𝗔𝗠𝗕𝗬𝗦 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟮 𝗪𝗜𝗡𝗡𝗘𝗥 · A collection of short stories of the sci-fi, fantasy and quirky kind. Take a quick spin around the clouds of Olympus to the frozen wastes of Jupiter's icy moon |
The very first story, The Goddess of Door Hinges, is...
Featured in the Quantumpunk issue of Tevun Krus, a sci-fi Watt-zine by Ooorah.
This is a contemplative piece set trillions of years into the future when the last red dwarf stars have died out, and iron stars have emerged. The surviving civilization is type III or above on the Kardashev scale—meaning they are so advanced that they can manipulate spacetime itself.
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The strings vibrated their unique patterns under the watchful Eye of Gova. It was a symphony of astronomical beauty that soothed Her souls. Still, it was Her last project at the Academy, and that made it exhausting—though exhaustion was nothing but a figure of speech.
Gova decided it was time for a break. She blinked Her Eye.
In one spatial-temporal blip, She burst out into the greater cosmos and awakened in Her favorite hideout. It was a self-crafted worldlet that drifted in an undisclosed space in the far reaches of the Pisces-Cetus galaxy filament.
She consolidated her ethereal, six-dimensional form to a three-dimensional shape reminiscent of the Olden Ones. The worldlet was too small to exert a substantial gravitational pull, but She preferred the light tug on Her feet, which were now covered with a skin of carbon nanotubes. Her sensory perception was curtailed, but She found the minimalism of her 3D experience strangely fascinating. It was, after all, a vestige of a bygone era—that of Olden Ones that existed on a tiny blue dot in an inconspicuous arm of a spiral galaxy.
"Hello, Xym," She said to the undulating cloud of sparkling particles that circled around Her.
Xym welcomed Her in a series of high-pitched clicks.
Gova had created Dark Eden 81 trillion years after the expansion of this universe. The last red dwarf star had illuminated it with its meager, natural light and powered the garden she had nurtured. Although the star itself was no more, Her artificial Mini Sun had made sure the garden retained its lush foliage—a somber expanse of dark violets and blacks that utilized any and all light it could soak in.
She set to work, tending to the needs of Her plants. She had already woven the hydrogen and oxygen atoms into the substance that formed the lifeblood of most Olden organisms. It was just a matter of feeding them. She could accomplish the task in the blink of Her mortal eye, but the Olden way held an allure that appealed to the melancholy within.
She had barely spurted the nearest plant with the colorless fluid before a presence made itself known. Perhaps it was the physical manifestation she had chosen, but She experienced a sinking emotion akin to a star collapsing in on itself.
"Mother," She telepathed, since Mother was able to "see" the very images one was capable of conjuring.
"Gova." The voice had no visible source in Her 3D world. "What are you doing here by yourself?"
"Mother, do you mind giving me prior warning before barging in?"
Mother ignored Her words. "You're not a Fledgling anymore to be playing with plants. Why can't you go Shkadov sailing like others your age? Are you done with your project?"
Gova hovered a finger over Xym, who twisted around it in a serpentine tendril of gas. "I'm not interested in it."
Mother's presence intensified like a supermassive black hole that allowed nothing to escape from its clutches. "Gova, if you do not graduate from the Academy, you will be nothing but a failure. I am your Mother, and I know what's best for you."
The pressure finally lifted from the atmosphere, and Mother was gone.
Gova had everything She could possibly want, but the melancholy within yawned like a cosmic void. From Her garden, She relinquished her corporeal form and became one with the fabric of spacetime again.
With a blink of her Eye, She went back to her project—exciting quantum fields just the right way to produce the music of the cosmos. With painstaking effort, She created a complex melody with only a handful of strings, imbuing them with mass from the Higgs field and blowing it all up into a pocket universe.
Within the universe She created, She observed a pale blue dot of a planet, suspended on a sunbeam—on which 3D beings now lived in the likeness of the Olden Ones.
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The subatomic particles we see in nature—the quarks, the electrons—are nothing but musical notes on a tiny vibrating string...The universe is a symphony of vibrating strings.
