Author: A. R. Carrasco

Necrology enthralled the children of Planet Symbiote.

An eight-year-old with slicked-back obsidian locks raised his hand.

“Yes, Dameion,” responded Dr. Franzheim Harrow before taking a gulp of water from his Fullman brand smartbottle.

Dameon asked, “If a star is born and then dies, isn’t that… natural?”

“No. It’s not. Can anyone explain why?” Franzheim asked the class.

The Fullman energy-fueled smartbottle of Dr. Harrow replied in the voice of an old man with a thick German accent, “Birth and death are not natural in the case of stars just as it is not natural in the case of an apple, an enslaved creature, or a piece of symphony music. The genesis of all cases is determined, not by nature, but instead, by its converse…”

“Thank you, Max. Can someone please elaborate? Perhaps you’d like a second go, Dameon?”

Dameon placed his hands behind his head and began to exhale the best words his mind could muster, “The opposite of the natural is the artificial. So…when a star is born, it is born through an artifice…”

“Yes, thank you, Dameon, a necrological artifice. As we discussed last week, a necrological artifice contains three laws. Who recalls the three laws?”

The neon numbers atop the seafoam green bottle of water disappeared. In their place, a string of pulsating dots trembled as the artificially intelligent voice spoke loud and quick, “Law, beginning parenthesis, one, end parenthesis, states power is never created nor destroyed, remaining forever constant. Law, beginning parenthesis, two, end parenthesis, states creation and destruction are the interpolar constant qualities of power. Law, beginning parenthesis, three, end parenthesis, states the degree to which creation attracts destruction varies directly as the product of the necrological mass of an object and inversely as the square of the difference between life and death.”

“Thanks, Max, you’re on a Kaiser roll today,” Dr. Harrow joked. To the class, Franzheim required the class to review Sir Isaac Newton’s first Earth publication. He explained the work “revealed to the world that color is not an innate quality of any particular object. Instead, color is the product of a natural artifice called light. In one beam of light exists every color. Can someone, other than the loquacious Mr. Weber, please provide the connective tissue we still require? We can go outside for our new moon snack as soon as I hear from someone I haven’t heard from today.”