Author: Logan Smith

In the beginning, humanity looked to the stars, and saw gods.

In their golden age, they went among the stars, as if they were gods.

In the end, when the stars started going out, they found gods.

***

You don’t see a lot of sunsets anymore.

If you do, you stop appreciating them. They stop being neat when you know in your bones what they always precede. A sunset means you happen to be in the right hemisphere of a staging world before the big show. When they eat stars, they usually eat more than one. That’s how we know where to meet them. Watch the night sky, wait for one of the lights to go out, and then shack up in a neighboring solar system.

That’s the irony of it all. You can pack as many paracausal weapons into a warsuit as you like but weaponized mathematics, caedometric suites, and AI don’t mean shit if you don’t have a skin-and-bones human to run it all. Some cruel fucking joke of the universe means the numbers don’t work otherwise. The universal constant. In every observable timeline, it has to be us, which makes just as much sense as the rest of this shit.

We’re an infinite army. It seems that way at least. We’re fighting a billion trillion battles across the observable universe against an enemy from the unobservable. Each and every one of them is a set of paradoxes and quantum violations given form: an unthing that cannot exist and does. They’re an infection from all the universes we aren’t supposed to think about and we’re the antibodies dutifully rushing to the defense.

I don’t see a lot of sunsets anymore. I’m trying to appreciate it, but it’s getting harder. A bunch of us are going to die, some more than once if they get caught in a bad loop. We’re going transatmospheric to fight for a main sequence star hosting an indigenous subluminal civilization. Soon, I’m going to take a backseat to the suite of psychedelics, quantum neural interfaces, and tactical intelligences that does the heavy lifting.

We’re gonna try to kill a god.