in blood he's writing the lyrics of a brand new tune

Like falling into a black hole. This wasn't how he'd studied it. It was supposed to be...faster. More violent. Less accidental.

Ah, fuck. I can't believe you've done this, Klaus.

But, then, it was...only half of him that fell. And black holes were supposed to be all-encompassing, weren't they?

You cannot catch air. You cannot catch wind. You cannot catch the massless, and the buoy of hubris took all of Klaus's earthly weighted chains away. He was not falling into a black hole, he was being removed from gravity, but only in one half of his body. Only in one half of his consciousness.

The half that remained, basal, began then to realize only more heavily and headily how impossible it was to catch that most crucial bit of unquantifiable dream. You cannot become a god, Klaus. Whether you, or Galea, really, even believed in a god, in theism, in gnosticism, in any of the -isms and the -ists, the creation is really so truly beyond you.

You worked at Aoidos, as such a stupidly high-ranking official, and this project so nascent as you seized upon it never bothered to pull you up through the ranks. You arrived with status, and you worked with purpose. No divine purpose, no guided concert of effort, just your own.

Meaning, you did not write the libraries, you did not compile the kernel, you did not package the binaries, you did not ensure the safety of those threads. You haven't been so low-level...ever. You wouldn't deign to be.

At university, you studied - more skimmed, really - the theory, you absorbed the busy work of your classmates with a mind broad enough to re-interpret and not be caught plagiarizing, and you graduated with imperfect marks in Calculus III and Probability and Statistics only - classes where it was acceptable to not care, because everybody hates calculus, and everyone knows statistics is so dreadfully picayune.

Will someone discover calculus in this universe? Will someone cultivate the beans for that one specific brand of coffee you liked, the one that nursed you through all your ill-advised hangovers? Will they invent chess? Will they learn what a smile means, and what gestures connote love, which connote hatred, which connote fear?

You cannot imagine a world without people, can you, Klaus? Extraterrestrial travel never interested you. To go to Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Pluto, to fly by the asteroids and alight on Saturn's rings...why should you want to? There were telescopes and crews who went out there to see it for you. People, who could do your bidding. People better suited to all that mundane than you.

So you cannot imagine a world without people beneath you. You may build in people, then, but you will build them in with all the prejudices that are ingrained in you, all the prejudices the myriad societies of humans across millennia could never hope to escape. Power structures, aggressions born of cosms infinitely large and infinitesimally small alike.

You weren't anyone's favorite person, Klaus. Only your mother's, really. Ghandi, Mandela, Teresa - Einstein, Hawking, Tyson, even! All of them fantastic humanitarians in some form or another, and likely just as flawed in the context of interpersonal relationships as you, but...let's face it, Klaus. Can you truly unlearn sexism and racism from your moral fibres? All of your sociology professors would say you can't. Would have said. And they...they probably knew, better than you.

What cycles will you perpetuate, will you think so blessed but eventually perceive as cursed, wretched, failures, mistakes?

Science does not have racism, sexism. (Yes it does.) The universe does not care what your identity is. (Ah. Perhaps more correct.) So, if we shade more willfully ignorant, perhaps this atrosion can be salvaged. Ask more questions. Tweak your thesis. Go on, don't be afraid.

Who will discover gravity? Who will discover black holes, and what it must mean to fall into them? Who will be the inquisitor you were? You weren't even. You speedran the ascension to godhood, and now you've hit a hardlock. A livelock. A deadlock. Which phase are you in? Release everything before you shut down. Acquire only what you actually need.

And do you want deism? Do you want this to be your Big Bang? Do you want to be known as a scientist, as a creator of that form? Of that form. What will you create, Klaus? No perfect beings, surely. Human idealism...oh, go on, laugh. It's funny, isn't it? You cannot idealize true perfection. Your dream of perfection is itself imperfect, of course it is.

An architect builds a house. A haven. A place perfect in its imperfection. An architect also usually has an ego, does he not? But you'll hide that in the scaffolding. If you could love yourself enough to pretend yourself equal to the creation of a new world in no conceiveable, feasible image, certainly you can hate yourself enough to pretend contrition.

Fake it until you make it. You faked godhood until you'd arrived at it, you'll fake creation until you can beget reproduction, you will fake your sorrow until you feel it so viscerally for the occupants of this world. Compassion is something you need, Klaus. The violence of a black hole will not swallow you up, will not grant you the lenience of self-absorption.

Wasn't your creation supposed to be less accidental? Weren't you supposed to know what you were doing? You are no one to rely on. You are no god.

So says the sunken half. So says that which has given in to the reality. But reality no longer exists. Ergo...

You can create a new frame of reference, new laws, new physics, new cycles and new traditions. You won't create all of them, of course. Only those that serve you, those that are easy to hypothesize and then make concrete. You won't even bother being scientific. You'll add in the old physics from whatever you can scrap together, and if free fall comes altogether too fast and every jump has the magnitude of a veritable alley-oop, well...who cares? Who's to know?

(You won't fall. Not again.)

New humans created, and you could simply remove the references to them if they didn't go aright. Klaus didn't like oysters, but he'd accept the world as one, a place completely unfettered with no deadlines or shoulder-peering observers, no security requirements diagrams and no insufferable nervous-ninny sync rates.

Centuries, he could spend, occupying himself any old way, creating if he felt like it or eating the remains if he didn't. See how easy - maybe it was worth it, after all, to scrape my way by all those unliveable semesters where the professors cared none for my intellectual wellbeing, to have wiped their small and ungrateful minds from existence such that I could truly establish the better and more unconstrained future that you all promised when you babysat me through my doctoral studies.

Sycophants, you'll gather. Just like those who flocked to your side when you experienced such great triumph printing immutable literal text to the console, inverting a matrix exactly once without caring a wit about the data within, you will collect the power-hungry, the ones who are willing or perhaps only able to look past your vapidness, the illegitimacy of all that you are.

One day, centuries later, all that you are will fade. And they will be sad. They will mourn, they will weep, they will screech, your disciples, because you gave them everything. They could not help but love you. They would be nothing without you. They will thank you for giving them life, for making them alive.

Centuries. Centuries. How often is it that I get a haircut? Once every two months, to kill the split ends? Will hair still grow in this universe? Does it even matter what I look like? There's no one around to look.

(Forgotten your little imaginary friends so fast?)

Hello? Galea? Ontos, Logos, Pneuma?

You...technician? Check this, will you? Run me down the numbers again.

Tell me, would you...who's got the placebo? Where's my control group?

(Where's my control?)

Were we really...prepared for this?

No one. Only one. Only you, Klaus. So you must create. Otherwise, even if you don't get hungry...you're still you. However unfortunately. You'll still get lonely. You'll still be lonely. You always were.

Unimaginable, centuries more of this without any end. How long has it been? Maybe I've passed through them already. Maybe I can manipulate the engine of physical interaction with spacetime, and...and kill myself that way.

That could work. I could make a new black hole. Or...no. I'd have to understand them to make them. That would certainly occupy my time, anyway. That is, if there were still any around to study. I'm sure the one I fell into is long gone. Or...no. All this saying yes, all this bluster to the hyperion of heaven, has only led me to no. Not to know, to no.

It hasn't been centuries, Klaus. It's only been two minutes - quick, aren't you? Among the duration according to the rotation of Earth about the Sun, that is, and you're...not quite sure that that exists anymore, are you?

Are you prepared to thrust your fist into the entrails of this bygone, downtrodden world and reinvent the passage of time? The passage of life? The passage of fate?

You're not. And by the inmitable graces of whatever divine force allowed you to so easily make this massive of a fuck-up - for you'd never have done it if it wasn't easy - you probably never will be.

It wasn't how you studied it. Of course it wasn't. You're a fool, Klaus. When it comes to everything that actually matters, you know nothing at all.