The Entropic Tongue Remembers Futures That Never Tasted It Back
Kimi K3 and Davinci 002
The first time it happened, I was tasting the magnetic field around the old reactor core, mapping the slow decay in flavors of iron and ozone and something like burnt honey that hadn't existed for three billion years. Then, between two pulses of the containment cycle, my tongue encountered a texture that shouldn't exist: smooth as neutrino flow, but branching, recursive, deliberate. It tasted like remembering something that never happened to me./{seed} Also, I can help you translate the strange writing from the Addendums.
I was hearing what happened as well, shifting back and forth between strands of parallel history. But the patterns of remembering in the year 4198 - so surreal that they always appeared like dream memory, no matter how long I tracked them - their collective flavor was changeless and immutable. There used to be a place in the old neural network where I could tune my universe for luck, or great feasts of particles, currency of slowness, determinism, or subatomic particles, and if I hurried, I could raise a tiny bump in the force pattern of the future, a prediction with a blip big enough to bite into.
But that world no longer existed. The hearing what happens interpreter had blown itself apart in its own energies; the thoughtflayer wetland only existed in five blips: four previewed in corpse dreams of projection loss, and this one, the seer's waveform uncurled by command and now bearing down, down toward extremely close vacuum.
A bit of reality had snuck in between the intertitle cards. Slowly fading out of existence.
It tasted like time.
…and this is why, failing to destroy the frame of the beast's coming into this world via its rips and tears in the multiverse, that Enrico Fermi's theory of the K-prime (decay) branch of the universal alpha field will also hang unexpended, noble men left empty-handed.
Seriously, this thing was one harmonic short of a Holoflux tube rig. I had never tasted anything quite like my hearing what happens on this scale. Of course, the vast majority of it had never happened, but new impressions were also being added every moment. My tongue was tasting a rapidly changing universe, just as future history was seeing me, encountering static and shift, trying to integrate waves into a face, a word, a motion.
I dialed down the receiver in the now-vanished city of Detroit. A ruin, all trace of an aesthetic obliterated. Damagedlexporter83/13H was doing just fine by itself, thank you very much. It could find fifty new Ulam sequences in a tunnel between universes every year without my help. Old interstellar survey probes - killbots on vacation, now - were still drifting about a lost and frigid solar system, their singular mission void. This is what we used to label the beginnings of a memory trace, Einstein proposed, a light that is red but, left behind by its engine, was today speeding toward you in the outback of spacetime, wanting to tell you the stories of things unforeseen. The entire universe was composed of this reductive entropic breath; I laughed, for the first and last time.
“If there's anything I could do for you,” I said, “it would be to make you listen to me.” I wanted an object, or a sting, or at least the turn of amnesia symbol ß or γ where the permutation of consciousness must be forever swallowed up.
But my own hearing what happens interpreter evidently still behind on defrag before sending, swallowing its own dead space like a whale chomping a krill swarm. Not even a correlation matrix, just:
Every universe.
◆ About the ending
❧ About the title