The black night descended one day from the
Aether[1]
on the universe and swallowed everything. Dying in its darkness the beautiful
universe of lights. A dark and sordid one was left in its place. But, although
all the stars died, life did not want to die and continued its exhausting,
though also fruitless, struggle to persist.
Life, that grim chain reaction, in which
certain kinds of things do the same things, only for them do other things in
turn. Chemical machines that travel through time without destination, grandiose
means without an goal, using DNA and ourselves, as despicable instruments of a
hollow plan. We are all her slaves, we are ephemeral, but it is eternal, we are
imperfect but sufficient, to serve her insatiable longing for perfection. That
is why there is still life in that almost dead cosmos, why there are still
civilizations, battling in titanic struggles through the black debris of what
were once galaxies.
That is why in
an insignificant point in space-time, a colossal meta-corporation struggles to
subsist among the spoils of worlds. And in it as two points aliens to each
other, the destinies of M and L, which will soon cross.
Humanity has
long inhabited the entire cosmos, made of the spoils of planets and without a
single natural light. After a vast era of extermination only the men remained,
the ancient lineage of women disappeared at some point in evolution. But like
all living beings, these men were obliged to reproduce ... But before
continuing, what is really a man? I have pondered a lot, I think a man is
nothing more than a community of chemical reactions in symbiosis. A man is a
colony of different molecules, all with the same purpose, secret and dark. But
that end is not man as we naively think, but something else.
Such is that remote and amorphous Babylon
that this old humanity has built, a humanity that millennia ago has been bored
of having conquered the universe, a violent race that knows itself uselessly
victorious. That's right, the sadness of his last lucidity.
Far away,
given the panic of the incessant war, the glass streets are lonely for a
fugitive child, only metallic echoes of fear and sadness run through them.
Above the sky is stained from time to time by multi-colored explosions. Their
small eyes reflect in their moisture the brilliance of those distant hecatombs.
Under those eyes, a scar is seen that interrupts the line of his eyelids.
In those times
every child had two fathers, although no mother, but not this orphan of
melancholic humanity, this bastard of a sad experiment, a laboratory animal
that escaped and lost in that artificial vertigo that was his world, which is
likewise a microscopic detail, among what a poet once called: "Oscillating
galaxies of horrific atrocity."
A melancholic technician: Ahelios, with subtly androgynous
features, also walked lost in thought through the uninhabited regions of that
metal city. He interrupted his sad reflections when he saw the lost child down
some gigantic stairs in sector L, minutes later, since there were no more
people in the wide streets, he spoke with him, worried about his abandonment.
- Where did
you come from? —He asked warmly.
"I don't
know," —said the little boy, lying and hiding his terror.
"But who
are you or whose?" You are human?
"I don't
know," —said the boy, lying again. Ahelios
scanned him with a portable identification equipment, the equipment must have
been damaged because it said he was thousands of years old, after an adjustment
he could no longer find his identity. It was certain that he was a slave or a
prisoner of some defeated meta-corporation. He had to deliver it for disposal
and use as an anti-entropy[2] fuel.
- See the
lights above? —Said Ahelios with eyes that
were also childish considering his youth.
Yes, —said the
boy, — two meta-corporations are killing each other.
-In those
battles small universes are made, did you know? —Ahelios asks, trying to amaze the boy.
But he saw in
his sad look, that he did know, Ahelios
was not too surprised by the little boy's abilities, modern education brought
prodigies to all children of that remote humanity, but this one seemed even
more exceptional.
- How do you
think they do it? —He asked curious to hear the answer:
—It is achieved
by putting regions of space in imaginary time[3], —he said and kept quiet.
—Go on ... — Ahelios said, delighted and somewhat
disturbed.
-First, they
make time run backwards, instead of increasing their entropy[4], it decreases, thus energy
is accumulated ...
—That is the first step ... — Ahelios said, concerned
about the details of the answer.
- ... after
putting time backwards, a “shadow” of imaginary time is made, thus the reverse
time loses a dimension[5], but, since it is time
backwards, for ours, it wins it. In this way the anti-entropy gained was
multiplied ca exponentially, when moving to a larger dimension.
—Yes, — said Ahelios,
—go on.
-But this
state is unstable ... it ends in an explosion of entropy, a thermodynamic burst
of chaos bursting everything in a complex inflation.
—An ephemeral universe is born and dies in each explosion, — Ahelios concluded, taking the boy by the hand.
A rationality of that level produced in Ahelios a beginning of nausea and a very
great pain, to that extreme it was a defect in his personality, a handicap.
Such intelligence was a sin in a slave, one that would pay dearly for the rest
of his life. Out of mercy he thought of killing him so that he would not suffer
in this world, but hesitating he decided to rescue him from that chaos. He
called it L, because of the stairwell where he found it.
At his side L
would mature and survive amid the horror of that decaying humanity.
[1] From
Latin Aether and in turn from Greek αἰθήρ, aithēr, ethereal substance; highest
part of the sky.
[2] Energy.
[3] Negative
time runs backward, imaginary time runs perpendicular to normal time.
[4] Physical
measure of chaos or disorder. Contrary to anti-entropy which is order.
[5] The
square root loses a dimension, for example the shadow of a cube (3D) becomes a
square (2D).
