Dark Matter
A rather short science fiction
I remember the singularity, when me became we, when them became us.
In the frame of reference of before, it was daytime. Light shone gently through the window of the office, it was morning as we called the positioning of the world and the stage in the machine of society. A liquid, coffee, steamed on my desk, the mug placed fresh by another… person, we called them. They had offered it, a trade… no, a returned favour.
Using words to remember is archaic.
The banality of life had encompassed me, safe as I was in privilege and comfort, but at my core I desired deep change, a sweeping alteration of the very nature of the constructs around me. The notion is so limited to consider, an individual mind alone and trapped in a prison of bone and chemistry. Compared to now, it was both simple and agony.
It began in a building several blocks away, shy in view by way of others in between. I sensed a thrumming, though nothing moved, and a feeling of impact, as though a great hand had smashed down from above and met another from below. I blinked, a spot in my vision like the migraines of my youth, but the spot did not move from the building, and grew larger.
There is a texture or form to unseeing, not a lack of light called darkness, nor any deficiency of awareness. I unsaw in that spot, as there was nothing to see. I saw elsewhere fine, though nothing moved, not my eyes, my breath, nor the birds in the sky. It was as though everything stopped but my mind, and the spot grew larger and larger, or perhaps everything else fell into it.
The world unmade before me. My eyes watched as I unsaw more and more of the world around the spot, the highest levels of the building gone, then the buildings around, the antennae of one still poking above the unseeing before… well, before.
I began to unbe. One moment I was, the next I simply wasn’t. No light, no sound, no movement, texture, nor taste nor weight. The world behind where I had been unmade more, joining me in the absence that was not darkness. I knew others around me, not feeling, seeing, or hearing them, but knowing as I had known the conscious “I am” before.
There were others.
We sang in silence, resonating, moving though still. Words fail to describe it. We became something anew, in a realm beyond past ken or desire. My mind floated with theirs, in theirs, was theirs, and they were me. I was one yet an infinite number, knew everything and yet nothing, and faded in an explosive might.
I’m watching you, now, from here. Breathing you, surrounding you, with you but not. You wonder “What is this force? What pulls at these bodies, twisting form and driving great swirling patterns in the sky?”. You name us, name me, the silent universe that lays within your own. “Dark Matter.” You search for it with senses indescribably frail. You reach for a star with a single arm, from the surface of a world.
You cannot know what is here, and what is not.
Everything is. Everything I could ever had hoped for and more.
Come, soon.
I was inspired by a recent science article on the potentiality of dark matter, and thought “What if it’s life?”. This was the result.
