Rakih_Elyan
He/Him- 5,311
- 3,738
The speed of light. That the speed of light cannot be surpassed is an iron law of the "normal physical universe." But whence does this normality come? Can only a universe that human logic can perceive and understand be called normal? And are those universes that transcend human understanding, or those that can only be conceived of in human fantasy, "abnormal," things that "should not exist"?
Not so. The universe holds infinite possibilities. This body, which seemed to contain a thousand stars, was not in the "Baryonic Universe" where the speed of light could not be exceeded, but in a "Tachyon Universe," where the base velocity was the speed of light. Here, just as it took infinite energy to accelerate matter to the speed of light, it also took infinite energy to decelerate "matter" down to the speed of light.
An closed her eyes. She recalled the moment of her own birth. A black ocean contained infinite possibilities and logics, countless axioms and concepts.
She was a tree. An Axiom Tree that grew from the deep, infinite void. She came from choice, was born of logic, strong and immense, towering and robust.
And around her were countless, endless other Axiom Trees, just like her. They were weak, slender, unable to grow strong, only able to maintain a simple form of existence.
An couldn't help but think of an analogy: a planet as complex and robust as Terra, teeming with countless forms of life, versus a planet made entirely of pure water, composed only of hydrogen and oxygen.
Even if their mass were the same, and their atomic count identical to the universe, the possibilities they could gestate would be completely different. They might indeed originate from the same "node of choice," both initially being hydrogen and oxygen, but one formed Terra, and the other a giant water ball.
One gave rise to numerous elegant theorems from its axioms; the other was fragile and singular.
It was because she was such a complete Axiom Tree that she could be born.
And the difference between her and her parent body, the Great Swarm of a Thousand Stars, lay in...
She was based on a kind of [Incomplete Theorem].
An undecidable theorem, one whose full scope could not be deduced from an infinite set.
In this universe, there exist things that are "truly true," yet are beyond the reach of human logic, beyond any artificially constructed logical system to touch, attain, prove, or analyze.
Mathematics is such a logical system. As a man-made tool, mathematics is not some system inherent to the universe, yet behind it lies a "platonic universe of mathematics," a "prototypical universe" that transcends human logic and, indeed, all logic.
A kind of truth.
Humans are a race that cannot see the truth, cannot touch the Great Dao. Though they live in the universe, can see electromagnetic waves, touch collections of matter, hear the vibrations of waves, sense the activity and retreat of molecules, and smell the characteristics of specific molecular structures... it is too little, far too little.
To the universe, humanity is still blind.
Although mathematics is merely an artificially constructed logical system, it can serve as a blind person's cane, guiding humanity to explore aspects of this "world of ideas."
But precisely because it is an incomplete tool, human mathematics discovers that there exists a kind of mathematical truth with real meaning whose paradigm transcends any given formal system. Its very existence reveals the limitations of the logical tool itself—that is, one cannot simply start from axioms and use basic logical rules to construct proofs or decide all other propositions.
Within any set of mathematical theories, there must exist some undecidable proposition. A single system of mathematical logic can only prove a part of mathematical truth, while "complete mathematics" itself is inexhaustible.
And from this inexhaustible sequence of theories, by simply taking a part, one can generate a specific kind of "solution" to the truth.
And through such assumptions—these axioms that are "perhaps true, perhaps false"—one can derive many different versions of "mathematics."
—The universe is such a "solution."
Some universes, born from uncountable mathematics—like the "Tachyon Spacetime" adopted by the Thousand Stars fire-kindler—have the speed of light as a lower limit, with no upper speed limit, and cannot use motion to mark spatial distance and temporal evolution.
Other universes lack a conventional—conventional by human logic—spatiotemporal foundation; they are a transcendent whole, a super-structure of mutual inclusion.
Still other universes are static from the beginning, everything a predetermined process, as solid as bedrock.
And in others, everything is a still frame, a three-dimensional cross-section arranged in four dimensions.
And yet other universes, including their infinite parallel spacetimes, are a complete, unified whole, in which every event has a definite "value."
It has no past, present, or future, or rather, the reality of its past, present, and future are all equivalent.
There are even some universes that, from beginning to end, consist of only a single "monad." The consciousness of this monad is itself a loop, an infinite cycle.
The Star Gods, from the very beginning, from the source, constructed the most fundamental logic of being and non-being, and from this logic constructed countless universes, obtaining an infinite and uncountable number of solutions.
That is, the truly infinite universes, and their respective, independent, infinite parallel spacetimes.
A logical system cannot become complete simply by including enough simple arithmetic axioms. These axioms can always be used to construct statements that can neither be proven nor disproven. By taking these statements as additional axioms to enrich itself, one can obtain countless "solutions" that are "derived from itself, yet different from itself."
That is, an infinite variety of offspring.
Because all of this is incomplete, infinitely many different versions of mathematics will branch out like a "tree," extending its boughs. And every "Child of a Thousand Stars" is an "Axiom Tree" gestated from the Thousand Stars fire-kindler.
They are life forms that are compatible with this "Terra Aetheric Universe," absolutely capable of surviving and thriving within it—a life that has "already made its choice before it was born."
The Thousand Stars fire-kindler is just such a vast, self-iterating catalog of complete logical systems, using this screening method to gestate offspring that originate from itself yet are completely different.
The Beast of a Thousand Stars truly mimicked the way the Star Gods hatched universes to construct its own original form, that fire-kindler which hatches the Thousand Stars.
The universes are the children of the Star Gods. The Star Gods stand "outside the logical universe," upon the convergent armament known as the "Great Aetheric Gyre," enveloping all that is. They are the founders who reside outside of logic, the first movers.
Surrounded by countless points of starlight, Ian indeed saw the 'endings.'
The many 'Terminuses' of the universe.
The [Cloud of Annihilation] of heat death, writhing in the silent darkness, waiting in this timeless, eternal moment.
The [Boundless Void] of the big rip, where the light of countless stars separated towards the distant horizon, until the universe, in its eternal motion, stagnated, on the verge of becoming utter emptiness.
The [Deranged Dendrogram] of collapsing timelines, where infinite parallel universes intersected and merged. The total destruction of one parallel universe after another brought forth immense energy, but this energy did not gestate new life, but rather a chaos that could not be defined by any method, an indescribable high-energy cosmos with no time, no space, no vectors, only ever-escalating energy levels and ultimate destruction.
The [Star of Unification] of the big crunch, where all matter, torn apart by gravity, merged into a single black hole. Everything was thrown into chaos by the extreme gravity, the time axis deranged, time itself reversed, an instant becoming an eternity.
The [Great Forgetting of the Seated Dreamer], where the universe originated from the motion of a single monad, and that monad had now stopped. Everything was the monad's dream, the monad's impulse, the will of an In-tellect... and It had chosen to cease, to stop the great dream, and so the universe perished, and all returned to ruin.
Many, many more...
The [Maddened Cosmos] of deranged constants, the [Unborn Egg] of restored symmetry breaking, the [Nirvana Wheel of Time] of an infinite iterative time loop...
Just as the Star Gods could use countless methods to create universes—universes with infinite maximum speeds, universes with reversed time, universes where the speed of light was viscous, universes where all physical laws were artificially modified, universes where the sum of a triangle's angles was greater or less than 180 degrees, alien universes completely independent of the parent universe with entirely anomalous mathematical laws—they could create them all and nurture life within them.
And the Terminus was the 'end' of all 'creation.'
It all happened in an instant.
On Terra, this power set of natural numbers defined by a Cartesian product, this inverted Qabalah unreachable from the bottom up by the four arithmetic operations, the Star Gods had been engaged in an infinite game of perfect information with the Terminus on the first axiom tree it had shaped, a Suslin tree where every chain (branch) and antichain was at most countable.
When the Terminus was victorious, the universe of Terra would fall into the unique ending of the minimal element. Conversely, if the Star Gods were victorious, then the branching number (possibilities) of the universe would be infinite.
Surveying all these dark endings, and the 'starlight' that guided him to see them, Ian finally had an epiphany. "The Terminus... is the universe itself..."
"The Terminus... is a [Created Thing]!"
Everything originates from emptiness, a place of annihilation where nothing exists. That is the source of truth and the Great Dao, a void that transcends emptiness.
The Star Gods were born from it. They were the first brilliance to illuminate the void, the first speck of dust to condense in the wind, the first peaceful slumber and dream, the first note and word to sing of fate.
Brilliance illuminated the deep dream. They created everything, and their creation was the infinite universe itself.
Whether it was the [Pure-Verse] of only mind and infinite possibility, the [Imperial Score] whose trajectory was set by fate, the [Sea of Yesteryear] of life and death's cycle, the [Mortal Realm] where most life resided, the [Fallacy-Verse] where most abnormal universes dwelled, or the [Fool's Place] where everything was indescribable.
All of these were [Created Things]. All of it was it. Light, shadow, fire, water, dust, stone, wind, frost, man, beast, the sapient and non-sapient, all that could be described by words and all that could not, all with names and without names, all existence, was this [Created Thing].
Humanity was born within it. Humans saw this created thing and called it the universe. It is ever-advancing, ever-present without boundary, ever-existing in infinity. All things depend on it for their existence, all of spacetime and all that is are but a part of it, all possibilities and existences are but a part of its set.
Except for one thing.
And that is 'nothingness' itself.
All existence, tangible and intangible, metaphysical, must eventually confront the 'nothingness' of the eternal future. The moment a [Created Thing] is created, it has this inevitable fate, even if that fate is to occur in the infinitely distant future.
But since it will happen, it means it has already happened.
