465. Exotic matter, 1

(Rose)

They saw us as a species on our own.

B - Us? As a full species? That could be fun. Do you want to reproduce with me?

I laugh, knowing full well she’s mostly joking. Although she could surely follow through if I were to agree.

R - Well, no, not really.

B - What about just making love then?

R - Ehr... Goodness...

She’s laughing now at my inability to refuse just as easily. I hate you.

R - Back to the topic... We keep returning, so to them it’s a little like that. I know it’s more like a new flower blossoming after the previous one has died.

Blume appears lost in thoughts for a moment.

B - Together, we’re a kind of dünyanın çiçekleri I would say. Not a species.

That sounds about right, although we’re setting the definitions and rules as we see fit anyway.

She tickles me then just for the fun of it. That bad flower doesn’t really care about the taxonomy of what we are.

She never did.

R - Okay, okay, I admit! I’m thinking too much, I know. Please, let me go!

But she doesn’t. She tickles me until I forget all about these pointless ideas, and beg for mercy.

~

We see shooting stars during the night. Low orbits are being cleansed over time.

My head resting against her tummy, I fall asleep alongside the lullaby of her slow heartbeat. Blume is Blume.

That night, I dreamt of myself as a species. A picture of me beyond what I am unfolded to my eyes.

Me standing over a field where roses where blossoming. And as time quickly went away, my persona standing there evolved and changed, reflecting everything I’ve been through.

And as it happened, as fingers and scars kept disappearing and reappearing, my hair and skin colour even changing, as my body reflected time, the roses at my feet were spreading.

From one blue rose maybe as a distant start, now withered and long gone. I saw the next shrubs grow and spread, and new flowers bloom alongside the past.

Some pink, some white, some black. Some yellow, and some red.

As I looked at the patterns of bulbs spreading, the silhouette standing there kept rushing through its time like a stranger, sometimes carrying a sword or spreading wings.

The silhouette became blurry from the stains of every change, more amorphous, some printing of presences remaining behind.

While around her, roses withered and vanished, replaced rapidly by new ones a little further.

In the final print, the overall and average portrait still carried my silhouette and shapes, but everything else had turned blurry, emotional, impressionist.

I woke up a little surprised by the lingering sight in my eyes. It was me, facing myself.

As if for a brief moment in that dream, I would have been able to speak to my former self, a previous Rose.

It felt weird.

Reality returns as I remember where I am and that I merely had a weird dream.

B - Rise and shine Rose.

R - Good morning Blume...

B - Looks like you’re still breathing out some of your dreams. Was it nice?

R - I think... I’m happy with what we are, whatever we are.

She tilts her head, as if she didn’t understand what I said. Then she grins. It becomes a simple and happy smile as she goes.

~

What we are walks a little further, looking for a nice place to wait and welcome our friends, whom should arrive shortly with the wondrous ship.

We pass by some broken rocks, struck by thunder it would seem.

Oh look. Another shooting star in bright daylight. It probably was another small satellite falling back to Earth. It happens a lot around here for some reason.

And a little further, we found a new curiosity.

It was like a small natural fountain, a pond with fresh water erupting from something in the middle of it, and flowing around.

And inside that pond, was a black javelin, stuck vertically. A long thin black line in my sight like a hair stuck in my eye. It appeared as a clean cut in the landscape or reality.

The closer we got, the more clear it was. It was a daiûa spore. Not a conscious thing, but one that already bends the laws of nature or physics around it. One of these anomalies that sparkle around the world.

Something not exactly alive, but close to it.

This one has that fully absorbent black that nature has done on various occasions. It absorbs all light on its surface. It’s a unusual shape however. Not exactly mushroom or plant. Maybe more crystalline.

R - So... Now comes the true question. Is this alive?

B - I don’t think so. I can’t detect any metabolism, neither material nor in T.I.

R - So it remains an oddity built by something unknown, but it’s nothing exactly alive today. Something dead then? Is it an artefact?

B - Possibly and no. It doesn’t emit anything so it’s not showing anything useful.

R - What is it then?

B - I’m not sure. I’ll need to examine it closer.

Through the use and influence of T.I., normal matter can be twisted into funny and exotic materials such as this, but usually, it requires the will and maintenance of something alive to structure the T.I. to that specific purpose.

Even if it’s just a few bacteria.

Here... We don’t know yet.

A long needle of some sort. A few metres tall, of a pencil thickness. Perfectly vertical, and unaffected by the surrounding elements. A hair of mystery lost in reality.

B - Curiouser and curiouser!

~

As I was washing my feet and some clothes, Blume was investigating.

After looking around it for a while, she tried touching it with one of her thin tentacles like brambles. Its tip was cut and removed as it touched it. That blackness absorbing all light was also absorbing or dissolving all matter.

B - Uh... It’s like a contracted hole. It’s already filled with water below, but not up there... It’s a contraction of space-time? It’s beyond my understanding in physics.

R - We really need to find that Einstein brain then.

B - Ah ah. My guess here is it’s a form of T.I. we never quite encountered before, with a structure that makes it like that, sharp like a blade for it cuts and swallows all that goes in neatly, but from every direction. It’s a sharp hole of highly contracted space.

R - We have encountered such a thing before then. The dark rain of Magenta was like that. Much longer though. And it all disappeared not long after in that chaos.

B - Maybe a drop of it flew this far back then? And it changed somewhat. Or it’s an older experiment it spat around we just found.

It doesn’t look out of place actually here. It’s as if it has always been there. And it’s not killing anything.

Maybe it’s just similar and nothing related to that other god.

R - Can we make anything useful out of it?

B - Hm. I guess we could try to make a blade out of it. A sword so dangerous it could kill us both if we’re not careful handling it.

R - Then maybe we shouldn’t do it. But you said it would swallow anything we throw at it, right?

B - It looks that way yes. Until it’s full. Then it will likely just be a strange and super heavy rock.

R - It sounds like we could do a hundred useful things with such a power. But... nothing comes to my mind you know.

B - We don’t have to use it.

She’s right. I feel a little bad of my old flaw, and that was odd. We still don’t know what it was, and we left it as it was.

I’m a little unsatisfied, but we move on.

~