A la Node

The creature looked very much like a wasp, very insectile, articulated, inscrutable. Very buzzy. It tilted its head down in a way that should have been quite awkward, but was instead perfectly smooth and mechanically precise. Well, you get this sort of thing with aliens, the unnerving bodily movements, the strange smells, the general… well, alien-ness of them. It looked down at me, and amid the low polyphonic buzzing noises, a voice came, though honestly I never figured out if that voice came from some translation device or was crafted from a superposition of thousands of different pitches of buzz. Frankly, it got annoying sometimes, the buzzing.

It is the fate of small stones, so it is said, to be ground away into dust by the actions of life and the cruel mechanics of the world. It is true of most, in fact, though a few undergo the opposite transformation, accreting layers of mass in the warm wet interior of a kidney, or the cool wet of an oyster. Some, in the vacuum of space, gather into planets.

“Kick the left posterior superior temporal sulcus again.”

“Nothing, Steve, I think it may be burnt out.”

“It can’t be completely trashed, he was at work just yesterday, I swear he felt guilty about not getting that javascript done.”

“Look, the guilt centers just aren’t responding to shocks any more. I put a hot clothes hanger wire into the medial prefrontal cortex the other day, and all I got was a twitch.”

“We’ve got to do something, the last couple of stories, when he’s managed to post, have been crap. The guilt complex is the only thing we’ve got to work with now that the adrenal gland has shriveled up like a raisin.”

“I know, I know. You can only run so much guilt and self loathing through a brain before it loses it’s ability to respond, though. Maybe we could make him sick again? That fever a few weeks ago kept him in bed for days.”

“Yeah, but how much writing did he get done?”

“Point. Anything going on in the ambition centers?”

“Sleep.”

“What?”

“Sleep. Ambition centers are stuck on sleep, have been for a while.”

“Damn. Steve, I hate to say it, but I don’t think we have much choice, he’s running out of time tonight.”

“Well, push the guilt program, maybe he’ll get something done this weekend. If nothing else we’ll suck all the energy out of the system and make sure he doesn’t do anything else.”

“I just hope he appreciates what we’re doing for him.”

It seemed to be made of glass, though Harry assured me almost fervently that it wasn’t. I could see that it wasn’t, didn’t imagine it would be, I had just commented on the appearance – but Harry was oblivious, too habitually jovial to ever really notice his own condescension. I tuned him out and looked at the piece, the depth and sheen of it changing as I looked. I couldn’t seem to find the same perspective twice, it always looked as if it had been turned ever so slightly away from the orientation you saw a moment ago. It made my eyes water.

Harry seemed unusually thrilled with it, or with something. Of course he got paid either way, and for that matter so did I, but to him the prospect of a unique object was exciting, a grand discovery. To me, it would be a defeat, which is why it was not going to happen, Harry’s good mood be damned.

In the infinite dark of a hollow space deep within a cold dead nickle-iron asteroid long divorced from the sun that had once held it in thrall, lived a Mind. In the darkness it thought about the universe into which it had been born, of the ancient times when it had walked free on the surface of a world teeming with life. It thought of the wars and plagues that had taken away, bit by bit, that embarrassment of riches. It thought of the millenia of struggling desperation, the migrations, the sorrows, the collapse. It did not think itself lucky to have survived.

As long as the universe outside the cold metal shell held some trace of heat, it would remain. As long as it remained, it would remember.

It was the last dying thought of a race long gone, it contained everything they had known, everything they had considered, observed, imagined. All their works recorded, all their thoughts set in eternal motion. In the darkness, it remembered, remembered the very birth of life and its long and painful end. It mourned, and knew mourning in exquisite detail.

It knew as well what had gone wrong. Too late now, but in dying the answers were laid bare. Perhaps in those final moments every creature understands the flaws of its life, or perhaps only the accursed few are given the insight of ending. The Mind knew the mistakes that had been made, knew how it could all have been repaired, what path could have led them all out of the darkness. It was only in the ending, the passage into death, that the circle could be completed. Having taken into itself everything that they were, and having watched them pass, it knew how they they could have been saved.

It was a shock then, to find the darkness penetrated by a brilliant light. The news came to it in words and images and emotions: they lived yet, and hungered for the solutions it had seen in their ashes. Come to us, they said, you have seen our end, now tell us how to live.

In the Dark by Kenneth Lett is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.