ENGINEERING A COCKEYED CONTINUUM
MAY 24, 2011. Well, we tried to build a universe, you know, a really big one, but it kept falling apart. They shipped in some seal they said was unbeatable, but that didn’t even begin to help close the cracks.
It must have been a design flaw, but the architects swore it wasn’t their fault. And the bio-labs were useless.
The engineers tried, but they were on patch-patch duty around the clock, and then big sections caved in and blew out through the wormholes.
It was a mess.
One guy, I don’t know, some kind of nomad on independent contract, just laughed and told us we were going about it the wrong way. He said all we needed to do was stand back and set up a really good movie projector. Something like that. Nobody paid any attention to him.
Then, finally, a domehead scholar showed up, and in three days he solved the whole problem.
Religion.
Going that way brought everything into focus.
Turned out it was the universal seal, and those huge drifting pieces came back together like filings drawn to a magnet.
Of course, you then convince the inhabitants they need to bow and scrape and believe in one creative force that lies outside themselves. You can sidestep the need to appoint actual deities by claiming they’re all invisible. That would be a tough sell for about five minutes, and then everybody would settle in.
Just a matter of transference (non-Freudian), through which the inhabitants yield up their native capacity to do magic to gods they’ll never see or know.
When, in the general population, symptoms of “magic-repression” rear their heads, you call it something else, and you distract everybody by inventing ceremonies and rituals.
Scriptures are nice. Particularly, if they’re said to have been found rather than concocted.
Eventually, people won’t even know what you mean by the word magic. They’ll claim they’re confused, it doesn’t makes sense, it must have happened in a distant past too obscure to reconstruct.
Centuries later, everybody is used to being inside the continuum. Permanently.
Of course, that wasn’t what the original designers had in mind when they started building the universe, but they were willing to make sacrifices to get the job done.
And that movie projector deal was apparently too far-out for them to grasp. They could have saved themselves a whole lot of time and suffering, if they’d caught on to the concept that reality can be manufactured whole-hog. Boom. It doesn’t need piecemeal construction at all.
You put one guy in the Void, which is to say, you ask him to stop creating altogether, and once he does that and gets used to the state of mind, he unrolls a whole universe from scratch, from nothing, in a few minutes, at most.
If you want to go into his continuum and see what’s it like when he’s done, you can. But there are no gods, there is no ritual, there are no hierarchies, and there is no contention of SACREDNESS about his art.
And the measurements of things? You know, the fact that a leaf on a nut tree is 5.1265 to the length of its 12.4902 branch…and that ratio is also found in the eye to the nose of a certain fish and the horn to the leg of a particular mammoth and the tooth to the jaw of a monkey…it was just the way it was. Interesting, but no big deal.
You can visit this universe whenever you want to. And leave, too. There aren’t any entrance or exit signs. You just hop in and hop out.
It might be fun, it might be thrilling, it might be ecstatic, it might be boring. Up to you to decide.
You don’t like this one, there are plenty of others to see.
One—that is to say, the illusion there is only one—is always a problem. The continuum that has Earth in it—they call it the physical universe. To a lot of people who look at it from the outside, it’s a joke, because, well, the illusion is operating there. All manner of weird things going on. The pride in living in the “only one,” the continuous manufacturing of humility, too, as the flip side of that coin. Those people are really bizarre. Even the scientists. They keep figuring out more and more about the construction details—which, of course, is okay, if that’s what they want to do—but what do they have in the end? What do they think is going to be the result of all that work? Seems like another twist on religion. You could just hand them a complete set of blueprints, but they’d probably make a Scripture out of it. I once knew a guy off the X-145 who tried to set himself up as a god in one of these continua. No, really. He’d come out on his balcony every morning in a multi-colored bathrobe and holding, what was it, a lamp in his hand. I forget what it was supposed to signify.
He could talk, I’ll give him that. And he’d draw small crowds. But they thought he was funny. They laughed and took pictures. The guy said he had created that continuum and therefore he was in charge of it. I mean, even if he had made it (which he hadn’t), so what? He could suddenly make up all sorts of rules? The only basic rule is, don’t punch a hole in a continuum somebody else created. That is, unless it’s one of those “only ones,” and the people there need a kick in the pants…
JON RAPPOPORT
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