skonen_blades

Yes the snake offered us the gift of knowledge
Because he knew it would hasten our death
The Garden of Eden did not happen a long time ago
It is happening now
We haven’t been banished yet
Our expulsion won’t come in the form of a deity telling us to leave
It will come in the form of our garden being no longer fit to support us
The serpent offered us the opportunity to become parasites
And we wolfed that opportunity down
The burden of intelligence
The ability to see what’s in it for us
To look out for number one
To see the angles
To gain an advantage
To screw each other over for a percentage
To climb
To see success as growth instead of stability
To subvert and create and twist
To improve
It’s suicide by auto asphyxiation
As nice as art is, as beneficial as science can be
It’s all masturbation that comes at too high a price
Side effects of the curse
There’s no way out
We will leave Earth because we’re crafty
We will not die here
And we will spread
And humans will be synonymous with cancer in the universe
Destroying with one arm
And patting ourselves on the back with the other
And always eating
Our mouths will consume galaxies
“Only enough to survive”
Will be our motto
As we apocalypse solar systems
Into our glowing bellies
God made us dumb as a gift
The snake made us smart
Now we turn the Garden of Eden into an anthill
A garden of eating
God’s curious about how it will all turn out
But he won’t save us
There is no rescue
This is our show now
And God help the universe


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The swaying in and the swaying out. Family leaving like waves pulling back from a beach. This shore of ground-down boulders. Time making rock into softness. One small day. One small billion years. The universe is an accordion breathing fat and thin from each big bang to each heat death. The big question is "is it a cycle or a one-off"?

This universe, the one-hit wonder. A big-ticket item. Guaranteed this universe is someone's free ride to the big time. If this universe was a creation, was it for an elementary-school science fair or a nobel prize? Are we what's created in the wake of some unknowable craft? Maybe we're in the engine right now.

The big bang was caused by a piston shoving phsyics into a pocket until it ignited. Every stroke creates another one. Universes like cartoon gas clouds behind a car. You can track this car through the higher dimensions by the trail of dead universes.

We all need overlays. We all need filters. It's too bright to look at almost anything if you know enough. A cozy little standpoint helps. A cloister of prejudice. We're all living sorting hats, putting everything we see into a small number of houses.

Planning for the future is an art form. The sine wave and the particle. The sudden swerves and the trees in the way.


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Ode to Time

Oh sideswipe of time, you raucous flow chart, actuarial tabling us from milk and cookies to cancer-ridden hardware we can’t replace. You dancing dog. Your enemies number the ones that waste you. I have known people that have loved fully and achieved mighty goals welcome death with resigned grace. It's the ones that haven’t done what they wanted and can’t see the beauty in their failure that hate clocks as much as witches hate bodies of water and piles of sticks.

Time, you have sandpapered off my corners but I am not yet a wheel. The ride is still rough. The pull of you as I roll downhill feels like gravity. You go by quicker because of your familiarity. Only adventure slows you down. Only effort makes you invisible. Only fun makes you fly.

Records broken create timestamp beasts, children of yours that embarrass themselves until they are broken again. You cannot be divided. We have not yet found your smallest number. You are as unknowably vast to us as space. The fact that we have the audacity to measure you is hubris.

According to us, the Earth is out by a whole day every four years. According to US, the EARTH is OUT by a whole day every four years. What unbelievable arrogance. Foxes don’t know that they are called foxes, lions don’t know that they are called lions, and time does not know that it is comprised of hours and minutes and seconds.

There are no stopwatches in space. The right amount of time to make a sun ignite is merely the right amount. The number of revolutions needed to create a planet is merely the number of revolutions needed. If it cannot be a planet, it will be an asteroid belt. If it cannot be an asteroid belt, it will be rings around a gas giant. Nothing is measured. It merely exists. And time is what enables it to happen.

If there is a God then God is time. Time gives the universe permission to exist and it gives us permission to experience it.

Our human label makers will break one day. And the universe will take no notice. Time will wheel and erode and create and let this universe keep on keepin’ on like the gigantic clock it is. Each nova a tock, each quasar a tick. And there will be no numbers ever again.


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Shifters, we called them.

People not in line with our own universe but only barely out of sync. It could happen to anyone. A person wouldn’t even know if it was happening to them. One of the more extreme giveaways was if a person was speaking to a person that wasn’t there, chatting away to dead space.

Sure, to them, they were talking to an old friend; a friend that had always existed but had never been born in this universe.

No one knew what was causing these shifters to take over existing members of society, only that the numbers were on the rise. We had tools to measure the impostor’s molecular quantum makeup but they were the size of MRI’s in hospitals. Not portable. We didn’t have anything we could carry around and scan citizens with.

If they were being replaced, where were the originals going? Was it a chain reaction down the line of every multiple universe in existence or was it just our universe that was eroding on a quantum level and letting strangers in? Were we soon to cease existing entirely?

So far, the shifters themselves were only from universes slightly different from our own. We didn’t have any shifters from universes where Hitler lost the war, for instance, or worlds where the Romans successfully conquered Europe. So far, they’d only been people who still knew what year it was and the prime minister’s name but thought, for instance, that we had no space program or didn’t know what an eggplant was.

Very hard to spot. It could be anything. You couldn’t question one of these things about every single aspect of their lives. We were terrified.

Until we noticed the weather.

It turns out the weather is different in every single universe. No two are alike. Universes mere atoms of existence away can have thunderstorms while we have sunlight. Chaos theory or something.

So we keep an eye out for people wearing scarfs on sunny days, people wearing shorts in the rain.

And every time we start questioning a suspect, we start with a conversation about the weather.




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The rules were simple. No time manipulation, no transmutation, and no spell could be used twice.

Morden the Uneasy entered from the west quadrant of the arena on a massive floating bed attended by golem slaves made from flower petals. The metal caps on the stumps of her legs glimmered with diamonds in the sunlight.

I sat high up in the private viewing box with my client and tried to pay attention to the match. The arena floor was projected real-time on the table between my client and I in hard light. Whatever section of the fight I was paying attention to would come up picture-in-picture on a baseball card floating to the left of the action.

It was an expensive AV setup in the most expensive seat in the house. If this gross display of wealth was meant to impress me and keep me off-balance during the wage negotiations, it was working.

Khallista of the Red Flame entered from the east quadrant of the arena, wreathed in the red fire of her clan and already whimpering from the recent focal drugs that had turned her eyes completely black.

There were better skilled people on the craftlist above me that could have done the job that my client was asking me to do. I wasn’t cheap but this client could afford the best. I figured if he wanted a fall guy to use as bait for a trap, he would have sought out the cheapest loser he could find so I was curious why he picked me. Not the bottom and not the top and not a particularly fast riser.

I warily accepted his offer of more details over dinner at a Magic Pit Fight in the hopes of allaying my suspicion.

Rowst the Unbelieving staggered in from the ‘blue’ north quarter. He was blindfolded and dressed in nothing but a small toga, stained by the sores covering his body. A perfectly circular halo of small glowing fairies crowned his bald head.

My client sat across from me in the shadows. Whatever air of mystery he was trying to create for me was also working very well. I was very curious about his identity. Courtesy wouldn’t let me ask until he offered to talk to about it so I sat back in silence and continued to watch the players enter the arena.

Shorelocke the Dread Shadow entered from the south to complete the roster. He was cut from darkness. There was an absence of light around him. He was like a person-shaped hole cut in the fabric of reality. His glowing eyes stabbed out in twin beams of white, eager ferocity.

These fights were not to the death. They were for rights and rankings. This was a championship round, though, and sometimes accidents happened.

My client leaned forward into the light above the projection on the table. I looked up to meet his eyes and froze with the words I was planning to say dying in my throat.

A Fixer was staring back at me. I’d only heard legends. His pale face and dark eyes marked him out as a rare purebred human but that wasn’t the giveaway. He’d released the glamour for me to see in this moment so that I would be suitably awed.

He flickered with possibility.

He was staying close to the dimensions surrounding this one so his changes weren’t extreme. The different versions of himself were very similar to one in this quantum thread. His hair length varied a little from second to second. A scar would sometimes pop up on a cheek and then vanish. His eyes would go through a gradient of the colours he was born with as the moments went by. It made me slightly nauseous to look at, like I had motion sickness.

Very occasionally, a woman would flash through his features or he’d disappear for a millisecond as he passed through a universe where he’d died already.

He leaned back in the shadows.

I composed myself and asked him the question I’d been wanting to ask him since I’d been contacted.

“Why me?” I asked.

“Because”, The Fixer responded, “you are unique. You know what you’re talking to, yes? You realize what I mean?”

I nodded. As someone that could extend their sense of self across an almost infinite number of dimensions as easily as a bird could extend its wings, The Fixer had a very special definition of unique.

We all have a double in almost every other universe. However, if you picture all possible realities as a spectrum, the differences between our universe and the other possible universes get more and more pronounced the further away you get from your universe of origin.

There are universes where I have a different haircut and a different job. There are universes where I am married.

Go further and there are universes where I was hit by car when I was six, for example, or choked on a chicken bone when I was seven. There are universes where my parents never met and I never came to be.

What The Fixer meant by ‘unique’ was that he had spread his dimensional-self wings and hadn’t found me. What he meant was that there was only one of me. Here. Only in this space-time continuum and only on this Earth.

I reeled. This was the end of one life and the beginning of another.

“You realize how valuable that makes you to my kind, of course. I only offered you a job to get you here.” He said. Languidly, he motioned with his index finger and I heard the doors lock.

“You are going to be added to The Zoo.” He said.

On the table between us, the Magic Pit Fight began to the crowd’s deafening cheer.



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