Chapter 1

In the beginning there was everything

It's easier to write this down in the first person; none of the messy indirect speech stuff. None of the 'he did that and then had he'. No.

First of all, nothing happened at that time. Even though there was everything. Does that make any sense? Allow me to more fully explain. Hopefully, by the end of the book it will have made just enough sense to keep reading, and just enough nonsense to get published. At least, if that's how publishers work in the future.

Because I'm from the past. Don't try and calculate the when; it is not a certain time I'm talking about. I've always been from the past, from wherever you place yourself in the streams of time - even if it's essentially wrong to think of time as a constant, unique flow. See, I was there, right from the beginning; a beginning nested in so many beginning before this one.

Believe me, I saw how it all went down. I saw the tiniest of things in the smallest of space and all that crap those folks that call themselves scientists believe in.

That's right, it's a belief. And I'm telling you, I saw all that and then some; believe me if you will, and laugh at me if you won't but it was nothing like these folks have been thinking it was like.

It was everything.

I know it's hard to explain. That's another reason I'm writing this all down. Also, I reckon it's quite important. I've heard talk that some have attempted this before, with a varying degree of success: some went crazy in the process, others simply vanished as if they had never existed.

Before I go any further, I should remind you I wasn't alive all the time in between, so there might be some dark spots. Places and names could be important, but then again it's only one version of events. What matters is ... Everything matters, don't you see?

I guess you don't. I guess you will. That's why my life is out of love. No, wait, that sounds like some gangsta song I picked up on the way. Call it interference.

Anyway. It sounds a bit crazy but things might've started out on a large piece of rock.

-- Nikolai Feiredoun Smith, Precipitative Mnemonics: A theory of Everything of Sorts

Paul was sitting on a comfortably plush pillow, large enough to actually lie down on. His eyes were wide open and his chin touched his chest, as if checking for signs of a strange new life form right in front of his splayed feet. Sadly enough, there was nothing but sand there. A lump of wet sand and some seaweed and twigs made to resemble a castle of some sorts occupied a spot nearby. He hadn't even liked the beach as a kid.

All around hiim, the imagery of a lush lagoon paradise enveloped him warmly. Coconut trees and thick bushes of exotic plants swayed lightly in the breeze. The sounds of a gentle ocean not very far away rose up and down with every new wave. A mellow, reddish sun indiscreetly cast soft shadows in the sapphire-blue sky. Thin clouds paced themselves like ladies in white lace, prancing on a promenade. Waters the color of emeralds only rose up near the sand castle, without ever reaching it. The poor excuse for a sand castle stood as a barrier in that sense, a ramshackle fort between Paul's beach and the wild blue yonder.

It was just a projection though. Paul made it go away. "I don't want to calm down," he said and sighed. The lagoon and everything else that came with it vanished in a jarring fashion, leaving nothing but an opaque black shiny surface behind. An ambient light shone on every surface in the room, its source magnificently obfuscated. "It's not fucking working anyhow," he said and stoop up lazily.

Paul was standing in the middle of a hemispherical chamber, its black walls sorely lacking in distinguishing features, dull rather than imposing in any way. It was meant to be soothing; Paul had begun to loathe the chamber during the past few days.

"At least the sand is real," he said and got up, brushing off the last few grains of sand that clung stubbornly onto the cloth of his pants. A disembodied voice filled the chamber then. It was clean, concise and carried a slightly whimsical tone. It had a carefully tuned characteristic - it sounded neither male nor female. "I like the pants; quite the throwback," the voice said.

"Spare me," replied Paul and rubbed his eyes as if he'd just woken up. He ruffled his black short-cropped hair. He felt nervous and there was noone in there who didn't need to know that. He simply stood there motionless in the middle of the sand-laden chamber for a few moments, his hands firmly dug in his pants' pockets.

His clothing was the most retro feature of his personality; black, cotton-woven pants covered his legs and a green-dyed woolen vest over a white shirt. It was partly a statement - that he couldn't give a damn what people thought about how he looked or what he wore. But they cared about what he did. Lots of people cared, even those that didn't know he even existed.

Paul was considered in many circles and from many perspectives, a weird person. He was medium-built, perhaps a tad shorter than average, his physique unaltered in any way. His brown eyes were possessed of a sparky glint though; the latest in augmented utilitarian optronics. Still, he kept them offline most of the time and allowed them to feed him his surroundings in the most unremarkable, basic human way. Most people who met him in person did not believe a man of his status and responsibility was still, for the most part, a rather dull, limited human being.

That thought always brought a smile to his lips.

Being the Co-ordinating Entity of SMAGMA, the single most powerful conglomerate in the Solar system that controlled the majority of mining zones and industrial facilities scattered between Mars and Jupiter in the exorbitantly rich asteroid belt, was a job lots of people had already died for.

In the few social gatherings he attended for reasons mostly beyond him, it made him a really popular figure. In reality though, it made his head spin most of the time.

"They're still waiting you know," the voice said, trying to remind Paul of the fact without sounding too pushy.

"I know they're waiting. They're being paid to wait. That's the only thing they have to do all the time," he replied and sighed.

"You'll have to agree, they're kind of uneasy. Waiting only multiplies that. I've been told that's not a good thing."

"Steamy little fuckers," Paul said and almost wished he'd picked up some kind of drug addiction along the way. Real drugs though, an actual substance in the bloodstream. Somehow Paul thought biochemically imbalancing your brain was so much better than the purely stimulae-based digital stuff everyone felt it was okay to get absorbed in these days. "It's like we're on TV," he added and scoffed before starting to pace around the room, the sand's abrasive nature not unlike the raspiness in his voice. The disembodied voice tried to sound perplexed, for the sake of conversation.

"How do you mean?"

"You know what I mean, don't play coy with me," Paul said pacing about, waving a finger.

"You've insisted that I sometimes play coy, Paul. I'm an AI, not a mind-reader," the gender-neutral voice replied with a carefully measured level of hurt.

"Sometimes there doesn't seem to be much of a difference, does it?"

"It's just statistics, Paul. Science."

"You mean luck," Paul said derisively looking at his feet. "You're not my friend; don't call me by name. I hate it when people do that," he added.

"I'm not exactly people, though the definition is a bit hazy. I'd say I should be feeling hurt, but then again feelings are supposedly reserved for people, in which case -"

"Just shut the fuck up! I'm trying to think!" Paul shouted and kicked the sand-castle next to him into oblivion, which wasn't that devastating considering its previous state.

A thick silence ensued. Paul sighed, he breethed deeply. He looked more like his usual self again. He tried to relax his muscles, flapping his arms and legs like a runner right before the start of a race. It didn't feel like it was working for him though; he was still tense like a rope made of strands of marble. Hard, but brittle.

"Alright. I'll just have to tell them."

"Just like that?" the AI asked, disbelief carefully modulated in its tone. What Paul was about to do, had ranked really low on the probability estimates and simulations; he'd really taken it by surprise.

"Do they need a fucking picture as well?" Paul growled and stood for a moment before the outline of an immaculate doorway appeared on the black, glass-like surface of the chamber, as if it had been there all along if you just looked at it from the right angle. It reminded Paul of the old, decrepit House of Horrors, leftover from a bygone age of smoke and mirrors, from a childhood that rarely bothered him anymore.

"Smoke and mirrors," he muttered to himself absent-mindedly, and looked at the ceiling overhead, as if he thought he'd heard someone laughing.

"I understand the reference, but not the implied train of thought," the AI chipped in as the door to the chamber opened fully, letting in bright white light flood the limited space of the chamber, the sudden change in ambience painful for the naked human eye. Paul's eyes adjusted automatically, but he squinted nevertheless for just a moment; the memory of sunlight was still strong in the decidedly animal parts of his brain.

"Who the fuck asked you to," he said but stepped outside nevertheless. He felt the hard, unyielding white surface of the nanoceramite surface adjust; it was set to a grassy, earthly feeling.

It will have to do, Paul thought to himself and shuddered involuntarily before clenching his fists and trying to control his breathing in an effort to appear calm. Though he considered himself an accomplished, skilled liar, it wasn't easy to believe in such a bold lie himself. It was one of those rare moments, he really had to convince himself to go through with it.

The thing with lies is, as every half-competent liar knows, that the bigger the lie, the easier it is for people to fall for it.

The problem was, that this time, it was nothing but the godawful truth. And that was the part that was harder to swallow.

A bulky, class F, deep-space suit was floating amidst the shade of a giant piece of rock, gravitating peacefully hundreds of millions of miles away from the Sun. Cold as dead space on one side, hot like a burning stove on the other, somewhere in the multitude of giant rocks the size of small mountains that made up the asteroid zone was mankind's latest frontier.

It was where there was money to be made.

The suit's motions were languid, but premeditated; it propelled itself with very tiny, erratic pulses of ion thrust, computer-controlled but man-made. A man named Khalid wore the suit; it said so on a name plate on the breast of the suit, and on the side of the suit's helmet. His face hid behind the opaque faceplate. it couldn't ve been anyone, but in his heart, Khalid knew he was special. All of God's creations were, he believed.

A nanite unit had been fried by a recent sun storm. Radiation hardened kits was what kept these machines going, and when they failed, it was men that kept them going. It was Khalid's job to replace the NAU and realign the manufacturing satellite to shield it again behind an asteroid without a name, only a number. Unlike Khalid.

The satellite was a non-descript thing, shaped like a giant metal bowling pin. One could feel it humming away when working, chewing through raw energy and resources with the avarice of its makers. It hummed ever so gently while it extracted, purified and stored the precious earths, so ironically mined so far away from the titular tit.

It was too cheap a task for precious, heavy-lift machines to handle; it didn't require a lot of delicacy or ingenuity, and the cost was insignificant next to pulling a MEAU off-schedule to do a job any space-rated human could do. So Khalid had to bring the satellite back in working order. That was his job; everyone had a job to do, out there. No real place to call home, but a job nonetheless.

Out there, farther from Earth than the Earth orbits the Sun, Khalid's mind one way or the other ran in all sorts of directions. There were many things that could go wrong in space, that fact never changed. To ease itself, the mind strays in odd places.

The thought that man had still a long way to go to meet God was something that troubled Khalid when he had the chance to be troubled.

As soon as he drained his suit of any remaining static via an antiquated plug, his hands deftly went to work.

There were other, shorter paths offered in life to meet God than outlasting the universe. There was death, ascension and reincarnation if one believed in those things. These were always supposed to be most likely, but noone really knew - you had to believe, as was the case with many mundane things like paychecks and orbital mechanics. And that troubled Khalid, for in his mind, there was no way God would be so God-damn agnostic. The irony escaped him like droplets of sweat trying to escape his own microgravity.

He unscrewed the access panel with his spanner slowly but steadily applying torque, his body hugging the satellite like a noisy clam hugging to a sun-bleached rock.

And why shouldn't he be, he thought again. It's his right, everything falls under God's domain, even Him perhaps.

But not man.

The panel came off cleanly, hinged by micrometer thick rods, sleek and light as a silvery hair, almost as if this was just a paper toy, a child's dream come alive.

Mankind was like that, like a child. Immature, vainly trying to grow up too fast, too soon. That vain search had always been a beast that needed to be soothed and contained. It was never supposed to simply vanish, to go away though; that would be against nature. There was a purpose to strive for, hidden. And going against nature, was going against God, Khalid thought to himself and wished he could wipe his brow with his gloved hand.

A mute alarm appeared on his helmet's display. It took Khalid more than a healthy amount of time to realise it was time.

He practically dropped everything he was holding, the nanite LRU and the spanner-like hand-tool and let them rotate and gimball, tumbling in space like nuts and bolts and springs from something broken, still tethered to the satellite. He pushed himself against the hull and spun around in an almost random direction, away from the satellite, toward the direction of the sun, leaping into the vacant space with all the grace of a brick.

He thought of the legend of Icarus and couldn't remember the name of the father who had built him waxen wings.

He steadied himself with the suit's microattitude thrusters and straightened himself out like a bulbous, white space coccoon would, shooting farther and farther away while the alert blasted on full only for him to hear.

"Khal, what the fuck?" rang a woman's voice inside his helmet. It was Echo-Twenty-Two, the pod pilot orbiting the manufacturing satellite a few hundred feet away, idly checking up on IPN traffic, snug in her pilot's shell, completely oblivious to anything else than her screens and monitors.

"It is time for Qiblah," said Khalid and facing the Earth, a dull little black spot in front of the sun he could barely see at 10x optical and 100x reconstructed zoom, he began the morning's prayers.

"Right, right. Of all the people, I get stuck with you," Echo said and began munching on something audibly, the sound of her eating carried over as perfectly as her voice. No static, yet clearly, nothing but noise.

Khalid tried to ignore her and for the most part he managed to. But while he was praying to God, that higher power that be, the most benevolent and wise entity that had created everything in abundant wisdom, he couldn't help but feel a deep need to shout to Echo for her to shut up, mind her own business and leave him be in peace until the God-damn prayer was over.

"Come on, they're not paying us by the hour," she blurted while Khalid wasn't even finished praying, much less finished repairing the satellite that had them out on such a rare occasion, on such a glib morning, even when the Sun still stood there all the time, and night was but half a rotation and a minute away.

"Allahu Ahkbar," he whispered and used the microthrusters on the gloves and feet of the suit to realign himself towards the satellite. From where Echo stood, it looked like someone was trying to climb up an invisible ladder, awkwardly sliding on a sheet of ice on all fours at the same time.

"You're fucking hilarious, man," Echo said and clicked off with the echoes of an irritating laughter.

Khalid though, having said his prayers and cleared his mind, felt he was a good man, a righteous man, a man that lived by God when he could, and sought his forgiveness when he couldn't. That was one of those times he knew he'd feel sorry for later, but felt it was his God given right as nothing but flesh and blood human, to lose it for just one moment. He very rarely did; maybe it was the day he should, maybe not. God provides, he thought.

Understandably so, he cut the line to the nanite LRU and flung it with all his might roughly toward Earth, which stood no larger than a shiny speck and as far as he could hope for, roughly toward where Meccah stood once. The little metal shiny box spun around wildly and away, like a very expensive coin falling endlessly towards the very precise equivalent of a wishing gravity well. Khalid smiled from within his visor, only for him to see in his hazy reflection.