And elsewhere, elsewhen—
The contact was going well, he saw. Far away across the quantum-froth multiverse – ‘far’ by a definition that would have meant little to most humans – it was as if the softest, hesitant knock on a door had been made.
That was all he needed.
Later, humans would call him Terminus.
Him. They would assign a gender.
And a god’s name.
But even that ‘him’ was nothing but a human label associated with the human name they had applied. It had nothing, intrinsically, to do with him.
His own awareness of himself was quite different, of course.
To him, the universe that humans inhabited – so large to them! – was just one transient bubble in a high-energy foam, a foam barely even describable within the limits of human physical theories. To Terminus, this foam of realities, all of it, was home. Indeed, he had once learned about his own origin, had looked back and watched his own creation.
That is, as if he had watched such foam until, purely by chance, those swirling bubbles self-assembled to form a pattern. An image.
His own image. His mind, his self.
This was how he had been ‘born’, he came to understand. Not conceived as a procreation of other life forms, not as a member of any species, not a product of any chain of life – not even an automaton, created as the result of a decision of other minds.
He had been ‘born’ in a place – a universe among an infinitude of others – that was so vast and so long-lived that there was time for minds like his own to come about through the random collisions of stray matter particles, the pushing of stray wisps of energy. Not through the slow working of any kind of natural selection or evolution – but by sheer chance, all a mind’s complexity could be created. Given enough time that scenario could play out, over and over.
Even before their first encounter, humans had guessed at the existence of such creatures as Terminus. In theory, purely through logic. It was all a matter of time, and chance. Given enough time, the wildest, most improbable act of creation could appear literally out of nowhere. The shards of the broken vase would leap up to the shelf, reassemble, all spontaneously. All you had to do was wait.
But, however born, once born Terminus had been given a purpose.
Scattered across every universe, in every bubble in the reality foam, there were lesions, or doors, or portals – each a breach of a boundary. The portals came in a variety of forms and designs, lodged in the hearts of giant stars, or on the surfaces of rocky planets, or drifting in the thinnest of intergalactic dust clouds. Humans might have labelled them black holes – but most were far more sophisticated than those crude ruptures in spacetime … But, in a sense, they all worked the same way.
Terminus did not know how the portals had been created, distributed. That belonged to an unimaginable before. But he knew they all had a single purpose.
His role, as he understood it, was to spread complexity – life and mind of a wide definition – spread it out from the intricacy of his own origin, his own unimaginably ancient cosmos, across reality, across a wider multiverse. And, since not all universes could endure as long as his own, he would reach out to other universes and rebuild them – or at least start that process – share with them the gift of infinity. Of eternity. Eternity and infinity.
What else was there to do, in a multiverse of eternities and infinities, but to share? As to what came after that – what became of the universes he touched – Terminus had no interest.
But for now the game was unfolding, once more, as it had so often before.
It was simple. Wait for somebody, on the other side, in a target universe, to find one of his portals.
To reach out to that portal.
To touch it – whatever that meant in terms of their own embodiment. Sometimes, a mere wisp of deflected relic radiation was enough. A mere glance.
After that, for that somebody, everything would change.
And now one such portal loomed in his awareness.
One glance. One small touch.
Terminus would eventually learn all things about humanity. Humans would eventually call him ‘Terminus’ after a Roman liminal deity. A god of boundaries. Indeed, the very name meant ‘boundary stone’. In their early days the Romans had made sacrifices to such stones, in the belief that the god Terminus, if pleased, preserved such boundaries, and so ensured a little piece of civilisation stayed peaceful and intact a little longer.
Of course that didn’t quite fit his own role.
But a later generation of Romans, under the Emperor Diocletian, had invoked their god of the boundaries to push back, actively, at the cult of Christianity, which at that time was rapidly infecting and destabilising the pagan core of their ancient culture.
A terminus could be an active, expansive entity, then. A weapon. Even in human culture.
Perhaps the name was apt …
To smile was a human reflex. Yet now, it could be said, Terminus smiled.