Meanwhile, in Brutus, the flourishing of visual arts gave rise to the need for a special kind of glass that enabled naturalist painters to filter out diffuse light. These glasses were smoothed down from natural mica splitting at first. Then, when demand increased, craftsmen began manufacturing glass polarizers aimed at different wavelengths. One day, as a craftsman held a new lens against daylight during calibration, a whole new world suddenly took shape in front of his eyes.

  He gasped in amazement, which drew his workmates close, and they too gaped at the heavenly spectacle through his lens. Word spread like wildfire. Production scaled up immediately in these specs, while business in the industry at large also boomed. At once, the whole nation was looking up at the heavens with polarized lenses in their hands. Nature disjoined two adjacent worlds with a clever optical barrier, but when the curtain was lifted, the land of myths and legends came to light in plain sight.

  Sight, so vivid and transparent, left an impression far stronger than could be produced by any hypothesis or proof following rod calculus. Soon, positivism and skepticism became broadly influential in Brutus’ public discourse. The people of Brutus abolished religious courts, sent the king to the guillotine, and instituted a democratic republic. Minds so freed set off growth in productive forces. Empirical sciences triumphed, while rationalist principles motivated reforms in the humanities. The nation marched steadily into the age of steam.

  Progress continued for hundreds of years until every street was teeming with steam-powered machinery enshrouded in their own pearly vapor. Brutus began to stagnate. Overpopulation crowded its land; endless coal smoke poisoned the air; the widening gap between the rich and the poor, adding to deteriorating living conditions, caused existing civil tensions to escalate. A revolution was on the horizon. Desperate to redirect popular grievances and find a scapegoat for themselves, the governors of Brutus turned their eyes to the sky.

  At this point, survival was already strenuous. Nevertheless, Brutus pooled its recourses and built a fleet of nine airships equipped with the latest military technology and nine thousand crew members. The plan was to sail across the heavenly barrier, settle in the other continent, colonize it, and carve out a new home for the people of Brutus, which had become, by now, a nation teetering on the brink of disintegration. The expedition was its last throw of the dice.

  When the fleet from Brutus arrived, they came to a people still living under feudalism. Here, lords thrived, and their tenants suffered. All the while, hollow crowns exchanged hands by the day. The people of Pugnus gawked at these extraterrestrial visitors as if they were something other than human. But, abiding by principles of civility, they still received the crew with friendliness. It dawned on the crew then, that, contrary to the propaganda they had received, Pugnus was not populated by monsters in human guise. Far from it, these were real people like themselves. Troubled by their own conscience and embittered about Brutus’ ruling clique, the crew refused to obey the genocidal order and declared alliance with Pugnus in its self-defense.

  Their mutiny was the last straw for Brutus. When the news broke, Brutus’ two major parties descended into malicious smear campaigns against each other, and then proceeded to commence a ninety-year civil war. This was the breathing space Pugnusneeded. It seized the opportunity to reinforce itself against the next round of attack. The expedition crew taught Pugnus everything they knew, sowing the seeds of an industrial revolution. The encounter with foreign ideas also breathed a new life into Pugnus’ ancient sciences. Its civilization entered a stage of rapid growth.

  Keen on making the traitors pay, and eager to nip Pugnus’ technological revolution in its bud, Brutuslaunched a second campaign the moment its civil war came to an end. Steam-powered chariots fitted with swivels were airdropped onto Pugnus’ plain in coordination with foot soldiers carrying high-pressure smoothbore guns. But never in their wildest dreams did they think that Pugnus would be waiting for them with ironclad super robots. These metal giants were driven by internal combustion engines and wore indestructible alloy armor protection. Slowly but surely, they advanced, tearing through Brutus’ front lines, wreaking the armors on the steam powered chariots, and crushing the troops’ hyperbaric airbags.

  All that live by technology shall perish by technology. The Brutus army, so thoroughly defeated, had no choice but to surrender. From then on, the two nations entered a two hundred-year standoff. They hadn’t figured each other out fully, and for that reason they cautioned against reckless attacks, which held potential for self-sabotage. The compromise was a cold war, one rife with mutual provocation and espionage.

  During this time, public support for peace never tailed off, but many more came under the sway of fanaticism. They sang the tune of hate and called for an arms race. Vigilant nationalists even discovered the subtlest distinction between the two people: those native to Pugnus had bigger right eyes and the contrary was true of those native to Brutus. But how could a common humanity pertain to faces so different? The foreigner must go! We must secure the existence of our people!

  Ignorance fueled chauvinism. The cold war soon escalated into hot, violent battles. They had been sitting at the poker table for two hundred years, watching each other, thinking. Now, they were ready to play their hands. First, Pugnus deployed its ground forces, then in return Brutus destroyed all of Pugnus’ satellites and space stations in one fell swoop. Pugnus launched MIRV intercontinental ballistic missiles at Brutus, so Brutus turned its strategic laser weapons to Pugnus’ capital. Pugnus redirected an asteroid at Brutus, and Brutus intercepted it and resolved the threat into a meteor shower.

  The war went on for six hundred years, and neither saw that war was good for nothing but agony and devastation. Instead, they came to the decision that conventional weapons were simply incapable at vanquishing the opponent. This prompted both nations to propose “millennium projects” aimed at catalyzing scientific progress in their own nations, suppressing breakthroughs in the enemy’s by any means necessary, and culminating in the design of an ultimate superweapon to wipe the other off the map.

  Pugnus, a weapon design project, code named Singularity, began research into quark fission chain reactions to generate the energy capable of ultra-mass destruction. Meanwhile, Brutus started developing an electromagnetic pulse weapon designated Ragnarök. It would produce microwaves that broke chemical bonds by setting atoms in vibration and, when directed at the enemy, would completely obliterate them. Time passed. Regimes changed. Periods of peace punctuated the unending war. The millennium projects staggered from time to time but were never put to a full stop.

  In the end, they were completed at almost the same time, with the quark bomb coming into existence only a week earlier. The state council of Pugnus spent those few days in deliberation, dithering between unleashing total destruction and staying with deterrence tactics. Just then, their spy satellites picked up signals in Brutus of countless high-power radars switching on. Their opponent had launched the first and ultimate strike—the deadly microwaves shall arrive in minutes. The president of Pugnus held his finger above the launch button. His advisor shook her head: nothing can revert this world’s course to death now, so why destroy another before taking its last breath? The president let out a sigh before pressing the red button.

  The snail felt an itch in tentacles, so it brought them in and rubbed them against each other. Pugnus and Brutus were born at the outset of its ascent, and the millenniums and eons that had passed for them were mere seconds to the snail, who remained oblivious that two civilizations just perished on its head.

  For the snail, the droplet was yet beyond its reach, and there was still half the way to go.

  Three

  Chaos

  The lawgiver of the southern galaxies was Speed, the lawgiver of the northern galaxies was Haste, and the lawgiver of the center was Chaos.

  Measuring five kilometers in diameter and approaching a small terrestrial planet in magnitude, Speed was, at least in size, less a living being and more a celestial body. As it turned out, its corporeal self was a layer of crystalline solid wrapped around a planet, stretched over its terrains like floor covering. Lattice vibrations in the crystal is what Speed used to build a basic arithmetic logic unit; then the unit evolved into an advanced, multitiered logical architecture. It was a supercomputer, commanding all silicone-based life-forms in the universe, fueled by none other than radioactive decay in the planetary core, but Speed owed its humble origin to three simple logic gates: OR, AND, NOT.

  Meanwhile, the appearance of Haste was still stranger. It had evolved, consequent of a carbon-fundamentalist movement, into a nebula of clustered nerve fibers. Once upon a time, carbon lives warred against silicone lives; the carbon alliance was losing and driven all the way to the edge of a spiral arm in the Milky Way when a puritan movement broke out across the alliance calling for the destruction of any and all inorganic modules used in assisted computation. Haste commanded all carbon lives, but even so it was helpless against the revolution. The computation matrix employed in military strategy and resource allocation had, too, been blown up by the radicals.

  As a last resort, Haste transformed itself. It grew out its nerve fibers, which provided structural integrity to its body, and placed bimolecular chips at all nodes. Haste also wrote a biological algorithm that did away with binary data, thereby overcoming the propagation delay in signal transmissions inherent to organic bodies, to allow for concurrent processes execution in disjoint parts of its body.

  In the early days of its new anatomy, Haste’s tremendous computing power helped the carbon alliance win battle after battle against all odds. But soon enough, Speed came to the realization that it was no longer a good match to its rival and resolved to forgo tactics. By then, silicon-based lives had taken hold of the majority of resources in the Milky Way, so they took advantage of their reproductive efficiency and advanced through the battlefield by way of suicide attacks against staggering casualty figures.

  Had Chaosnot stepped in, the galaxy would still be mired in infinite, cyclic war and strife. The details of the story did not survive, though one thing was certain: Chaos swayed Speed and Hastetoward peace by demonstrating its own power. Since then, silicone and carbon lives had resigned to their own provinces: one residing in the galaxies on the Scutum-Centaurus arm, and the other in the galaxies on the Perseus arm.

  For long, it remained a mystery just what sort of thing Chaos was, a mystery even Speedand Haste knew very little about. It was less a thing and more a thought insofar as its consciousness did not turn on any single entity. Nor did its existence depend on anything else, including gravity and electromagnetic waves. Chaos was omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent. Some civilizations worshipped it as a god, which Chaos did not endorse; other civilizations hunted after it across the galaxies, and they received no punishment.

  Speed and Haste were the only ones to enjoy the privilege of unilateral communication with Chaos, who seemed to hold the two commanders in certain esteem. The passage of time saw developments to intergalactic space travel technologies that led to the expansion of civilizations from the Milky Way to galaxies beyond. This was a new chapter in history, marked by the easing tension between silicone and carbon lives and the retirement of their commanders to the backstage. Speedand Hastewent on to rove the Milky Way. They became living legends and were revered as lawgivers and spiritual leaders.

  After Speed and Haste moved on from their respective communities, Chaos began reaching out more frequently. It occurred to them that Chaos had started paying more visits to their consciousnesses, as well as exchanging a great deal more information at each visit. In confidence, Chaostaught them lost knowledge and unknown theories and, at times, also answered their questions. Although they did not know Chaos’ reason for doing so, living things as they were, they suspected that Chaos was lonely.

  At last,Chaos reached into both Speed’s and Haste’s minds at the same time, which allowed them to feel Chaos and come face-to-face with each other for the first time. Cautiously, they reached out to each other and attempted to communicate. These two rivals, who had fought for tens of thousands of years, understood at once that despite the astronomical differences in their life-forms, mental structures, and values, in other fundamental ways they were the same. Haste hesitated for a few microseconds before sending its greeting to Speed, which Speed returned in goodwill without dallying.

  Just then, they received Chaos’ neural oscillations. “I am dying.”

  “That’s impossible. Even we can attain immortality, let alone you?” Haste rejected the claim out of incredulity.

  Speed was more prudent. It evaluated Chaos’ declaration carefully and came to its own conclusion. “Chaos was right. It had suggested to us that the universe is an isolated system where, according to the principle of increased entropy, all things eventually and inevitably end in decay.”

  Silence overtook them. Chaos departed, but it left behind a data packet and kept their Speed and Haste in connection. Chaos’ intention was beyond them, so after a brief exchange of opinions, Speed and Chaos began working on decoding the data packet together. Soon, a sea of information came pouring in, and the past lives of Chaos the living being was revealed to the two galactic leaders.

  Chaos’ species originated from a brain parasite. They swayed their hosts to make macro decisions favorable to the parasites without compromising the hosts’ self-determination. At the advent of the age of exploration, the host civilization of this parasite species began to venture outside their own stellar system. When galactic civilizations in the Milky Way came in contact with each other, Chaos’ species flourished through their communication and collision.

  Having absorbed and synthesized the wisdoms of so many civilizations, Chaos’ species surpassed them all and grew to be leader of the pack. During their heyday, the Milky Way was the parasites’ farm for knowledge. These hidden puppet masters raised civilizations as if they were sowing seeds, accelerated their development in all sorts of ways, harvested their technological achievements, and finally destroyed them before they became too difficult to deal with.

  At last, the parasites grew tired of the bondage of corporeality and decided to let go of material existence completely. They succeeded and, as a result, gave up reproduction and lost the possibility of evolution ever again. They were stunned to discover that even the purest minds decay over time and grind to nothing. One after another, Chaos’ fellow beings stepped into the graves they dug themselves. Chaos was the most powerful among them and so survived to this day.

  But now torrents were rising in the depth of its subconscious too. Chaos had an inkling that it had little time left, so it made Speed and Haste know of its last wish. As a parasite, Chaos had no sensory faculty of its own. It perceived the external world only through other living things. But there are a thousand worlds in a thousand lives’ eyes, so Chaos had no integral understanding of the universe that belonged to itself. Its wish was for Speed and Haste to modify the body it once had. Chaos wanted to experience the universe in its essence without mediation before its life slipped away.

  At the end of its message, Chaos left a series of coordinates. A myriad of things went through Speed’s and Haste’s minds; nevertheless, they followed the coordinates, which led them to a cleverly hidden black dwarf. This was the carcass of a star, and at the center of the carcass, they found Chaos’ well-preserved corpse. It looked like a ball of flesh, round and sturdy, with functionally indeterminate appendages and wings. After initial analyses, Speed and Haste found that it was composed mainly of organic matter; in addition, it had a crystalline organ, reminiscent of Speed, and the organ was responsible for reason.

  Speed and Haste did not know how such a strange life could be capable of parasitism. They conjectured that Chaos was the leader of its species and that was why it had such an unusual body. Once they scanned Chaos’ body, Speed and Haste decided on a modification plan. They would implement various external sensory receptors for Chaos, construct a central processor to deal with the external stimuli, and connect the processor to Chaos’ rational organ. Speed and Haste completed their construction nearby on a dead planet that orbited the black dwarf. And if measured from on this planet, their creation took seven sidereal days.

  Now that Speed and Haste’s work was complete, they felt a powerful consciousness descending by them. That was Chaos—about to return to its former body. Then, all of a sudden, this strange ball of flesh showed signs of life. Speed and Haste looked on from the exosphere at this tiny, insignificant thing below: who would have thought that it was once the master of the Milky Way? Chaos sat still and quiet and saw the world for itself for the first time. The universe opened up in front of it.

  It saw flashes of nebulae, the births of stars. Satellites orbit planets, stars heave the Milky Way, their movements unceasing. Heavenly bodies collide, heavenly bodies explode, their sounds a thunderous silence. Species originate, species die, but the transmission of electromagnetic waves was a constant through their ebb and flow. The foldings of space carve out dimensions. Time twists and coils and compels all things to their destiny. Scattered pulsars are the lighthouses that coordinate the universe. Black holes, the graveyards of time and substance, make what is into what is not. The cosmological redshift and the expansion of the universe are never slowing down. Dice fall and wave functions collapse. In lieu of God, the observer determines the outcome. A singularity becomes chaos. Existence reverts to nothingness. Between meaning and meaninglessness, life strikes a balance.

  The presence of Chaos grew dimmer and dimmer. To Speed and Haste it directed its last words:

  My friends, thank you.

  Four

 

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