaker formation. Tiny things, they are, the entrances to the Archives–each one not half the size of the flakes of ash and whale shit falling like marine snow at EOT.
Forgive me for my repetition. I am asking in advance for grace to do that recursive shit which anchors self-to-self. I learnt the circle liturgical from this place, this underwhelming afterlife spent working in a library. I learned from the shelf behind my desk that I helped fill with observe-and-report write ups of the Cancrins–the little space spiders. Every structure they build begins with the outline of some great web. In that web is written the repetition-elaboration of some story that came before. Town’s foundation tells the story of it’s founding as it fulfills its basic function: girds the great cross-hatched webs that cover Cancrin towns like trap-doors or camouflage netting. Every structure tells a story (and at the height of their civilization(s) many stories). By the time cosmic autumn rolls round (every time), when the stars are burning bloated red embers and the only lichen left clinging to the rocks in the heavens is actual lichen. Then, every then, the Cancrins are already dead (long dead). All of them. Every spider on every Cancri. Every time.
This isn’t the self-annihilation humanity pulls on iterations of Earth that break bad. Every archivist, no matter the species, has seen that shit-and-death at end-of-days. Watching-from-on-high the history-whole of a failed iteration of Earth (at great speed (in a time dilated environment)) is the archivists equivalent of watching a forklift video.
Cancri 55(e) is something else, what archivists call a “basement”–a world that (because of atmospheric-or-other conditions) will most likely never make contact with other intelligent life. On some cellar worlds, its the high gravity, the surly bonds that stunt mountains and turn a clumsy trip over a rock into a death sentence that keep every-being’s nose literafiguratively to the dirt. Other short-straw worlds are so radiation-baked by their angry mother-star that nothing lives on a surface–overworld as scorched, lifeless place to many of those cultures (not unlike the underworld of human mythos). The problem with Cancri 55(e) (at least initially) was the cloud cover. Clouds always guaranteed that these little arachnids never did the thing that species that thrive (truly thrive) must do: look up and contemplate the stars (so that they might one day make friends out among them). I’ve seen it happen three cycles that I can remember: the brutally lonely extinction of the space spiders.
It was spring again in god’s garden, when the big bang echoes (again) and everything is hot hydrogen for a long time while time cools and congeals and the ink dries on physical law and numbers learn to stand still and be counted and light learns the speed limit and re-teaches it to everything else. I felt in my metaphysical guts that the spiders were doomed to die alone and unknown (again) in this replay of the universe. I knew where my bones used to be that my assigned topic of interest ended in a recursive dead end for a beautiful little civilization of (admittedly repetitive) story tellers and architects and the profound unfairness of raw probability did gall me. What the fuck is the point of endless “observe and report” if there is never any intervention, if we only ever watch whole civilizations die?
Reader, I did a stupid thing (several actually). As is our way in Archives, this document will offer confession-explanation, after-action of the consequences (and if I still exist at the end, my suggestions for Corrective Action will come soon after, amen).
This was the inciting event: “I don’t know my function.” I said it aloud, quite loudly I confess, and that started the mess in my Borges library built of Escher stacks clinging to the walls of a functionally bottomless well a-few-forevers deep. “I don’t know my function. Like, why are we even doing this? Who is asking us to write reports on worlds that inevitably die?” and oh boy all hell broke loose, but a nerdy contemplative hell. It was as if I’d filled that forever-well with whatever crisis of faithlessness I’d finally stated aloud. It was as if I’d said what every body–every archivist in amplified-ear-shot buried on a balcony desk or shuffling across impossible stairs– was thinking.
Quite suddenly, the whole place went silent. The common-commotion of archives, the clatter of typewriter guts, the singing (on and off-key) and the under-breath mutterings that carry too-far on the strange geometry of the place. All gone. For a few heartbeats it was just the HVAC system and the ambient cosmic aftermath of the beginning. Then came the wailing and the ‘woosh’ of robes on metaphysical bodies doing final-death dead-weight dives into the well.
Archivists are a mellow, contemplative bunch until we’re not. AEC (Accute Existential Crisis) is fatal at EOT (almost always). It’s a soul sickness that sits dormant in every one of us always-already waiting for the excuse to go mad in the place-unplace where time shouldn’t be (but consequence always-inevitably falls). I spit sparks on a voice like hot wind and away-things-went.
In panicked horror at the dam I had broke, I tried to roll my words back. I leaned out over the balcony, shouting through cupped hands: “I mean, just cause I don’t know the function. Our function. Does not mean it’s not there.” That made it worse. Another wave of Archivists leapt to their deaths, dozens? Hundreds? I tried to catch one, almost got pulled to my own annihilation for the effort. “Everyone has a function. Conjunction man said so. In the song. It’s in the song!”
Things went prison-riot pretty quick after that: archivists defecating into the hole. Alien archivists screaming “Attica!” in dead languages and setting fire to a galaxy’s worth of shelves–whole sub-archives. Oh the texts, acid-etched on silver, are just fine. But the ones cast overboard? Into the hole that has no end? What happened to the worlds-correlate, the little rocks with lichen-life clinging to them in the firmament above when their record, their silver plate was destroyed?
I had only just begun to panic at the destruction above/below when the stewards flooded the hole–the whole library filled with angry fae things. Balls of light animate, shaking angry and shocking weep-screaming archivists gone book-mad. My supervisor (I think) danced, strobed and sparked, streamed in a fit all in my face. The best my workstation could auto-translate was “inciting, inciting, inciting a riot” and “inviting, inviting, inviting, my violence” before the fucker tazed me.
When I awoke, I reeked of burnt hair. Found myself freshly shackled to the desk where I spent my whole miserable afterlife (chained, as every Archivist left alive-ish in the hole is chained).
Reader, it is then that I resolved to do crimes. Inciting a library riot at Archives was accidental (but I’ll own my error). Altering the fate of a world was quite deliberate.
I closed my eyes and called to mind a hex designation, a numerico-alpha with a corresponding memory address in god’s great mediocre machine (the solder ball that does the Author’s work in their absence). (0x2A) clear as day in my eye’s mind. These hands found the dials steam-punked into the great oaken desk and guided metal polished smooth over eternities to specific sets of ‘where/when’ combinations in Cancrin history.
Gears and electro-mechanical guts sighed and slid-resigned to guide the payload: silver plates, acid etched all with detailed (perhaps too detailed) accounts of moments-crucial (allegedly) in the life of a planet’s people. Bearings sing like fine roller skates, the woosh of vacuum tubes and out slides a magazine loaded with Cancrin history about to be altered-actually-altered by me.
I swear to, well, you that I only intended to alter one plate. I paid (adequate) attention to the forklift video about a doomed Earth. All (competent) archivists and HVAC beings know ‘observation affects outcome’ and ‘as above so below’ are laws strong and stranger and spookier than iron. I confess to not considering the second-and-so-on order effects of my actions.
I lurched awkwardly, stretched lanky from desk to shelf and tested the shackle on my ankle to snatch the one record I called for: CANCRI 55(e) HEX 0x2A: Strip Mining, it’s a process: Aranaen First Contact with Extra-Cancrin Life.
Imagine my surprise at turning back to another plate of silver already ready at the desk. This record had my name as author, though I did not yet etch it. Slowly, at first, and accelerating as I gathered supply and my courage to defy, the plate began writing itself: First Contact, it’s also a process: Human/Cancrin Meeting at the End of History.
Half baked, but bold in the certainty that “it worked”, that I could alter the history-future of Cancri I set about doing so. Nothing wakes a ‘basement’ world up like an encounter with forerunner technology. Nothing says ‘its a big old galaxy’ like a precursor artifact to reverse engineer. And so I set to copy pasting like a hack author mad scientist. I drank a swig of the etching acid, rolled the holy hobo spliff from dregs dug out of the corners of desk drawers. And when the varnish or sawdust had me seeing profane visions, I did the sacred work: I wrote. My word-algorithm code-poetry spread from hex 42 to every universe with a Cancri that could harbor life. Space curved like worn-warped wood, time dilated and dallied, so that a star system might meet a wreck waiting for an outside force to alter its trajectory.
It went like this: Von Neuyman’s monster (crash) landed on the loneliest moon of the farthest gas giant orbiting an especially metal-rich star. The ‘probe’ that was really a great-hulking ship-derelict lingered long, centuries long, there. The machine with endless appetite, last gasp of the long dead ‘Geauntoord’ doing what such machine monstrosities do: devouring to reproduce.