"The greatest weight.-- What, if some day or
night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest
loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have
lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times
more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every
joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or
great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same
succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight
between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal
hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and
you with it, speck of dust!"
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse
the demon who spoke thus?... Or how well disposed would you have to
become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more
fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and
seal?"
-Frederick Nietzsche
How did it come to this...
Did the details really matter? Hell, that was the thing. None of it mattered. Sheena had done her best to just keep her head down, do her job, go through life without being noticed. They'd even picked her for this job for those qualities...
And none of it mattered. She'd been chosen by random fate and chance to be thrown into a system of massive, grinding gears, where anything that was straightforward was hostile and everything that wasn't ended up being hostile too. All her efforts to just avoid it, move away...all for nothing. One last betrayal, a cold declaration that her death would serve a greater purpose she had no say in and no desire to have a say in...if she hadn't broken the rules, she wouldn't even have had this time.
Maybe that was the final cruelty. She couldn't move; her legs were too badly damaged. She was bleeding out, her body slowly going cold. A vague memory of an ancient philosopher condemned to death came to mind, drinking a poison that slowly claimed his body from the legs up, allowing him to walk around and talk and then lie there and talk before it finally claimed his life. He had willingly accepted this. For her, the choice had been thrust on her.
She'd thought herself so smart.
The Immutable, they called it. An ironic name. Immutable meant nothing changing, ever. The essence within this...was the exact opposite. An impossible crystallization of the end of all things. A shard of a dead universe, something beyond void and gravity and all that should have been when the clock of existence finally ran out...
Another universe. There WERE other universes.
Forget a small fish in a big pond, she was an atom in a stellar cluster.
The war between the two sides...what were even their actual names, they'd been called the Psychopomps and the Cornfeds for so long that she couldn't even remember their actual name. It was the Psychopomps who had set this up, or...someone behind them. She had the vaguest inkling that as big as the war was, it might have been a proxy for even bigger forces. Forget being stepped on, she was having a mountain dropped on her.
...except...
She still had it.
---
"How long before our forces arrive?"
"Three minutes. The closest interception is five minutes away. We'll have the Immutable retrieved and gone by then!"
---
A shard of a dead universe.
She'd thought it was antimatter...and it was, in the same way a campfire and a star going supernova were related. The Psychopomps had a plan for their enemies. Not defeat, not destruction...the closest way Sine could think to describe it was 'potential castration'. Not in the sense of risk of castration, but a weapon that would literally take their enemy's future and murder it, long and slow. Invoke decline that would let them consume their enemy at their leisure. Steal the possibilities of countless beings to insure their own dominance. Forget genocide, this was...a life that was dead from the moment of birth to the moment of actual bodily ceasing. To warp reality so that it would slowly grind your enemies to dust without any input from you...
What kind of people could look at this miracle, at this amazing knowledge, and decide the best use was to just inflict more misery when all the tools of the universe to do so were already so nigh-infinite in number?
She wouldn't even be any kind of significant loss. Another drop of blood in an ocean of it. The universe would keep on going forward, and when there was so much more, people would turn inward and chew their own guts out. Even those who aspired to more were not immune to such corruption...
...it wasn't fair.
It wasn't worth it.
If this was the bent the universe had...
...maybe it was better off straightened out. A perfect line.
Perfect void.
---
"...that is impossible."
"Sir, we just double checked the readings!"
"She CAN'T open the Focus! The very NATURE of it means she would want to die before she opened the Focus!"
"Sir, that was based around her not being aware of certain things that that damn woman made her aware of!"
"...what happens if she opens it?" The form said, turning to their superior.
"...Without the proper shielding...it'll infect and undo all the kinetic energy in the immediate area and spread from there. A cancer on the most basic energy of...everything. Everything will grind to a halt on an atomic level. The universe will cease to exist."
There was quiet amongst the beings, as the reality that even they were fallible, that they could make mistakes, and when they did, the rarity just increased the severity.
Perhaps some would rejoice that such beings could panic, even if it was just the sole one who did.
But that was enough.
---
The Oblique Focus. Designed to work on her subconscious, to make her desire anything but to NOT open the container that held the Immutable. Even if it meant her death.
But...things had changed. The person who had been given the package and the one that was lying here were two different women.
What kind of life could I have had if I had made one step different? What kind of life could I have had elsewhere?
None of it mattered. She didn't matter. She had no power, no hand in how things turned. No understanding until it was far too late, and no tools to make use of that understanding even if she did.
...screw it.
Screw the universe that let itself come to this. Screw the gods or higher beings or whatever that decided this was how they wanted to run it. Screw the Psychopomps and the Cornfeds for always wanting more, and everything in between that didn't do what was needed to stop them.
If the universe was, in the end, going to hand someone like her something like this at a time like this...
...It was better off gone.
The Oblique Focus could keep her out if she was driven by curiosity, or greed, or desperation, or anything that she might have sought to save or improve her life. But against the urge to just end it all, and to go first, on her terms...
It might as well have not been there.
The Focus cracked open.
And the universe broke.
And then all there was was the fires of creation and unmaking as they danced and raged and burned.
----
"...some will find it crass that we executed him."
"He acted on his own. That is treason."
"He likely saved this universal sphere from complete annihilation. Including us."
"Except we can't come out and say why. All the systems know is he turned a whole fleet of ships into bombs and their antimatter cores rendered one of the more fertile mineral regions a dead mess of black holes. If we tell them the alternative was everything ceasing to exist...questions would be asked. We cannot have them asked, so he had to die."
What was left unsaid was the double-layered nature of the scapegoating. They had everything figured out, they knew Sheena Traverse was just another pawn to push around, and discard if needed, but circumstances had led to her costing them their great weapon and nearly destroying the universe in one last angry temper tantrum. They couldn't even villify her after her death, or perhaps seek out her remains beyond the physical, because...
Their fellow had played the only real card they had. Just like one way to stop a forest fire was to blow up the woodlands that the fire was advancing towards and deny it fuel, their fellow had used the chain reaction of matter meeting its opposite to concentrate the kinetic cancer inward before it could spread and crush it into itself. Unable to proceed outward with its destruction, it had gone inward and annihilated itself.
But not without consequence.
The memory had been erased. All traces of remains, on every aspect, had been erased. Only their grand nature prevented them from having forgotten like all the lower-borns that the woman had existed. He should be content by this punishment, this utter negation...
...except, as one man across many strings had said, there are more things in heaven and in earth that were ever dreamt of in your philosophy.
But...this was beyond even him.
So their fellow was blamed. Others would be blamed. The universe would keep going, here and so many other places, and nothing would change.
...that was the most likely outcome.
But then again...their arrangement had also been that.
And instead...this.
Whatever this was.
-----
The basis of the eternal recurrence was the idea that your existence would be your life, repeated for eternity, and whether you would find this a blessing or a curse.
The concept of multiverse theory was that unknown events created new timelines, new universes, eventually creating their own wholly separate concepts of existence that split off their own universes. The idea was that one life was a nigh-infinite fractal, a thousand thousand thousand possibilities spinning out from each other, going off in other directions, merely the domain of ponderance...
But what if such a life ever so briefly touched the very idea of possibility ending? The likely end point would be all possibilities ending...unless something intervened.
What was shattered may not be able to be rebuilt. If the very deepest nature of a life, a mind, a heart, a soul amongst the unfathomable planes of existence could be so shattered...
Perhaps the simplest thing, the nature of all trends, was to reassemble it not as the infinite division, but the infinite straight line.
Instead of so many lives rendered in theory, a life of life after life after life after life rendered in reality.
The eternal recurrence.
---
Sine woke up with a jerk.
The sedative gas had finally worn off. Carol, it seemed, had thought she would sleep longer and had put her to bed.
She'd had...a dream. She couldn't remember the details, they were already fading. Something about a delivery. Which fit. This was her life.
Her life now, anyway. She'd been around this bend a good nine-ten times already. All the best of times, all the worst of times.
For whatever reason that was.
For what greater punishment could be inflicted on an angry, selfish woman then forcing her to live, not with the regrets of one lifetime, but more than one? On and on...maybe forever.
Existence worked in strange ways.
Sine got up and sat at her office table, adjusting a picture of Zephyrus and another with Carol and other Kobbers, and a third with her and Hypotenuse. She'd do some paperwork.
Another grain of sand in an infinite hourglass.
Sheena was dead.
Long live Sheena.
