The Conversation

After my first failure on Earth, my mind wandered through the emptiness of space. Time never meant anything to me, and once I stopped keeping track, it could have been a fraction of a second or it could have been billions of years. But I stopped drifting to become corporeal nearby a nameless blue giant; its light was ghostly, eerie against the black backdrop of the cosmos, its solar wind bombarded my young nerves but it was good to feel once more. For a while, my newly formed eyes drank in the sight. But the memories of the doomed world forced their way into the forefront of my thoughts and the emotional pain, which was a relatively new sensation that I learned amongst the humans, forced the ghost of a sigh between my lips. For the first time in my existence, I didn’t know what to do. I could find yet another world; I knew that there were billions upon billions of them within the billions upon billions of galaxies that punctuated the inky depths of the universe. But even if I were to try again, for the first time in my existence, I was not optimistic. Life, no, sentience, was a complicated matter, and I realized that now as I stared into core of the brilliant star that burned and seethed before me.

I folded my legs underneath me and crossed my arms. Suspended on the fabric of space-time, I closed my eyes and with all of my concentration, I focused on retracting my essence from the furthest reaches of the universe and ever so slowly into my corporeal form. I have no inkling of how long this possibly took, but as I grew less and less aware of the space around me, I felt the vague vibrations of yet another sensation. The closer that I looked into myself, the stronger this new sensation became. Once I was completely unaware of anything other than this single point in space, the crescendo of the vibrations slowly began to fade. Is this what it’s like to die? I never thought it was possible for me to die, nor did I think it would be this easy, this peaceful. I wonder what will happen. Will I cease to exist? At this point, I would not mind oblivion, anything to end this hopelessness, the turmoil that my soul was feeling. Go ahead, fade away, disappear…

“You liked to be called Altair, correct?” The boy opened his eyes to the smiling face of another child.

“Yes,” he stood and looked around. “Where am I? And who are you?” They were standing in a void of white, Altair felt a floor underneath his bare feet, but there was no shadow. He wouldn’t have called it being surrounded by light, not the opposite of the universe from whence he came, but this could not be non-existence.

“You can call me Than,” the other boy said. He was slightly taller than Altair, also simply dressed and barefooted. However, where Altair’s hair was long and black and wild; Than’s hair was short and the color of the vanished stars. Where Altair’s face was gaunt and drawn over severe, sharp features; Than’s face was more full and jovial. Where Altair’s skinny, pale body was covered by a long, almost comically large, slate grey sweater; Than’s torso was uncovered and his skin was dark, with the hint of muscles underneath, the pants he wore were reminiscent of a djinn, embroidered with multicolored, swirling patterns. “You’re at a place that I call the Terminus, the space between.”

“Between what?” Altair asked.

“Existence and oblivion,” Than answered plainly, flashing Altair a wide, bright smile. “And you have no idea how thrilled I am to see you here.” He outstretched one dark hand. “I’d like to show you something, before I explain who I am.”

“Well, I suppose there isn’t much for me to lose,” Altair returned the dark boy’s smile with a thin, pale grin. For some reason, Than was familiar, though Altair was sure he never met the boy before. “Are you like me?” He asked before placing his own hand in Than’s.

The moment that their skin connected, the whiteness was replaced by a gradient of red. An indiscernible distance below the unseen platform upon which they stood, was a vast well of scarlet. From this well sprang a wilderness of sanguine columns. Some were thick, others thin, some writhed like serpents, some spiraled like DNA, some stood straight and some twisted together while others fell apart. All of them reached upwards into depths of swirling pink and crimson. “What is this place?”

“This is what I call the Implexos.” Than answered, releasing Altair’s hand. “What you are seeing is the timeline of every universe that ever was. Below us are all the universes that ever will be. You already comprehend the concept of time, that it permeates and connects everything in the universe from whence you came. Well this,” Than opened his arms and turned away from Altair to bellow out into the dimension before him, “this is all of existence!”

“Then who are you and why am I here?”

Than turned back around to smile at Altair. “This form is the same as what you’re doing right now. It’s the only thing that allows us to communicate. All of these timelines, universes, tendrils, are what I call tempanguis, and they all have one common ground. They all come from the origin, the source, the principium below you.” He pointed downwards towards the well from which the serpents flowed. “That origin is my heart and all of the subsequent tempanguis are driven by the forces that you call gravity, electromagnetism, and etcetera. And they are all my body. I am the sum of all of these forces, I am energy, I am time, I am existence itself.” He smiled. “I am what you would call God.”

Altair considered this for a moment, looking around at the shifting forest around him. He walked over to one of these timelines and peered closely into it. Altair could see all of the threads that intertwined to form the tempangui. All of the atoms and stars and black holes, all of the heartbeats and tears of the life that existed between them, all of the pain and joy within, all of it, a whole universe before his eyes in a space small enough to be observed at once, yet when Altair went to touch it, his fingers slipped right through. “So is this the fifth dimension?”

“I suppose it would be,” Than answered.

“But you aren’t like me?”

“I suppose I’m not.”

“Then, what the hell am I?” Altair asked, the emotions behind were thinly concealed, but the turmoil was there, growing stronger than ever.

“You are what gives me hope, my friend. Let me tell you my story, which consequently is your own.” Than walked over to the universe Altair was observing. One dark finger went to stroke the timeline; ever so gently it trembled underneath the boy’s touch…

“At first, I was not alone. My body was laid alongside another. How we came to be, we did not know, we simply were. Another, higher dimensional being must have placed us there, but as you’ve already experienced, my friend, we can’t exactly ask it why until it decides to contact us. It must be waiting for a certain point that we have yet to reach, but already, I digress.

“This other body was my opposite, but still we must have loved one another. It was within our nature to seek each other out. However, the being that determined our constraints decided that whenever we touched, we would destroy each other. I did not realize the impossibility of our shared existence until I completely pushed her away and out of the space where we both once resided. It was then that I discovered loneliness, the same cruel trick of fate that you now feel. At this point, there was only me, only my body, and throughout all of these universes flowing from my source, I could not feel her. For eons, my mind searched the Terminus, but I could not find her. And as time itself flowed ever onwards, driven by the forces set forth by her absence, I only grew more alone. I gave up on the Terminus, and returned my focus to stretching my tempangui towards the Omnia, the everything, beyond. For I have found that once all the matter in a universe evaporates into energy, and once all energy evaporated even further, I cease to exist along with my loneliness. It must be then that I ascend and cease to become aware of my former existence. Either that or even I fall back into the Terminus and there forth face my own end.

“So, for an indescribable amount of time, I expanded all of these possibilities autonomously, with the end goal to fade away, hopefully into the place where my long lost lover awaits me. But then there came to be a universe where there formed a… bubble, for lack of a better term, in my forces. That bubble could move along the timeline at will, from its beginning to its very edge. It was a new kind of existence within myself, outside of the forces that governed the tempangui, that existence is you, Altair.”

“So I was right,” Altair breathed. “I’m a mere anomaly…”

“You’re more than that,” Than responded, “you’re proof that anything is possible. You showed even me that. You inspired me.” With one sharp movement, Than’s finger ripped through the timeline they were observing. Instantaneously, all points above and beneath the division turned into glittering fragments of time and space and trickled down, in between Than’s outstretched fingers like the cosmic dust it was, before vanishing altogether.

“Why did you do that?” Altair asked.

Than smiled, “No other reason than curiosity. See, they do this all the time, without my influence, and once they disappear, I don’t know where they go. They must go to her in that space beyond the Terminus and Omnia. Countless times, I have tried to follow them, to see if there is any way they can lead me back to her, but they all disappear to where I cannot trace them.”

“What does this have to do with me?”

Than laughed, the noise echoed throughout the Implexos, and all of the shifting tendrils shivered and vibrated. “At first that’s all I thought you were, a virus, a threat. But whenever I tried to destroy you, to end the timeline where your bubble appeared, you instantly popped up somewhere else. All of these timelines have you in common, at one point or another. No matter what I did, I could not destroy your consciousness, I could not touch your essence, as much as you can’t touch mine.” To emphasize the point, Than blew the vanishing dust over Altair, but Altair did not feel the glittering particles. “Somehow, you kept on appearing. I could not touch you, you could not touch me. Much in the same way that she was to me, you are the yin to my yang, only we can coexist.

“This is what inspired me to create, you guessed it, sentience itself. Time, your fourth dimension, permeates everything. The space between something’s creation and destruction is what all of existence has in common, in the sense that to exist, there has to be a separation between a birth and death. Yet you have neither a birth nor death, you simply were, no matter how many times I tried to end you, you’re the same as me in that manner. So I endeavored to create sentience. Life has always existed, and it was within these constraints that I decided to work. Living things are a lot more ephemeral than say, stars and atoms, yet their physicality is subject to the same forces. But the forces that cause something to be alive are far more complex. Stars exist thanks to gravitational and thermal forces. Atoms, and therefore molecules, exist due to nuances in electrical forces. However, to be considered alive depends on interactions between all of these forces which in turn are governed by these slight differences and a brain that regulates all of these interactions as autonomously as I once existed. Billions of interactions between billions of different molecules and countless numbers of atoms that flit in and out of my own body, appear and disappear in and out of existence, all bound together by electrical attraction and regulated by electricity itself, which can furthermore only exist underneath certain conditions, a planet with an atmosphere bound by gravity and just far enough away from a star that provides just the right amount of just the correct shades of my energy to allow these molecules and chemicals to exist. The possibility for life to even happen at first excited me, and then became mundane. But with the advent of you, my friend, I figured out a way to endow these living creatures with my own consciousness

“I took the most wondrous, complex creations that I could find, the brain, and tweaked it just enough to be able to perceive meaning; just enough to be able to create and observe, to be able to look out into the universe and wonder how it got there. However, in most cases, and much to my great pain, these living beings perceived separation to be more apparent than it actually is. They found their individual consciousness to be disconnected from each other, and failed to realize from whence it actually came. It came from my own energy, from what they called God, but in their superstitions, they forgot what I even meant, and so forth concreted their separation. As you can see,” Than motioned around at the Implexos, “I am one body; I am one energy; I am their universe, and every universe for that matter. Their brains are not much different from those that they called less intelligent, and in essence their souls are all the same energy that connects every other living being, they only have meaning because they perceive an existence at all. You have seen what I am talking about in the humans that you hold so dear.”

“You’re right,” Altair said. “When I tried to tell them that their time is all connected, and their souls are all one form of energy they could not observe, most of them grew very angry.”

“That is arrogance, one of my worst inventions, the belief that one life is more important than another. It causes me great pain.” Than shook his head and cast his eyes to the principium below. “I give them drugs to expand their consciousness, and they reject them all in fear. I give them love to realize their connectedness, and they still choose to hate. I give them sign after sign after sign, their heartbeats, their fellow living creatures and the planet on which they live on; I give them the tools to see their universe and all consequential schools of thought and science, even most of their religions have some common ground, and yet they choose to cling to these petty differences, even something as unimportant as the pigments in their skin. They hold imaginary concepts, such as wealth and their foolish opinions on how another person should live their lives, to be supreme in the world and universe. They fail to realize what actually is most supreme, that is life itself, and in most cases, they cause their own extinctions….” Than looked back up at Altair with pain shining in his eyes. “This causes me great suffering, my friend, but you give me hope in something more. If you keep trying to convey to them what I am showing you now, you may yet get through to those wise fools.”

“…I don’t know if I can.” Altair looked back into Than’s eyes. “The pain of failure is too much.”

“You’re telling me!” Than laughed, vibrating the tempangui once more. “I have experienced every love and loss that ever was. So, you really have no choice, since you aren’t actually alive, I cannot kill you. You can sit here or in the Terminus, or you can meditate and rejoin whichever timeline you so choose. But, until we evolve, I fear that higher being will let us suffer for eternity. Just know, my friend, that you are not alone. We finally have each other…” Than outstretched a hand. Altair grabbed it and they squeezed tightly. In a moment, Than slowly faded into the shining dust of time and space and fell through the invisible floor, back into the origin of all things that seeped forth from far beneath.