October 11, 2024.

SPOOKTOBER STORY 8.

In the beginning, there was nothing, forever and forever, except for Stel, the Lady of the Moon. Stel wondered for a long time what that meant, “Lady of the Moon,” since it was just her, there, in that void, and things like “lady” and “moon” and even “of the” meant nothing, since “of the” implies one thing having a relationship to another thing, and there wasn’t another thing. There was just Stel.

Stel didn’t know how she knew that she was the Lady of the Moon or that her name was Stel, she just did, and she wondered if that meant someone else had created her for some reason. She thought about that for a very long time as well, and did not come to any conclusions except that she knew her name was Stel, she was the Lady of the Moon, which was not very much, but she guessed she should do something about it.

So, at what can’t be called the end of a timeless eternity but was just before the start of a timeful eternity so it might be helpful to think about the thing before the beginning of time as the end of a span of time even though such a thing didn’t exist yet and wouldn’t forever except until it did, Stel invented time.

This new thing (time) gave Stel some little measure markers to organize things into a neat row, sort of see things in perspective. It was pretty helpful! She thought about what she should do “first,” a concept she had just made up off the top of her dome.

The “first” thing Stel did now that time existed was invent matter. Bloop! She made a little rock.

Unfortunately, she didn’t think the rock through very well and it was composed of extremely volatile and unstable compounds. It exploded in her hand like a firecracker and created the universe.

Hey, give her a break. It was the first time anyone had done anything like this. She was making it up as she went along!

Stel, the Lady of the Moon, felt pretty overwhelmed. In the beginning, forever and forever, there had been nothing, and now not only was there time, it was filled with a whole bunch of junk floating everywhere! What a mess! She zippy quick invented gravity to try to scoop things together to make them easier to clean up.

All the little chunks of random gas and matter and junk started collecting themselves into convenient spheres, and Stel nodded happily to herself, pleased with her reflexes and quick thinking.

She took another week or so inventing different, better forces to keep the spheres of junk together once gravity had collected them, and she saw that it was good, but that it wasn’t really an end-game, because there was a whole lot of trash everywhere, it was just in balls now.

So, over the next few billions of years she spent time and effort cleaning up the mess, but in doing so, she discovered another new concept: fatigue. She’d cleaned up and destroyed a lot of matter that she had inadvertently created, but there was still a lot more to go, and cleaning was a lot less interesting than creating.

Stel considered this. Was there a way to invent like a destroyer thing, that would do her work for her so she could sit back and think about new things to do instead?

She found a nearby ball of junk and squinted at it. There was an idea brewing in her head, but she hadn’t quite figured it out yet. Something to do with the composition of this ball of junk. If she jazzed it in just the right way, could it… maybe…

Stel, being able to see all of time and possibility, kept one eye way forward in time, and experimented with the ball, until she came across an eventuality that suited her needs. “This will do,” she said, the first words spoken in the Universe since the beginning of time, and then she picked up some random nearby crap and threw it as hard as she could at the ball of junk.

Whammo! The crap hit the junk ball and blasted some of it apart in just such a way that pleased her. It created a lot of heat and high pressure that caused a chain reaction with some of the junk remaining.

Now all she had to do was wait. She went over to the random junk that had been ejected from the junk ball when it was impacted by the crap, which gravity had already started to collect into a rough sphere, locked in an unsteady orbit around the junk ball.

She sat on the accreting junk, which seemed like a good vantage point, and decided to wait and watch what happened. Over millions of years, the heat and pressure she had created by hitting the junk ball with the random crap created little self replicating chains of stuff, and those self replicating chains started replicating in more elaborate and interesting ways. It was fun to watch.

When Stel wasn’t watching the self replicating chains of stuff, she was inventing new dimensions and physical laws to toy around with.

The replicating chains of stuff became bigger and bigger, and developed ways of protecting themselves from the elements. Stel thought it was a hoot.

Some of the chains started destroying the other chains, and it was good.

One particular set of self-replicating chains started spreading over the whole junk ball, destroying a lot of junk in its path, and it was good.

A while after that, the same self-replicating chains started destroying the junk-ball, but Stel wasn’t worried, she could check the width and breadth of all of time whenever she wanted, to make sure the process was continuing correctly, and, it was. Good!

The self-replicating chains destroyed enough of the junk-ball that, as a method of self-preservation, they developed ways of getting off the junk ball and going to other spheres of collected crap. The process repeated whenever they populated a new crap sphere, destroying a lot of it, moving on.

Stel was pleased with her little destructors. They kept developing new methods of destruction that were better and quicker and more effective, zapping whole crap balls out of existence, even (or especially) if it was covered in other destructors.

One day, Stel went into one of the other dimensions she’d invented and created a new branch of metaphysics composed of numbers she’d found scattered around (and it was good), and when she returned, everything was gone. The damn destructor things had destroyed all matter in the universe, even the little ball she sat on, and she was surprised to find that she was saddened by its loss.

“Oh, huh,” she said. “My ball.”

There was nothing for it. They’d done exactly what she’d foreseen they would do. She looked around at the completely empty void, and spent a few days grieving the loss of all the different types of junk, and the destructor things she’d grown fond of, and then moved on with what she was doing. She still didn’t know what “Lady” or “Moon” meant, but at least she’d figured out “of the,” which she supposed was a win.

She created a pyramid made of thought and then destroyed it. She destroyed magnetism for a little, then brought it back. But as she did these things she felt a strange sensation, a little itch, that bothered her. Stel ignored it for a few millennia but after a while the itch became all she thought about, so, she investigated.

It wasn’t in time, it wasn’t in space, it was somewhere in between. She pried open the veil between the two and peeked around, and there it was. One of the self-replicating chains! It had survived! Wow! What a trooper!

It was very old, and had degraded quite a lot, but she shrunk herself down to its size to see what was going on. “Hello,” she said in its clumsy language. “I thought you had all destroyed yourselves, what’s up? How are you doing?”

The last destructor chain lifted the part of itself that could perceive visual wavelengths to perceive hers. “You!” it cried.

“Me,” she agreed. “What’s up?”

“I am the Heleth Nelbik, Trewþe Emperor of All-Space,” croaked the destructor chain, through its severely decayed noise-making parts. “I persist, past Frashoketeri, past the theomachy against Gog and Magog, past the cleansing fire of Elspith’s Gun, and have waited for impossible aeons in my sheltered abomination of desolation, that I may seek a single answer.”

“Oh?” asked Stel, Lady of the Moon. “That’s nice. What would you like answered?”

“My lady,” whispered the chain, through its ruined anatomy. “My question is simple, I only ask… why?”

Stel considered this. She squinted at the chain, trying to divine its meaning. “What?” she asked.

“Why?” it begged, trembling, pulling itself from its throne, collapsing onto the floor of its shelter, its lightwave orbs turned up towards her. “Why?”

“Uhh…” she said, backing away. “What do you mean.”

It crawled towards her, pulling itself on its ruined limbs. “Why…” it gasped. “...the suffering… the defiling… insanity… cruelty… the… the…”

She backed all the way into the corner of the room, watching the ruined chain dragging itself towards her. This was very unpleasant.

“Why? Why? Why?” it screamed at her, before sagging, its energy stores spent.

Stel stared at it for a while. “Um,” she began. “I guess I grabbed some random crap and whipped it at a ball of junk? Does that make sense?”

The rapidly disintegrating self-replicating chain did not move when it spoke. “No.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, anyhow, goodbye.”

The chain lay still and silent, and she saw that it was crumbling at its seams. It seemed very distraught. She reversed its entropy, so that it would persist forever, but removed its ability to interact with her, so that she would not feel that annoying itch any more.

Then, she left, and thought about all of this for a week, then moved on to projects that were more entertaining and forgot about it for forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever.