When he initially saw the pink scrap of paper, there was no anamnesis. It was, after all, the first of the universe’s cycles. He had no past life to remember. The expansion of the universe crawled to a stop billions of years later. Its contraction lasted barely a second. After the next Big Bang, there was a life to remember. For no particular reason, he always remembered that pink scrap of paper.

“Déjà vu,” he would mumble, the paper quickly forgotten until the next life.

“Where there are humans,

you'll find flies..."

― Kobayashi Issa

The president swats the desk, but the fly escapes to the wall. Satisfied at its distance, the president opens a file that reads “CONFIDENTIAL” in red. Focusing, he leans forward and the fly zooms off the wall. It hovers over his head for a moment before the president registers the buzzing and swipes, missing again. The fly flees the building, going up through the clouds, the atmosphere, then inside the moon. A hard-working alien passes by, grabs a handful of flies, and plugs them in.NO CURRENT HUMAN THREAT, the alien reports before clocking out.

For the first time in billions of years, she fell asleep. She dreamt of a dry black ocean with a glowing white shore. At first, she could have touched the shore. By the time she wanted to, it was far past late. She raced to catch the edge, past burning spheres and colorful cosmic clouds. She winded through solar systems and brushed past planets, leaving new moons in her wake. With each moment, she got faster, but the ocean got wider. Billions of years seemed to past before she catapulted off a comet and her fingers grazed the edge of the universe.

She woke with a start.

“Weird dream,” she mumbled.

The years spent chasing fade in seconds, along with the universe’s existence.

When you look at the stars, you are looking into the past…

Small green hands grasp the telescope. One large black eye closes while the other two peer through the lens, far into the cosmos. “Life detected,” the telescope signals. Excitement spurs him forward too quickly. Suddenly a long-necked dinosaur appears in his vision. He chews lazily on flat green leaves with wide chomps. The little one shrieks and flees to find comfort, while the past in the light dances inside the lens.

#aliens #dinosaurs #telescope #cosmos #cosmoscope #earth #space #stars #universe #light #lightshowsthepast

Maea stared wide-eyed at her wrists that were now sporting thin golden cuffs.  

“What the fuck?” she said. She tapped on one of the cuffs with her nail and it made a soft clink. She searched for where the cuffs ended and she began, but the golden material seemed to have meshed with her skin seamlessly. She pressed a finger to the surface. The cool metal gave way just as her skin would have, but it still seemed strong, unbreakable.

Maea stared at her wrists, eyes narrowed, mind working furiously. Eventually she sighed. “Believe it or not,” she said to herself “I have more important things to focus on then... then whatever this is,” she shook her head back and forth in frustrated disbelief at how her day was going. But her sister was in trouble. She took a deep breath then pushed the cuffs to the back of her mind.

“Alright Maea, think,” she said to herself. “Why would anyone want to kidnap your sister? She’s too lame for that really…” she commented to herself, although it did little to calm her fear like she had hoped it would.

As if activated by her voice, the cuffs began to vibrate softly and grow warm. A buzz traveled through her body making her whole being hum. She raised her hands, but held them as far from herself as possible. She looked sideways at the cuffs, grimacing with uncertainty, then gawked as the cuffs began to glow. Gold light emanated from her wrists while flecks the color of the tip of a flame formed in the air around them. These sparks of light rose in tendrils, swirling and circling her hands, illuminating them with a golden hue. The sparks gradually danced together between her hands into a cloud of shimmering light. As Maea watched mesmerized, an image started taking shape, the flecks melding into the burning image of her sister. 

“Bobbi!” Maea exclaimed. The image crystallized, adding two other strangers to the scene. The various shades of shimmering gold, yellow, and orange gradually included all colors of the visible spectrum. It was remarkably life-like, giving Maea a clear image of the people that attacked her sister and her.

“What about the other girl?” one of the strangers, a male human asked. He jerked his chin toward the women sprawled on the floor, eyes closed. That’s me 20 minutes ago. What the fuck is going on? Maea thinks. 

“We don’t have time for her,” his companion responded. “We can’t risk someone walking by.” Maea recognized the galgen who had knocked her out before. The soft texture of the dark green fur covering his body was easily discernable. “Besides,” the galgen continued as they carried Bobbi away, “the empress has a high reward for this one, so we’ll already be making a fortune. Selling her,” he motioned back toward Maea, “would be practically worthless in comparison.”

“You got that right,” the human smiled greedily.

The scene began to dissolve, the color fading. The light separated back into individual sparks of gold, then gradually disappeared.

I gaze across the universe, searching for life in the void. Life is where the art is, where I need to be. A flash of bright blue planet catches my interest. I focus my attention and am delighted to find sentience. The creatures that have evolved here are soft and tiny with few legs and little hair. My interest in the evolution of such a weak creature is peaked, but I did not come here to work. I concentrate on the planet. Earth, they call it. I arrive when there are roughly 7.53 billion beings, self-named humans, living on a dying planet still vibrant with life. But this number will fluctuate as I travel the timeline. 

Shrinking down, invisible to all but myself, I browse the creations of my creations. I don’t plan to explore long, just a century, maybe two. 

First, I find the greats. I gaze at a star filled sky as Vincent Van Gogh contemplates a night in France. I applause alongside Queen Elizabeth I during the first showing of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I soak up Freddie Mercury’s energy as he belts his soul at Live Aid. I dance in the crowd at Woodstock, enveloped by the crowd, the music, and the buzz of human experience. The 25th anniversary performance of Les Misérables, the filming of Dead Poets Society, the years it took to paint the Sistine Chapel, I explore every renown artists in Earth’s history. Then I go further.  

I discover the talents who never found fame, uncover works lost to humanity. I experience heartbreaking performances, most of which are too close to the artists heart to share with the world. I find discarded masterpieces, trashed for being too eccentric for the public’s appreciation. I laugh in delight as I watch children paint unicorns, rainbows, cupcakes and elephants. The spirit in their mistakes inspire me. Art classes, school concerts, run down galleries, small town shows, I am there for it all, filled with pride by the purity of each human’s attempt to bring more beauty and meaning to life. 

All artistic works that have and ever will exist, all the different definitions of art and forms of expression, I am there for their creation. I watch while they are performed. I laugh, cry, and brim with rage as the art intuitively requests. I see it all. I feel it all. And when I finally reach the end of my explorations, I am exhausted and changed.  

It has been said by many beings, humans included, that there is an infinite feeling that accompanies art; this indescribable understanding that art is powerful, ethereal, forever. This feeling is me in the art, experiencing a completely different form of creation, hand in hand with the creators. My energy becomes intrinsic to it, my presence forever tied to its existence.  

I’d like to claim selflessness, generosity, but I gain as much from art as it does from me.  

Satisfied, I give Earth one last glance then retreat. Having found plenty of inspiration, I get back to work. 

#art #thepowerinart #creation

I can’t properly describe what I have seen these past two weeks, mostly because I do not understand it. Even so, the world needs to know, so I will try.  

After 4,020 attempts the microscope performs better than I could have imagined. The magnification is strong enough to see past quarks, the smallest known building blocks of life. Until today that is. To test out my creation for the last time I brought out a business card from my wallet and placed it under the microscope. I began with a small magnification, around one angstrom, then slowly increased it, passing an atom, then its protons, neutrons, electrons, alpha particles, beta particles, all the way to quarks. Then I kept going.  

Magnifying into emptiness, I shrunk the area of observation at a steady rate for exactly 10 minutes and 29 seconds. This is when I saw a small blip of black contrasting against the white of my microscope light. It popped into my vision for half a second then disappeared. I decreased the magnification and the black speck came back into view. As the lens focused, I noticed the speck was shaped like a sphere. Then I noticed a light coming from inside. Oddly enough, my microscope’s light seemed unable to penetrate the speck’s outer surface. As I zoomed in, the light crystalized into many tiny flecks of light scattered across a pitch-black background.   

At this point, I was astounded by the discovery that there was some sort of light conductor at such a small scale. I continued increasing the magnification until I noticed the lights were spinning, painfully slowly, but they were clearly spinning. I zeroed in on one of the light flecks and soon realized that the light was spiral-shaped with 6 tips. As I zoomed closer, the streaks of light making up the arms of the spiral focused into the burning outlines of millions of suns. I was looking at a brilliant galaxy, existing casually inside my wallet.  

I explored for a while, but I found landing on a certain spot in the mini-universe at such a large magnification was difficult. When aiming, I had to shift the business card to get my view where I wanted it, but the lightest touch would catapult my view to a completely different spot. This is how I ended up losing the first mini-universe. I attempted, and predictably failed, to zoom back into the same spot as before. The accuracy required to find such a minuscule point made it impossible, but this led to the biggest discovery of all. I didn’t just happen to stumble on a mini-universe at first glance as I had first thought. I realize now that the odds of that at such a small scale are minuscule. No, I was able to find another mini-verse because they are everywhere. I lost one universe to find another, then another, then another, all located in the spaces between the quarks that make up a tiny piece of a business card.  

After that I started grabbing different materials; a pencil, a leaf, a strand of my hair, and found more mini-universes in all of them. Discovering a universe in a strand of my hair thrilled me. It means that there are worlds inside me, in my cells and rushing through my veins. This microscope proves that universes exist in the spaces between all matter. Inside everything that has ever existed there is more life than we could ever have imagine. 

I warn you now that if you cannot handle what you have read so far, if you are feeling insignificant or are teetering on the edge of a mental breakdown, stop reading. Go research a bit about optimistic nihilism, then maybe make your way back here if you’re feeling better. You will only feel smaller from here.   

After two weeks of observation I discovered that, like a snowflake, no two mini-universes are the same. Each has its own set of universal laws that have led to vastly different realities. Some of the differences were subtle. Most were magnificent. I was astounded as I watched a storm of ice meteors caught in a star’s orbit remain frozen as it skimmed the molten surface of the sun, thermal equilibrium seeming to be nonexistent. Meteors raced through the black void, suddenly slowing down or speeding up with no visible interference to cause the speed variations. I watched two planets on a collision course, but as they neared each other they slowed, coming to a complete halt just before crashing, then shooting back out in opposite directions like a pinball. Matter would disintegrate then reform, as if the atoms that made them were falling apart then putting themselves back together. Whole entire planets vanished into dust or gas then reappeared seemingly as solid as before, sometimes faster than I could blink. Stars burned bright then went dark, only to burst suddenly back into flames.  

As astounding as this was, most of the differences were far more magnificent. I must admit I cannot explain it. Having learned the rules of this universe so intimately, my mind simply cannot understand what I’ve seen, nonetheless explain it. It’s like growing up knowing that 1+1 equals 2, but in this new universe 1+1 actually equals 23. It’s wrong. It’s so wrong, but right before my eyes it’s the truth. Some universes had no light, but thanks to a completely different form of illumination, it was far from a world of darkness. Some universes had no matter, but there were still tangible somethings. They were just clearly not matter. There were universes without color, but they were also not black and white. Motion was not up or down, right or left, but something else entirely. Temperature was nonexistent, space was twisted, time overlapped.  

I realize that most of the above makes absolutely no sense. If that’s the case then I think I’ve made my point. Once I publish this letter of discovery, I am going to release my technology to the public. This is too big a discovery to inhibit with selfish goals. No, the whole world deserves to know, to see this infinite system of universes existing everywhere, in everything.   

I’ve been wondering since this discovery, whether there are even smaller universes in between the spaces of the mini-universes. Does everything keep getting smaller and smaller endlessly? Is all that we see and touch and are a universe inside a universe in another universe?  Are we in the middle of this sequence, or are we the mother of all universes? To try and answer this further, my next project will be to build a telescope. It will be powerful enough to see to the edge of our universe and to discover where we are in an infinite sea of universes. 

#universes #infinity #multiverse