Cosmogeny

From Various Scriptures[1]
Assembled by Vesper Alan Nisroch, Thought of Mirk
For Elucidation and Edification
With Annotations and Marginalia[2]

Before the beginning, there was not nothing. The world was, however, without form, and void, and nexus[3] was upon the face of the deep.

In coalition, the gods, led by Numiel, acting on mystic secrets invented by Mirk, threw back nexus, gave time a direction, and permitted the world to burst into being.[4]

The gods took immediately to the game of creation, collaborating first on humanity. But each god saw their collaboration as imperfect and devised individual upgrades -- Sequoia the elves; Hafgufa a succession of seafolk; Magzagrond and Urdle the dwarves and gnomes, respectively, plagiarizing freely from one another; Dalya the halflings; the Burning Hate a prolific oeuvre of variously monstrous and chimeric races; and so on.

Each god planted their creations in an environment optimized for them. Humans, adaptable, along with halflings, were placed on Androsia, that continent of a variety of environments (humans later migrated to cold Kryia and hot Sola). The dwarves, gnomes, and elves were placed on Heim, where Mirk went to work persuading elves to follow the ways of night, shadow, star, and moon. The other gods let the Burning Hate have barren, arid Stepa for her minions.

Sequoia and Hafgufa created the wild flora and fauna of the lands and seas, respectively; Numiel created dragons and the Burning Hate perverted them in her own image[5].

It is not known who invented the all-sacred Cat – the priesthoods of half a dozen gods attribute this creation to their patrons. Certainly, Sequoia created the catfolk, the tabaxi, who still revere her today. Sequoia and Numiel, in the days when they were close, collaborated on the lion. The Burning Hate created the tiger-demonic Rakshasa. But these were based on a preexisting model; the Cat herself may have existed with the gods, before time was.

Early on, but not immediately, Numiel invented Good and Mirk invented Evil[6], which led the gods and their creations into conflict[7]. Sequoia and Dalya sided with Good, the Burning Hate sided with Evil, and other gods refrained from taking sides, or attempted to play both sides against each other, or invented Chaos and Law in imitation of the Good-Evil dichotomy, until all of morality and ethics was a hopeless muddle[8].

Fear Not

In the long ago, in time that was, before the quarrels and strife of recent centuries:

The new Archbishop of Banor had been raised to her position through promising a tremendous plan to defeat Calabia. Seven times in the centuries Banor had tried righteously to conquer Calabia; seven times the bloodlords’ military superiority and judicious political alliances had rebuffed the crusades. Eight is not an auspicious number to the Numielites of Banor, but the Archbishop made grand promises, much grander than any portents allowed for.

The Archbishop’s tremendous plan was this: she prayed to Numiel to send angels to free all the food from the stockpens of Calabia, so that the food might rise in revolt and Banor might sweep in as conquering heroes.

And so the Archbishop’s prayer went up the celestial bureaucracy of Numiel’s demesne. It may actually have reached Numiel, or it may have been intercepted by an archangel, saving Numiel’s attention for more important matters – it is difficult to imagine what might have been more important to our god’s attention than this, but little do we know of the bureaucracy.

It is known that someone at or near the top received the prayer, and answered it by delegating, sending an order back down the celestial bureaucracy. It is not known why the order was passed on by all the ranks of angels – perhaps the might of Calabia was respected even in the heavens, perhaps the bloodlords’ intertangled political alliances extended even there, perhaps the difficulty of the task was generally recognized by the host, perhaps Numiel’s ineffable designs simply called for it to be so.

Eventually, the order wended its way to an inexperienced junior angel. His complete true name is not known – it may even have been erased from reality as a consequence of his actions – but history knows the angel in question as Arossiel. Arossiel had little experience with humans, but he was eager to prove himself to his superiors, and so he volunteered to take on the task of freeing all the food of Calabia as Banor’s army approached, rather than passing it on as all above him had done.

In the stockpens of Calabia, there was a food who was a human woman. Her hair was black and short, and her skin was pale as teeth, and the name that she was called by her friends, and that we call her today, was Lily – the overseers had a different name for her, or more precisely an alphanumeric code, the specifics of which are of little importance and have been lost to us.

It came to pass that, as Lily was getting ready for sleep in the stockpen, this celestial angel Arossiel came to her, a frightful whirlwind of wings and eyes, shining hot and brilliant like the midday desert sun, intoning in a terrible and awful voice, “FEAR NOT”.

Utterly disregarding Arossiel’s perfectly clear instruction, Lily gave a terrified squeak and dropped her hairbrush.

The angel had little understanding of mortals, but it was quickly becoming clear they cannot follow simple instructions, so he pondered for a moment, then did his best to tone down his terrifying affect somewhat by mimicking Lily’s humanity, folding in wings over eyes and shining less radiantly.

He was between Lily and the door, and there were no windows in the stockpens that one might dive out of, so she could not flee; she could only cower in terror.

Arossiel began apologizing and begging Lily’s forgiveness, “Terribly sorry, please forgive me; I did mean it genuinely: fear not.” He began to sense that his holy mission to free the food and raise them up in revolt was already going poorly, barely having started at all. He shrunk down further, modulated his voice and his apologies, trying to calm and soothe this petrified human.

After many long minutes of his apologies, Lily came to more thoroughly grasp that this unfamiliar creature was not there to hurt her. She grew less terrified and more curious, eventually opening a dialogue with a befuddled, “What…?”

Just the same while, Arossiel began to panic about how far behind he was already running on his mission. The armies of Banor were thundering towards Calabia, and he hadn’t even freed a single food. It was taking this long to get her mood barely back to where it started before he showed up. Still, he tried, “It is very important: I need to rescue you, and you need to rise up against your overseers. You and all your friends.”

A dozen problems with this request flashed instantly through Lily’s mind, and she protested, “I have three friends. Together, we have…” She looked around for an example, then picked the hairbrush off the floor and brandished it like a weapon, “Not much more than this. The overseers have… even if they didn’t have swords, which they do, they’re a lot stronger than any of us.”

“You outnumber the overseers ten to one!”

“Yeah, and they could take ten of us each even unarmed. We’d be torn to shreds.”

Arossiel examined Lily’s human arms and legs, consciously recognizing for the first time that she was, unlike an angel – or for that matter a vampire like the Calabian overseers and ruling class – not equipped with much in the way of natural weapons, defenses, or abilities. He grew crestfallen; he had been so confident that he could pull this off, but his unfamiliarity with human anatomy was proving to be his undoing. It was far too late in the mission to requisition incandescent holy arms and armor with which to equip a myriad of humans. “Oh.” His light grew dim and his many wings drooped.

Lily, native to the stockpens, was intimately familiar with despair; she could recognize it easily, even in an angel. She sat by Arossiel and reached out to touch him. Where some of us might have criticized, might have scolded him for not thinking his plan through, Lily had more kindness in her heart than we do. She was still not clear on the exact nature of Arossiel’s mistake or the extent of his inexperience, but she intuited the general shape of the error and said, “It’s a mistake anyone could have made.”

Arossiel remained filled with doubt and despair, but Lily gradually calmed him with soothing words and gentle touch. At this point, he fell in love with this individual human, and with humanity itself, seeing here the best of it in her. Still, he realized that he would not be able to convince a myriad of food to rise up in revolt if he could not even persuade one that it was possible. So it was that Arossiel stayed with Lily that night instead, a more pleasant experience all around, and she taught him much about humans and what he would need to know to actually help them.

Battle was soon joined in the fields of Calabia, and the Archbishop’s armies soon lay derelict and ruined. The fate of the eighth Banor invasion of Calabia had been decided before it began.

Arossiel the angel fled Calabia with Lily. He fled from his duties and from Numiel’s service; he fell from grace and lost his wings – though it’s unclear just how literal the histories are on the point of the angel’s wings and the loss thereof. The two wandered the world together for at least some decades.

After Lily’s death, Arossiel continued to wander, now alone. More learned and exalted theologians than I have debated important questions about Arossiel’s angelhood, his true name, and his place in history. However, I insist that he never truly escaped his nature or his love of humanity, because it is known that he helped to solve mortal problems wherever he went, helping humans without the direction or blessing of his celestial former superiors. We have records of good works perpetrated by Arossiel dating at least a century from the day he met Lily in the stockpens of Calabia, before he falls from the pages of history.

Today, Arossiel is generally reckoned among the saints, though he has long been deemed ineligible for official ecclesiastical recognition.

From the Hagioigraphy, chronicle of the lives of Numielite saints by Dord the Tall, Archbishop of Shell, written some eight hundred years after the events described.

Meltdown

In the old days, they used to say light speed was the limit, the absolute limit. Not even information could travel faster than c, let alone matter. They went off on the wrong path trying to at least make quantum entanglement work for them, but they never could. They had no idea what we could accomplish when we finally got on the right path.

The doctor had the idea, but my design team and I made it happen. We made everything happen. We put human bootprints on Proxima Centauri B! Light, ambling along like a slug, would take four years to get there – the team we sent got there in seconds, and back safe just as fast. We can go anywhere.

The first tests were so colossally successful that we hired whole teams of new technicians – including Betsy, with her cute eyes – to expand the system. We’re scaling it up until we can colonize, that’s the end goal.

“The tremendous reward is worth the risk”, the doctor said.

The consequences of actual criticality would be absolutely catastrophic, in the most literal sense. Cataclysmic. Apocalyptic. You know in Norse mythology how the gods are all supposed to die in Ragnarök at the end of time? Well, good luck to the gods themselves if this thing goes critical. We’re not just talking about any simple explosion. This would be nothing so prosaic as mere entropy; it would be so much worse than even the mere heat death of the universe. When we talk about this, we start throwing around words like rift and void and we need a new tense for verbs that happen after there’s no such thing as time anymore.

“Infinitesimal risk,” I said, “harder to get closer to zero risk than this. You take a thousand more likely risks when you shower, get dressed, and eat breakfast in the morning. A million. So yes, worth the almost zero risk.”

I built so many safeguards into the system. It’s idiot-proof and bandit-proof. If you leave it running too long, it shuts down. If it runs too hot, it shuts down. If there’s a fire, it shuts down. If it doesn’t hear from the control hub for an hour, it shuts down. If any safeguard is tampered with, it shuts down. If bad guys get into the facility – well, they can’t, not without about a million bullet-holes, but if we pretend there aren’t all the autoturret emplacements, the fact remains that if bad guys get close enough to worry anybody in the building, and anybody hits any of the handy buttons that are everywhere in the facility, it shuts down.

Even if you get past the buttons, you can’t make it go critical from any one place. There are so many redundant fail-safes in the whole system, you pretty much must have somebody in a hundred places disabling every safeguard and backup system and alarm and governor and auto-shutoff. And each safeguard has half a dozen alarms that go off if you tamper with it. And only one person, head of the design team, even really knows anything about every safeguard. And you’d have to disable every safeguard in one day, before everything gets automatically reset to base settings at midnight.

My team and I really did design it to be absolutely impossible for it to go critical through malice or negligence or any combination thereof. Impossible.

But Betsy. She’s got cute eyes and she’s smart enough to understand the math behind the system, so of course I liked her, so I invited her over; it should have been as simple as that.

But you should have heard what she said about my collection when she saw it! She called it weird! The note of mockery in her voice! Then she laughed about it! And she turned and left right out my door, snickering all the way, and went home!

Now I really don't want to talk to her today.

I don’t want to deal with her.

Or with people.

Ever again.

The Place of Terror

It begins when you are loaded into a cage on a transport vehicle. You can struggle, you can fight, you can strike or bite, but their armor – or their ability to feel pain? – is impervious. You can try to hide, or you can try to run, but they will find you and they will catch you. All appeals fall on deaf ears. There is nothing you can do to avoid it; they will, no matter what you try, load you up into the cage, onto the vehicle.

And then they take you to the Place of Terror.

They unload you from the vehicle outside an imposing brick-and-glass edifice and bring you inside. They don’t bring you immediately to the Terrormaster to cower before her, of course. That would be too easy. They leave you in a cage in the Place of Terror for what seems like an eternity. Their bureaucracy grinds through your papers while they let you stew in suspense.

Eventually, they pull you from the cage, but soon you would give anything to be back in the cage, back on the vehicle, because each step of the process is worse than the last. They haul you before the Terrormaster; you are laid prostrate before her, under a burning lamp. Your vitals are measured and indexed. Your every orifice is scrutinized and roughly probed. Your blood and excreta are taken for analysis. You are catalogued and recorded by the Terrormaster’s assistants, as the Terrormaster herself watches on, observing the process with malevolent relish.

Soon, they inject you with unknowable chemicals. These are not chemicals of execution; that would be too clean. Perhaps these chemicals reduce your will to fight – you just want to get back in the cage by now, anyway, away from the Terrormaster. Perhaps the chemicals make the fear center of your brain fire uncontrollably, but it’s already doing that. Or maybe they just burn like fire rushing in your veins. Whatever they do, your own heart is complicit, forcing the chemicals to every corner of your body as it beats a drumroll – exactly as they intend.

In the end, they don’t kill you. Maybe that’s too easy for them, or maybe if they control your mind so entirely with fear then they don’t even feel the need to destroy your body. Once your terror has nearly consumed you, they load you back into the cage, back onto the vehicle. They transport you away from the Place of Terror, back to your home. There, you are set free again, and left to stew, always in the back of your mind that they will bring you back again to the Place of Terror one day: perhaps soon. It is impossible to know for sure; you can only wait in fear and trepidation until once again you will be forced to go on a trip to the vet.

Ex Uno Plures

The archival room was entirely dust-free – it would not do to let dust accumulate on the old manuscripts, so a sophisticated ventilation system kept it out of the air – but it still felt choked with dust. The ventilation system was the most sophisticated thing about it – otherwise, just a fluorescently lit room crammed with cabinets of manuscripts. No windows, just a heavy metal door with a digital lock – to keep the manuscripts from escaping and causing havoc, I guess.

I was reading a copy of a copy of a copy of an ancient Roman text, E Filium Henrici, found in an old monastery in Germany when they catalogued their library last year. It wasn’t making sense to me, I figured due to careless errors propagated and perpetuated each time some monk painstakingly copied the document to preserve its text.

Translating the document in my head really took more attention than I was paying it. It had been growing increasingly clear that I wasn’t going to make tenure, that I was never going to be able to pay off my student loans, that the best I could hope for with my classics PhD was sitting in a stuffy-despite-not-being-stuffy archival room studying ancient Latin that didn’t make sense. Not for the first time, I was thinking of going back and getting into engineering. I had always been pretty good at engineering; it had come down almost to a coin toss in undergrad whether I would end up going into humanities or STEM. My best friend Utkarsh went for the program I should have, and he was doing very well for himself until he got laid off from his job at Clepsydra Corp. My mind was drifting.

The text was saying something mathematical about time – no mean feat using Roman numerals: there’s a reason we use Arabic numerals today. I wasn’t sure if the shift to math had been sudden or gradual and I just hadn’t noticed. I backtracked until I didn’t see any math. I noted what was probably a copying error just before the math started, but could have been a hapax legomenon, a word found only in this one place in the entire body of surviving Latin. It took me a solid second to notice that the word was specifically “Utkarsh”, which jolted me right out of my inattention.

The whole sentence translated to, “Utkarsh will be interested to see this.” Not the kind of name you’d ever see in Rome – did they have enough contact with India for a Hindi name to show up in such a text? I suspected a hoax, a forgery, but the provenance of this document had seemed so definitive.

I was interested enough to pay attention this time, and as I read it with Utkarsh in mind (not that the author had my Utkarsh in mind when he wrote this two millennia ago, of course), it actually did turn out to really be the kind of thing my Utkarsh would be interested in, math to do with the passage of time – that was why he got the job at Clepsydra Corp in the first place, they were working on engineering time itself.

I was at the receiving end of a long game of Telephone because none of the monks who copied this could possibly have known anything about what it said, but I quickly figured out it was some pretty high-level math. Even today it would be high-level math; two millennia ago, they were still working on inventing advanced concepts like zero.

I flipped back to the beginning of the document and began to read it for real this time. It seemed to be something about it being possible to backtrack on a road and take a different fork than you took before; that, if you get the math right, it’s possible to eat the stalk of a plant when previously you had eaten a person. Back to not making sense. “When the anomaly appears”, it interrupted itself repeatedly and with emphasis, “do not go with yourself into it. Stay good.” I was baffled, so I turned back to the math.

It soon became clear that I, not being a mathematician, was out of my element here, too. I was barely better than the monks – I could translate it, but I did not comprehend. But at least my confusion made sense here – the earlier bit was worse because it almost felt like I should understand it but was just outside my grasp. Something about the branching paths and eating the plants and people was right there, ready and waiting for my brain to apprehend, but I didn’t have a handle to grab it by.

“POTES CAULEM PEREDERE.”

You can consume the stalk.

You can eat the stem.

You can…

Wait.

You can consume STEM?

Where previously you had eaten human… the humanities?

I can change my mind about having studied the humanities, go back to the fork in my path, and have studied STEM instead? If I get the math right? The math that Utkarsh would be interested to see?

I was in the process of pulling out my phone to text Utkarsh when reality abruptly turned inside-out across the table from me. My eyes immediately started to hurt when I looked at the distortion of space. It looked like a vortex, but more so – just as the third dimension added by a whirlpool would be unnerving if all you knew was the two-dimensional surface of the water, this was unnerving because all I know is four dimensions and it was impressing a fifth – or more? – onto my senses.

Out of the vortex-but-more-so peeked a face. The face unnerved me, too, but for a different reason – it was intensely familiar, but wrong. It was the face I see every time I look in the mirror, but with more gray in the hair, a longer beard, a variety of crow’s feet and worry lines. The face said, in a voice entirely unlike what I hear when I speak, but exactly like what I hear when I listen to a recording of myself, “It’s very important that you step into the anomaly and come with me. They’re coming for you.”

My first instinct was not to trust this guy wearing my face, to turn and run.

Then I thought, no, that’s ridiculous, who can you really trust but your own face emerging from an anomaly?

…Wait. The document told me specifically and repeatedly not to go with myself.

But could I even trust the document? The document that said, about going back down the path, to the fork… A dozen questions burbled from my brain at once, and the one that reached my mouth was, “Why did you come back to now?” I pointed at the Latin document, “You could go back to undergrad, study STEM instead of humanities.”

The face that was like my face scoffed, “When do you think I went first once we got the math right? I never studied humanities at all. Now come, we need to get you out of there before they come.”

“Who’s they?”

“They want you not to have invented time travel, so they’re coming for you before you have.”

That wasn’t an answer to the question I asked, but before I could press more, there was a slamming against the archive room door. If somebody was after me out there, I didn’t have any choice but to go into the anomaly with myself, against the explicit and repeated recommendation of the document. The document that I figured I needed if I was to invent time travel. I looked at it, looked at the face in the anomaly, looked at the door.

I hesitated.

I hesitated long enough for the door to get blown off its hinges, falling with a metallic KLANGG into the room. I was paralyzed with confusion. Half a dozen black-clad, black-masked guys with guns swarmed into the room through the doorway. There was a lot of overlapping shouting –

“He’s here!”

      “Get down!”      “They’re both here!”

   “Surrender yourself and the device!”

        “Don’t let him get away!”

“Disrupt it!”          “Protect this one!”

            “Don’t let him hurt him!”

Amidst the chaos, the face disappeared into the anomaly and the anomaly disappeared into itself.

The shouting died down – a quieter voice replaced it. “Are you alright, Dr. Harrison?” The voice was familiar, but I was more concerned about the document, making sure it wasn’t damaged by the blast and the dust. “We couldn’t let you go with him. He’s bad news.”

I furrowed my brow. An ancient Latin document and a squad of men in black agreed on one side, against my self from the future on the other.

The lead black-masked guy pulled off his mask, revealing another mirror-familiar face. He pointed at the Latin document, and began to explain, “We need you to do it right this time.” He pointed where the anomaly had been: “That us is a monster. We need you to stay good.”

I stared into his face – my face – with a gradually dawning sense of who wrote E Filium Henrici two millennia ago. Time travel promised to be complicated.