The God of the Gaps
by Adrian FirthI deconstruct Universe 15 - now a place of endless frozen night - and record the details its inhabitants' demise. Their battle against heat death was glorious. At their zenith, a thousand billion sentient beings raged against the advancing cold and darkness, only to be overwhelmed by the imperfections of their flawed reality - the reality I made for them. Disconsolate, I examine their continuum's surface for consciousness leakage. My search fails.
In all my trials, no being has ever escaped its reality or saved its cosmos. Each failure, each dead universe, seems to confirm that the movement of coherent matter between realms is impossible, that only information may pass. My experiments foreshadow a death for my people as inescapable as my guilt. In my universe, a singularity awaits; soon all will be made one, in a fiery and fatal unification.
A scant ten star-lifetimes remain. The time to come, marked by the oncoming stream of moments, will drift past most races, draining slowly into an ocean of eternity; but for us the ocean of time is shallow and storm-tossed. My kind are nearly immortal, and the flowing moments speed us toward a rocky shore. So little time. I have lived twice the span remaining, and I am too young to die. My race must survive. My beautiful Alpheria must live.
I break orbit from the star hiding me and head into interstellar space. My people evolved from the stars, but when I look out to the surrounding points of light I see not ancestors, but the souls of those my experiments doomed. I cool, shrinking to the size of a red dwarf, lying to myself that the end justifies the means. I know that even were I to save them, my people would not forgive me. The Council of the Wise made that clear eons past, when they decreed only stable universes may be created, branding me a criminal and pariah. Disheartened by my latest failure, I blacken and drift through a gulf between galaxies.
A ferocious assault catches me unaware. Unheralded, four yellow stars materialize at the vertices of a tetrahedron. I am enclosed, then skewered by tunnels of space-time snaking inward from the suns. I try to flee, but their snare binds me, bleeding my energy. The four swell and boil, while I diminish, contorting in pain. It is the seventh and most vicious attack my kinsmen have brought against me.
Once they honored me as a great thinker; now they despise me as the most terrible mass murderer of all time in any continuum. They would rather we all died than my work continue. But I will not accept the death of our people. Outcast, I persevere, skulking in the wastelands of space and the remnants of supernovas. Perhaps my willingness to kill on such a massive scale marks me as an aberration, an evolutionary freak. If so, that is fitting. All races must evolve. There is but one constant in all universes: evolve or die. I will not let us die.
I break three fetters and jump from the agony of their assault to a nearby nebula, dragging an attacker with me. Before I can rid myself of my last assailant, the others appear and reattach themselves. They drain me. I thrash and tug at my bonds, searching for escape. My strength fades and fails, and they force me to a halt.
Their leader speaks. "Stop struggling, Cyrix. Accept the inevitable."
This I will not do. "Are you in such a hurry to die?" I ask. I know him well. I like him. It is Osiris--he is, was, a friend and close family. Together we have roamed this universe, played God, laughed, mourned. I don't want to kill him.
"It is over. The killing must end. We will not trade the lives of innocents for our future."
They mistake my burden for their own. The enormity of my crimes never leaves me, and the depth of my self-loathing is far greater than their shallow guilt of association. It would be so easy to let it end now, but I will not take the coward's way. There is only one route I can take from here, but I do not want to travel it. I am reduced to begging. "Please, Osiris. Don't force me to hurt you. Leave now. Choose to live."
"I am sorry it has come to this." His response augers my death. I wonder if Alpheria would forgive him if I were to let this happen. I wonder if she will forgive me. Dark blotches drift across his surface as he prepares a final blow.
Sadness fills me and leaks into my reply: "I too, am sorry." I do not yet know how to save us, but I have at least learned enough in my research to extend my immediate future. The monstrous energy surge I deliver is drawn from a place beyond their ken. I register their shock and surprise as they expire.
Their attack moves me to try again. I hide within the radiation and gas left over from the collapse of a binary system and turn my attention to the only experiment still running. Another barren cosmos greets me. I examine the remnants of its history. Life never passes easily--the denizens of Universe 16 put up a magnificent fight: they learnt to manipulate their physical constants. But they only delayed their end. I know such tricks and they cannot help us. My knowledge is not increased.
I am laying the foundations for Universe 17 when a planet-sized sphere of rotating, blue fire manifests before me. I expand, ready to fight, but there is no need. It is my beloved, Alpheria. She carries my kernel and will eventually spawn my child. She knows I am not the evil creature my persecutors seek. Alpheria will love me whatever I do. I need these things to be truths. I gladden, becoming a bloated red sun. Alpheria orbits me, spiraling downwards. I extend geysers of incandescent gas, yearning for her caress.
Tsunamis of flame roll across her when she speaks. "Have you made any progress?"
I do not bother to dissemble. "Not enough. It appears that soon we must all perish."
She flares, emitting twisted torrents of energy. "It cannot be. There must be a solution." She speaks with the urgency of fear, not anger.
I regret the harshness of my words. Scaring her serves no purpose, and I have worse news to pass on. My surface darkens. "If my work was not so hampered, we might have a chance." I tell the story of recent events, and although I have killed so many already, I stumble over the ending. Her visage cools and her orbit stabilizes as I speak. Osiris was her brother.
She completes an entire revolution before speaking. "Osiris was a fool." It is not forgiveness.
She leaves me, with no goodbye, dissolving into a myriad uncoordinated particles. I wonder if I will feel her touch again. Alone, in desperation, I fashion a perversion.
I provide Universe 17 with ten space-time dimensions, instead of the usual five. To four I give a sensible size. The remaining six I hide at scales of the quanta. Macroscopically, I allow cause and effect, but I undermine this rule with random, probabilistic behavior for fundamental particles. I build atoms from a diminishing series of interlocking substructures. The life forms that evolve here will need to harness the energies of stars to uncover the intricacies of what I have wrought. Mass and energy I make interchangeable, thus limiting the maximum speed of movement. Final adjustments leave the bizarre continuum unstable--doomed to the heat death. I seed self-replicating patterns into the ridiculous structure and hope the life to come will be curious enough to explore my work in detail and thus develop the intelligence necessary for escape.
After an inflationary nudge, Universe 17 swells and unfolds. I carefully monitor the slow expansion, but the macrocosm remains silent. Have I created a dark wasteland, devoid of consciousness? It would not be the first empty realm I have made. I investigate. Close examination along the axis of time reveals isolated pockets of defeated intelligence. Life does not flourish long in this mixed-up place. Marooned by my twisted physics, most races perish with their stars. I pity them. The challenge is too complex. They have no future.
I leave them to their doom. Should I try the opposite and create a realm of inevitability and plenty? I doubt this would advance my knowledge. This universe is a complex one, and my experiments must mirror it. But how many must die so that we might live? Perhaps Osiris was right. Perhaps it is time for me to accept the unacceptable. And at this moment, my pondering is diverted by an anomaly: an infinitesimal stream of sentient beings leaking from Universe 17.
Unlikely as it seems, a people able to breach my container of death have arisen. My essence sings as I gather up the escapees, encasing them in a bubble of slow-time. I count some 400,000 beings in 603 spacecraft.
Behind them, Universe 17 is cooling, but I hold a spark from that dying fire. I scan their minds and the minds of their devices. I must learn their secrets. The first thing I discover is their name--they call themselves humans.
Most humans are of limited intelligence, barely able to provide for a fraction of their individual needs. They survive as a species because of cooperative behaviors. The majority know only rudimentary mathematics, although there are a few with some skill. Many believe they travelled here through a big black hole, but I know this is impossible. These dark pores exist in many universes, but they cannot be traversed intact. Tidal forces invariably tear apart any object that approaches a black hole's central singularity. My hope threatens to collapse, but the presence of the humans will not allow it. These survivors are hope incarnate. They found a way out. Finally, I find one who understands the details of their achievement.
Their scientists discovered that some black holes are less savage than others, that black holes tire as they age. Escape came via a monstrous black giant standing at their galaxy's centre: an ancient, rotating sinkhole of space-time, hiding a swirling torment of event horizons and mass-inflation singularities. They developed artificial consciousnesses to amplify their meagre intelligence and assist their transit through this twisted topology. They use time-contraction side effects to reduce the terrors of tidal forces and gamma radiation to minuscule periods of subjective time. Thus they avoid destruction.
The same technique cannot be used in this place, but I return to my records to re-examine them for similar exploits that might be applied to gateways presently labelled impassable. I sift the strange details of black holes, wormholes, fractal paths, spin-reversed dimensions, time reversal and other exotic phenomena. Now that I have some hint of what to look for, it is not long before I discover something which might work. Immense relief overwhelms me.
My people come in the dying moments of our universe as radiant stars and glowing balls of plasma. The brilliance of our gathering illuminates a galaxy. Pragmatism silences my erstwhile decriers and nobody speaks of my crimes, but I know that I remain unforgiven. One by one, they pass through the rift. I send all who wish to pass, those I love, those I hate.
The Council of the Wise materialize around me and merge to form a single rotating ring of white fire, the size of a solar system. I have nothing to say to them, nor them to me. I know they cannot sanction my actions, but nevertheless, I take their display as silent thanks. After a time, they too pass through. The last to arrive, in the guise of a tiny, white pulsar, is Alpheria.
I rejoice in her decision to join the exodus, for too many have stayed behind to die. I burn for her embrace, but the gateway has limited duration, and all my resources are required to hold it open. She pauses at the threshold. "Let us go through together," she says.
"You first. The portal will collapse as I enter--it will be safer if I can slip through unimpeded."
"I can't leave you."
Her reply tells me she knows I'm lying. It is impossible to simultaneously maintain the rift and pass through. No doubt this will be a relief to the others. She is flickering, crying pulses of light--as am I. "You must go now! The gate is unstable."
"I can't."
"You must. Remember that I will always love you. And do not let them ostracize my child!"
I'm running out of strength, and the tear I have made in space-time threatens to bring this place to a premature conclusion. I have no choice. I throw her across with a parting thought: "Goodbye, my love." I will never see her again, but there is no immediate opportunity for me to dwell on this finality, as I must heal reality's wounds.
When I am done, I turn my gaze to the humans and release them from stasis. The time left for this realm will seem, to them, an age. I wonder if they will need the services of their creator, a guilty and imperfect god. I fervently hope so, for it is time to begin my atonement: I am responsible for the creation, and thus the deaths, of the sentient beings in seventeen universes.
©Adrian Firth
Adrian Firth lives in Auckland, New Zealand with his wife, two cats, and a writing addiction. He has worked as a teacher, horticulturalist, bartender, web developer, and computer systems trainer. But not all at the same time.