I wrote this over a year ago, before I was aware of climate fiction as a genre. I crafted a few entries then moved on to the novel I’m currently trying to finish, but I’ve always wanted to revisit it, and Substack seems like a good format for it—I’d like this to be a place where I can publish a mix of short-form fiction (or serialized fiction) and think pieces. Most entries won’t be as long as this first one, but please leave feedback in the comments! The ability for writers and their readers to communicate directly is one of Substack’s best features.
Welcome to my Blog: My name is El’sha.
This term will be un familiar to most of my readers, so I will do my best to elucidate. In the distant past, there were those who explored the world not only to satisfy their own curiosity or wanderlust, but to bring those experiences to others. With the power of their words, they transported their followers thousands of miles to share in the sights, sounds, and smells of exotic lands. It’s said that some even used miraculous technology that allowed others to see what they saw and hear what they heard, even over great distances, but I don’t believe the legends, myself. Regardless, this is a tradition I am trying to revive, or at least emulate. You hold in your hands a collection of my travels and travails, my samplings of the world I live in. An assortment of amuse-bouche, to borrow from an ancient tongue. There is no grand narrative, save for that the reader may extrapolate from these offerings. There is no agenda, save my conceit of becoming a blogger. I hope you find this tome entertaining, if not enlightening.
Janery 1, 3263
I entered the lecture hall with a group of students. It’s a large rectangular building, symmetrical but vaguely ugly, constructed from scavenged steel and oak beams. A lumpy plaster, presumably colored with crushed shells or mineral rocks, rendered the whole thing whitish, save for a few small glass windows set into each wall. The single room within was much warmer than the chilly winter air outside, but it quickly became stifling as we all shuffled to find places for ourselves on the crude wooden benches arrayed around the stage at the far end of the room.
A man stood on that stage, hands clasped at his back. His grey robes were plain but marked him as a scholar and possibly a priest as well; the two could be hard to differentiate at times. Any respectable study of ancient humans had to be tempered with a reverence for the divine, or the temptation to recreate the marvels of the past might prove beyond the willpower of the researcher. The man stood frozen in place for several minutes, then abruptly turned to pace across the stage in agitation, his steps clack-clacking throughout the hall. I made sure my quill was well-inked, carefully placing the pot on the bench beside me and balancing a stack of blank white pages on a rectangular sheet of metal—my makeshift desk—on my knees.
He wasted no time once everyone was seated, returning to the center of the stage to stand behind the podium, and clearing his throat loudly. A hush fell over the crowd, and every head seemed to lean forward slightly. After a few moments of silence, punctuated only by small, suppressed coughs or the squeak of a leather shoe on the slatted wooden floor, he finally spoke. He had a strong, high voice, with a hint of a southern drawl, and the building’s excellent acoustics carried it clearly to me in the very back row by the hall doors.
“The void at the beginning and the end swallows light and time itself, denying even the possibility of their existence all, negating their potentiality. If anything could swim in those waters, it would have to be as dark and eternal as its home, as all-consuming and all-denying, and if such a not-thing could exist, it must. Call it God if you wish but it is a destroyer, not a creator: How would such a will react to the sudden presence of an imperfection—to the spontaneous genesis of a bubble of force, heat, and disparity? A boil on the endless cold plane of still-death?”
He paused dramatically, and the crowd tittered. I used the opening to catch up with my notes.
“Can there be any doubt? Slowly, gently, yet with terrible force, the giant in the deep would crush it. It would be expurgated, destroyed so wholly that no trace remains, and it would be as if the bubble had never existed at all. This is the bleak reality of things; this is the nature of what is. Existence in its totality cannot allow time to spool out, and without time’s arrow energy cannot creep down its gradients: The sun can’t shine, Earth can’t turn within its radiance, plants can’t photosynthesize, sheep can’t graze, humans can’t laugh and love and give lectures on metaphysics.”
A few people laughed at this, and the speaker flashed an ingratiating smile.
“And yet, the world exists—we exist. We fill our lungs and count the days: we plow the fields and harvest the grain. We spit in the face of the void with our every tiny sensation, and long after our time ends our constituent bits continue to defy, denying the denier. How can anything exist at all, let alone the incomprehensible richness we mostly take for granted? Time itself is the greatest mystery. It is still, yet it flows. It is universal, yet intensely personal. No more can be said of it but the simple truth: As the void crushes a bubble, time is created. The bubble is gone from the void before it existed, but inside! Inside, everything begins. The very smothering of nothingness that damns the world beyond all hope is the spring by which the clock is wound. It is the First Gradient. Raw power circulates, igniting the fires of creation and driving an endless inward spiral of complexity that expands ever outward. Fractal chaos generates worlds within and without, pillars that stand on nothing at all, yet support the very heavens. The extremes are exhilarating, the unimaginable density of the tapestry humbling.”
“The paradox of creation is that it is gone before it existed, developing over trillions of years yet never born at all. And if one bubble could be, why not two or three? Hundreds, thousands, all at once, everywhere at once, for time and space lack meaning in the void. An infinite constellation of embers singing silently in the endless darkness, rivaling the void itself—yet all ultimately futile. It is the curse of the cosmos to be doomed from inception, and as it is above, so it is below: the negating force influences everything in our world. Galaxies and superclusters form only to be eventually shredded by the expansion of space. Stars are born and die, exploding in the cataclysm of a supernova, shriveling to the faded glory of smoldering red dwarfs, or collapsing into those void-seeds our ancestors called black holes. Planets grow from dust caught in the wake of these giants, living or dying by the quirks of cosmic fate. Some are large enough to grow sheltering atmospheres: most are small enough to be devastated by collisions with various debris. The cosmic dance is majestic and brutal, filled with birth and death, tragedy and drama and farce, and it is within the gas bubbles surrounding those rarest of rocky worlds that the sublime phenomenon we call ‘life’ unfolds.”
By this point in the lecture, the audience was literally on the edge of its seat. We had all made pilgrimage here in the hopes of learning the secrets the ancients had gleaned, and the heady delight of this man’s quasi-scientific revelations was clearly more than most here had dared to hope for. I’d filled two pages already.
“Oh, LIFE! That most puzzling of puzzles, the crowning jewel of spiraling complexity. Its most basic elements, aminos, combine to form millions of different proteins, each folding in more ways than there are quanta in all the universe. The ancients believed they were formed by a creator’s hand, yet they sprang into being through natural processes! The very action of entropy driving energy from concentrated states to diffuse is sufficient to form these compounds given the right raw elemental ingredients, a modest amount of heat, and stable conditions over time. Many useless compounds are formed in these primordial baths, but over time the laws of the universe function as a search algorithm that blindly assembles and disassembles until stability and utility are achieved. Alas, even the ancients at the height of their power could not tease out the secret recipe for life-from-non-life. Their time ran out too soon.”
The man bowed his balding head in silence for a moment and the audience followed suite. The Time of Strife was long past, having faded from living memory fifty generations ago, but the loss of life and achievement was so catastrophic that it had been etched into the collective memory. No one alive could mention the fall of the ancients without taking a moment to contemplate and mourn, in a fashion.
“How ever it happened, simple living things formed, self-replicating structures composed of interacting chains of carbon, a jigsaw that duplicates itself imperfectly. Some copies are less stable—less adapted to their brothy home, others more so, and the search begins again for those islands of stability in a sea of redundancy and failure. Complexity begins to spiral outward and competing strategies emerge, synergizing or clashing, shaped by their environment and shaping it in turn. It is this very feature that makes the puzzle so difficult: we must separate the organism from its environment to study it, yet every organism is part of its environment.”
“Ancient mathematicians knew that all self-referential systems were inherently full of unknowable truths, and the web of life is the greatest recursive structure of all! It is completely incomprehensible when viewed as an assemblage of discrete elements. No, worse than that: it appears comprehensible. Despite their triumphs, the ancients viewed the natural world in this reductionistic way and made catastrophically foolish decisions that seemed perfectly sound at the time as a result. It is from this very error that we derive the axiomatic basis for all our collective knowledge as a modern organized species: A theory is only as representative of reality as the ideological framework in which it is developed.”
“The Ancient scientists understood bias and correctly attempted to account for it in their work, but they almost universally failed to consider alternate ideological structures when formulating their theories. In fact, those that attempted to do so were branded as heretics and excommunicated from their respective communities: research that suggested the dominant economic paradigm was dangerously maladaptive was buried or outright ignored. Thus, only research which affirmed the ideology of infinite growth on a finite planet was propagated within the learned circles, and by all accounts this echo chamber our forebears created persisted well into the Time of Strife.”
“But, I digress. To grow beyond hard limits imposed by simple cell structure, early life took drastic measures. For mutual benefit, one simple organism took up habitation inside a larger one and became part of its structure. This drastic move, called Eukaryogensis by the Ancients, represents life’s recursive nature to the extreme, for the host organism serves as the symbiont's environment, but it is in a very real way an extension of the symbiont's own physical form. I will return to this point again and again: it is foolish to the point of madness to attempt to understand life as a collection of disparate elements. Life exists in its totality, shifting and evolving through time as it seeks to fill space to capacity and exploit all available resources. It is necessary sometimes to consider a single species and study its interactions with another, but this strategy cannot be the default approach, or be in any way representative of how the observer attempts to model living systems. To do so is anathema. To do so is the highest capital sin. Reductionistic world views are omnicidal!”
The man’s voice grew to a crescendo during this tirade, and several people near me jumped as he roared that terrible word. Omnicide: the crime of the Ancient Ones. He lowered his head between outstretched arms gripping the sides of his podium and spoke no more. In the silence that followed, the room slowly filled with the buzz of soft murmuring, and I knew that many among the audience were praying. Since I write these words with the intent that they will be read by someone not versed in my people’s culture let me now clarify for you, the reader, that our relationship with our ancient ancestors is complex. They are equal parts revered and reviled, and their greatest achievements are also their greatest failures. They created a world beyond what any now alive can comprehend, and then destroyed it so thoroughly that almost nothing from it remained nor has ever been rebuilt. Their glory robbed us of opportunity—they exhausted this world’s finite resources, rendering them into useless forms and diluting their natural concentrations down to unusable levels. Yet, we persist, and our daily existence is defined by the limits established over a thousand years ago: limits we cannot hope to approach, limits we do not dare to approach. As the audience’s prayers died away, the speaker finally lifted his head, took a deep breath, and began anew.
“Even a single cell is a universe unto itself, but life did not stop there, for life cannot stop. It is an emergent property of the intrinsic conditions of our bubble. Some cells outcompeted their neighbors by joining forces and living colonially. Then colonies began to interact and live in closer and closer proximity, until it became beneficial for them to physically merge. Some became homogeneous, but others maintained a distinct, compartmentalized structure, with each contributing species performing a function that benefited the whole. One colony might ‘see’ and warn the others of danger or lead them to food; one might turn the waste of another into energy and share it with the rest, and so on. Cooperation for mutual benefit is the founding principle of complex life. As these amalgamations became more common, they began to compete and specialize. Their microscopic peers began finding ways to exploit them, so they grew thicker skin, then internal structures that could fight off invaders that found their way inside through an orifice. All the while, complex molecules called DNA encoded the organisms’ morphologies and functions and allowed them to continue creating near-copies of themselves.”
“Over billions of years, DNA grew longer, diversifying as changing conditions selected for certain traits over others. It also began branching, and soon there were hundreds, then thousands, then millions of distinct, complex, structured organisms occupying every conceivable environment, save perhaps the emptiness of outer space. The full history of life is beyond the scope of this talk, but several of my colleagues will address the topic in greater detail in the coming days. It is sufficient for now to state that we are a product of this ongoing process of diversification, specialization, and adaptation. We are a single branch of an ever-expanding tree of life: its roots reach down to the dawn of time, and its buds extend outward towards time’s end. It is our blessing and our curse to understand our place in this bubble—this universe—like no other animal this planet has birthed.”
I ran out of paper at that point, which was a relief because my wrist was starting to cramp. Who knew blogging was such hard work? Anyways, I may regret starting this project with such a heavy lecture—I’ll attend a few more in the coming days before I pack up and head East to the coast. People have been warning me to stay far away from the venenum, but I’m the kind of girl that takes such warnings as a challenge. See you next week!