Microcosmic Scope

Zoe placed the cover on top of the Petrie dish. For a moment she stopped to appreciate how gross it all was: the thin beige-gray slice of cerebellum, the cerebrospinal fluid seeping from the thawed meat, the smell—or lackthereof. She couldn’t help but regard it. It was all so disgusting and bizarre and incredible.

She brought her eyes down to the microscope and for a breath, Zoe saw nothing. Just blackness; the slab of brain being too close to see. It was in need of adjustment. She turned the coarse focus knob slightly to the left. Slowly. Fingers twisting stubbornly slow and patiently, until—Light!

The radiant sun.

Blobs of brain tissue.

She zoomed back in on a lightning storm of nerve cells; all firing and flashing along their axons. Further still, to the short-branched root of a single dendrite.

Too far. Zoe needed to see the Myelin Sheath. She wrapped her fingers around the knob and began to twist; a fraction of a turn at a time. Carefully. Moving too fast would completely distort the image.

And then she sneezed.

Her hand twitched, the knob twist, and there went the picture. She felt a brief flicker of resistance on the dial, but before she could stop her fingers the screw cracked, and the lens went coiling outward; zipping away from the cells.

Zoe tried to tear her head away but it was as though she were stuck; her brow anchored to the eyepiece, or her attention moored to the view. Whatever the case, she was along for the ride; hauled behind the horns of the lens as it skipped back from cells—to individual tissues—to the beige-gray lump on the Petrie dish.

But it didn’t stop there.

The lens kept going.

Zoe saw herself at the table; one mass of flesh staring down at another mass of flesh. And it was impossible and nonsensical, but it was true, and it was happening. Then she was gone; dissipated into the scope of the building—the community—the city of organisms all twisting and turning and pulsing. She was the night sky; black-blue with a birds-eye of the topography—the contours. All the light blinking against the darkness. But only for the span of a half-breath.

It dissolved.

There was the Earth, one beating, throbbing organ—amongst many beating, throbbing organs in a solar system. Some dead, others dying. Most dying? There was only the decaying. Only the truth of contrast.

It zoomed out further still.

Swirling. Everything bending and warping, elliptically; past nebulous clouds of green and purple, raging like some celestial bull towards the center—towards light. Like a moth to a flame, she spiraled towards a singularity.

She?

Zoe had lost herself. She’d left her flesh and bone far away, on an insignificant rock in the bullish void of space. She. A single thing—cell, organism? Her ego crumbled from beneath her; it was all still widening.

It found there was no one source. There were many. Many solar systems; flashing as though single organisms in an expanding galaxy of reds and blues and colors lacking descript. It was a galaxy, flat and tilted and leviathan, ever corkscrewing in on it’s nucleus; a black hole returning all the energy of the Milky Way.

It gasped.

Messier 63. Andromeda. The Milky Way. All unique and distinct and writhing. All alive. A network of splotches existing in the dark; occasionally interacting, occasionally bonding—for a time. It was too much—too hard to comprehend! Like following every single grain of sand across each beach, on every planet, in all…

Wider still.

Everything was so far from everything else. And every speck of star was so isolated; like there was an eternity of empty space between universes; like they were as good as individual atoms drifting along a black river. Islands, then—Light!

Blobs of brain tissue.

Zoe zoomed out from the microscope and tore her head away. She looked down at the thin, beige-gray slice of cerebellum on the Petrie dish; seeing red.

And she vomited the cosmos.