The Last Obligate Of A
Self-Ordained Sorcerer
( L.O.S.O.S. )
Chapter 00
PRELUDE
Spacetime is a funny thing, it’s here, it’s there, it’s absolutely nowhere. Yet somewhere, sometime, on that intangible construct lies a point, a moment of significance if you will. Far past the ‘Gnab Gib’ of the great donut (a term coined by an Earth-form of great significance) lies the last cosmic fusion reactor left in existence, and around it, the death throes of sentience itself.
As most other times are irrelevant in such circumstances, we shall have to adopt local customs of our specimen. Around this last solar remnant were three planets, none of which were native to their orbits, and aboard them were the scavenging vestiges of a once galaxy-spanning civilization.
Seven of their artificial ‘suns’ prior, they had come together under a banner of resistance, a consortium of fools hell-bent on destroying the only enemy that truly mattered, or rather didn’t, Entropy.
Above all terrors is the puppeteer of icy claws and inarguable actions, or, through the devil of innocent fear, the root of all life’s evils, Scarcity. A hand felt by all, be it through food and famine, or the even more fundamental equation, the energy required for the universe to sustain the concept of matter itself.
With manifesto struck, a technosphere of truly inspired madness erupted between the collage of sentient life forms that persisted in a universe without stars left to muse. All the rational solutions had already been researched, explored, allocated, and/or ruled out entirely. So ‘The Cabal That Remains’, a congregation of artificially-extended biological life, and entirely artificial intelligences, resorted to that which was irrational.
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It started with a rogue notion, a nudge of sorts to ‘wipe the slate the clean’, to abandon all the science and math and technology that had engineered their survival thus far. Because, what if it was naught but a cage they’d built?
Nearly half that which could think effectively had a stroke upon considering what was proposed. Soon, contrary answers were levied to problems with known solutions, and avenues of blindness became apparent. They’d been foolish to think they had been privy to the entire picture.
Foundational principles of the universe found themselves on the table of consideration- What was existence to their minds but a perspective in spacetime, or more accurately, moving forward, through spacetime.
Why did they maintain such a velocity? It violated nearly every principle of symmetry just to propose, but it had been taken as an insignificant constant. Time had been assumed immutable, gauntlets of brilliant lives had been devoted to proving any sort of malleability, yet it remained inarguably fixed, and thus, the notion had been entirely disregarded prior.
Hypocritically of course, their very own science deemed such temporal acts as inconsequential. The math seemed unbiased towards the flow of time, action, reaction, they were just perspectives on a singular event happening in both directions. So why their bias? Where did the notion come from that Time should flow at all? And what really defined ‘a moment in time’?
Already their civilization had a multitude of embankments of expired life-forms that operated in simulacrums of existence, graded to fractions of their own time-speed, so the concept of particulated time was not lost on The Cabal, but this was more than that.
That paradoxical nudge of a notion had come from a singular individual, that none would have thought deranged, but nonetheless, was one who dared believe that spacetime was exactly the opposite of what they’d considered it to be. A ‘Timespace’ as it were coined; a solution to their momentum, and a Pandora’s Box of possibility.