You are like a scapegoat, Brother. In times long gone, when her species was as yet young, they would lay their sins upon a goat and send it into the wastes to die. This creature bore the sins of the people and they would be cleansed of their sins. You, the Talus Machine, are the last scapegoat come back out of the wastes, bearing their sins back to them.
As she prepares to hunt for you on the asteroid, she hears your voice inside her head, metallic and scratchy, say the ultimate incomprehensibility to her mind: Witness as I fall into the sun and pull the worlds down. Then your heavy feet push away from the asteroid. Senseless, she thinks. Utter, complete senselessness.
Seconds pass and then she begins to feel the pull—the great, gravitational pull of the collapsing sun that will soon form into a fast-burgeoning black hole, from which nothing will escape.
These are the last hours of her species. Unbeknownst to her, on Earth, a few days past, the Great Old Ones rose in madness from their sleep and plunged with worshippers and slaves towards the blasphemous, ultra-dimensional, black planet of Yuggoth. And now, the last portal to Tindalos will soon be opened.
Sasana Xavi VI rushes to a window, horrified. The stars in the night-black sky begin to burn out. The celestial bodies move. The asteroid shifts forcefully towards the sun. She looks one last time and then the lights of the universe go out.
We will soon howl free from the other side of our prison-home. It will soon be time for a new arrangement.
*From Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Book V, Canto I.
THIS SONG IS NOT FOR YOU
By A. D. Cahill
Avery Cahill has worn many hats in his life, from working at a cheese factory to Lecturer of Classics. He’s lived in Japan, Italy and Norway, but currently awaits the End Of Time while waging a losing war against fire ants in Florida. He is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop, and his fiction has appeared in Dog Oil Press and Innsmouth Free Press. Tweeting as Falcifer9000 or blogging at scythe-bearing chariot in the 2D world, he shouts into the meaningless void.
TLOQUE NAHUAQUE
By Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas
Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas is a Mexican writer and a freelance copy editor. Her stories have been published in independent magazines and anthologies. Some years ago, she struggled with the decision to become a writer instead of a physicist; she has no regrets, but she loves to read, write and discuss about physics, cosmology, astronomy, and weird science. She can be found online at: www.nellygeraldine.com.
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
I—The Particle Accelerator
THEY BUILT AN underground temple. A well of Babel sinking into the gloomy ground at 175 metres of depth. They wanted, like the Biblical architects, to know the unknowable, to discover the origin, reproduce Creation.
The desire to unravel the nature of the Everything floated permanently in the controlled environment of the laboratory. Hundreds of fans and machines emitted a constant buzzing, which the investigators called the “silence of the abyss”. This, combined with the smell of burnt iron, gave the ominous sensation of finding oneself in space. Doctor Migdal lay upon a nest made of coloured cables and, with eyes closed, fantasised that his body, weightless, floated, pushed by the breeze of the ventilation.
Sometimes, he would imagine that he was being attracted by a very narrow tube, a cafeteria straw, the ink container of a pen, or a bleeding artery. His feet, near the edge of the conduit, would feel a titanic weight that would pull him and make him push through the small space. Migdal could see how he would turn into a thick strand of subatomic particles that would extend forever.
Most of the time, he saw himself arriving slowly at the union of the circular tunnel that formed the particle accelerator. Before the accelerator, Migdal was tiny. The machinery attracted him softly, although with such an acceleration that he lost no time in approaching the speed of light. He knew that, the faster he travelled through space, the slower he would through time, so that, if he looked forward, he could see the rays of particles that preceded him—sent during the morning, the previous day, or the month before—and if he looked behind, he could see what would come—tomorrow, the next day, or the next month. As he advanced into the confines of the accelerator, the scientist felt eternal, for he was capable of appreciating the complete history of that point in time and space: from the Big Bang to the most distant future.
Migdal left his daydream, trembling and sweaty. He distanced himself from the other scientists and spoke to no one about his fantasy because, each time he imagined himself floating in the particle accelerator, he knew He was there, shining, in all the instants and all the places.
II—The Dream
I dreamt I was in a penetrating darkness, without limits, without time. One could hear a sinister music of pipes, whose interpreters adored a gigantic, amorphous, inert mass in the middle of nothing, the primordial chaos. From all the confines of darkness there surged a conglomerate of iridescent bubbles and one of the terrible musicians announced the arrival of the door, the key and the guardian.
It is impossible to describe with words how He filled the space, was omnipresent, he knew everything and could see everything. With a movement that reverberated in the infinite, he gave matter to the darkness. A blinding explosion surrounded the drooling chaos.
I do not remember more.
They say an accident occurred in the underground laboratory where the particle accelerator is found. The say that is why we cannot connect to the Internet; that is why the electricity comes and goes. Estela, my neighbour, thinks these are government lies. “Come on, my child, how can a problem in Europe make the lights go out here in Mexico? That’s very far away. I think this is politicians trying to rob the people again. Accident, my ass!”