It All Starts With The Gum Base

Chewing gum dates back to the ancient Greeks who chewed resin from trees.

Modern chewing gum was patented in the US in 1869 by a dentist. In 1928 another American invented bubble gum.

Just about everyone that ever lived is dead.

They say the last of our species died during the 422nd epoch of the sun. I was alive a long time before that. I don’t know when I died but I know exactly when I was born, the first time around. 86088.582 — the decimal cycle when I popped out into the universe. That makes me one of the oldest, which I’m quite proud of, even though I’m one of the youngest. I can’t explain why it makes me feel proud — it’s dumb, honestly. I like the thought that I was one of the few who breathed that air and walked among those ghosts.

It all starts with the gum base. The stuff that makes gum chewy.

Traditionally, the base came from tree resin, today it’s synthetic.

Most worlds in the universe that did support life are already dead. Most species died long, long ago. Like I said, ours did. Sorry to say. It’s fascinating, actually. All worlds have a finite life span you can calculate to the bare millennia if you know the factors. We’re talking a lot. Helium fields and hypergiants, and all those billions of bio-determinants of the evolved species, like neuro-hormone distribution patterns. Sexual aggression versus intelligence, those kinds of things. We covered this back in Psych 6 so I’m a little foggy.

They pour the gum base into a mixer, then add colour and flavouring.

As it begins mixing, they pour in glucose spirit, a sweetener. Because it’s liquid it helps keep the gum base soft.

Ghosts are real, in a way. Sorry, I’m not trying to scare you. What I mean to say is, each life leaves behind an echo. An imperceptible ripple, the faintest deviation of a wavelength. If you take a bucket of water out of the ocean, you’ve changed that ocean forever, in a way. Do you know what I mean? It takes a while to get your head around this type of thinking. They call it Scale Meditation — we’re supposed to do it every other cycle but to be honest I often skip it.

Let’s get one thing straight — I don’t even know if you existed. I’m only guessing but it’s quite probable. The odds are in our favour, which is good enough for me.

I ought to tell you a bit about me. I’m right-handed. Endomorph. O blood type. I’ve got B+B Class life expectancy. My eyes are grey, my hair light brown. Genetically I’m the person you knew, if you knew me. But to tell you the truth we know little of who we were.

Next they add dextrose, a powdered sweetener.

They blend the ingredients for about 20 minutes. The stirring action builds up heat which melts everything together.

The mixture is ready when it reaches the consistency of bread dough. They transfer it by cart to a machine called the pre-extruder.

I remember being born like it was yesterday. The first thing to come online is the sense of smell. Funny, isn’t it? It was like toasted bread. That’s one thing us few agree on. I can smell it now, warm and enveloping like a blanket.

I didn’t discern this at the time, at least not consciously. It might sound obvious, but they manage consciousness very carefully, especially for the younger classes. It’s what they call the Bloom Paradox. A mature brain, neural pathways fully mapped out, but empty as a bucket with a hole in it. You can’t just switch it on — total nova. So they fill up the bucket, drip-by-drip, a word, emotion or motor function at a time.

Say if you were skilled with your hands, you still would be. Or could be. It’s the same for personality. If you were a neurotic asshole, you’re still a neurotic asshole. The words you had are the words you’re stuck with. Phonology, syntax, vocabulary, ticks, impediments — warts and all, that’s just how it is. Vision, hearing, touch; they come right at the end.

By the time you finally open your eyes you’re good to go. Well that’s what they say, but I felt terrible. Like you don’t altogether own yourself. The lines on your hands, the way your hair feels. They belong to you and yet they don’t. Imagine that. A puzzle where the pieces are slightly too big, so that you have to force them into place.

The machine squeezes the mixture through a narrow opening, like squeezing toothpaste from the tube.

This transforms the big bulky wad into thin manageable strips that can then go through the extruders.

What I was saying about all worlds and species having a finite lifespan. That’s not entirely accurate. I should tell you about them. After all, they’re the reason I find myself here, a neophyte to the dying light.

I wouldn’t say gods is the right word. They are not divine, whatever that means. What they do can be explained scientifically. But how they ‘became’, how they liberated themselves from the great equation, you could say there was something spiritual in that. At least, I like to think so. They sought to bend the narrative back on itself. The listener becomes the storyteller when everyone else has left the room.

I’m not always such a positive person but I admire them. The peculiar thing is, I haven’t encountered them in what you might call the physical sense. I know them as intimately as one can know another, and I can conjure them in my mind — or perhaps it’s deeper than that — but I can’t keep hold of the image long enough to transcribe it. It’s like, how do you paint something without any paint? I’m not given to feats of the imagination.

The extruders squeeze each strip down to the actual width of a piece of bubble gum.

It comes out as one long continuous stream, to be cut into bite-sized pieces later on.

My oldest memories are what they call necessary artifices. I hated them for that at first. Planed-down, made vague, distilled to an essence, a broad, blurred brush. I remember maternal love. I remember sunshine and innocence. I remember tastes and smells. I remember pain. They made me wise in the ways of the universe. As much as I needed to be.

Hey, don’t worry. I’m not some mindless drone, some dumb worker ant. In fact I — we — are pretty special, in the grand scheme of things. You see, we are the first. The first to ever have another chance. Thanks to, ah; I suppose you could call it a sort of miraculous conception. If you think miracles exist in the most mundane of things.

This extrusion process heats up the gum.

If they were to cut and wrap it now, it would stick to the wrapper. So the next stop is the cooling chamber.

Even worlds long dead might harbour an echo of life. Ghosts from a brighter era, trapped in limbo at the fading of the universe. If the conditions and fortune allow, you might find something. A broken line of code, a petrified cell, partially preserved in some dark, forgotten place. Cowering in icy stillness; flotsam on a molten sea.

Before us it was plant species, bacteria, a few invertebrates. Simple cellular bits and pieces. And that took millennia. One thing the non-divine should know about resurrection — it’s hellish slow. Well, depending on your perspective.

The odds of finding anything are infinitesimal. The odds of finding enough intact material for a complex multi-cellular organism were considered zero. But they found us. And when I say us, I mean an unimaginably narrow sampling of primates of the family Hominidae. Homo sapiens sapiens. Humans.

When the gum comes out, it’s cooled down enough for what they call the cut and wrap.

One machine does both jobs in a fraction of a second.

As the continuous stream of gum enters on one end, the machine cuts it into bite-sized papers, pushes each piece into a wrapper, then twists both ends of the wrapper closed.

At an aimless juncture in the universe, a transient quiver of cosmic coincidence, a reaction occurred in a millionth of a millionth of a heartbeat — a synthesis — that no one could have intended. Or perhaps that’s disingenuous. Maybe there was some middle tier lab tech with an overlooked genius and a grandiose perspective. Or a grievance. I guess that would make them a deity of sorts. Boy, some creation myth.

Bubble gum comes in gumballs of all colours and sizes.

But for blowing bubbles, nothing beats the chewy, gooey pink stuff in the twist wrap.

And that’s the strange thing. I — the ancestral ‘I’, mind on matters unknown, chewed, expelled, and moved on. A live saliva sample, given the understanding, can provide a complete biogenetic blueprint of the creature it derives from. What this reaction did was to fix the living ‘blueprint’ within the structure of a newly synthesised compound. Gum.

That plastic confectionary was like a safety deposit box impervious to heat, cold or decay, incubating the code that would, eventually, unlock life. I mean a life. An individual. Right up to the second of expulsion. Clinging to a surface. Flattened under foot. Darkened by dirt. Frozen in time. You ought to step a little more carefully over those smudges on the road. Nebulous islands on a tarmac sea. Think about that.

Last stop, packaging. The gum moves on to a scale that automatically weighs out the right amount per tub.

Did it ever cross your mind that one day all would cease to be? Must’ve done at least once, right? And probably at the most humdrum moment in time. It’s not categorically a worry though. It could even be a comfort. Gaze impassively at the dying stars, the yellows dwarves, the old blue giants, the last waltz of spiral galaxies like tiger lilies entwined, and feel small. Forget your problems, your doubts, your mortality. Let your cares evanesce into oblivion.

In my dreams they take the stage beside me, playing out the tale of what was and what is left. Civilisations rise and fall. Worlds are made and unmade. It’s not propaganda, but it is by definition dramatic. One-minute Hamlet. Abridged for our comprehension. Sometimes I sense a dim connection with a distant time and place, but that’s likely to be causation. As in, I wonder about my life a lot, so my subconscious tries to reconstruct it. I think, therefore I was. Hah. Then I wake to the darkness, crazy with emotions like anger or fear, or longing. Sometimes love.

They seal the tub with plastic to make it airtight. This keeps the bubble gum fresh.

I don’t know you, this time. But maybe I did. And if I did, I would have loved you dearly, I’m sure of that.