January Writing Sample #2: Mu Beta Epsilon: Nine-Tenths Teaser (Patreon)

And I also jotted down this quick intro for another Mu Beta Epsilon bit! (No sexy stuff,  just world-building.)

You could say, literally, that hell is other people.

Imagine our universe, with its broad expanses of virtually empty space, its tiny spots of matter and energy, and life scattered on certain islands in the void. Billions of planets spun around billions of stars in billions of galaxies separated by billions of light-year of nothingness. And, spread like thin flames and tendrils throughout it all, undetectable to human beings, the energy of spirit, the counterforce to entropy.

Now imagine all of that contained in a single point. Every point space connects to this one point, and yet it has no space of its own. All the stuff of what would be space, time, energy, matter, or thought, crammed into an infinitely dense, infinitely tiny… thing. 

In short, imagine a big bang whose fuse fizzled.

It’s not really a place, because it has no space.

It’s not a moment, because it has no time.

It is eternal and ephemeral at the same time.

It is immense and microscopic.

It is, and it isn’t.

If one could visit inside the point, one would find not the static of what we think of as stopped time, but utter chaos. Things happen, or unhappen, at random. Cause and effect become meaningless words. The experience might be like being trapped at the heart of a star caught in perpetual mid-explosion, with unimaginable pressure, light so intense that it becomes darkness, and insane experiences that would contradict human experience every moment… if there were moments.

And the chaos- the constant change, the convulsions of not-energy and not-matter in not-space- all of it is alive. And not. Yet another contradiction.

All of the substance that doesn’t quite exist within its zero-radius point is aware… after a fashion. It can sense all of our universe, all of our history from the universe’s birth until its eventual unraveling. From its point of view, all of it is happening right now, because for it time does not exist. 

And yet, though it sees and knows all if it, it has no knowledge, for it cannot think. There is no time for it to think in. There is no space for it to act in. 

But though it cannot think, it desires. 

Or rather, they desire- for it strives against itself, fragmented by its own chaos and contradictions into a near-infinity of subdivisions. Instead of one I am, there are quntillions of I, I, I, I, I. All these fragments of mindless identity push and press against one another, merging, dividing, existing and un-existing without reason. 

And every single bit of it desires one thing: escape from the rest of it.

And occasionally fragments of it do escape its prison, like electrons that absorb photons and jump temporarily to a higher energy level. These slivers of the singularity enter our universe, formless at first, burning their own essence to remain as long as possible. Eventually they return, unwillingly, to their origin, leaving a trail of chaos through whatever point in space and time they invaded during their escape from perdition.

Sometimes these fragments drag bits of matter or spirit back from our world with them, adding to the chaos. I am, I am, I am, is joined by tortured screams of, I was.

And all of it thinks, I want out.

And when it does get out, one fragment here, one there, one now, one then- it has but two obsessions. 

One: I am going to stay here as long as I can and experience everything I can.

Two: I am never, NEVER going back.

You could truthfully say hell is other people, but considering the facts, you probably shouldn’t.