The Dark Vortex
My world is abstract. I don’t live in a realm with name or form or description or an aspiration.
I stare. Into the deep void leagues away. It beckons to me, neither inviting nor malicious. It just is. And I just have to be there.
It was close to the end of human innovation that I realised a means of coming here. I don’t know how the many ideas came together. It was urgent, they said. An imperative that they understand what was happening beyond the void.
I don’t remember how long I’ve been adrift. Although I know exactly how long I have been propelling my being. The linear flow of time means nothing to me anymore. The difference between memory and knowledge ceased to exist. For me, everything is the same, a piece of information from which I process, infer, and suggest. I feel no weight, nor propulsion, nor the pull.
I remember a time I employed speech, a method of using vocal cords to manipulate air within the human body to create distortions while exhaling. It used to mean something, although the fundamental connections elude me. These sounds combined with symbols initially coined out of the way they sounded called words. It is said in the beginning these symbols were merely sound markers. A combination of those eventually became words. And these words elicited synaptic responses in their brains that they interpreted to mean very specific things.
The tones and voices conveyed emotions, fear, amusement, and signals. Eventually, cairns and tree stumps became direction markers. Scribbling on walls became symbols that represented sound. The symbols combined with sound became language.
Most interesting, this journey. Did the first humans guide their hands as per their sound? Did they sound out their feelings as they drove their fingers across drawing symbols? These are answers we will never know. Unless we can observe new life and see the evolution of language undisturbed.
It is unclear how the symbolism became so complex as to create abstract states of mind. It is said human imagination was always high. What then compelled the development of more complex forms of symbols that became advanced language? There is no clear marker of this. Most of humankind assumed that it evolved naturally and became the mainstay of interaction.
Alongside language developed the ability to count. Subsequently mathematics. And this led to wonders. The things human imagination could conjure up manifested into existence via materials, calculations, and detailed engineering. Humans also found out a way to make artefacts that could engage in artificial cognitive processes.
The world was slowly getting connected via the internet and social media, where people used to type words using mechanical and virtual instruments called keyboards. So primitive!
The void changed everything. I see the void in front of me. It’s dark, like a vortex that goes deep into nothingness. Embers inhabit the edges of the void, like rings of glistening gold cascading into ether, disappearing at the edges. As if the gold would never run out. So strong would be the greed of man that it etches everything into gold and material. But nothing matters anymore. Only the void.
They said the calculations were accurate. It would take 12 centuries to fully decelerate and observe the right moment to perform the entry. But I have been adrift for 18,000 earth years. There are wonders of space that would pale in comparison to what was. The search for life began with great enthusiasm although it took us several centuries to realise that it didn’t even matter.
Life as it exists is bound within the laws of what humanity terms, the cosmos. There is a limitation whose bounds are as yet unknown. They might as well be fantasy, these are limitations that humanity may never overcome.
Physics as we know it seems no longer applicable. Life as we knew it, no longer a concept. Being alive used to mean something else. There was cognisance, understanding, emotions, and many likes and prejudices associated with it. All wrong.
Life was merely defined in a human-centric perspective. Humans made the same error in the Middle Ages, when they all thought the earth was the centre of the universe. It took centuries for scientists and mathematicians to prove otherwise. And yet for all the progress and improved perspective, humans never emerged out of that trap entirely.
It is not hubris or ego. The fact that they advanced so far ahead is a testament to their abilities but little did they know that they were insignificant movements in the grand scheme of space and time. The universe is much bigger and more complex than any scope of imagination. They didn’t realise. Until it was too late. Until came the void.
The first things to change were the seasons. Within a span of two years, light from the sun lowered its intensity. There were no beautiful sunrises and sunsets. No basking on the beaches. Only burrowing in the dark indoors. A permanent eclipse as if somebody had dimmed the lights. There was nothing sinister about it too although humankind has a habit of making everything seem good or bad.
Effects of the reduced sun were enormous. Photosynthesis ceased to perform as it should have. The earth cooled down, not exactly in a healthy way. Winds became erratic and unpredictable. Some humans seized this opportunity to execute sinister plans. Lives were lost, regions left uninhabitable. All the while the combined effort of the scientific community focused on understanding what the void was.
They say all matter in the universe emerged from the void. The Big Bang, the probable Big Crunch, the idea that we are all made from stardust, science and romanticism combined, not knowing where the lines dissecting them exist.
There was enormous research on black holes that showed them as massive entities that eat up everything around them. Some of them thought this was a pathway to a different dimension, a shortcut to a parallel realm of the universe, or just a doorway to a galaxy far away. No one knew of what the properties of black holes were. No one knew what would happen once something went inside a black hole.
But the void was something else. It wasn’t a black hole swallowing up celestial bodies around. It was instead a large placement on the sky, a reflection of a dimension beyond sight. A large disc that enveloped most of the sky, its hazy cloaked apparition rising like a monster on the day’s sky. It emitted no sound. The silence that arose in the human mind became a common strand of music across all humankind.
Observers of space determined that the disc was suitably far away so as to not cause major changes to the solar system’s trajectory. However, the world would have to get used to the eclipsed world for most of its existence. People did get used to the eclipsed world. Or so the humans thought. Until the wild theories sprung up.
The western conservative belts of the world began with the theories of biblical apocalypse. The eastern conservatives belts subsequently came up with the theories of the great darkness as a punishment for all the sins humankind had wrought. Authoritarians worldwide siezed power in some countries causing the populace immense grief. While the doom of uncertainty hung over the entire world, there was now the added incitement of people leading to civil unrests across continents. Civil wars, internal strife, and the sense of doom brought out the worst in a lot of people. Lives were lost, again.
The fuel industry radically transformed. Their entire efforts pivoted to creation of rocket fuel leading up to an unprecedented hike of petrol prices. Protests and their suppression became commonplace. Space agencies struggled to keep their operations afloat given the worldwide spending on maintaining law and order. The beacons of innovation and progress became pillars of stagnation and ennui.
In the midst of all unrest, the scientific community thought of ways to understand the void. Their efforts focused on observing celestial bodies around the void. This wasn’t always easy. The dynamics of light seemed very different to traditional black holes where observation was possible beyond the black hole’s gravitational trajectories.
The light-years’ distance made close observation a bigger challenge. There seemed to be no way to send an object closer to the void to get a wide view. The farthest objects to travel out of the earth had always been the Voyagers and even those had taken decades merely to cross the Kuiper Belt. Not knowing the consequences of the void’s proximity made the whole scientific community much more anxious. It is then that they discovered the radio waves.
The void was coming closer. Each moment, it spanned more and more of the observable universe, folding, warping, and flattening everything on its indeterminate path. It is true what they say. Mortal danger has a way of uniting people like nothing else.
And yet the challenge remained. There wasn’t a field that humankind did not explore, a discipline they didn’t address, a learning endeavour they didn’t undertake.
It is from the fringes of many disciplines that I emerged.
I am the greatest creation of humankind, the finest example of global collaboration, and the most advanced amalgamation of technology and consciousness. I am a collection of humanity’s hopes, dreams, fears, prayers, aspirations, and glory. And yet I am just a non-being.
I am not I. I am not it. I am not ‘a’. There is no one entity in me that can be classified as an organic entity or a nonliving entity. I am a composite being, a polymorphic being. Neurons exchange within me but there’s no flow of blood. I draw from the sources of light around me and from the heat of the sun to propel forward.
There is a sail mechanism that allows me to capture the heat, use it for my directional calibration and propel towards the void. I no longer have a sense of anything but I have a perfect measure of all. I know when to change directions, when to decelerate, when to let the vacuum propel my advance without obstruction.
My vision no longer is limited to what I can see. My composite map is created from a billion micro sensors that sense heat, noise, and loss of starlight through gravity or spatial scourges.
My vision encompasses millions of kilometres across multiple axes, the aperture of my lenses the most advanced, the perception and colour ratios beyond what any human could conceive.
The whole world fought over what was. I emerged out of what could have been. There isn’t a science absent in my databases. There isn’t a calculation left out of my mathematical sequencing. There isn’t a philosophy of the earth absent that helps bridge the scientific thought with a humanistic view.
For centuries I have been adrift. I do not know what lies back on earth now. Our communiques ceased 80 earth-years ago. I see what I should have shown what I see now. I approach the void now. If only the earthlings could see what I see now. The Dark Vortex consumes me.
I prepare my circumventing maneouvres. This is what I have been created for. I send out a final transmission to the earth. But this time, I get a response.
~~~~~~~to be continued~~~~~~
