A Final Word

A translation from a scroll recovered from the uninhabited planet ‘Paradise’:

I am T’ak and this is my foretelling of the end of this skein, recorded for the first and last time and to be preserved forever in the holy script of our people, which is rarely used. For generations greater in number than the islands of the world, our history has been recorded as song, poem, dance and hymn. But, now, as we observe the signs of our coming doom, we attempt to preserve our unique bifurcation along this long path of years atop these islands for our ancestors and our descendants to judge, as they are doing now and have been throughout our long sojourn, on this singular scroll.

We are many in number, and scattered for many days' sailing in all directions, on the islands of this great, boundless ocean. Many songs describe the wonders of our cities, wrought from the living branches of our life-giving tree-hosts, each bough carefully, thoughtfully and symbiotically melded to organic and intricate architectural form. We are housed, clothed, and fed by their grace. We traverse the rich, shallow seas between the islands that comprise this world in vessels ritualistically carved of fallen trees alone, and avoid the barren plains of the deep ocean to which most of this planet belongs. We are gardeners and sailors and philosophers, but ultimately travelers at the boundary between a multitude of layers, some physical and others more tenuous, that both separate and unite.

We, our people and this world, inhabit a central layer within the cosmos. Not central in the sense that it bestows upon us any special recognition or favour, but, in the case of our world of worlds, a physical centrality. Our islands, too numerous to recount and diverse in shape and culture, are suspended above a vast, deep planetary ocean. At the bottom of this unfathomable shared world swim the mighty and powerful rulers of that abyssal plane. Our people have never seen nor directly encountered these creatures, even though they are richly depicted in the poetry of the ancient sailors. They are described as alternatively malevolent and indifferent, wise, callous and ancient, but our spoken poetry has a complex structure and is rarely literal. The remains of their gelatinous bodies and their structures, enormous and solid but unmistakably shaped with purpose, have washed ashore at certain sites when the currents allows. Chants associated with these events tell of misfortune that accompanies the cosmic flotsam.

Above us, we know of another layer: that of the stars and planets and those beings who travel between them through means unknown. Our astronomer-theologians have been tireless in their efforts to interrogate this realm, and, using glass prisms of delicate precision and mechanisms of metal, have done much over recent generations to further our understanding of the astronomical objects: the stars and their eternal fires, the planets in their eternal dance. We know of the brothers and sisters of our world and the shared embrace of our parent star, one stellar island among countless others. We are not able to venture beyond our world but we are also not entirely ignorant of our naivety. We have traced several enigmatic visitations from beings from other planets in our many tales and riddles of oral history. As we share our ocean world, so too do we share the galaxy of worlds. These discoveries have enriched the spiritual lives of our people by revealing to us the physical nature of the cosmic chords that were already bound within the melodic polyphonies of our ancient hymns of creation. These songs imbued the first threads of the newly-woven tapestry of our history with hope and wonder, and to gave cause rejoice in the bond shared by all living beings in this vast sea of stars.

We are also a temporal centrality; the fulcrum at the pivot of these untethered existences, between the timeless depths of the ocean and the infinite sky above. The parallel timelines that run both simultaneously and cyclically from creation to completion place us now in the centre. As we have faced our trials in this world and on these islands, so have we in the lightless deep and when encircling the prominences erupting from the stars. It is through our shared experience of this universe that we are united, these separate corporal journeys merely mirrors of each other reflected through a prism of biological and teleological chaos over which we have no control. But, as we too are agents of chaos it is through these machinations that I hope to work to hamper the looming menace of our demise. When I finish this inscription, and once you have read it, we can be sure that the portents of which it foretells will never come to be. I have plucked it from the ether of hypothetical possibility, extracted it with the normalcy and boredom of my stammering prose, to prevent its occurrence. It now exists as a shared fiction, nothing more. I am a priest of chance, of probability - by recording the ending of my world, I have prevented it.

This is my hope.

* * * *

The first omens of the apocalypse were those of mythical proportions. Blubbering masses of gelatinous ooze floated lazily onto shore on several western isles. The rotting stench of scores of writhing mounds of erupting intestinal confusion wrapped in thick, black slimy leather assaulted our people as they bubbled and fizzed in the putrid air. Panic swept through those shores, and the women wept as they foresaw, as I did, that the unravelling was beginning. However, it was from above that more certain signs of our impending devastation reached us. The glinting of a daytime star summoned the priests, astronomers, and time-tellers to our scared observatory at the equator, and from there they glimpsed blurry sight of the shape of a vessel of the heavens. A harbinger in orbit.

Some days later, they fell from the sky. Grey, mineral cities of modular brutality and incomprehensible geometry the size of our largest islands, their descending undersides puckered with blue and orange fires, plummeted into the surface of the ocean with terrifying power. The sun was extinguished, and so the separate layers of our reality began their steady collapse. The impacts vaporized the seas, and drowned many people in the monstrous waves that followed, and deafened islands for hours around. The gargantuan hulks sank with preternatural rapidity and disappeared beneath the swell into the chasms of the deepest oceans before the deadly waves reached the shores of nearby atolls. The stars were obscured by the liberated steam, which formed thick obtrusive clouds that have yet to part. The cities of the sky were falling into the seas while the denizens of the deepest reaches were coming ashore in their grotesque fury, and on our islands, stuck in-between, we had nowhere to go.

The dark nights that followed were filled with violence. Violence in the sky as lightning and thunder bore down on the islands and violence within our trees as branches were torn from their roots and our people turned on themselves and each other. Fear drove some into the ocean, their choice to test the hospitality of the deep-swimmers, but they died before their heads were fully submerged. The once rich and fertile seas were poisoned by some invisible curse. Our brothers in the deep were fighting their battle too and it seemed they had little inclination to share ours. Similarly, were we able, I expect we would witness the tragedy and awe of all of the cities of the sky tumbling from the firmament as their sheer, blocky mineral surfaces crumbled to dust, just as those we have seen crashing into our world.

But, there was also cause to rejoice! The time of our people is passing, but we are celebrating with song and dance. The unravelling is also an entanglement: the once disparate threads of our separate layers unite here on the dirty floor at the foot of the cosmic loom, ready to once again be woven into the intertwined, parallel, but separately intricate patterns of life when the weaver deems it time to begin again. We are privileged to be witness to the temporal cascade that is the ending of this skein, and at this terminus we are grateful to be joined by our astral and abyssal kin to face the maw of an uncertain ending and a joyful beginning.

Come now, brothers, let us be together as one again...

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begin: ‘Summary Log 1145a’...

priority: medium...

attn: chairman, members of the board...

Survey vessel Altir reports the conclusion of expedition Harvest 112. The goals of the expedition were to:

• study the abyssal megafauna detected by autonomous reconnaissance expedition Lantern 33 of the sub-Earth terrestrial/oceanic planet HD 556991c (‘Paradise’) from low orbit and, if possible, in situ, using ‘seafloor autonomous extractor laboratories’ (SAELs), with particular focus on resources of high economic potential. Return of live specimen strongly favored to offset expeditionary costs.

• conduct biogeochemical determination of planet for future settlement and resource extraction opportunities.
• avoid contact with endemic planet-bound bipedal proto-civilization (Kardashev-Sagan scale: <0.01) in accordance with Council protocols. Assumed hostile and of limited xenological interest.

It is with regret that we report the expedition has been unsuccessful in meeting these objectives. An attempt to capture a live specimen of abyssal megafauna via the use of the subsonic skycrane mechanism proved unsuccessful (see attached technical report) and resulted in the atmospheric rending of the organism. As a result, visceral remains from a mature male were scattered across an uninhabited island chain in the western hemisphere.

Unfortunately, it is also our duty to report the inadvertent but severe contamination of the planet-wide ocean of HD 556991c following the currently unexplained multi-component failure of the atmospheric entry and stabilization thrusters of three (3) of the five (5) seafloor autonomous extractor laboratories (SAELs) launched synchronously from Altir (see attached technical and toxicochemical report). Due to their size, and despite following established Council planetary protection protocols, the devastating surficial impacts associated with the thruster failures of the SAELs within the stratosphere coupled with subsequent environmental contamination from the damaged structures, has resulted in a catastrophic (likely terminal) mortality event affecting the abyssal megafauna of the planet. We also predict the probable collapse of the current global oceanic ecosystem of Paradise through complex, impact-generated climatic feedbacks and an ocean-wide trophic cascade; on-board computer models suggest planetary ecological decimation within a matter of Earth-weeks.

It is likely that the collapse of the endemic proto-civilization of the planet, which preliminary scans reveal to have attained an approximately neolithic Earth-level of technological and scientific advancement, will follow soon after through starvation or mass mortality due to toxicity-related ailments. Our expedition was, however, successful in ensuring that the expedition was carried out without their knowledge of our presence, which unfortunately meant that, in keeping with Council protocols, we were rendered legally unable to intervene to provide assistance following the contamination event. Therefore, it is our recommendation that environmental regulation and terraforming experts are dispatched immediately to determine and mitigate the damage to submarine and terrestrial resources, and to lead decontamination efforts following the terminus of the extinction event to facilitate future human settlement opportunities.

Claims adjusters should also be briefed in order to prepare for potential legal action by the Council and non-governmental agencies due to the aforementioned loss of ecological and xenological resources. However, we anticipate the limited success of any such litigation as all relevant Council policies were strictly followed, and we continue to boast a 98.4% success rate in terms of SAEL deployment over all of our expeditions to date. That being said, we also suggest a preemptive re-evaluation of the performance of the suborbital maneuvering thrusters and the structural integrity of our current and future fleet of subaquatic autonomous laboratories (a more detailed technical report is attached) to prevent future loss of valuable assets as well as accidental contamination events.

End ‘ Summary Log 1145a’ ...