Fractured Infinities

Once Upon a Time...

In the beginning, there was nothing.  Everyone agrees on that.

But that's about the only thing they agree on.  Some say the gods created the world out of the primordial elements; others claim that a singular creator-god brought it into existence using sheer willpower.  Yet others say that the world was formed from discarded body parts, clay, sweat, or tears.  There are a hundred thousand variations on the same story, woven through time like a single golden thread in a tapestry.

They're all wrong.

Those hundreds of thousands of variations all have one important similarity – the word 'world,' singular.  As that particular word happens to be an essential component of the story, it's not surprising that they all have it in common.  It's impossible to tell a world-creation story without discussing the world, after all.  But, sadly, that one word is why they're all wrong.

Then again, that's the nature of stories, to get the broad strokes right while being wrong in every particular.  It's why they're so fascinating.  In this case, the proper word should be 'worlds,' plural, though 'multiverse' is a more precise term.  And it wasn't created out of nothingness, or primordial soup, or willpower, or a nasty assortment of bodily fluids.  It wasn't created at all, at least in the normal sense of the term. 

So, really, that plethora of stories doesn't do a very good job with the big picture, either.

If anything, the array of end-of-the-world stories are even worse.  They tell us that the end will come in fire or ice, heralded by trumpets and the blaring of horns, presaged by omens and signs and prophecies.  The four horsemen will ride out of the sky or the frost giants will sweep down from the north, obliterating everything in their path as the world convulses.  The devastation will be noisy and explosive and, above all, obvious.

It's not supposed to be quiet.  A single crack, like the snapping of a tree branch in a high wind, isn't supposed to signal the end of the multiverse.  But it will.

Or maybe it already has. 

See, that's the problem with thinking in stories: you're so busy looking for the showy signs that you miss the subtle ones.  The stories that get repeated over and over are only a fraction of the whole tale, smoothed and tweaked and made palatable for the masses.  'Happily ever after' is only the beginning of a new adventure.  It all depends on where you start and end the tale.

This tale, for instance, starts with a crack.  Or maybe it starts with a question.  Or maybe, just maybe, it starts earlier than that, when a particular bubble of a universe arose from the heaving sea of the multiverse and began to grow.  Eventually, stars formed, then exploded, giving birth to more stars.  Planets grew alongside their stars, and a few special ones happened to contain the right conditions for life to form.

Maybe that's too far back, though.  Maybe you don't care about the evolutionary arms race that eventually spawned sapient races, only to massacre them before they reached their full potential.  Maybe you only care about the particular species that managed to survive until now, forming flourishing, fragile civilizations that whisper stories to each other in the dark of the night.  Maybe, you argue, the crack and the question are really what's important.

So let's get back to the question.

* * *

"Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?"

"You are, my lady," I drone, and she smiles.  It's the smug, satisfied smile of a woman sure of her place at the top of the heap; I don't think she realizes how unpleasant it looks.  I've seen corpses with better rictus grins.