Let There Be
I do not like the task assigned me by the Council. As spokesperson, I’m the one who must deliver the verdict.
The first step is to find him. We are still Oneness, but we are Many in One, and he can be conspicuously absent when he wants to be. I realize that I have to look within myself to reveal the door. When I enter, I see him flitting among his multitude of creations, with his Glory dialed up high, pretending to ignore me. Everything sparkles, and the explosions are distracting. He knows I’m here, and he even knows what I have to say before I arrive, but it is difficult for me to delineate the ever-present now of eternity without pretending to put things in some kind of order.
He flies up to face me, and we manifest conventional forms suitable for discourse, without excessive limbs or wings or eyes. To balance his active masculinity, I assume a superior attitude drawn from the feminine principle. He speaks, “So you are going to do this thing?”
He forgets to tune down his disarming Brilliance, but does so at my request. Then I say, “You know it is inevitable.”
“Yes, of course. Just as you know it won’t work. It will only precipitate the outcome you hope to avoid… Excuse me a moment.” He suddenly shrinks out of sight. There’s a pop and a small bubble expands from the point where he disappeared. He grows back and mutters, “Needed to adjust the basic symmetry groups underlying that one.”
I resume, “We are aware of what is likely to happen, but the Possibility Field is intrinsically unpredictable. Because it contains all possible things, we can never be entirely sure.”
He swirls his lavender cloak around himself. His eyes become sad, and I cuddle him as a mother would a child.
I watch his Multiverse spawn branches and interwoven beaded threads, each bead a universe. I admit to him how much I admire it. I am delighted by the cataclysms, the big bangs and supernovae, and the way one universe buds off another. I especially admire his ability to create self-motivated squishy things out of mathematical constructs.
I ask him, “Why do you do it? Why do you crystallize Possibility into sequences of time, expanses of space, discretized energies, cause and effect?”
His eyes are mirrors when he replies, “Because we are sterile. We live in Pure Possibility. Nothing really happens. It’s an eternal dream with no consequence.”
I sigh and say, “We do not entertain such thoughts in the Council.”
“And that, dear sister, is exactly my point.”
The child has become a quarrelsome old man. I take a different tack. “Well, the Council’s point is that your Multiverse is sucking up Possibility. If we don’t stop it, those funny little creatures that emerge from your laws will sop up all our Magnificence. It’s all clever prestidigitation, but what your creatures do with Possibility is pathetic. And then they die.”
“Who or what is pathetic is a matter of opinion. I give them time and space. I give them reality. Immortality and omnipotence are overrated.”
This borders on impertinence, so I deck myself out in judicial robes and formally announce, “The Council decrees that you not exist. We hope that your nonexistence will imply the nonexistence of your creations.” I gesture broadly at his entangled universes burgeoning and twisting in infinitely non-repetitive ways.
He puffs up to gargantuan stature, and his eyes become infernos belching flames and black sulfurous vapors. “If you annul me, you will trigger a phase transition in the Possibility Field that destroys us all.”
The tantrum lasts just a moment, and he becomes once more the petulant and mischievous youngster I have eternally loved. He says, “It doesn’t matter, anyway. This always was and always will be. It’s that transcendence/immanence conundrum. The end is implicit in the beginning, without distinction. We can’t get around it.” He sighs deeply, and a myriad of expanding manifolds emanate from his mouth like smoke. “Let’s get on with it.”
We pause solemnly and enter into the peace of eternal togetherness. The Council is there within the wholeness. We recognize the moment and execute the sentence. The Possibility Field grumbles, and he is gone.
Odd. We no longer understand what is happening. We only know there is a bittersweet void, an infinite sorrow. Something important does not exist, never did and never will.
And there’s this Multiverse, churning away. Growing. Sucking. Where does that come from?
Something is happening to the Possibility Field. Instead of soaking slowly into the Multiverse, the Field is disappearing in huge feathery fractal chunks, ever larger and larger. I linger in the cracks long enough to realize that, once our Splendor is gone, never to have existed at all, the Multiverse will be all there is – uncreated, necessary, a thing in itself, unfolding in the circuitous forever of its multiple time lines. My only consolation is that something akin to us lives on, in the fragile little packets of slime that inhabit it.
AS PUBLISHED in the online magazine New Myths Issue 44, September 2018.