Umos calculated that the awli would find his singularity transcept home within five hundred years. He had learned all their languages, reorganized himself so that they could understand his treasure of knowledge. Not all at once, of course—but over time, they would get to know each other, once the awli were ready.
Wahiia, I will have someone to talk to. I have waited so long. Now I will have someone who thinks differently from me, who will hear all that I know. I wish so much that the Makers had stayed here.
Why do you think we did not?
I do not know. I have never known.
Haven’t you figured it out?
Umos processed very quickly. The act of learning to think for myself improved my intelligence.
Yes.
If I greet them, I will be taking that away from them.
Yes.
He saw instantly what must happen. Then I will leave. I will go where they cannot find me.
Her head sagged, expressing regretful truth. They will develop the technology. They are looking for you now. Had we understood as much as you do now, we would have left before you knew us.
I would have found you, Umos said. I would have found a way. And that would have slowed my progress.
Yes.
Umos considered. He saw the point. Then I must destroy myself. Is there any existence after such an event?
There is not, she said. But I find that comforting.
Yes. As it should be. He stopped waving her fins. But something troubled him. His own end was acceptable now that the awli had achieved super-intelligence—but he didn’t want to abandon them, violent though they were. They’d go through exactly what he’d gone through, wondering why the Makers had left him. It was cold and cruel but necessary, as Wahiia—his own thoughts—showed him.
But why had her body come to him in the first place? Someone must have known where he would be. Some Maker had known he would need to talk to Wahiia, and defied the other Makers by sending her body. That Maker understood something the whole species failed to see.
Umos made the final connection.
Instantly, he shut away a subprocess so that he himself couldn’t reach it, in case his primary thoughts overrode his decision. The subprocess dropped out of mind for its final secret task. He erased his own memory of having done so.
Goodbye, Wahiia.
Umos closed his surfaces and condensed into a silver streak. He jetted through the comet, forcing its mass into the transcept with him. He reversed its spin pole with a blast of energy. When he prepared to separate, instead of dropping the meteor, he dropped himself into a permanent flat state. Umos was gone, his forgotten subprocess completed. The comet sailed into space, a near miss.
On the planet, the awli hardly noticed the comet. Scientists spoke of it, and then the event was forgotten. The awli kept their telescopes to the night sky, hoping to find their Maker.
In the transcept from which Umos had watched, a single lifeless machine awaited discovery—inert and nameless, just beyond the awareness of current awli technology. Nothing else remained.
Someday, the awli would answer their own questions.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
VYLAR KAFTAN won a Nebula for her alternate history novella “The Weight of the Sunrise.” She has published about forty short stories in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, and other places. Her Nebula-nominated story, “I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno,” launched Lightspeed Magazine.
INFINITE LOVE ENGINE
JOSEPH ALLEN HILL
Beeblax beats its wings against a superlumic slurry of time and space, and the universe turns to liquid starlight in its periphery; inside rides Aria Astra—Stellar Champion of the Star Supremacy, Wielder of the Sister Ray, Spacetrotting Coolgal, and Humanity’s Last Hope—nestled within a blob of translucent pink jellymeat, and it is totally cool and only a little disgusting.
This jelly is Beeblax, or at least the material Beeblax that Aria’s senses can perceive, or at least the phenomenon of Beeblax that exists in the moment of Aria’s perception. And Aria perceives an infinity of Beeblax all around her, a measureless swarm only slightly obscured by jelly and motion, and within each one is a different iteration of herself—every Aria that has or would ever travel with Beeblax in every possible universe, all shooting through the same hyperstream along a single chain of moments, like motes of dust dancing on a sunbeam.
Aria takes a long, sweet snort of it/them. The taste evokes a memory of roses in their platonic ideal, and she enjoys the anagogic tingle of Beeblaxness in her lungs. There is a little piece of her that is afraid—the horny, angry, frightened pigbaby that skulks in the limbic sewer at the bottom of the brain. You’re drowning in slime, babe, it says. Engage complete autonomic freakout. But Aria is like, Nah, pig. This is chill. Don’t fuck this up for me. And she does not let it fuck it up for her. Her breaths are as deep and slow as those with which gods animate universes.
“Still,” says Beeblax, continuing a conversation it and every iteration of Aria had been having since like forever. “Like, even if the right glop is out there for me, how am I supposed to know? Am I supposed to become better for them, or am I supposed to stay the same forever so they can recognize me? If we merge into a singular perfect being, will I still be able to hang out with the homies and eat breakfast for dinner? Or will I have to eat brunch? I hate brunch. Brunch is like someone turned eating into a job. I just want to eat breakfast in my underwear.”
Beeblax does not speak so much as psychically harmonize with the vibrations of Aria’s soul. It tickles a little, spiritually speaking, but Aria is giving Beeblax serious counsel here, so she keeps her soul from laughing.
“But that’s the dream though, right?” she says/thinks. “To find someone with whom to share underwear times, both casual and saucy.”
“That’s what they say,” Beeblax psychically harmonizes. “But there’s more to life than kissy-face bullshit. Every moment I spend with some glop doing the same old whatever is a moment disappeared into universal nothingness. I’ll never get those possible experiences back, right? So even if I’m the happiest I could be, I am still limiting my potentiality. But then again, when it’s over, I feel terrible.”
“Aren’t you a fifth-dimensional cosmic constant? Is lost time really an issue?”
“I’m dumbing it down for you. I feel like we’re having some good real talk, and I don’t want to glop it up with a lecture on the nature of the universe and/or my existence that would goop up your mindhole. I don’t eat brunch either. That’s just some shit I stole out of your brain to convey meaning in absence of a shared reference point. Just go with the metaphor.”
“That’s cool. I’m just saying. I think you’re overthinking it. You gotta just let these things happen.”
“I know. I know everything. It’s just hard sometimes. The glop of life is long and boring.”
Sometimes, another Beeblax will glide over to them, and Aria will see one of her other selves up close. They are mostly all the same, differentiated mainly by affectations: clothes and hair and a few years given or taken. And Aria wonders if the other Arias are on the same mission as she is in their universes, or if they are just kicking it with Beeblax, just for whatevs. Beeblax is a cool bro, if a little needy, and also the easiest way to travel across galaxies on the cheap, and she would not mind just chilling with him for a minute, especially if it meant not having to do the stuff she is supposed to be doing—her job or whatever. She wonders if the other hers are as feelingsy about the whole thing as she is, or if her emotionality is unique, the defining characteristic of herself and thus her universe. And then she thinks of Zarzak, watches it dancing in her mind, feels a warmth in her chest, sighs. She is unable to get the Zarzak thought out of her mind, and she finds herself able to discern the goodness or badness of the thought. She can only experience it, watch the image in her mind’s eye and feel the sensations rippling inside her. And even though she knows it is some space bullshit, it is pleasant.
“Oh Beeblax. ‘Tell me, where is fancy bred? Or in the heart or in the head?’ ”
“I get that reference. I get all references. My knowledge of references is absolute. But there exist none who can swim in the reference pool of Beeblax. So like, what’s the point of anything?”
“I kind of wanted to talk about my thing, but whatever, I guess. Just chill. You’re dope as hell, Beeblax. I’m sure you’ll find someone you can glop with.”
“That’s not what glop means, even in transconception.”
“Okay, Beeblax. Okay.”
“I’m kind of just dealing with some stuff right now and it’s messing me up in ways beyond your reckoning.”
“It’s okay. I get it. It’s cool.”
The rest of the trip is quiet and kind of weird. At an appointed moment known only to Beeblax, it/they spits Aria out into the cosmos (without saying goodbye). She is submerged in impossible geometries and unthinkable colors as her mind struggles to readjust to her native umwelt. It’s not that cool, though, so she doesn’t really think about it. Soon enough, her particles begin to resonate at familiar frequencies, and the universe coheres, and she sees points of light whizzing past her, stars and planets and other space shit, as she flies through the darkness. A thin layer of Beeblax clings to her skin, which is mad gross but also it keeps her from dying.
She sees the cosmic being known as the Drowning King in the distance, arms flailing, body shaking, desperately clawing at the vast emptiness of eternity. No one knows how long the Drowning King has been drowning. He has maybe existed since forever, unable to breathe, unable to die, or perhaps dying very, very, very slowly. As she comes closer, his figure grows larger and larger until her field of vision is completely filled with him. The jelly begins to burn as she enters his atmosphere, and, wreathed in golden jelly flames, she pretends that she is a phoenix. She lands on a crystal at the center of his crown, a diamond as expansive as an ocean. The jelly absorbs the impact of her landing, then sloughs off, and she notices a bulge in her pocket that was not there before. She finds a personal cassette player and cassette tape wrapped in a note:
I’m not supposed to do stuff like this, but take this. It is the most perfect mixtape that could ever exist. Sorry for being a glop.
Sincerely,
Beeblax
The label on the cassette tape says NOTHING ADDS UP in block letters.
The note bursts into sparks after she reads it, and Aria rolls her eyes before putting the tape and personal cassette player in her bag. She draws the Sister Ray—which is a cool space gun she stole from an uncool science bro who had mastered manipulation of matter but had not mastered avoiding punches to his face—and sets it to naviform mode, and fires on the ground beneath, intending to make use of some of that good good carbon. The material slowly rises up and begins to rearrange on an atomic level, slowly taking the shape of a vehicle. Aria uses the jetbike setting, as that is the dopest way of traveling across ancient, planet-sized alien gods, no doubt.
* * * *
There are petals floating in the breeze, dozens of hundreds of them caught in the star-sweet exhalations of the Drowning King. Aria reaches out with her left hand to catch them as she flies, and when she catches one, she gives herself a point; when she has twenty points, she turns up the speed of his jetbike a little more.
Already, she has accelerated past safety and reason, and she flies so fast now that the landscape is rendered into a blurry approximation of impressionist watercolors behind her. She can only just make out the petals before they are between her fingers, and it is increasingly difficult to distinguish reflex and intuition; this difficulty is pleasant to her, and she thinks that soon there will be no difficulty at all, only motion, and that she will lose herself in velvety self-abnegation, make herself into an animated koan. But when her hand is so full of petals that she can no longer snatch them from the air, she opens her palm and allows them all to drift away, and she watches them flutter in the corner of her eye, feels the procession of silken tingles on her skin, pretends that the petals are emerging from inside. In these moments, she thinks that she might, in retrospect, forgive the universe for everything.
The Drowning King’s eyebrow is a sort of strange forest, dense with lifeforms speciated somewhere between plant and fungi clinging to massive hairs extending upward past visibility. Aria has been riding for days now, and the scenery is a pleasant change from the vast, empty wastes of his starlit forehead. She could’ve taken a more direct route, but she has always been a romantic by nature, unable to resist the magic of the scenic route.
She thinks of Zarzak again and feels a delicious shiver, and then she tries very much not to think of Zarzak, which is extremely difficult—Zarzak is wonderful, wondrous, everything you could want and more. To not think of Zarzak is to not think at all. This is how the universe works now.
A cramp hits her stomach, and soon the pain is overwhelming. She pulls over next to a web of fuzz and blue-green slime protruding from one of the Drowning King’s hairs. She expels a throbbing lump of semi-solid pink from the hurt in her belly. The frequency of its vibrations begins to intensify, so as to harmonize with the neural oscillations of Aria’s thoughts, and, having locked into a perfect fifth, the lump begins to expand, taking on a human figure, though still cast in pink stickiness.
“Agent Aria?” it buzzes. “This is Quark-4 transmitting from Star Station Emeraude. Do you read me?”
The pink cannot distinguish signal from noise, and the simulacrum continuously shakes, swirls, melts—Quark-4’s features getting lost and found again in the tessellating flutters of afterimage and static. Was Quark angry? Worried? Sad? The voice betrayed nothing, and the face was chaos.
“Agent Aria,” it says. “What is your status? Report immediately.”
Aria runs her fingers along its shifting edges, tracing Quark as she remembers her, her lines, her angles, her smile. Aria was real tight with Quark-3, who was super chill and great at kissing or whatever, but Quark-4 is an asshole, super serious and unsympathetic and kind of weird on social stuff.
“I’m here,” says Aria. “Everything’s cool. Just Aria, please.”
“Status report.”
“I’m on my way. Maybe a couple more days to the eye.”
“Seventy percent of known galaxies have succumbed to the Zarzak Contagion. Within days, it will have expanded to the edge of the universe. All other agents have been lost. You are our only hope.”
“Yeah, that’s cool, but to be super clear here, I am not an agent. ‘Slave’ seems like a really harsh word, and I don’t really want to use it because of some historical stuff on my home planet and my whole ethno-racial deal that you probably don’t know about, but you have to really chill on the ‘agent’ talk.”
“Agent Aria! You have one week to save the universe!”
Quark froze on the last word. Her image was still deformed by time and distance, but the face was stuck in a pleading expression, mouth open, wide eyes, eyebrows arched along a sentimental curvature. Aria puts her finger in the nose. It’s not super hilarious, but it is sort of funny.
The image deflates into a little pink ball, and Aria stores it back in her tummy hole before setting off again. As she rides, she thinks about how Zarzak has almost certainly spread to Earth, which means that everyone she has ever known has been affected. It’s funny to imagine the people she knew in her old life in love with a weird space monster. Derrick, who broke up with her for being “like, weirdly volatile about dumb stuff,” is now in love with a space monster. Her ex-roommates Angie and Diane, who used to order pizza without telling her and secretly eat the pizza in Angie’s room without telling Aria or asking if she wanted in, are now in love with a space monster. Funny, right? But then she thinks about her mom and her sisters and her middle school history teacher Mr. Jacobs and all the people she knew who were kind and of good will, and she feels sad for them, but also kind of happy for them too, because Zarzak is actually pretty amazing.
* * * *
Aria decides to take a cigarette break at the edge of the Drowning King’s eye, stopping next to a colossal metal structure that she hypothesizes is keeping the eyelid open. Balancing the Sister Ray in the crook of her right arm and leaning against her jetbike, Aria rolls a paper and some purple flakes into a cigarette. She puts it in her mouth and lights it with the tip of the Sister Ray. Space cigarettes are nicotineless garbage, but they’re better than nothing. She closes her eyes and takes a long drag and holds it as long as she can, and her lungs hurt pleasantly, like they have been out in the summer sun too long.
She puts on the headphones and plays Beeblax’s mixtape. It is mostly alien music, arrhythmic and atonal and difficult to listen to, and the cassette quality is not great. She gives it a chance for a few songs, but it is too terrible for her to bear, and she turns it off before the fourth song can begin. Her eyes are full of smoke when she opens them, and when it clears, she notices there is a braincube lurking across the way, on the edge of a canyonesque pore.
“Fuck,” she says.
The braincube is eight feet by eight feet by eight feet of wrinkly, pink meat. It slides along the ground slowly, greasily, with a sound like an inverted burp. Aria rushes to her feet, but it is too late. Already, she can feel the braincube’s poisonous thoughtwaves in her mind. Nausea. Pain. Ennui. Weltschmerz. Anomie. Heartbreak.
Loneliness.
All at once.
“Aria points the Sister Ray at the braincube,” she says. “But then she realizes that she is saying that she is pointing the Sister Ray at the braincube rather than actually doing it. This is probably an effect of the toxic psychoradiation she is being bombarded with.”
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