A chime from the wall in front of her attracts Harmony’s attention. “Turn on voice recognition,” she says, not moving. “Get mail.” The 51-inch television illuminates before her, unveiling a looped animation of an Irish shore at sunset, grasslands tumbling off gray cliffs into the ocean, shining with verdant life, washed in wind. A message window displays in the center, with fine black type, reading:
New mail from Faith: Orion’s Manifesto
Anticipation pulls her from the couch to the screen, where she stands momentarily bathed in green, blue and golden light. Harmony touches the words with her fingertip, and the file opens. She reads:
On the Theory of Unity
She stares at these words for an indefinite time, wondering what is behind them. Harmony clears her mind, discarding preconceived thoughts. Then she presses on the screen again, and the page flips. His text begins:
Twilight comes to ages as to men, as to horizons, with a lengthening of colors.
Deep in the infinite night of space a wave crest flew, a star. Hurtling through the vastness its heart was afire. The song of gravity gave it voice. One of a trillion in the endless choir of galaxies, yet it was not lost. Around it were jewels, billions of them, dark in the cosmic storm, their intricate designs dancing precise, spinning in blackness, fast in the immensity of nothing.
This racing cloud of dark matter—this fine black tapestry, spinning in an oblong disc like a great lace shawl, inside of which ring there were empty orbits cleared by planets, crowned by moons—so much more glittering darkness. The star and its vortex of castaways spiraled through time in perfectly synchronized, random harmonic rotation. Of the largest stones, the third out from the star was a strange gem, shining outside of the visible spectrum of light, a yearning orb made aware of its circumstance by the coming of self-proclaimed life.
Blessed with water and warmth, in a bath of vapors, only in detail did this ball reveal oceans and islands, monstrous cliffs and constant motion. Tattooed with strange geometry, a crystal web grew on it of roads and towers, monuments and rails, bicycles and new lights. Somehow this third planet refused equilibrium, exploding with design and ideas as if from nowhere. The light of the sun never touched an idea. This was the shadowless womb, the subtle heart of this jewel: a myriad expression of an invisible dimension—a bridge to concepts, reason and insanity, to truth and lies.
Rockets carried machines into the sky, with thrust enough to conquer gravity, with precision enough to carve a slingshot path between the planets and through the Oort cloud, past the heliopause on a lonesome, epic journey. The void opened in absolute immensity.
They found countless things in the darkness. Worlds without stars, adrift, black systems still turning, storms of gravity and lifeless, dark masses hid throughout the infinite shroud. These wandering eyes saw the invisible and the impossible. Depth perception was a revelation to the cyclopean earth—perspective. Infinity, came the binary transmissions, is much larger than we had imagined.
And they found many things in the light.
(It breaks here, it’s incomplete, even changes font
—Faith)
The cosmic sphere turned, in circles in spirals, the conflux of all dimensions, around one focus. It was the center of everything, the heart of existence, the constant beginning. Untouchable, unreachable, invisible and impossible, this was the unexplained anchor of the universe; the source; the white hole, forever open;
the endless bang.
Ecosystems of strange creatures came like volcanoes—of heat and minerals, gravity and entropy. Photosynthetic vegetation graced many worlds, as a product of light and water compounds, but often things were found that bore no resemblance to anything seen or imagined, where the attempt to describe them led to the invention of new words. The majority was younger yet balanced nearly to perfection, often more crystal than organism. Five-fingered hands were, by comparison to claws, almost unique, if inevitable still, a once in trillions of trillions rarity of physics and evolution—soft and precise.
Struggle was like a fire on a shoreline, a spark that could not persist without fuel. On Earth this fuel came like rivers from these windows of creation, these echoes of multidimensional bursting, these fountainheads of imagination—these souls. The great emptiness of space, the near infinity of unknown matter in the dark, was a canvas. Love rippled through it, in the fabric, coming from some worlds like heat from volcanoes, or light from stars.
The oddity of the Earthstone was not fully in the organization of the gases in the atmosphere, or the ceaseless activity and reproduction of the objects stuck to it. It was the statues, books and movies, the music, language and math, the intent—the freedom. It was hope built of fear, prejudice feeding ambition, fueling change. Not raw chaos, but entropy risen to live by intention. It was a will to meet the future. Awareness was, each a node in the space and time of thought. If math was a rendition of the informational components of inanimate existence, language was the more complex expression of the animated. Imagination was itself a weapon and a heart, a very counterpart to space and time.
It cried out, a psychic wave, changing the shape of the universe.
One cell formed as a perfect liquid crystal, a perpetual spark, in a cave or puddle under the sun. Through division it multiplied. It spread through the water and was washed ashore. Touching the earth, it reacted in a trillion unique ways, opening eyes, opening minds. Often it flew. Only pieces of it ever died. It evolved immunity to disease and near immortality. As they came to awareness most of its parts functioned like perfect machines, though aimless, quickly atrophying, cycling, evolving. In terrestrial boredom they still insist on an illusion of being the penultimate life.
In the darkness of the infinite nothing, we are significant. We are rare.
We are shining in the twilight of our infancy.
(Send you more soon, Harmony. I don’t have the energy to convert it all tonight. There are 73 pages. I know he would want you to see it.—Faith)
Harmony steps back from the screen, her mind captured in this vision of galactic dust and alien life. Suddenly Orion is there again, talking to her. She smiles. “The twilight of our infancy,” she repeats, and the monitor fades to a gentle golden shade. “Turn off voice recognition,” she says. Pieces of it died, Orion says the words in her mind. She wishes he had told her more, where it was going. Though the image is thinly veiled his last thought is unfinished.
She walks to the window. With a thought it clears completely, revealing the storming day. Harmony does not smile, but her eyes lighten as they take in the dark sky.