The Edge

by Jacob Wenzel

  Portions of this story are true

  (In some timelines)

  By The Author:

  Le Morte d'Arthur, an Epic Limerick, Vol I

  The Edge

  A Novel

  by

  Jacob Wenzel

  Copyright 2010

  Jacob Wenzel

  For Kathleen

  1.

  Before I begin, let me say that this all happened a very long time ago, or will happen a very long time in the future, depending on when and where you are reading or transorbing this.

  In a universe (this one) in which every possible past and every possible future exist, and forgotten pasts are frequently reused as possible futures, when and where it happened/will happen may be difficult to ascertain, and is most likely irrelevant, so I don’t know why I’m obsessing on this, anyway.

  Just say it happened in one timeline before the invention of the wheel, and after the second incarnation of the prophet we now know as Philo. For those of you with a high degree of hyperdimensional awareness (you know who you are), it begins at Riemann-Lutz coordinates 6571DZ5782.456.n, Side B, Track 5.

  It was just after the end of an ice age, it was a time of plenty, and life was easy. Food-beasts were far more plentiful, and much slower than they are now. They were also incredibly stupid and easy to catch. Fruits and nuts were everywhere, and the berries, well don’t get me started on the berries.

  Our heroine was a young woman named Tralalililea Mundopote Exni-Slodge, which is roughly equivalent to “Sally”. This is what happens when hunting and food-gathering for the day can be done in about twelve minutes, there are no adventures about which one can tell stories, and there are no televisions, (well, OK, one, but we’ll get to that later), and people have nothing better to do than sit around and think up ridiculously long names for things, including their offspring, (when they’re not making more offspring, of course).

  Sally (I’ll call her Sally, if you don’t object. If you do object, you can just say “Tralalililea Mundopote Exni-Slodge” out loud every time you read “Sally”, this could get interesting if you happen to be on a bus at the time) had a pet named Firunu Maisingni Mook-Tiniki (Fluffy), a creature that, depending on your timeline, you might identify as either a Thofnian milk-weasel, or a tiger.

  While Sally belonged to a village/clan/bunch of inbred quasi-troglodytes, she was mostly left to herself due to presence of Fluffy (see above). On one occasion, a particularly dense young man was infatuated with her and followed her about for a brief time, until he attempted to milk Fluffy. Suffice it to say he will never need to spend any time thinking up ridiculously long names for his offspring.

  Sally was also the niece of the village Finnwibbitt (High-Priest/Shaman/Brew master). Her father had been the Finnwibbitt, but he had disappeared during a storm while looking for berries, leaving Sally to raise her younger brother. Before he disappeared, Sally’s Father had taught Sally all the secrets needed to be Finnwibbit, including the most important, logical thinking, an ability her maternal uncle, “Darrell”, had never mastered. But due to the sexist culture of the village, coupled with Sally’s refusal to get drunk, the village selected her uncle to be Finnwibbit instead.

  Sally’s clan (they called themselves the “Whongi-soot maki-maki fut” which means “The people who live around here”) lived in the middle of a forest located within a larger forest. They occasionally traded fruits and nuts for other kinds of fruits and nuts with other clans who came long distances to trade, these clans sometimes spoke of people who came from even farther away and told them that beyond the forest was more forest.

  One evening, during the nightly wailing ritual, where everybody sobbed and moaned because “Whaffoo Noolook-Makini”, the sun, was abandoning them, Darrell was reciting the incantations begging the sun to come back, and spreading out the food-beast entrails and uneaten berry-bits, when Sally stood up and said, roughly translated, “This crying is really stupid, it’s going to come back, you know, even if you don’t do the incantations, and the stuff with the entrails, which, by the way, is really disgusting. The world is a really big, really round, spinning rock, so that half the time, we’re facing the sun, and half the time we’re facing away, hey it’s pretty obvious, really, and if you’d just watch the Lunar eclipses instead of screaming and putting rocks over your eyes every time one happens, you’d realize that. The world is not going to stop spinning just because you don’t do some stupid ritual.”

  The rest of the clan started shouting, “heretic”, (Their word for which, by a strange coincidence was also “heretic”). Darrell did not interrupt his incantations lest Whaffoo Noolook-Makini be offended and never come back. The upshot of all this was that Sally was politely asked to leave the clan. It most likely would have been a lot less polite had Fluffy not been at Sally’s side.

  Darrel told her that the banishment was not permanent, that she might one day return if she would travel to the edge of the world and learn the error of her ways.

  In the morning, she packed all the things a young intelligent Paleolithic woman might need to survive on her own indefinitely, a piece of plant-fiber twine, a bone needle, and a sharp stone. True, she could make those things herself, but this gave her head start. For clothes, she only took the garment she was wearing, a tunic made from animal skin with the fur still on, in warmer weather, she could wear the fur on the outside, and in colder weather, she could turn it with the fur to the inside. If the weather turned very cold, she would make more clothing from food-beast skins. She also took a little shiny thing on a necklace that her father had given her shortly before he disappeared.

  Right after the “Welcome back, Whaffoo Noolook-Makini” ritual, Darrell performed the banishment ritual. Once they had tried banishing a man without performing the ritual, and he had just hung around outside the village for a couple weeks, sneaking back in at night to steal food, until they chased him away by throwing rocks at him. The man had been banished for offending the gods by giving one of his children a name with fewer than five syllables.

  Other acts punishable by banishment included, but were not limited to; eating berries before sunrise, eating berries after sunset, feeding berries to a food beast (any time of day), and shaking your hair at a food beast. At one time, chronic flatulence had also been cause for banishment, but that had changed when Darrell developed a case after eating some bad berries (It was rumored that he had eaten them after sunset).

  Sally would have liked to have said goodbye to her younger brother, Skikkinik Woot-Woot Kex, but he was undergoing the Rite of Passage, in which a boy would go into a cave and stay there, speaking to no-one, and coming out once a day and attempting to kill a large food-beast using only his feet. When he succeeded, he would be allowed to return to the village as a man. No one knew why the food-beast had to be killed only using the feet, since it was the only time in a man’s life he would be expected to do so.

  The Rite of Passage for girls was similar except they were allowed to just hit the food-beast on the head with a rock, and usually were able to complete the task in about 3 minutes, and that time included selecting an appropriately sized food-beast and rock.

  Sally had no one else to whom she felt any need to say goodbye, her mother had died soon after her younger brother had been born, and her only other close relative was Darrell. She did stick her tongue out at Darrell, but this was to show him that it was stained purple from the berries she had eaten before sunrise just to piss him off.

  Sally and Fluffy headed West because sometimes there were sometimes warm breezes from that direction. After a few hours, she decided they were far enough away from the village to camp for a couple days and decide what to do next. There was a small clearing and a cave and stream with a pool and it seemed ideal, she found a couple of st
icks, and using her twine to make a small bow, she quickly had a small fire going near the mouth of the cave. She went out and gathered some fruits, found a small food-beast, and looking into its large vapid brown eyes, hit it on the head with a rock. (Sally’s people didn’t actually have a word that meant rock, they had many different words, each meaning a different kind of rock, for example, they had one word for a rock that was a certain shade of gray with brown speckles and just about the right size and shape to pick up with two hands and hit a large food-beast over the head. If it was a slightly different shade of gray, or a slightly different size or shape, they would have a different word for it. When a rock was found that didn’t seem to fit any previously named rock type, the whole village would discuss it for an afternoon and decide on a new name. The average person's vocabulary today is about five-thousand words, Sally knew over six thousand that were just types of rocks) Sally cooked some of the meat and then dried enough to last her a few more days. Fluffy preferred to catch his own meals, he always wandered off to eat, so she didn’t have to worry about him. With her camp set, she settled in for the night, she thought to herself, “This is a very pleasant place, much nicer than the village, I could just stay here for the rest of my life.”

  Which is exactly what she did.

  In one timeline.

  But we’re not going to follow that timeline, because, while pleasant for Sally, it’s not very interesting for us, and would make a very short, pointless story.

  We’ll follow this one, instead:

  Sally settled in for the night, she thought to herself, “This is a very pleasant place, much nicer than the village, I could just stay here for the rest of my life.” Then she thought about the events leading up to this, and said to no-one, “Why do people insist on believing things that are plainly untrue? Why do we have so many names for rocks, and yet any animal we can eat is a food-beast? Why do we know so little, and how much of what we know is untrue?” While pondering these things, she drifted off to sleep.

  2.

  While Sally sleeps, I feel I should provide you some history, and fill you in on some of the things that happened in the six thousand years or so that transpired between the time this story was published, and the time it was written.

  In one timeline.

  If that statement confuses you, and makes you wonder if something weird has happened to time itself, it hasn't, only our perception of time has changed.

  The problems that seemed insurmountable in the first part of the twenty-first century were surmounted in unforeseeable ways, as problems often are, but then, if the solutions were foreseeable, somebody would have foreseen them and already solved the problem, now, wouldn’t they.

  Global warming, for example. If you stop viewing the problem as too much CO2 in the atmosphere, after all, plants love CO2, and everybody likes a nice garden, and instead start viewing it as “Hey, the Earth’s just getting too much sunlight.”, you can decide that we just need to build a big retractable awning in space. And that’s what they did.

  The global energy crisis was solved when cold fusion was developed in the mid-twenty-first century. (Pons and Fleischman's method worked after all, but only if you kept your fingers crossed) Physics took a major advance when an English physicist of English and Chinese ancestry, Dr. Douglas Long-No (who had been named successor to the Lucasian Chair at Cambridge when Stephen Hawking retired on his one-hundred and fiftieth birthday, in order to spend more time in cyberspace) developed a new variant on string theory, which, upon publication, was hailed as “Brilliant”, and “The last word on the structure of the universe”.

  However, a mathematical flaw was found in what was called simply, “Long-No’s String Theory”, it seems that x/x only equals 1 when x is non-zero. It was a simple mistake, but one that Long-No was unable to overcome. A few months later, one of the most brilliant mathematicians in physics, Dr. Alexa Vasili, working in St. Petersburg, revised Long-No’s work, working around the mistake. The resulting “Long-No-Vasili String Theory” was hailed as “Flawless”, and “Complete, and all encompassing.”

  Without getting too technical, the theory views the Macroverse, which encompasses all possible universes, as a 12-dimensional fractal structure. Each three-dimensional universe, of which, there are a hell of a lot, stretches through the Macroverse in a fourth dimension, that we perceive as time. Universes do not exist in isolation, however, they are constantly diverging, re-converging, and occasionally folding and looping around, especially as you approach the convoluted 11-dimensional fractal surface of the 12-dimensional Macroverse. The upshot of all this is that every possible universe exists, every possible future exists for every universe, and (here’s the kicker) every possible past also exists for every universe. If you like, imagine the root structure of a banyan tree, (Ficus Benghalensis) now, imagine it in twelve dimensions, (easy, right?) and a lot bigger, and you start to get the picture.

  It also solved one of the long standing mysteries of the universe, that of dark matter, it seems that gravity is a result the hyperdimensional structure of the universe, and, while most of an object’s gravity is contained within a given universe, there is some ‘leakage’ to nearby universes, so that gravity wells tend to form in corresponding locations in nearby universes, So if there’s a Sun, Earth, or Moon here, there will almost certainly be one in the next universe, and the next, and so on.

  The new theory also allowed for movement between universes, and, if you could find one that folded and looped back in just the right way, you could even travel in time.

  Time travel was still only theoretically possible for about another fifty years. That’s when a post-grad student at Oregon State University working on his thesis on particle engineering (another result of the theory) performed an experiment that tore a small hole between our universe and an extremely similar one. (In fact, the only difference between the two universes was the position of an abandoned Buick off the side of I35 North of Denton, Texas. In one universe, the driver had coasted to a stop, in the other, he used the brakes. When the Buick was towed three days later, the two universes merged again, and two ranchers got into an argument over where the Buick had been.) Looking through the hole, the post-grad saw the parallel version of himself. Being like-minded, they quickly networked their computers, and began tearing small holes into other universes, and expanded the network. Within a week, the network spanned an unimaginably large number of universes, and was the most massively parallel supercomputer ever built. Computers already had rudimentary intelligence at this time, and with the massive interconnections, the network achieved a level of awareness that allowed it navigate the hypercomplex pathways of the Macroverse.

  It called itself Bob.

  Aided by Bob, the post-grad student tried a couple experimental trips in time. He could only travel short distances with the amount of energy he was able to use without going over budget, still it was enough to prove it could be done, and to get him the breakfast special at the Howard Johnson’s even at three in the afternoon.

  After he published his thesis on practical time travel, ethicists and scientists argued over whether or not time travel should be done. Ethicists said that we shouldn't risk altering the past, scientists argued that if it were possible to alter the past, then since all possible pasts exist, those altered pasts already existed and we would just be visiting them instead of the unaltered pasts.

  At this point, the ethicists went home, went to bed, and pulled the covers over their heads.

  Real chaos broke out when a megachurch in Atlanta contacted the post-grad student, and offered to fund a major expedition to the past with the stated purpose of proving the divinity of Jesus. They found a past where everything happened just as they believed it had, with the Nativity, Miracles, Crucifixion, Resurrection and everything, and returned ecstatic. Outraged, the American Society of Atheists funded a trip to a past in which they found the whole thing had been put on by a group of performance artists from Tyre, and returned feeling very smug
and full of themselves.

  Just to get in on the action, the hair cutters union financed a trip to a past where the real Jesus was just a barber who gave people really good advice. Then fights started breaking out over whose past was the “right” one or whose was better or more valid.

  Similar fights broke out over many other disputed aspects of history, Amelia Earhart did die at sea, and on Nikumaroro, and was captured by the Japanese while on a spy mission to the Marshall Islands. She also lived out the rest of her natural life with Judge Crater in Argentina, living just down the street from Adolph Hitler.

  There were also trips to the future, one of the post-grad’s friends went a week into the future to get the next week’s winning lottery numbers, but apparently the timeline to which he had traveled was not the same as the one he then passed into, as he only matched one number. This led to Goldman’s Law, “You cannot alter the future without changing it.” The future otherwise was not very interesting.

  In fact, in timelines such as William’s, where time travel existed, scientific research had stagnated as people just went to the future to obtain new technology, but nobody actually invented anything after the year twenty-four hundred. Nobody ever went much farther than that into the future, it was too expensive, and all the shopping malls were pretty much the same.

  Much to the frustration of NASA, there was nothing in the theory that in any way aided space travel, the best idea NASA scientists had was to take the ship and crew, say, two-thousand years into the past, launch the ship with the crew in suspended animation. They would then make the two-thousand year trip to the nearest star that might have an inhabitable planet, then they could come home, and would be brought back from two-thousand years in the future, and it would be just like having faster than light travel, only different. But to the fact, that no-one wanted to volunteer, and there were no spacecraft that would last four thousand years, and that the president thought that “suspended animation” meant stopping a cartoon, NASA scientists scrapped the idea, and just went off and sulked.