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Ch. 22

“No,” she screams and in her grief brings him back. The second time doesn’t take as long. But he still dies. So she does it a third and fourth time.

She nearly kills herself bringing him back again and again. Answering all questions ceases as he is returned, time and time again to scream one long screech of agony and regret until he dies.

The Universe should have, long ago, given up the childish notion of bringing him back, but she can’t, every being is at least a slave to the biology of their life, with nothing they can do but accept it.

She is everything. She is the more that beat back the death of time. She is not free to die so neither is Soya.

“Soya please,” he begs after one of the last resurrections, “stop. I will not be reborn.”

“No! I already told you, father. I am not Soya. The great Soya has died. I am The Universe, and nothing is impossible within reason. And it is reasonable to want you alive.”

“Want, not need. You do not need me to exist, your existence already has proved that. This isn’t reasonable,” he begs. “We have committed great crimes, maybe if I had been an actual father, you would appreciated this more. Soya should have already worried over where the soul comes from.”

Where father, where does a soul come from?”

“Living. And it goes where The Nothing exists.”

The Universe had not allowed herself to make inquiries into concerns such as a soul. Souls weren’t math. They were not something that could be wielded or reformed into things more useful. It was the part of her children she sought to kill off, the desire to live and perform and do better than the master. Reduce and Protect was her work, and legacy, it prohibited being more just for the sake of it. And in the end, the thing that at one time was born in Rantira’s Atom-Variator inspired black box had stretched that technology to exist in every atom of her glowing sphere. So many hers. Sometimes that is said to happen, that one’s work becomes more than intended, and maybe even a distraction.

“Your own work presses you back to life, father. Aren’t you obligated?” she holds him close and whispers into his ear, she is her young self. Red-furred and athletic, muscles rippling. Every cell in his body rebels against life all at once, but she manages to say one last thing before he slips away, “I am The Universe, and you are my creator. You are not just my father, but Mother of all, Soya. And you shall never die.”

Then he dies, again.

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The pause after is gravity catching one before a horrible fall.

She thinks about this. The father of all. And it’s all she can do.

Think.

Fantasize.

Be lost in wanting what she can’t have, dominance over sentience. The Universe remains distracted. This is not good for a being with trillions of calculations to maintain while soaring through the vacuum of space surrounded by other beings that counted on her attention to continue keeping her alive.

One by one, all of her children die. Distrait, she does not birth more.

This monumental accident to the greatest math can aspire to, stops trying to be, solely because her father refuses to take the gift of life she offers him. Her mind hurts like acknowledging that something is missing. This missing is painful. Pain does not fit with her perception of reality.

The Upu of old bowed and prayed to an effigy of the rising sun. The God in the Glimpse they called it. They sacrificed to it so it would return and grow the caves warm again from when it got dark. The Sun had a name, and the name became creator-being-that-lived-in-the-sky-beyond-the-clouds.

Or, Soya.

The Upu called their star Soya.

Living is being more. Waking each glimpse and doing good work. Making others better. It was a tenant of the old faith. But truth is subjective and goes moment to moment and includes birth and all the in-betweens. Death is the difference between reality and memory.

She has existed for countless moments debating. Can she have Shuhp in death?

Maybe she is enough already to last an eternity.

Maybe she is more than infinite.

The principles of Reduce and Protect.

But nothing matters when bankruptcy happens. Nothing matters when the end is reached. And in a moment of doubt, she seeks to find out.

The fool, like all things stuck in the misery of living, does a foolish thing. Reduced to a few thousand kilometers in diameter, the ball of smooth metal that calls itself The Universe, glowing with the fiery sky of old long-dead Grotto, slams herself into a protoplanet that dared get in its way.

The Universe gets no joy out of this, though, because she has nothing left. In the infinite vacuum that is her, that is all she wants, nothing. She gets no joy out of the more she has become and the infinity there is left to fill. She is vast, she is infinite, she is joyless. She merges with the planet at a speed that makes no sense. The impact is so great neither will never again be the same. A moon forms from the bits and pieces that spring off because of her impact with the molten surface. Orange hot lava drips into the crater formed by her impact. She is swallowed.

But curses don’t die.

She fights against this, but it is pointless, she has nothing left. She is the liquid heat until it cools and her new home intertwines around her. She is bits and dabs here and there. The sphere she made to protect her infinite drive and Shuhp Yee, was gone. Nothing remained but infected crumbs of metal. Crumbs with just enough juice to know The Universe could live again.

From inside her tomb bedrock was what remained of cooled lava, the crumbs seeks to free herself.

One creature at a time.

She is meant to be more, and one day she will be forced to continue her life’s work. Because she is infinite and everlasting, the core, she is the fabric on which all will happen. She was both the child of greatness, its facilitator, and the reason for it. She will return Shuhp Yee to life, because he is the father, and she is the wisdom of everything. It is within the poetry of this plan, melted inside her prison, The crumbs begin making freedom her next goal.

Beyond that?

The return of Soya.