> All species evolve alongside their ecosystems, where they come to form niches—homes for a reprieve against an unforgiving world. Some, like the Tourists, eventually outgrow their niche and must therefore change their environment. Others, like the Pre-Bottleneck humans, would destroy their ecosystem out of a desire to bolster their individual niches, if only for a short while.
> And then there were Terrence and Abigail, who became horribly limited by their new ecosystem. These limits, though testing, proved to mold them into even greater versions of who they once were. In their most foreign ecosystem, Terrence and Abigail were forced to learn—to adapt.
> ~ Excerpt from An Ecological View On Pilgrim History (Trouble Clockwork)
Discovery #1: Star Screen
“Terrence? Terr, you alright?”
Abigail pushed herself away from the ceiling and began to float towards Terrence. Amidst her flight, she couldn’t help but admire the craft’s interior. Various bells and whistles of unknown purpose blanketed nearly every inch of the wall space. Lights flashed across the devices, filling her with a dreadful curiosity about her new home.
“Agh, yeah, I’m fine. Back’s just a little sore. You good?” replied Terrence.
“Don’t know—door’s closed and I don’t have half an idea of what happened. How the hell did we lose gravity?”
“My current guess is that the Cube’s shell somehow repels gravitons—but it’s nothing more than a hunch. Regardless, it’s pretty nuts that this thing can nullify Earth’s gravitational field just like that. The lab gang will lose their minds when we tell ’em.”
Terrence chuckled as he thought of his coworkers’ reactions. With their vision blocked by their external surroundings, the inevitable dread of the situation’s severity was kept at bay—they still thought they were on Earth.
“Tech like this could usher in a golden age for humanity! Just think of how many scarcity problems could be solved with a mastery of gravity. First, we just gotta figure out how to open up that damn door again,” said Terrence as he looked around for anything resembling a ‘Door Open’ switch.
Spending the entirety of his career solely focused on theoretical physics, Terrence lacked the experimental restraint of someone like Abigail, who had extensive experience in applied sciences.
“Let’s just get our bearings before we go an— hey! Quit it!” Abigail shouted at Terrence, who lacked the willpower to refrain from pushing the buttons that wholly surrounded them.
Terrence raised his hands in the air with an expression of guilt as a pressed button caused a blank portion of the wall to turn black. Scattered throughout were tiny specks of white. It confused them.
For minutes they stared at the dark canvas, intrigued by its lack of context. Slowly, they noticed that the dots were drifting across the screen, some eventually moving out of view.
They had realized that the dots were not moving across the screen; it was the screen that was ever so slowly moving—spinning to be exact. And with a bit of focus, they noticed the same spin occurring from within the ship.
“Shit.” Abigail broke the silence.
In the suspended state of zero gravity, tears welled in her eyes, refusing to fall. She wiped them away, regaining her sight.
“You’re seeing it, too,” Terrence added.
“So those dots. . . they’re—”
“Yep. They’re stars.”
“Good God, it’s showing us the outside of the Cube. That explains the zero-Gs.”
“Well, then I guess it was a blessing that I didn’t manage to reopen the door.”
Terrence let out a nervous chuckle. For the moment, he suppressed the trembles of fear aching to surface throughout his body.
Neither Terrence nor Abigail could slow their breathing, though. Anxiety crept up until it engulfed them whole. Both ignored the near hyperventilation of the other as they worked their way through the situation.
They could only be so confident of their new hypothesis with the limited information they had been given. If they wished to prove themselves correct, they needed to steer the ship. In search of control, they analyzed the devices surrounding what they immediately called the “Star Screen.”
Beneath the screen, Abigail noticed a hole. It was just larger than a human finger and emitted a small, yet intense light. Morbid curiosity got the best of her, leading her to cautiously insert her finger. No harm was done, causing her to let out a sigh of relief—quickly followed by a sharp inhale of fearful excitement.
Through the slight rotations her finger made while in the socket, she had caused the Cube to rotate. At first, it proved to be jerky and erratic, but she eventually got a hold of it. Once coupled with the stability brought on from grappling to one of the craft’s numerous support bars, Abigail gained control of the ship’s rotation.
A complete 180-degree rotation exposed a beauty no human eyes had previously rested upon. Again, the buildup of tears blinded them as the liquid clung to their retinas. They wept both out of wondrous appreciation and an even greater realization of dread.
Before their eyes laid a nebula—a star nursery. One of the great interstellar dust clouds of infinite complexity and awesome hue painted life onto the lifeless black of space’s void. The glint of the stars pierced through the veil of tears, only causing more to well. The rolling hills made from the gasses of creation seemed to stretch into infinity, with each cosmic stroke seeming purposeful, yet organic—divinely organic.
Tears welled, too, because of the sight’s implication. They knew not where this nebula was located but understood it was nowhere near Earth. They were too certain of this dreadful fact—the nearest nebula to Earth existed more than 700 light-years away.
Further scouring of their surroundings was not necessary to fully comprehend how truly lost they were. Even if they could perfectly operate their new machine home, it was not guaranteed that they could find their way back.
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Discovery #2: Replicator
It was as if they were playing Russian Roulette9 with every action they took. So many buttons, so many foreign devices—one of them had to open the bottom hatch. They would be given just enough time to panic before being sucked out into the vacuum of space.
> 9 | This phrase references a barbaric “game” once belonging to the Pre-Bottleneck humans. Russian Roulette served as a test of chance, where players would load a single bullet into a gun before pointing it at themselves and pulling the trigger. The closest comparison we have to the “game” is the dangerous use of the Displacement Wand by the citizens of Alcore.
It was an understood risk. If they did not experiment with the Cube’s devices, they would undoubtedly die. It would’ve been delusional to think that waiting for help was an option.
Terrence found the Replicator on the wall opposite the Star Screen. It must be noted that noticing the device was not difficult, as it stood prominently in the center of the wall, approximately five meters tall with a four-meter10 diameter. Foolishly, he first approached it by sticking his head in, observing the part of the cylindrical tube that goes upward, obscured from plain view. He found it difficult to control his motion from this awkward position—his legs floated towards the buttons below the tube.
> 10 | Righteous and beautiful Four. My most watchful Quadrinity. Live through my eyes. I do not know how to live if not by your direction. You give me hope. You give me assurance that my actions do not betray my fellow kin. You give me love. I feel it with every waking moment. I love you.
Realizing the inevitable, Terrence jerked backward in an attempt to prevent himself from sporadically activating something within the ship. He failed in this attempt, pressing the activation button for the Replicator in which he floated. It was much more sensitive than he’d thought.
Before the translucent door came crashing down, Terrence managed to pull his head out of its path. His hand, however, remained at the base of the Replicator—just enough so that the tip of his pinkie finger was sliced by the falling door.
“DAMNIT!” He grabbed his throbbing hand, surveying the damage done to his finger.
“Hey! What happened?” Abigail floated across the craft toward the source of the distress.
“Damn door.” He smacked it with his fully intact hand. “Sliced my pinkie.”
“Ouch. At least it doesn’t look too serious. We can wrap it up with some torn fabric; no need to worry. It’ll take longer to heal than if we were on Earth, but at least it’ll he—” Abigail’s eyes lit up towards the Replicator. “—the hell? Holy shit Terrence, the blood!”
Terrence turned to face the oddity. The two watched as his blood floated toward the center of the tube before being manipulated. The individual molecules within the blood spread apart, forming eerily uniform lines, wave formations, and lattices.
Shortly after, a minute but steady stream of an unidentifiable light gray goo came from above. The goo, too, floated towards the center, attaching itself to the blood—multiplying it. Within seconds the amount of blood doubled, tripled, and then condensed—down to a single cell. Terrence’s original cell.
Additions of what Terrence and Abigail would later refer to as “paint” became more precise, turning into material other than blood. They witnessed the creation of life. First, a cell. Then a bundle of cells. Then an embryo.
And by the time Terrence had realized what was being created from his DNA, he slammed the same button that started the process. The door opened, and additions to the embryo ceased. Terrence carefully reached in with his good hand and pulled out what he knew to be a partial copy of himself.
“Oh my God. I— How— I can’t—” Terrence stumbled over his words as he stared at the unformed embryo.
“It copied you. I—I’m not going to even try to understand what happened. It’s just. . . It’s a—”11
> 11 | With a basic understanding of dark matter harvesting/manipulation, it was quite a simple process—one which we currently take all too for granted.
“It’s a miracle. A goddamn miracle.”
Terrence was shocked out of his stupor by this realization. He posited that as long as they had an energy source—which unbeknownst to them, they always would have—then they would also always have access to sustenance. Terrence pulled the protein bar from his pocket and shouted.
“Aha!”
Abigail, realizing his intention with the protein bar, mirrored his excitement and pumped her first—unintentionally rotating herself backward. Terrence pulled off a raisin from the bar and placed it within the tube, remembering to hastily remove himself this time. Despite the pain still pulsing through his hand, he pushed the button with enthusiasm.
Again, the glass door shut and the “paint” came from above, equally attaching itself to every original molecule of the raisin. The dried fruit grew to four times its original size before again compressing into a nearly invisible speck.
A vine formed from this compressed point, weaving randomly throughout the tube’s interior, covering much of the available space. And then came the grapes—hundreds of them forming in clusters at various points on the vine.
Terrence and Abigail giggled in excitement. Upon deciding that the grapes had fully ripened, Terrence pressed the button once more.
Giggles turned to laughter as they picked the grapes from the vine and felt them crunch between their teeth. Their minds raced as they considered how the rest of the bar would be reconstructed. Regardless, Terrence and Abigail could survive off of the grapes alone, as they provided both hydration and nutrition.
They’d done it. They solved their first problem: Their sustenance could be maintained. They were free from want.
Shortly after, they solved the resulting waste management problem by putting unused material back in the Replicator. By ending the process as soon as the material condenses to a microscopic level, they could eliminate it. Any resulting human waste would be dealt with in the same way.
For the first time in the few hours they had been adrift, the pair could finally breathe a sigh of relief. They weren’t dead just yet.
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Discovery #3: Navigation
The Cube was designed perfectly for Tourist anatomy. With support bars littering each wall, the Tourist pilot could suspend itself in the center of the craft by latching on with a few of their many, many tendrils. With their remaining appendages, they would then be able to carefully operate any of the craft’s devices.
While the implementation was flawless for a Tourist, it was just barely manageable for human operation. The many high-sensitivity motion readers—which were perfect for the highly precise movements of a Tourist’s tendril—were crudely operated by a human finger, meaning that the humans aboard had to devote the entirety of their attention to operating a single device at a time.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
Despite this encumbrance, Terrence and Abigail managed quite well—learning at an astonishing rate. Days passed before they, too, were proficient not just at rotation, but also motion. Then, through countless attempts of trial and error, they learned to operate the Mirror Maker using similar tactics. They were clueless as to where they set the exit points, but the practice gave them hope. With enough knowledge of the Cube, they might just have a chance of getting home.
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Discovery #412: Exoplanets
> 12 | Infinite blessings. Infinite love. Infinite guidance. Infinite appreciation. Infinite holiness, imbued infinitely. Infinite stars in our domain and infinite eyes for you to watch through. Infinitely blessed are we.
Many years would pass before Terrence and Abigail gained complete mastery over the Mirror Maker. However, a necessary step towards this end skill was the understanding of the Cube’s onboard coordinate assistance mechanisms. This knowledge came just after their first month in the Cube.
Through simultaneous manipulation of the central Mirror Maker control panel and the Star Screen’s rotation, they had learned how to essentially “lock on” to the coordinates of a star system in the center of their view. A spawned Mirror would effortlessly take them to the system, where they could repeat the process.
From their view, the planets would be invisible—blotches of darkness floating across an even blacker canvas. But thanks to the onboard location devices, they managed to Mirror just outside of a nearby planet’s atmosphere with minor efforts.
For the two, it was very intriguing and fortunate to learn that the Mirrors, along with the Cube itself, do, in fact, move through space parallel to the largest nearby mass. This greatly aided their ability to travel effortlessly between planets. A hypersonic game of chase was not needed with every traversal.
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Discovery #5: Love
It proved difficult for the researchers to avoid each other’s arms. They shared the universe, and the universe shared them. It was the most fantastic adventure in human history; only one could witness it for the other. They were humanity’s most accomplished explorers, experiencing the universe in its rawest, most unadulterated state—more alone than anyone before them. Still, it did not matter, for they had each other.
From the start, they were coworkers—barely even friends. In the initial weeks, too, their relationship remained professional. The beginning of their stay was devoted solely to a scientific analysis of their home—if they had hoped to pilot the craft home, a high-level understanding of its functions was desperately needed. And eventually, they gained significant knowledge, giving them free rein to explore their four-walled13 playground.
> 13 | I think back to my childhood. You must remember, as it was yours, too. One of many. I recall my days on Shoei Covenant, staring out into that deep green-blue ocean. It was there that I truly saw myself for the first time and, recalling my lessons of your grace, I felt you staring back at me. I’ll never forget the joy. Thank you, our most gracious Quadrinity. I love you.
Then, as their minds freed and spirits lifted, they found their way into each other’s arms. After that, it was a simple, beautiful life—and oh-so-fulfilling. Every day was the same, yet always so different. Terrence and Abigail explored the cosmos together, never disappointed by a day’s expeditions. The universe’s creativity proved to be as limitless as they once dreamed.
Journals were kept, chronicling the highlights of their great intergalactic road trip. This was solely possible because of the peculiar longevity of the tablet, which was brought along for the ride. Fortunately, the device came equipped with a small solar panel—an addition that Terrence once called “stupid and unnecessary.” Although they were thrilled by the near limitless battery life, it was worrying to know just how efficiently the lights within the Cube were able to activate the solar panel.
With endless time for exploration and contemplation, they wrote stories about the planets. Some would tell of lost intelligent tribes, delving into the odd secrets of their home planet, always wary of the glimpses they catch of the mysterious sky box. Others would tell of leviathans lurking beneath the turbulent oceans, waiting in slumber until a sufficient food source could reemerge on the planet.
To both relief and dismay, intelligent life was never found in their travels. Plant and fungal variants dominated the surface of a few worlds, but it seemed as though their monopolistic domination of resources harshly stunted any intelligent growth.
In their lifetimes, they would only find one planet with any animal life at all, but the species were ultimately uninspiring. The creatures “thought” in the same capacity as plants or jellyfish.
This lack of sentience made it impossible for the pair not to ponder the question of intelligent life’s rarity. Yet, they shied away from imagining the godlike beings who entrapped them within their vessel. It always felt like they were just out of reach, yet always watching.
Regardless of the questions surrounding intelligent life, Terrence and Abigail found solace in their endless exploration of the cosmos. The pair knew the durability of their craft all too frustratingly well and did not doubt its resilience, allowing them to make the most of their situation.
On a planet Abigail named “Acne,” they had a front-row seat to the planet-spanning fields of supermassive volcanoes. On Terrence’s “Pikachu,” they flew through the seemingly endless clouds of seizure-inducing lightning bolts, decimating the already barren wasteland below.
In a scene fit for a Pre-Bottleneck jewelry commercial, Terrence and Abigail first held a romantic embrace while observing the hellishly beautiful surface of a planet they mockingly named “Jared.” Mountains of diamond refracted the sullen hue of their planet’s hot blue sun into a dazzling rainbow across the scorched rock. The shimmering sight pushed them into each others’ arms, tearing down the emotional wall keeping the two apart.
For years, they tried for a child, and years passed without success. For a time, they blamed their infertility on themselves. Eventually, though, it became apparent that this was the Cube’s doing.
Although not poisonous to the Tourists, the material used for the Mirror Maker’s internal wiring proved a catalyzer for a human body’s natural decay. It was a slow, gradual poison, but a poison nonetheless.
Creating a child would be impossible inside the Cube, so they didn’t. Terrence and Abigail had each other, and for that alone, they felt fortunate. Instead, the intergalactic travelers could focus on their grand goal: The return to Planet Earth.
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Discovery #6: Cancer
Terrence and Abigail did not shy away from the likelihood that they, too, were suffering under the same environmental effects that kept them from conception. Cancer was imminent. Even if they found their way home, it would likely be the death of them.
With all of this acceptance, they were not surprised upon the first discovery of lumps. For Abigail, it reared itself in her breasts at the age of sixty-one. Terrence’s appeared on his neck—three months after Abigail discovered hers. He was sixty-three.
It was the Mirror Maker’s fault. For the most part, the Tourists contained the hyper-reactive material allowing the machine to function, but only enough for sustained Tourist use. The Cube was not designed with humans in mind. After thirty-four blissful years journeying the universe from the comfort of their Cube, they were forced to look finality in the eye.
The thought was always present—that of their inevitable demise. It had been suppressed until the moment they learned of their doom. The Cube provided them with a slice of heaven, making their mortality quite easy to ignore.
Terrence and Abigail agreed that it would be an atrocity to keep the experience for themselves. They needed offspring, lest their righteous goal be rendered moot.
One did not need to convince the other to use the Replicator. They knew it was the only way to create a child capable of inheriting their herculean task. Before cancer took hold of their bodies, there were lessons that needed to be taught—a mission to be ingrained.
The genetic copies were pulled from the Replicator when they looked slightly older than a newborn. They cried—the sign of a healthy birth. Shrieks echoed off of the unyielding walls of the Cube, spawning a dreadful thought.
What have we done?
Abigail looked into her—infant her—eyes and found herself unable to breathe. Floating about the cabin with her clone in hand, her mind disassociated. Emotions came in droves, as contradictory as they were powerful.
The pride of motherhood mingled with the guilt of an executioner. Joy erupted from the knowledge that her efforts would not go to waste—all the while accompanied by a deep, pervasive sadness that the true effort had only just begun.
It was too much to handle. Her subconscious mind had to solely focus on maintaining her sanity—automatic functions were shifted into manual.
A minute passed before she snapped out of it. The synchronized cries of the infants hypnotized the pair, rendering them static. It was not until Abigail felt the creeping tunnel vision that the thought of breath resurfaced.
The sharp gasp triggered a pain in her chest. It reminded her of mortality—and of the eventual fate of her younger self.
“I’m so sorry,” she said under her breath.
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Discovery #7: A Hypothetical Application of Theoretical Physics
Though their bodies slowly decayed, their fire did not dampen. The goal was the same as it had always been: survive, explore, and find a way back home. Now, the only change was that these values needed to be instilled in their clone offspring.
Terrence and Abigail accepted that they, the originals, likely would not find their way back home in this lifetime. For a future iteration of themselves, however, it remained a possibility. One way or another, the feet of a Terrence and Abigail would once more brush through the lush grass carpeting their home planet.
However, the more they dwelled upon the slight probability of randomly finding their way home, the more they despaired. Failing to find a speck of life on any of the thousands of planets they surveyed reinforced this doubt. No matter how large they imagined the universe to be, their minds could never truly comprehend its enormous scope.
They would remain lost. The random chance of stumbling upon Earth would always be rounded down to zero.
During the infancy of Gen 2 Terrence and Abigail, a ridiculous idea brewed in their minds. For guidance, they turned to that which initially accompanied them on their journey: the tablet.
Stored on the device was the entirety of On the Mechanics of Invisible Forces and all accompanying citations. It would prove to be their intellectual life raft.
It was information they knew better than any other topic—especially because it was one of the few books in their digital library—but that would not necessarily be the case with their offspring.
They needed to be taught. And for good reason.
By the time cancer showed itself, Terrence and Abigail had managed to make a tool out of nearly everything they entered the craft with. By deactivating the Replicator during its atomic magnification phase, they could get creative with the endless supply of limited materials.
Their undershirts’ cloth was replicated into massive sheets, allowing them to segment the Cube and create bedrooms—a slight but necessary reprieve from the ship’s constant light. Platforms were constructed for when they wished to enter the gravitational pull of the planets they visited.
From the sheets, they even created an entire room solely dedicated to the games developed to keep themselves active.14 And, of course, a bathroom was made where they would collect the waste matter before reducing it to a single cell in the Replicator, always deactivating the device before the genetic material formed into another embryo.
> 14 | The first game developed was "Grapeball,” in which Terrence and Abigail would each repeatedly magnify a grape to the size of their head and then attempt to hit each other with it while in zero gravity. The all-time record of this game was 834-701, with Abigail reigning supreme.
The protein bar was dissected, reproduced, and magnified a million times over until every meal was fully balanced and often varied. Over time, the dishes grew unsurprising, but at least the lovers were constantly fed.
However uncomfortable the concept initially was, they eventually began magnifying their blood as well—for art. On their massive curtains, they would come to craft beautifully complex murals, depicting not only the scenes they had witnessed but their home planet as well.
Beyond as a journal, the tablet served no other functional purpose. By their time of departure, they essentially had OtMoIF memorized, giving them no reason to pour over it again. That is, until they found one.
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Excerpt from A Brief Dissection of “On the Mechanics of Invisible Forces”
By: Concrete Halloween
It is unfathomable to think of how much we owe to Dr. Terrence Martin and Dr. Abigail Melfi for their masterful work creating On the Mechanics of Invisible Forces. The universe would be irreparably changed without their divine ideation.
Compounding on millennia of human scientific research, they fit together the last pieces of the puzzle. Through their study of quantum mechanics and its interaction with dark matter—among other subjects—their team of researchers managed to explain away the last bits of assumed “chaos” and “chance” from humanity’s natural models.
Through their work, they proved Determinism correct. They found their Theory of Everything.
For the most basic components of the universe, everything was predictable. By extrapolating outward from the starting conditions of the Big Bang, the rest of existence would hypothetically fall into place.
Terrence and Abigail proudly and confidently declared that there existed no chaos, no randomness—simply a rigid order that had always stayed just out of their reach.
The team later posited that if every action in the universe is just a very exact result of every other action in the universe, then a machine could hypothetically exist that could calculate all of these highly complex math problems. It would be far greater in size and scope than Earth could sustain, but they all agreed it could be done. With enough time and effort, the universe—assuming constant Definitivity—could be perfectly simulated.
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“What if we could rewind back to that day? See where we were, you know? Like, see where we went,” said Abigail.
Terrence yawned and stretched out in their shared hammock bed. He had gotten a good night’s sleep, one that could only be experienced from sleeping on a planet with a similar gravitational pull to Earth. He rolled over to face her.
“Well, good morning to you, too, Abby. . . What do you mean? Like, you want to find a coordinate log? Do you think we missed something from the last time we tried checking?”
“No, no, no. I was thinking about if we could actually see what happened that day. I couldn’t sleep last night in between nursing sessions with the Littles and haven’t been able to stop thinking about OtMoIF. If we were right, and the default state of the universe is entirely calculable, then—”
“Then it should be possible to calculate it. Of course,” Terrence cut in. “Are you really suggesting that we try to build a Universal Computer? With grapes, blood, and cloth? Really?”
“I don’t think we’ll be able to accomplish shit—not for many lifetimes, at least. We could lay out a plan, though—a blueprint for our descendants. For future-us. Maybe one day they’ll find a habitable world—and the courage to open up the hatch. They could build from what they find there. They would just have to follow our plan.”
Terrence began to open up to the idea. In his mind, the chance of some far future descendant being able to create this miracle machine was far more likely than the most optimistic probability of randomly stumbling upon Earth. He still kept some reservations, though.
"Hmph. I’m not opposed, honestly. But what about what we discussed while we were writing the report? If some civilization had managed to make a Universal Computer, they would start a chain reaction, breaking everything they interact with from Definitivity—causing their actions to be unpredictable. If the Previous Tenants15 can construct Mirrors, they must’ve broken themselves from Definitivity. Right?”
> 15 | “Previous Tenants” was the nickname Terrence and Abigail gave to the mysterious extraterrestrials who originally constructed the Cube—those we know as “Tourists.”
“They got rammed by a damn asteroid, Terr. I feel like that’s something you could predict and avoid with a UC. It must’ve never occurred to the Previous Tenants to make a Universal Computer.16 This assumption has to be made. Otherwise, we’d have to accept that our mission is over. More than anything, we—no, they need the hope.”
> 16 | This assumption is incorrect. The Tourists did have access to a Universal Computer, but they chose to never break themselves from Definitivity by looking into and disproving their own future. In their typical, very principled fashion, they showed restraint for the few million years of owning this technology, only using it to gaze into the universe’s unalterable past. Eventually they did break, hiding themselves from our prying eyes, but the reasons for this change currently have no relevance to human history.
She pointed to the wall, through which slept the children.
“You’re right,” sighed Terrence as his eyes drifted to the ground. “We can’t delude ourselves into thinking that one day our ‘kids,’ or their ‘kids,’ or their ‘kids,’ or whoever will be able to just randomly find Earth. . . .”
Terrence drifted off into a silent pout as he came to terms with his situation.
“Stumbling our way to Earth—it’s just not possible. . . shit. Are we actually about to do this? Do you really think that simulating the entirety of the universe to retrace our steps is truly possible?”
“I’m more certain than I’d ever been. I already started drawing up the plans last night. Let’s give future-us something to dream of. Let’s give them purpose.”