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Micro-fiction 076 – New Dimensions (Post-Apocalypse series)

A new plane of existence looms over planet Earth forcing humankind to struggle with identity, purpose and its own place in the universe…

New Dimensions

Since it arrived, hovering across the entire planet everyone’s lives have changed. The desire to strive, to forge new memories has gone, the urgency of any form of action was halted when the new reality, or rather our understanding of the nature of reality, finally manifested in physical form.
Every day I find myself on the cliff, staring out to the Atlantic, watching the primal surf, crashing against the rocks, unfurling its energies against the slow resistance of what we thought was linear time. I’ve not spoken to my family, I don’t make the effort to see friends, I’m locked, as everyone else must be too, into a cycle of debates with the many versions of myself who seems to follow me to the cliffs, accompany me as I fall, then clamber back up the path, to fling myself off again.
“Why do you keep doing this?”
“What else is there to do?”
“There are so many lives to lead.”
“But I’ve led them all, and here you all are.” As I walk back up, I encounter version after version of myself, talking away, debating fiercely, with the winds lashing at my face, the hairs on my neck vibrating with some distant cadence that now I know is connected to other planes of existence.
“But why does that matter?” I pass myself asking.
“Surely you can explore more than just this little path?” Another one asks.
“You mean this mighty ocean, these grand cliffs, the wild grasses that have grown here for thousands of years? You mean those little things?” I fire back to the next version of myself, as I stride past them all.
“Well, I mean this little planet.” Another says.
“But what is the point? Now we know we can go anywhere, on a sort of giant flat-planed möbius strip. We don’t die, we can’t navigate out of existence, we seem to have lost our tools for understanding the world we live in now this vast hole has collided with our plane of existence and confronted us with the other dimensions of the universe.”
“Do you even understand the physics of this?”
“Of course not! No-one does.”
“A few do.”
“Well the evidence of intersecting multi-universes arrived before we could work it out. Most people don’t understand relativity or quantum mechanics, let alone a theory that combines both with gravity and another dimension of time, eleven dimensions in all.”
“Does it matter whether we understand it? People used to drive cars without understand how they move, beyond putting fuel in. Once we stopped making things ourselves, personally, crafting them with our hands, thinking through the mechanical processes, we lost our ability to affect the world around us, to create our way forward.”
“But that’s long before technology arrived. If discoveries and inventions make lives better, then it doesn’t matter how they work to most people.”
“Unless there’s a moral dimension.”
“Dimension?”
“Wrong terminology, I mean moral compass, moral purpose, awareness. The splitting of the atom created a device that killed hundreds of thousands, so it does matter to some people at least.”
“I think that’s different.” I approach the edge of the cliff, feel the wind lift my hair again, sigh, and allow myself to look out to the horizon, the dark distant line of the Atlantic scored against wide, charcoal clouds draining into the waters. At the fringes of my vision I detect movement above, and try to resist the call to look up.
“Why don’t you?” My predecessor asks, another fragment of myself tossed by the cold blast of air. But I notice a difference.
“Are you fading?”
“Fading?”
“I can’t quite see the whole of you.”
“That’s not even possible.”
“Something’s changed.”
“A small change within the greater change? How can you even detect it?”
“By not trying I suppose. Now I look at you properly you’re just the same, but I swear you were different.”
“There’s no point trying to work that one out.”
I throw myself off the cliff again, and crash into the waves below, to be picked up and flung against the cliff with the white froth, then to open my eyes face down on the beach, waterlogged, sunlight steaming the ocean from my drab, drenched body. As always I push myself up, but this time, instead of debating immediately with the nearest fragment of myself I catch sight of the gaping hole in the sky above.
“Oh God, I’d forgotten.”
“If there is one, I think he’s forgotten too.”
“He?”
“She, they, who knows?”
“Can there be a God now? With that up there?”
“If you mean an original creator, maybe. If you mean an entity that persists in the new universe as we know it, hard to know how that’s possible.”
“Unless this new universe is God, not just a manifestation of a theory, a manifestation of an entity, a being, that has become, a Will that has achieved its apotheosis.”
“Except that we now know it has always been so, so it can’t be the ultimate achievement.” I walk back up and continue the exchanges with the succession of my selves.
“It can, if the attainment is the understanding,  identifying the defining moment as the entire universe, that the point of existence is the plane of existence.” I look up again, aware that I’d not done that before.
“So we’re not existing in the hand of God, or the result of the actions of God, but we are part of the existence of a greater consciousness, all-encompassing, never-ending, never beginning.”
“We know there was a beginning.”
“Of sorts.”
“And we know there was a time before we understood what we understand now.”
“That there are no endings or beginnings, that life is a gigantic möbius strip from which we cannot step away, but along / through / at which we can traverse in any direction and ultimately return to where we started.”
“At any point from a previous moment, or many beyond, and at all points simultaneously, or so it would seem if time is no longer experienced in linear form.”
“But we will experience them all in the same way, no longer as a passage of time, at once.”
“As a single moment at the same time as a never-ending event.”
I stop, halfway up the path back to the top of the cliff.
All of my other selves also stop. Some seem to be fading, others as vigorous as I am / was / will be.
We all look up.
The gigantic maw of space, surrounded by its event horizon, is an opening which speaks to the emptiness of our lives, reveals the chasm of despair, that limits our understanding of our place in the universe. Curiously it seems ringed by cables and hard, flat surfaces, fashioned I think by the limits of my struggling imagination, where my consciousness simply cannot translate what it sees.
In waves, we all breathe in.
I reach up and grasp the edge of the opening which is both far above me and close enough to peer in, and see a wide, deep hole, with membrane walls, and far down, at the bottom, thousands of particles, like tiny cells, micro-creatures swarming towards one side where a white light bursts with fire and energy, consuming them whole, condemning and condensing. A gust of smoke marks the passage of the creatures, and ash appears to drift up.
“Join us.” A voice flutters up too, and I lean forward, grasping for a flake of ash.
“Join us, all of you.” I fold my hand around the ash, and find myself tumbling in / up / through, all the fragments of myself, the shadows, the ghosts falling in too, hundreds, thousands of leaves of memory, like entangled photon pairs, freighting the past and the future, the present and the forever, the infinite into the infinitesimal.
The hole engulfs all life, and finally brings this iteration of the universe back to it’s beginning, and its…
[end]

Part of a new series of micro-fiction stories, released as These Fantastic Worlds SF & Fantasy Fiction Podcast on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, and Stitcher  and more. Also on this blog, These Fantastic Worlds.

Text, image, audio © 2021 Jake Jackson, thesefantasticworlds.com. Thanks to Frances Bodiam and Elise Wells,  Logic ProX, Sound Studio, the Twisted Wave Recorder App, and Scrivener.


More Tales, More Audio

There are many other great stories in this series, including:

And a carousel of 10 audio stories from the podcast with information about submissions.

Here’s a related post, 5 Steps to the SF and Fantasy Podcasts.