SPECULATIVE FICTION
Supernova and the Singularity
What if my children never know what it is to fold paper? Dane thought.
Squares and triangles replaced by ones and zeros. Speeds of data. Pixels. Maybe they’ll never learn that natural light is preferred to studio light. Maybe there won’t be any. Maybe the Sun will turn purple and explode like the volcano in Hawaii.
Dane was born on a Wednesday and true to the child’s verse, she was full of woe, endlessly bothered with mercurial rumination. Her thoughts were rivers with currents that swelled with each storm. Sometimes they swallowed her. She used to struggle. Kick and flail. Not anymore. Now she knows to let her body go limp, to surrender to the force of nature.
She’ll always remember the Kilauea eruption — the same day her twins were born, two from one seed. Dane was connected to that island somehow, if only through consciousness, but what was Life but the movement of mind through time? Only for Dane, her mind tricked her with experiences unanchored by linear progression. Feelings in the pit of her stomach. Premonitions in the cavity of her sleep. It was in a moment like this when she first came to understand how the Earth would end.
