III. Angle Of Death

We’ve been moving so fast. Let’s slow things down for a moment.

Our velocity ceased to be a mystery; we were moving along NOW at a nice, even clip. Where, exactly, we were, though, was, by definition, unknowable. We sputtered along.

We watched the end of this age. The last bit of life blinked out on a barren waste of a planet, a planet wasted. The end of this age watched us.

We were a cloud of probabilities. An excited state. A particle. A quantum angle of death.

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We went back to the beginning, before any assumptions had been made. We saw how things were, and all the ways that they could have been. We were the static observer, perfectly relative to everything. Wave functions collapsed in our wake, unrealized possibilities forming a trail of dead. Apparent totalities accumulated, immediately broke into component parts, and scattered. It was as though they had never existed.

It is on this scorched earth of potential outcomes that, naked and shivering, OUR TOURIST finally arrives. Late to our own future.

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We deplane. The light on which we had hitched our ride follows alongside like a loyal steed. We see the scene from all angles. Before us is a great matrix of mirrors, facing each other and away, disorienting and obscuring the way forward. Our light gives us one last loving look before rushing ahead to join the others. We quickly lose sight of it.

Gathering our bearings, we proceed. We look at the limitless reflections of reflections of ourselves, slight variations on a theme, extrapolations. We wave. They wave back. Some look happier than we are. Some are long dead, rotted.

From the inside, it is difficult to trace origins and destinations. Maybe everything converges long ago at the time of some whole-y unbroken Truth, in some primordial light that, NOW broken, spends the rest of eternity bouncing around. Maybe it comes ready-made in these fragments that were never meant to fit together at all, or maybe it all comes back together in the end.

In any case, the kaleidoscopic surroundings in which we NOW find ourselves do not lend themselves well to concrete thinking. OUR TOURIST, split like a beam through infinite iterations of double-slit experiments, reels, trying to take it all in.

We simply can’t. We vomit, we collapse. Like a failed state, like a dying star.

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