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Revenge of the Post-Historic Skeletal Polyhedrons, by WD Sparrow

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In the beginning… well it must be explained that to begin this story with a beginning would be something of a misnomer. But we have to start somewhere, if only to pander to our own crippled concepts of causality, so we shall say that once upon a time there was a race of creatures. They had no name, for they had long since evolved beyond concepts of self-identity. They were a race of beautiful alien beings, near-perfect and perfectly mindless, so advanced that they had no concept of the individual members of their species, for they were of one mass of life, in constant self-destruction and regeneration.

They had got this far by means of finding what one might call the right way. Long ago in the origins of their kind, they had found after countless millennia and anti-millennia of searching and wandering, this lovely and fruitful path in the time-complex, a path of events which they had evolved along into an asocial utopia, a path that had taken them to the edge of perfect immortality.

For time, to the rest of the universe is more like a tree than a conveyor belt, whatever we may have been led to believe. A tree that has an infinity of branches and roots (though some of the more advanced races, who have rejected the barbaric notion of conceptualism, do not distinguish between either, and there are some yet more advanced who, discarding the primitive limits of consciousness, have no thoughts of trees, or indeed of anything else). At any point in time there are, as you may have gathered, an infinite amount of possible outcomes to the present, creating an infinite amount of possible paths to travel. Even so, to counterbalance this rather lopsided earth-bound viewpoint, it can be said with equal truth that there is, for every event in time, an infinite number of possible causes.

The majority of life in existence can travel both forwards and backwards in time with varying degrees of difficulty. This is all dependent on the delicate matter of time agility. Some rather time-weighty and over-social races have to overcome the problems of time-momentum. Once they get going on one of the innumerable and forever reaching paths of time, it takes them quite an effort to slow down and stop, should they decide to do so. This is primarily caused by the antiquated notions of morality and individuation, which slow down and dissipate the effective time-will of the race.

I give as an example one particular race of rubbery grey cylinders, who managed to escape certain Armageddon for their race by a nifty change of direction, only to find that they had reversed down an unfortunate time-track towards their total enslavement by a race of powerful atomic pulses. They are thus doomed to shunt backwards and forwards between two equally unsavoury brinks of oblivion. There are a few unusual cases of creatures caught on circular time-paths, going round in a subtle cycle of evolution and devolution, always coming close to a realisation of their dilemma, (and thus the possibility of escape), but then reaching their starting point they forget all about it, and begin again on their hopeless path. Other creatures whizz back and forth along the time-tracks at will, finding new tributaries and shoots, and returning to more familiar branches when disaster threatens their futures (or their pasts). Some beings find a nice, optimistic, prosperous time in their civilisation’s history, and then just sit down and stop their time altogether, a phenomenon known as time-picnicking!

Of the many races still struggling out of primeval self-consciousness, humanity is unique in that its thought patterns are exclusively constructed around the fallacy of a single and unbending direction of time. Most life-forms are well adapted to think along both forward and backward time-streams without encountering conceptual paradoxes. Humans, however, are most likely to consider the reversing of their current time-direction as an unravelling or undoing of their current position of consciousness. Their bizarre ideas of causality are much at fault here. Humanity is wont to claim, in its limited experience of the time-complex, that events come about solely because of certain preceding causes, whether those cause are known or otherwise. This is in ignorance of the understanding of much of the universe’s life-forms who have the flexibility to see time in terms of causes coming about because of certain naturally postceding outcomes.

The chronological isolation of the Earth can be cited as a major contributory factor in their outdated constructions of pre-cosmic unparanoia. The consensus of belief among humans tends to dismiss the threat of alien invasion, of even of any alien life-form other than their own as a fiction. All this despite (or perhaps because of, as we shall later see) the fact that the Earth has been one of the most notable victims of inter-chronological interference.

But I digress, for I spoke of a time which once was, a glorious day far removed from our own time, and receding further from our grasp with each busy hour. And though I say “day”, I use the word lightly, for it was more probably a moment of the imperceptible sliding and shifting of life, when one race among many would attain perfection.

This moment, when it arrived (or nearly did) was no surprise to a particular rival race of advanced time-travellers. These creatures had adapted through the eons of their evolution, from origins as complex social beings enslaved by their primitive technology-worship, into the form of many-limbed skeletal polyhedrons. When tessellated they could build vast replicas of their individual selves, with powerful hive minds capable of the most delicate and gymnastic manoeuvres in time-navigation. Prophesy was a skill that came naturally to them, for as they amassed their bodies into symmetrical oneness, the great mind could, by observation of the patterns by which it expanded and gathered its siblings together, calculate the development of specific events along different time-paths. They predicted their choice of futures by an intimate knowledge of their own growth patterns. No race, save their afore-mentioned rivals had progressed so far as to need no tools or instruments beyond their own bodies to measure with.

They could also visit the future via a more direct and penetrative method: by sending out scouts. Detachments of polyhedrons would be sent out to explore tangential time-paths, and return to the original hive at an agreed later point of synchronicity (identical events in two separate time-paths by means of which time can be spliced together). One must assume that it was by this method of future knowledge that the polyhedronal explorers gained advance warning of their rivals’ near evolutionary triumph. Scouts reported back to the mother conglomerate, that beyond a certain distance along any viable time trajectory, all life fell under the insidious influence of their rivals, who in post-amoebal immortality effectively controlled the entire universe. It was a fate that could not be tolerated by the ambitious race of polyhedrons, but they had no chance of competing with such an overwhelming lack of sophistication. The polyhedrons still relied upon precise but unreliable self-scrutiny to chart their ­futures, and although their methods were beyond the capabilities of most life-forms they had encountered, this new race of life felt its way along its time, swayed it seemed by mere chance.

This race, who I must now reveal are the ancient precestors of humanity, became the victims of a trap, a cunning and deadly trap laid for them by the skeletal polyhedrons. The trap was intensely complex, so much so that the polyhedrons had to devolve somewhat in a reverse trajectory for several millennia before they could rediscover technology sophisticated enough to calculate the intricate twists and adjustments that they would have to make to the time-complex.

In short, their plan involved travelling backwards from a future point a little beyond our precestors’ accession to the throne of all existence, to create an event that mirrored in every way the circumstances which led our aftfathers into the realms of immortality. In their confusion, our precestral victims chose the wrong path, pushed along only by a will to attain their ideal. Far from churning their single-celled bodies into a pulp of indivisible and indestructible life, the path drew them in a cunning and hidden loop which sent them backwards, dividing and degenerating into more and more differentiated and specialized life-forms.

Having no minds, the amoebae could not realise any of this. After only a short trip along the treacherous backwards time-path, the polyhedrons’ loop devolved them beyond all ability to influence their direction in time. They regressed from self-reproducing single-celled amoebae to multi-celled invertebrates, and thence along a sorry and familiar decline into gilled water breathing vertebrates and photosynthesizing plant forms. They split into two distinct sexes, thus beginning the unfortunate disappearance of social interchangability. The creatures multiplied in quantity and type, forming separate species that could not interbreed, as they fell hopelessly backwards through time. Soon their native planet was disturbed by competing and multifarious species of insect, plant and fish, all participating in complex and inescapable food chains and ecologies, rapidly losing the adaptability and freedom that came from simplicity.

Before long clumsy reptiles and amphibians were staggering onto land, developing into large

And environment-dependent lizards. Lizards were replaced by mammals: increasingly social species whose needs were more complex and who wasted their energies on bizarre self-referential social duties, and in regressive tool making. The most degraded and self-conscious of these mammals soon began to pursue the task of enmeshing themselves in technological and psychological hierarchies, of inventing languages with which to distance themselves from each other, and of destroying the more promising species of animal and plant life which blocked the way to their own abasement.

It is hardly a surprise that they found themselves digging deeper and deeper into the obscure origins out of which most races of the universe have struggled to escape. They stumbled unknowingly and voluntarily into the grotesque traps of self-identity and philosophy, government and commerce. They wandered bleakly amid the primeval slime of art and literature, of capitalism and religion, into self-defeating spirals of technology and self-awareness. They acquired plagues of information which undermined them, and buried themselves under deluges of artefacts.

The humans of Earth are now doomed to tread this pathetic one-way system of time. While aII around them carefree alien races frolic in the curlicues and baroque swirls of the time tree, humanity sits like a man in a boat, being swept helplessly over gushing rapids, as the rumbling of a distant Niagara grows more distinct.

Curiously enough, the humans did get one thing right in their typically backwards way. There is much pessimism amid their various cultures as to the future of their race. Many foresee impending doom for all. What they cannot realise is that it is not their end which is terrible (for to come to an end was a trophy they barely missed). What they have to fear is their beginnings.

W.D. Sparrow