Firstborn by Paul Booth
Firstborn by Paul Booth
Before the Splinter, all is silence.
& & &
For millions of years and the length of an atom’s spin the Firstborn swim the universe. The solar winds carry them on chariots of thought. Clouds of mist, whispers of energy, they have no need for haste, for they move at the speed of evolution. They discover planets both strange and familiar; uncanny spaces of underground mountains and flying rivers; brilliant, colored gases of glaucous, green, and gold; endless arrays of yawning onyx caverns; swaths of water-filled plains; caverns made of straw and bone.
Yet, even in their majesty, their solitude deafens. It echoes in the hollows of time.
In their wander, the Firstborn discover inchoate species. Nascent animals poised at the precipice of being. On every planet, in every system, in every galaxy, the Firstborn meet creatures constructed of rage and lust—gnats of wrath. They swim through gestalt entities separated by millions of miles yet acting as one; dance with quantum beings of twinned energy; and follow one ancient, lonely hound, the last of its kind, longing for rest. The quiet enthralls. They honor it. We are boundless; we are infinite they intone in silence.
But in a momentary hesitation, an instant of unexpected desire, that thought echoes back to them. In that infinitesimal gleam of yearning, what the Firstborn hear is their own lament. No home, exodus epochs ago. They swim alone. First, one planet was not big enough for them and now, one universe is claustrophobic. So after millennia they wail, as one and alone, we rue our infinity.
No other beings like ourselves.
& & &
“And with our cranial capacities, no other beings like ourselves…” Professor Jeanine Courdrey trailed off in front of the room full of Juniors. Half didn’t notice, their eyes heavy-lidded with the combination of post-lunchtime drowsiness and the hot afternoon sun that streamed through the window. NEURO 380 was a required course for all neuroscience students, which meant the majority acted like they were there under duress, a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. Jeanine didn’t mind; she taught to the ones that were paying attention, the ones that maybe, just maybe, would change the world.
Jeanine had taught the course dozens of times before, could have done the lecture in her sleep, so the pause was unintentional and, to her, noticeable. Too early in the day for lethologica. She was in her mid-forties, and fit the professorial stereotype: pinpoint fascination with obscure topics, ability to talk for hours, absent-minded. She enjoyed leaning into the stereotype, playfully of course—she put elbow patches on her form-fitting jackets, let her grey hair out. In fact, the hair’s paling became a significant distinguishing feature of the neuroscience faculty’s youngest and the only female member. She’d always felt like an outsider there; and ever since her divorce had spent more time in her research than with faculty events; than with her family, even. It was one of the reasons Jared left. Or, at least, what he claimed in their settlement. Certainly nothing to do with their child.
From the lecture hall pit, the last echoes of her voice disappeared in an unnatural silence. Jeanine saw the back door open and a trench-coated man, dark-skinned and somber, walk in. Her heart dropped; somehow, she knew it must be Chas. Something has happened to Chas.
“Alright folks, letting you go a bit early today.” That did it; the somnambulant students startled themselves awake and drudged up the stairs, passing the man at the door without a glance. Freedom awaited them in the following hours, when they could conveniently forget all the lessons so intricately planned by Jeanine via the medium of red plastic Solo cups and heavy bass. If only she could be so free to wander. A few front-rowers smiled at Jeanine as they left and she returned the expression, eyes crinkled but her mind elsewhere. “Don’t forget our midterm next week,” she said, distracted. The few remaining students groaned good-naturedly as they packed their backpacks.
Soon, the room emptied, and the man walked down the steps to Jeanine, who haphazardly shoved her books and notes into her bag.
“Prof. Courdrey? Can we go to your office to talk?” he said, and she nodded. She pointed towards the door and he followed in audible silence.
& & &
The Firstborn have no voice. An eternity of wandering has rendered them mute. Why would they, when imagination conjures images more clearly than words? Space has no sound, and besides, the Firstborn speak through their own ethereal medium. What more need they say? All that need be said has already been.
If they have found peace within this, it is just that they have grown used the silence that surrounds them.
Neither have they form. How can they, when thought itself is ephemeral? Once they were like us, beasts of flesh and bone and blood and tears. But their history is now long shrouded in the folds of the past. They have no need for remembrance, for they look only to the future, to what their boundless imagination evokes. There is no time for memory in the infinite of possibility.
Long ago and forever hidden, they evolved, molted physicality, and flew beyond their corporeal bounds. The memories of those bodily selves evaporated. Now, when they choose to appear, they form as what they will into being. They can change their appearance, mold their structure. Their amorphousness demarcates them.
The Firstborn are an insubstantial corpus. They are both one and many. A cloud of heft and matter. They disperse together and coalesce as multitude. As they float through infinity, thought and energy intertwine as lover’s dreams. Infinity has changed the Firstborn, for they no longer see through time the way corporal beings do. Time is just one more veil they lift to reveal reality’s face. The Firstborn can no longer tell the difference between their old and young, aged and ageless, alive and not yet born. An ancient creature may appear as fetus and dust.
Like thought, the Firstborn weave trails through ether. Light travels through them and nourishes them. They flit in and out of starlight in seconds and linger, soft petrichor on an endless afternoon. They make no habit of being. They are, and that is all they need be. In the quiet expanse, they cry and wail and drown in the sorrow of recognition. They turn to each other in pity and in empathy, mourn their loneliness.
Are we cursed with progress?
Or are we doomed with growth?
They search with hope, a feeling they had long since thought forgotten. For in the vastness of the universe, in the expanse of eternity, there must be others with whom they could share time and space. We have much to offer, they bellow to emptiness, we have much to reveal.
For what good is the universe if there is no one to revel with?
And so the Firstborn intensify their search, if not for ones like themselves, then for ones who have the potential to evolve. They seek others, aliens, those that may yet be. As one, the Firstborn scour foreign worlds. Their whispers of thought become a cacophony of being, a substance within the insubstantial. Materializing a corporal form, the Firstborn rake the soils of alien planets, seeking the Other in the furrows. They swim the caverns of gold, hunt the embryonic within the luster. They root the skies and trim the earth. They sift the mountains of flora, following the hints of life. All thoughts of wandering dissipate as their focus matures. They echo wordlessly, it isn’t enough. We require more.
They burrow the air and skim the seas and fly o how they fly across the lands of countless worlds, each unique and beautiful and pure. But in each one, they find no other beings like themselves. None, in the universe’s hollows and fens and bogs. None, in the skeins and hanks and reels. None, in the vastness of space, in the eternity of existence. There are no other, and none that may be: not in appearance, not in temperament, not in progress, not in insight.
Their wail can be heard even today, in the echoes of dark matter and the whispers of nebulae.
And with nothing left to them except eternity, they begin the Great Splinter.
& & &
The only sound telling Jeanine that Chas was alive, a piercing beep every fifteen seconds, stung like a splinter when it rang.
The trench-coated man, who she discovered was named Eddie, escorted her to Saint Mary’s Hospital. “I just need to ask,” he had said, on the way. “Did anything weird happen with Chas before school this morning?”
She shook her head.
He continued, “There’s no easy way to say this. But Chas acted … odd at school today. Chas left school at lunchtime, went missing for the second half of the day. No teachers witnessed it, just a few students said that what they saw confused them. By three, Chas had been found at the edge of Marigold Woods, a few miles from school. But they were completely comatose.”
The rest of the drive to the hospital was silent.
“Ever since they came out, I figured at least one of those Fox News brats would do something like this.” Jeanine gazed at her child laying prone on the hospital bed. The room smelled ammonic, like it had just been cleaned, and she wondered for a moment who Chas had replaced in here. What had happened to them? Had they died? Was the room unlucky? She shook the thought out of her head; silly superstitions, not real.
Eddie cleared his throat. “Actually, we don’t think the other students were the ones that caused this.” He pointed at the prone child with his left hand. Jeanine noticed a wedding ring on his chubby finger; she wasn’t looking particularly, but ever since her divorce she just always saw them. “No one can explain it, and I was hoping you might be able to help. According to the kids that were with them, there wasn’t a fight, wasn’t an argument. No altercation. Do they have a history of passing out? Of epilepsy?”
Jeanine shook her head. “No, they’ve always been healthy, fine.” She picked up Chas’s hand and laced her fingers through it. “Wait, if there wasn’t an incident, why are the police involved?”
Eddie sighed, a deep, sonorous susurration from his chest. It echoed in the hospital room. “I’m not police. I’m…I’m what you call a specialist in these areas.” He flashed a badge, and she had a horrible moment’s thought that she really should have asked for identification in her office. The badge read, PSI: Paranormal Scene Investigation.
“Seriously?” she asked.
“Seriously,” he answered with a shaky grin. “It’s not quite X-Files, but it’s also not not X-Files.”
“I don’t believe in all that supernatural shit,” she said. “Tell me what happened—what other kids were involved?”
“I said the other kids weren’t involved. But I didn’t say there wasn’t an incident.” Jeanine followed his gaze. Her child lay still, eyes closed, blonde hair curled slightly on the smooth forehead. The machine’s steady rhythm reassured her that Chas was breathing. Chas’s chest barely moved. Jeanine stroked their soft hair, normally covered by the blue and gold hat Chas’s dad had given them last year. Janine felt tears on her cheeks; startled, as she hadn’t cried since…well, since she last saw Chas’s father. Her sister, Carmilla, she was the emotional one; Jeanine was the one who had to put herself on hold. Camilla needed those emotional moments. Jeanine didn’t. Hiding her feelings became second nature, one more tool in her daily survival kit.
She realized Eddie was still talking. “Look, we don’t know what happened exactly. But according to the other kids, they were all eating lunch together outside, normal teenage stuff. But they said it got real dark, like it was gonna rain, then a beam of light shot down over Chas here.” He paused, before continuing, not meeting her eyes. “And they levitated.” Jeanine raised her eyebrows at this. “At least, that’s what the kids said,” he continued, an apology in his voice.
“I’m sorry, what? And, I don’t understand, how did Chas end up in a coma?”
“Dr. Courdrey, that’s the weird part. We don’t know. The other students ran to get help and when they came back, Chas was just…gone. Like they’d never been there.”
Jeanine turned back to Chas. What the hell had happened to her child? She reached a hand out, felt their cheek. It was warm, but stiff. Felt unnatural to her touch. She could hardly allow herself to think about what it all meant.
At that moment, Chas’s eyes flew open. And they were a deep, rich black.
& & &
From insubstantial matter the Firstborn construct a Splinter, a crystalline machine of dark black. Thick as a wisp, the Splinter consumes light through blackened, mirrored faces. If the Firstborn had bodies, their reflection would have been exact, no flaws to mar the translucent exterior.
We Splinter to feel—
To Splinter is to feel agony, twinned pleasure and pain.
We Splinter to understand—
To Splinter is to understand the length of a breath.
We Splinter to grow—
To Splinter is to grow through cleaved flesh.
We Splinter to be—
Splinter is pain, and the pain is physical.
The Firstborn rip asunder from one another. The clouds of mist scald in the embers of dying suns. The great cloud corpus rends apart, a cleaving that echoes in the void of space. Ethereal becomes corporeal. Flesh swells on bulging bodies, blooms of fire raze sense skin. Sinew and bone snap teeth on metal. Blood throbs and they sense it crawling, scratching, burning in every carnal channel. The Firstborn are, once again, born.
Splinter is pain, and the pain is existential.
When the Firstborn Splinter, it is as if they learn the nature of solitude. They rend apart, to create, from themselves, another. The Firstborn become beings. They no longer hear the voices echo in the hollow self. Each new Splinter is a perfect twin, atomically pure. And yet, when each Splinter sees themself outside the others, they weep. For the first time, birthed into difference. Their intimacy becomes lone. From the We, an endless number of I’s.
And the space between We and I is infinitely cold.
& & &
Former professor Jeanine Courdrey—well, Emeritus Professor Courdrey, they officially let her keep her title—shivered with her whole body as she turned one of the Splinters over in her hands. A chill had come over her. It was a crown-like device, with a silver finish that reflected the soft light in her makeshift laboratory. Seven spikes protruded from the metal, equidistant around the circumference, like spiders’ legs.
After eight months, Chas has remained unresponsive. Jeanine could recall the moment their dark eyes opened with perfect detail: she gasped and clutched Chas’s hands; Eddie had run out to inform the doctors; they’d come rushing in, a flurry of white coats flapping in their wake. Superhero capes, or white flags? she wondered. This wasn’t an involuntary response—how did they change color?—and they’d flashed a light in Chas’s eyes, tried to determine what was happening behind the mind. Jeanine felt lost, no connection with her own expertise in neuroscience; she just moved back from the doctors who hooked Chas up to more machines, more electronic wails, more monitors.
There had been no explanation for the eyes. No movement. They lay completely silent, still, and staring. And they remained that way for months. The doctors determined Chas could breathe on their own and, following a protracted battle with the hospital billing department, she’d managed to check Chas out of the hospital to take them back to her own house. Honestly, the doctors seemed happy to get them out of there: one less incomplete name on their whiteboard. Chas just stared straight up from the bed, unmoored from reality.
She glanced at her watch: four in the morning, too early to call Camilla. Jeanine couldn’t work in the lab and care for Chas, so it was lucky that Camilla had trained as a nurse—but she wanted to share the first bit of good news they’d had for a while. She put the Splinter on the table with a thud. This would change everything.
& & &
Everything is change.
The First to Splinter is born into a vacuum of silence. When they call out, their voice the first sounded for eternity, wonder fills them. Becoming is an adventure. Their eyes the first for generations, they see the shimmering clouds and the dancing embers and the endless black. Hope expands their nascent heart. We … I … exist.
The First to Splinter tucks their arms around their body and feels for the first time the limits of their own existence. The boundaries. A dread encompasses them. Soon, their inimitable loneliness suffocates. They have ears and yet nothing to hear; they have eyes but nothing to see; they have a tongue but no one to speak to. With no reply, they collapse from the realization: all sentience is grief.
After eons and an instant they are joined by another, and another. The same wonder and shame fill them all as each Splinter comes together in Firstborn anguish. For this is the truth and the pain of the Splinter:
Each new Splinter plummets down to a planet with the possibility of life. Each has a mission, to engineer an equal. A being like themselves. And despite each Splinter’s uniformity, each has a unique function: some draw astral energy to encourage alien growth; some stimulate cerebral processing in the native fauna, rendering thought material; some provide light and power to worlds of entropy. The Firstborn leave each Splinter, a single part of their wholeness, with each inchoate species they encounter, to provoke and engage those with the potential to develop, to change, to grow.
For eternity the Remaining Firstborn wait for the Splinters to return. They seek news of success. They wonder what new species will flourish. The Remaining think stories to each other, imagine the conversations they might have with any Others that may come to be. Their excitement grows, a feeling unknown after millennia of endless searching.
We shift the boundaries of the self.
The Remaining wait with breath held against eternity for the Splinters to ferment evolution. But each Splinter has a story that dies with them.
& & &
She’d named the device the Splinter not only because thin, sharp needles jutted out the crown but also because of what it did. Her dissertation research had explored how two brains could be linked via digital connection, a sort of mind-link. Her thesis hinged on the fact human consciousness was simply chemical and electrical, the brain a battery filled with neurochemical inputs. There had to be a way, she reasoned, to link those inputs.
Her early work was theoretical, but with a recent grant from the university she’d begun work on a prototype Splinter, from which developed the one she cradled in her hands. It created a single neurochemical process within brain, splintering the neuron trails into parsable subjects, and lassoed them into a coherent train of thought, which could be summed up in a zip file and transmitted to someone wearing a second Splinter crown, where it was retransmitted back into the original state. All made painless and in a fraction of a second.
She’d been working on the device for twenty years. She never thought she’d be testing it on her own child.
She roused herself from her early morning nap and picked up the Splinter. It was just past ten. She dialed Camilla’s number, to inform her she was on her way.
There was no answer.
Camilla should be up by now. Jeanine got an uneasy feeling, a twist in her stomach. Something wasn’t right. Camilla always had her phone on her. She grabbed the Splinter and ran out the door, dialing Camilla as she did. Straight to voicemail.
Not now. Not when she was so close.
The lab was a few minutes from her house, but she blew three stop signs on her way. She could tell by looking at the bungalow when she pulled into the driveway: They were gone. She ran out the car, barely pausing to stop the engine, and threw open her front door. The house was silent.
“Camilla!” she yelled. “Chas?”
Only her voice echoed back. She was alone. Camilla had taken Chas. Or someone had taken them both. The Splinter clattered on the ground, carapace gonging in the empty air. Jeanine collapsed to her knees.
& & &
The Firstborn collapse, get up, and collapse again. The Great Splinter renders and sunders and divides, an amoebic replication. All fail.
All at once and without end, after the Firstborn have Splintered into infinity, there is one Splinter left. The Final Splinter, the Last, stands on the shores of a fiery lake and weeps oceans of evanescent tears, grieving the loss of ones they never would know.
Today, the Firstborn have disappeared from the cosmos. Perhaps they have died. Perhaps they have changed. The Last no longer hears the song of any Firstborn in the sky. No Splinter returns. Each dies, or each absconds forever. No new species evolve. O the dirges they sing, to no one. O the elegies they weave, to themself.
The Last will be, forever and now, alone in the universe. The Great Splinter has become the Great Cull.
As with the many Splinters before them, the Last feels the mighty wave of grief at their solitude. They, too, collapse, on that shore, and drown in the realization of their own existence. There are none left to relieve them, and they flood the grief of sentience.
But in their infinite wisdom and devout altruism, the Last looks up from that fiery shore and sees, shimmering in the red water below them, their own reflection. It is unlike the universe they’d seen before—the Last and not-Last, the twinned being, the imaginary self. It flickers in the twilight, an upturned lip matching their own. The twinkles of firelight spark off the surface like bubbles. Ripples encircle their growing realization. They meet their eyes—how can they not?—and find the moment’s infinite possibility. The Last realizes they had been looking to the cosmos for companionship. Instead, they must seek it inward.
The Last sets a task so monumental it outshines the stars: Instead of evolving others, it is themself who must evolve. I must jumpstart my self to survive.
The Last works for years on a New Splinter, one so complex and endless it dwarfs the first. Galaxies are born and die. Entire lifeforms crawl out of swamps, walk on land, destroy planets, and perish. Suns explode.
& & &
Jeanine felt her heart explode as she rushed from the house. She squeezed the Splinter so tight in her hand, small pinpricks of blood formed on her palms. She could hear her heartbeat in her ears and dark clouds clogged her vision.
She ran to the car and dialed her phone, The Splinter and its mate tossed aside on the passenger-side seat.
“Eddie, it’s Jeanine,” she yelled as soon as the call clicked over. “Chas and Camilla are gone.” A pause on the line chilled her.
“Jeanine? I’m sorry, our phones died.” Eddie’s voice echoed, like at the end of a long tunnel. In the background, Jeanine could hear the hospital’s familiar beeps.
“Oh my god, what’s happened, how’s Chas?” Jeanine could hear the phone being passed to someone else and a muted you talk to her as Camilla’s voice filled her ears.
“Everyone is fine, but we tried to get in touch. Chas is here, at Saint Mary’s. They’re fine. They had a bit of an incident. They moved and blinked their eyes, but now they’re back to stable. We rushed here as soon as we could.”
Jeanine moved the phone away from her face and blinked back tears. Damn it, she’d missed it, she’d missed Chas moving, and maybe if she’d been there, she could have helped, she could have encouraged them or been there god damn it why did she have to spend so much time on this goddamn Splinter? Why did she do this, throw herself into this new project, avoiding the emotional messiness of a family and friends? It was the same with Jared.
She yelled “I’m on my way” into the phone before she threw the car into gear and backed out the driveway.
The Splinters’ crowns began to hover over the seat next to her, and as she pulled out, a faint glow emerged from the passenger side.
& & &
The low pink dusk glows in the sky and the Last pauses once in their frenzy of creation. When the despair of their task overwhelms them, when the loneliness of eternity drowns them, when the silence of the universe quells them, they sit on the shores of the fiery lake and stare back into their eyes in the water.
Am I, the Last, cursed forever? In all of history, in all of eternity, I am what remains. Me. The one. The sole. The Last and the forever.
There are no more of Us. We have disappeared. Perhaps it is better that We are gone. Perhaps it is better that the universe forgets. What have We brought to the universe except our own endless searching, whining, pathetic entreats for worth? Value is meaningless without being. I have no one and I am no one.
There is no answer from their reflection as the waves of grief thunder against the Last. They rest their head on the ground for one final, infinite sleep, and feel the cold rocks and crisp grass on their face. They close their eyes.
A warm drop of water falls from the sky. It pings their cheek and trickles down the side of their face, hesitates as it reaches the smooth valley of their cheek, before it plummets down, around the curved, mountainous nose and, like a breath, slips between their lips.
It is sunlight on their tongue, sweet lemon chill across their mouth, tart dreams sparkling waves of electricity down their body. With hesitation the Last stands, sated, and admires the rosy sky.
& & &
The hospital room smells like lemon, freshly cleaned. Jeanine slipped her way through the nurses crowded around their station and into room 264. Chas lay on their back, dark eyes staring into infinity. Camilla hugged her. “I’m sorry we weren’t able to get ahold of you. You must’ve been so worried.” All Jeanine could let out was a whimper as she moved closer to her child.
“How are they?” she asked, placing a cold hand on Chas’ pale face.
“The blink happened a few hours ago and there’s been no movement since.” Camilla latched onto Jeanine’s arm as she turned to the prone body. “The doctors say it was probably a muscle spasm. Not bad news, not good news. So frustrating.”
Jeanine felt the Splinters’ heft in her bag. They weighed her down. She’d lifted them from the car, unthinking, as she ran to the hospital room, and now they compelled her, urged her onwards.
“I can’t stand it anymore, Camilla,” she said, wrapping her fingers around one device as it throbbed and pulsed by her side. “We have to try.” She pulled one Splinter out, a faint hum emanating from the device.
“What…what is that?” Camilla asked. “Is that what you’ve been working on in that lab so much?”
“I call it a Splinter,” she replied, placing one device on Chas’s head while slipping the other on her own. She glanced at the door to make sure the doctor wasn’t coming in. “It should help us reach inside Chas’s mind, to uncover what happened.”
“Wait,” Camilla said, clutching Jeanine’s wrist. “That Splinter… How do you know it won’t hurt them?”
“I don’t,” Jeanine admitted, “but I have to try. Otherwise, we’ll be falling forever.”
The device slipped on Chas’s head as it had been designed to do and, with a whirl and click, it snapped around. Two thin needles penetrated their head and a fine droplet of blood spilled down their forehead. Jeanine instinctively grabbed onto Camilla.
The Splinter flashed red and green as in turn each spike on the outer edge retracted into the metal band and turned inward. They nudged the edge of Chas’s forehead. They didn’t pierce the skin, just poked it until dimples appeared equidistant around their crown.
With a start, Chas sat upright and turned, sharply, to look at Jeanine through alien eyes.
& & &
The Last sits in solitude, at the end of all space and instant, crowding and floating in and around them self. The Final Splinter unveils itself, complete. The Last touches its cavernous, glowing surface.
We are both Last.
It is the size of a solar system, bigger than any their species has constructed before. It pulses and hums. The Last clamors, their thoughts rain down. They understand its quadradic perfection, each side a perfect match to the others.
But wait, not quadratic at all. Quintic! Such a dimension has never been reached before. Five dimensions, they scream in silent anticipation. The Final Splinter is my salvation. The Last revels in their insights, their accomplishment. But they also wonder:
What would their unique function be? What would it allow them to do?
Unthought: Would they evolve?
The Last flies to the surface, touches it and surrounds it all at once. They wait, space dust hangs in eternity, fireflies spin in space. And….
No sound emerges from the Splinter. No greater meaning flies through them. No evolutionary leap occurs in their space. They scream, this time in anger and disbelief. How could this be? I am the Last, the only, the sole being. I dreamt eons for this.
They orbit the machine in an eddy, their anger spiraling into fear.
The Last in the universe and I cannot evolve, they realize with shame. An end to the endless. Their fear radiates out—a supernova. It destroys planets in its wake and creates ripples throughout the galaxy.
I was right to doubt.
The Last’s failure means they are alone. And the truth numbs their mind.
& & &
Jeanine numbed at the first words she’d heard from Chas in eight months. “Thank you.” But no, not heard: they seemed to form in her mind, complete and whole, like a memory more than a conversation. Jeanine looked at the being that could no longer effectively be called Chas—her child, her baby, who floated in the space between eternity and forever—and felt the earth move beneath her. The words echoed in silence throughout the room.
“Thank you for giving us voice.” The Splinter was doing its job, transmitting the thoughts from Chas’s brain into Jeanine’s. “We can tell by your light color that you are confused. Let us explain. We are the Last. We arrived and Splintered with this being, the perfect vessel, our engagement. They incubate us; they birth us.”
Jeanine thought, who are you?
“We are the last of the Firstborn, the Lastborn, the first and last of our kind. In this being we see Our past, and the future of Us. We have joined and begin the Firstborn anew.”
Chas floated towards Jeanine and laid their hand on her check, stroking the soft skin. Jeanine leaned into the caress, feeling the fingers draw streaks across her face.
“The future of us,” she whispered, exhaling slowly.
& & &
The Firstborn exhales from the fiery shore and through the veil of tears, counts the stars in patterns as yet unseen. The lake itself is larger, the fire gone. The water laps at their feet, bubbles like music. The Last stares at their reflection and their reflection stares back. They realize: The Great Splinter has worked in ways they have not anticipated.
Their universe has rewound. The stars are in different positions and the planets have shifted back. The gestalt creatures are but one and the quantum twins are holding hands and the hound is at peace.
And the Last comes across a tall building of stone that pierces the sky.
The Last finds a group of people, humble and meek, sitting at table in the hot, yellow sun. They seem to consume and that sound from their lips, that guffaw, it placates.
The Last searches their distant memories. It has all renewed. The Last realizes their truth, that they have come full circle. They have lived so long, all eternity passes them. But now, they see their future catching up to their past. The plains of time are no barrier to loneliness.
These are the last of their kind, but the beginning of the Firstborn.
The Great Splinter sent them back in time, back to the start of them. The new First ambles to the once-and-again people, arms outstretched, ready to offer their knowledge and being to the ones in the pack. One being, covered blue and gold on top, feels the warmth of the First’s light on their face and smiles. A connection is made. A new Firstborn floats. The air smells of sweet dew. The Being sparks. The First drops to their knees and feels the soft grass in their fingers. Each blade contains an infinity. The Last lifts their head to taste the candy sky. They make ready to renew themself.
Being of evolution, they poise.
* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Paul Booth 2024
