《Sha Nagba Imuru》
presentiment
And at Inifinity''s End, Change spoke.
These were its words.
"Weep not for heroes. Curse them."
from thus?
- story, start -?
And I opened my eyes and beheld the blood on my hands. Around me, around me, they all fought, and what they fought was a war. Screams of anger, and of pain echoed across the battlefield as the stars danced madly in the heavens above and the Elder Gods fell towards the dead earth. The ground was parched, and cracked, and burnt, the remnants of life long since withered and turned brown, and at this moment there was no hope left.
No. Hope was long and far away. We had lost. And we had lost everything. Stumbling to my feet, I looked around the chaos of the battlefield, until my eyes locked on those of one man. His eyes calm, clinical, disinterested, his countenance calm. Here was someone who didn''t fear for his life.
My own expression was half-crazed, but I felt the same. We were of a kind, and that changed everything. Reaching into the back of my mind, I connected with the Principle of Ontology, fell into an echo of the W¨²xi¨¤o W¨³sh¨´, and gestured.
Come. Let us end this.
He nodded, and fell into no stance. Instead, around him, everything simply unraveled, as the seams of existence were unmade. I narrowed my eyes, then charged.
There was no interval between the beginning and the end. In one moment, I had crossed two miles and opened up with my first blow, a shattering resonance that would break the reality of his soul. He stepped out of the moment that defined his death and flowed around the worldlines defining my victory, falling back into the world where he survived. I pursued, but he was ready, had prepared a trap, a hidden fist glowing with the fury of a green sun. Accepting the blow as it was offered, I stepped through it and let it echo through nothing and out of my back. As the coruscating fury of a titan''s rage decimated the armies surrounding us, I dodged his second conventionally, lunged forward through the lacuna of his pace, and had my mind fall into a certain pattern as my hand made contact with his body, and my spirit brushed against his souls.
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
Void Architecture. World Eater.
The un-not surrounding the man crumpled, and shattered into pieces, and his eyes widened as he understood what I had done, confidence replaced with horror. The effect spread, and he turned to flee. In the next moment, he no longer was. Even if he had used a truer method of escape, it wouldn''t have been enough.
Nothing would have.
This multiverse was doomed.
As what I had done extended, and continued, ramifying as it grew outwards, the local physics failed, its axioms disrupted and coming undone. I watched from the inside, as men, women, and children fell apart. I watched as the old gods fell. I watched as the event horizon of reality extended throughout everything, and the bubble of math that defined this plurality fell, and descended into One.
And then it was over.
Another Samsara Breaker had died.
And I, once again, and as always, was alone.
Beneath me, separated by what was only a conceptual distance, something like a star flickered. A singularity. The terminus of the axiomatic branch that had formed the world I had destroyed.
I stepped down, to it, and let my mind fall into a pattern more.
Antithesis: World Eater.
It was the negative image of the first, arranged so all the prismatic concepts that coloured the reality of the death of a multiverse cancelled each other out, to a certain and uniform grey.
And the singularity exploded, unravelling out into a glorious and complete system of the world.
I stared at it from the outside, and almost took a step towards it before I stopped myself, and slowly turned away.
My arrival and everything that I had done had been unwritten. So had the actions - and final life - of the other Breaker.
It was over.
This was no longer my home.
"Goodbye," I whispered, hugging myself as I walked away. "Goodbye."
I don''t remember how long it took.
But eventually, after I had walked too far, my body and soul ceased to be valid propositions, and everything collapsed as I died, and once again fell into a new world.
it would never end
It would never, ever, end.
Why could that thought still make me smile?
Sha Nagba Imuru
Epilogue: Prologue
If science has taught one overriding truth to humanity before all else, it was this: That we are not special. That, as a species, humanity is enormously insignificant. That we are a people of specks, made of specks, living upon slightly larger specks that, in finality, look like - and are - cosmic dust.
Humanity is flotsam. Humanity is seafoam. Humanity is brief, fragile, and altogether too intricate to truly embrace in the faint window that we have on existence.
The human kind had rejected that notion. I had rejoiced in it.
Looking back, here, at Ultima Mobile, I believe that that may have been the start of it all - the window that had lead to this world, this moment, this decision. But, perhaps that''s just wishful thinking at its finest, and at its worst.
Sometimes there are no explanations.
And sometimes?
Sometimes, the only explanation necessary is the who that informs the identity of the one asking the question.
I''ve found that those times are the worst.
Why did things break?
"Because it was you."
Prologue?
I lived to be older than anyone born just a decade before me could have dreamed to die.
Death had been murdered in the turning of the world. Unbound from it, unlike my fellows, I watched as humanity increased in knowledge. I watched as they built a wholly artificial utopia to escape from the other side of that phrase. I watched as they uploaded themselves to machines, digitised the information of the universe, and I watched as they took grasp of the guttering light of knowledge, and there, on a planet that they had never actually left, ascended.
I watched as they threw all their works away, and left everything behind without even understanding what they had lost in the process.
The Fermi Paradox had found its answer: Any species that failed to destroy itself transcended the fabric of space and time to chase answers to the kinds of questions that Yog-Sothoth would have been fascinated by, dragging the disinterested majority in a wake of increasingly purposeless utopia. It was as fitting as it was bitter, to know that all who could see the wonder of our world would judge it, and ultimately find it wanting.
The transcension, as it was called, was utterly anticlimactic for those not directly involved. This is what happened. One day, every computer in the world went idle, every AI vanished, and every medium of storage was erased, save for a three kilobyte program that unfolded into the thirty-seven exabyte lotus of pure information, this containing:
Item One: Recipes for mind uploading hardware; technological paradigms scalable to any level of advancement.
Item Two: A method of adjusting the curvature of spacetime through phenomena arising from electric circuits that none of those left behind - baseline or otherwise - could possibly understand.The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Item Three: A transperfectly persuasive manifesto detailing the reasons why the transcension had been necessary. Apparently, humanity had moved to a universe without entropy.
The few who remained stared into this font of information, and felt in it the subtle judgement of those who had left us behind.
It went unsaid that this wisdom was not for our hands.
That we had been left here already meant that we had withstood their inexorably perfect arguments.
So, from the graveyard CERN had become, we dispersed, and dropped out of contact with each other, the last left on the planet becoming minorities of one as we all walked without the others'' informational even horizons.
Some of us went to destroy the archives. Some of us went to try to remake the human kind. Some of us went to wander.
But I think all of us, in our own ways, knew that, in the end?
We were going to die.
For the next several decades I haunted the world, ruling as one of the hundreds of lords of the dust that remained, over a realm of ashes and a kingdom of no one. While some of my peers set to restore the species, and may have succeeded, I strayed across the world and slowly slipped back into the familiar madness that came with being alone.
In the nineteenth century, a man named Alexander was stranded on a deserted island.
Not by a shipwreck.
By his own will.
He dreamed that he would attain passage from some other ship, crossing over the horizon.
It was not to be. On that island, he lived for four years, and was utterly alone. The world ravaged him for it.
When, at last, a ship appeared on the horizon, what met the sailors as they came ashore was something that was barely recognisable as a human. Ragged, tanned by the sun, clothed in skins. in just four years of isolation, that Alexander had all but lost the ability of language. In one of the great ironies of history, the ship was the same as had left him; the captain, same as had stranded him.
Isolation is not good for a human.
But I was never very good at being human to begin with.
Humans cooperate and organise. Humans cover for their weaknesses, and create a gestalt of their strengths. Humans have true power only collectively, and that is a world in which I cannot believe, because I can never bring myself to embrace the paradox, that we tell tales of singular people, and not even once does such truly arise in life.
Twenty four hundred years past, there had been another alexander. One who had risen to Greatness on the backs of his nations. Of that man, risen thus, all said: "Alexander was one of the great men of history. Nobody can do what he has done." Both statements are true. Both are false. And everything I tell you is a lie.
One of these sentences is a lie.
Was I out of joint, or was it the world?
Either way, the answer didn''t matter; because, half mad, as I thought obsessively over a question that in all probability had no true answer, the universe died.
Silently, I went with it.
By the way, that''s a lie.
And then... ha.
My only wish was granted.
SNI