The Stone Machine
Amongst the infinite dark-matter filled pathways of space from Earth to the boundless planets that exist within the universe, there are two twin stars named Sirloth and Siriur. Around them, there are several planets in orbit, each a different size and home to its own civilisation. The closest planet, Czuria, is the dwelling place of a fittingly named species the Czurs. Characterized by bulbous red tentacles and elongated, cylindrical skulls, the Czurs have no visual stimuli system. It is thus natural that they remain primitive even among non space-faring species. The middle planet, Micregon, is inhabited by a queer species. The planet itself is constantly plagued by conflicts between rival clans. But the last planet, Axace, was where Earth’s contact with the unknown universe first found its purpose.
Axace was said to be a city of immaculacy. It was inhabited by a lively species with an intellect for magnificence. Each of them were 10 Akkads tall, a gargantuan size by Earthly standards. We citizens of Earth are hardly eight feet tall, and our sphere of existence, Earth, is just under 1,000,000 Akkads in circumference. As I had mentioned previously, their size is so colossal that they could be considered miracle workers of impossible human feats. A simple push by an Axacian is equivalent to the force of a thousand man, gathered collectively into a single heave. Despite possessing insurmountable physical energies, Axacians were a race of philosophers and mentalists. They were said to have prided themselves on their highly functioning mental capabilities. Amongst all Axacian inventions, one stood out solely above all others: The Stone Machine. My fellow clansmen have long-held the suspicion behind a replica of sorts residing on Earth, but knowledge of Axace has long since faded into the passing of myth and legend with time.
To those of us who are aware, Axace was plagued by a single predicament, the antithesis to their existence: ever since the conception of the planet, Axacians had suffered the millennia-long glare of the blinding red suns in the eternal daylight. If it was not the unquenchable rage of Sirloth that scorches the crops of Axace, it was the pulsating spears of Siriur that painfully embedded themselves into the skins of these Axacians. This race had never known the meaning of the dark, nor will they ever bask in the silvery shine of the moon.
This giant stone tablet below which I have written these musings is the only inkling of Axacian influence on us humans. From the wise Edimegas, my ancestors had learnt a vast wisdom that comprehend the Stone Machine at its simplest level. And it is now my duty to pass on Edimegas’s wisdom and advice, the remnants of his legacy, to the next generation of the Druids.
Signed: Druid Chieftain Erenor
The Axacians are an ambitious people. Each day, countless new innovations are made. Each day, countless buildings are destroyed to be rebuilt. Each day, countless Axacians venture into unknown foregrounds of knowledge. On Septon 32nd, evolutionary law dictated the birth of an extraordinary young Axacian named Edimegas. Some priests claimed that it was foretold in some signs: after a long drought, there was a faraway cloud on a hill, light and rapid; then, the sky which had long been corroded by the harsh red hue of the suns, was filled with the panicky flight of animals; finally, the Sun God’s temple grew a terrible shadow so big and so vast and so dense that none could pass through it.
The mind of Edimegas, even amongst a race which prided itself on its mental capacity, was one of the most cultivated that they had. He learnt many things from a young age. Where normal Axacian scholars would partake in intellectual pursuit at a medium age of 650, Edimegas was not even 250 years into his life when he studied at the most celebrated colleges of Axace. Towards the age of 450 years, the end of his infancy, young Edimegas had already written a curious book of knowledge on the subject of what us humans collectively call Physics, which was only discovered by Newton and Gauss after many years of investigation. He also propositioned revolutionary architectural reforms to prevent the imminent problems of water scarcity and resource overconsumption. But alone, his ambition and willpower were insufficient to protect the planet from the eternal droughts due to the twin stars.
Edimegas had always known that he was slightly different from the rest of his kin. Take the overseer of his research, an extremely ignorant Axacian who was fanatical in the old ways. The overseer conjectured that the book of Edimegas contained suspicious, rash and heretical propositions. He pursued it vigorously and brought it to court. Despite the immense mental facilities of Edimegas, not even the most spirited defence could change deep-seated beliefs of other equally traditional Axacians who were addled with the infamous curse of obstinance. They were so deeply entrenched in the long-held values of their cyclopean architecture that they had become blinded by their resolute adherence to this wasteful practice. Even when Edimegas touched upon the imminent danger of drought and overheating from the twin suns, he was dealt the affliction of being banished from a court that consisted of little but pettiness and discrimination.
****
Below is a translated record of Edimegas’ journal entries during his yearlong trial:
The overseer, clad in his skull-cap and long medieval tunic of darkened colour, was malicious in his unrelenting hatred. But I expected this, for all living creatures were affected by their emotions. The longer they lived, the stronger their emotions and my overseer’s stubbornness to resist change simply fuelled his hatred. So terrible and intense was his obstinance against my suggested reforms to prevent the apocalyptic droughts, that over the course of this year, his hair grew long and his beard grew beyond repulsive lengths. They were a void of abysmal darkness, slowly but steadily ripping the light away from his gaunt sunken cheeks. Contrary to the great physical energies that reside within our people, the hands of the overseer were elongated, gnarled and paper thin. There was a certain skeletal tone to his physicality as I had never ever seen in my youthful existence. Strangest of all were his eyes, twin orbs of white that had been fixated upon me the entire day of the final trial.
Beyond the archaic doorway embroidered with the barest of blood-red stones, I could vividly hear the indistinct chatter of my fellow kin. They were murmuring but the speed of their dialogue began to slow with a strange precision. The council of elders is a collection of old men and soon they will make their decision. On the first day of the trial, these old men seemed taken with an abject terror once they had heard of the terrible omens described in my book about the natural disasters plaguing Axace. But it was neither lie nor fabrication that I preached, simply the mere inevitability of truth. How could this so-called council simply destroy the entire ambition of my life? The research that I had published on this very topic of droughts and natural disasters, under the watchful eyes of privileged colleges, were all rendered null and void in this instant. It is preposterous that our race, despite our physical and mental capabilities, still refuses to use our mental capacity to our full potential by clinging onto these outdated beliefs that our current method of coping with droughts would suffice in the distant future. While we still hide from the horrors of blinding daylight under the shadows of the past, the twin suns that have long plagued us continue their life-long journey with the monotonous tone of the universe. They do not care for heresy nor tradition.”
So Edimegas listened, with a certain type of venerance, to their strange adherence towards these ancient traditions that would now be responsible for his impending banishment. From that moment on, he reached inwards within himself and felt an invisible, intangible aura coalescing slowly but surely. It was not the swarming of his fear of banishment, but a more intimate and accessible self-belief. Staring at the infinitely growing and dizzying garden of forked paths that was now his future, Edimegas, with all his intellect, chose the only logically favorable fate that was dictated by his instincts. Fuelled by his own ambition to translate his knowledge into impactful reforms for the citizens of Axace, Edimegas smiled in spite of his banishment.
As he uttered these thoughts in the hollow void of his mind, the same swarming aura surged forth around him once more. It seemed as though there was an infinitely saturated layer protecting Edimegas from the cold black manacles to which he was chained. When his eyes finally opened, the tenuous decree of the Council was reached without complaint. And even as Edimegas was hurled from the edge of the capital of Axace and into the exiled lands, there was an indomitable wall that withheld mental and physical harm that others had sought to wreathe upon Edimegas: a wall made of thousands of invisible persons. These persons were himself in other dimensions of the future and time and they jittered amongst each other restlessly in some eternal perpetual motion. So great was the force of this spiritual self-belief amongst himself that when Edimegas raised his head and stared into the great red plains of Axace where no creature had ever lived before, he saw only a single creature, of similar state and build to himself, standing as tall as a statue and beckoning him closer and closer and closer.
****
Diary entry of Edimegas after exile:
By a stroke of chance, I stumbled across the citadel of Urugace, far from the serpentine reaches of Council and safely hidden by the overhanging desert landscape. The citadel was built upon little dried tributaries, none of which ran in a straight line nor any recognizable pattern. Consequently, the absence of methodical and traditional architecture, at least superficially, acted as a camouflage to protect this sanctuary of intellectual freedom from the nefarious grasps of the Council. Here, I was greatly humbled by the charity of these obscure Axacians of genius. There was an abundance of individuals capable of mastering these diverse disciplines of metaphysics, of literature and of mathematics that I had never even thought of, much less heard about! During my sojourn here, I discovered a terrible and unspeakable secret embedded deep within the rumours that plagued the land: the secret of the Stone Machine.
Words did not suffice to describe, for it was a machine so dreadful that none had ever seen nor wanted to see. A mysterious masterpiece, born from desperate desire combined with the infinitude of the knowledge of an entire people. Within the vast depths of the half-faded parchments which documented the architecture of the Stone Machine, the thought of such a machine had struck me with a sensation so oppressive that I was momentarily overcome with suspicion and fear. Fear at the potential of this preposterous machine that apparently contained the secrets of manipulating the universe.
Against the vast depths of inventiveness, I realised that individual achievements of each of these Urugacian scholars were infinitesimally small when compared to the magnitude of potential of the Stone Machine. No amount of finite knowledge produced by this secret society of astronomers, naturologists[1], philanthropists, metaphysicians, scribes, moralists and architects could compare up to the infinitude of the universe that lay in the secrets of the Stone Machine, tantalizingly hanging just beyond my knowledge. The metaphysicist within myself wondered who gave me the authority to control the actions of stars and the cosmos beyond and impart my knowledge, my will upon them. But my life-long ambition beckons and I must not ignore this calling.
****
The geometry of The Stone Machine was composed of different layers: the tactile layer, and the visual layer. The latter corresponds to the ubiquitous form of Euclidean Geometry that existed through the universe. Lines were straight, and circles were curved. From afar, the Stone Machine was composed of a series of stone slabs, ritualistically arranged in a perfect circle, the favorable metaphysical position. Each of these individual stone slabs formed the basis of the geometry of the Stone Machine with the indefinite surface, smooth beyond comparison. This tactile aspect of its smoothness disregarded even the basic law of parallel lines. Thus, each stone slab had an indefinite shape, whether they were rectangles or squares or demented slabs. The Stone Machine emphasizes the importance of greater and lesser concepts, anchoring thoughts of individual Axacians and civilisations to its strange unordinary forms. Starting from the extruded text of hieroglyphs that were ingrained on the microscopic points of the surface, the Stone Machine was hypothesized to contain the eternal and divine workings of the strange Gods that orchestrated the dance of the Universe. These workings, as the original developers of the Stone Machine believed, dictated the workings of human sentience and the probability of different timestreams. Enchanted by the tempestuous lure of omniscience, the original developers of the Stone Machine eventually erased it from all annals of history when they were awoken from their trance-like obsession.
Ever a scholarly Axacian of curiosity, the grievous warnings and hushed tones surrounding the Stone Machine had failed to discourage Edimegas from the pursuit of this mythical relic. Like his predecessors who hypothesized the stone machine, Edimegas was taken by the idea. Unlike his predecessors, Edimegas had much larger views of the galaxy. He took it as his duty to spread his knowledge throughout the galaxy, and forlornly hoped that one day he could return to his home planet without fear of being rejected once more. This journey would eventually span the Milky Way, and eventually he would meet creatures and inhabitants of all planets, from Xerans of the distant system of Andromedas, to the Terrians that resided in Earth of our very own solar system. As accustomed as he was to seeing new things, Edimegas could not stop himself from smiling with the superiority that existed within all of us when he saw the smallness of our solar system and the tiny inhabitants of various planets compared to himself. But as he passed by twin moons that revolved further beyond Mars, Edimegas forged on, having deemed the moons too insignificant for exploration.
Compared to the immaculate structural architecture of Axace, Edimegas discovered that everything on this queer planet known as Terra, or Earth, seemed to be in some disorderly chaos. The architecture of the natural land, the rift between the seas and lands and the creatures and lands and seas all synchronised like a demented orchestra to form the inklings of a functioning civilisation. When Edimegas waded into these same troughs of water to scour for aquamarine life, he observed the small little specks of living organisms — which he coined bacterium for their resemblance to the bacta on Axace— that peacefully swam in even the deepest depths. Under the rippling mirage of the empyrean sky, a strange fondness grew in his youthful heart, for the humanoid fragile lifeforms who were struggling for survival in a vast world, much like he did in his youth, slowly rising to the top as the natural apex of the creature hierarchy. But beyond the seven great seas that spanned Terra, Edimegas could find no hint of life elsewhere other than those same humans that he had found, whether under the deepest canopies of forests or the luscious valleys intertwined between the towering mountain ranges. Past the great Saharian deserts were the arctic tundra, but Edimegas wisely refrained from entering into the domain of the frigid cold.
****
Diary entry of Edimegas upon arrival:
This planet is full of dwarf-like existences which seem to be similarly modelled after our race. Carried by the shimmering tail of a comet that is known as Halley’s comet, and under a beautiful aurora borealis, I landed on here in the local time zone of year 3000BC. My planet Axace, is two-hundred times larger than this planet, and we have over a thousand senses and over 72 different basic colours. These dwarfs, which I will now call Terrians, on the other hand, only have five senses and three different basic colours. After numerous journeys to planets of greatly varying culture and climate, I conclude that all civilisations share the same crucial 3000 traits. Further investigations into the nature of inorganic matter and tendencies of the universe revealed to me a set of laws around which affairs of the entire universe can be classified. These laws will suffice to craft meaningful interactions with the Terrian inhabitants, for they are universal and absolute. Through the mastery of the Stone Machine, these laws are comparable to a task as simple as learning the alphabet. As a corollary of these laws, this planet Terra, just like our home which I have been exiled from for truthful predictions of overpopulation and resource scarcity, is predicted to follow the exact same path that mine did without further guidance.
Edimegas smiled. He did not find this discouraging in the slightest, for it was his chance to guide a civilisation from its infancy and experiment with its growth in ways that he could not have done previously. Perhaps this time round, Edimegas could prevent the inevitable catastrophes that befell his planet, from occurring once more. But there was, unfortunately, a little lacuna in this flow of logic: how would he begin to convey the enormity of his knowledge to a race so horribly equipped to understand the grace of his language? There was no justifiable method for explaining the legitimacy of his knowledge.
So he said that he knew the secret of life. Axacians were no different from humans. All creatures that lived were susceptible to the hidden temptation of forbidden knowledge. This intrinsic desire of superiority, no matter how faint, existed in some form or shape within all species of the vast universe.. Edimegas looked up and down at the Earthly inhabitants . He argued that their people, their worlds, their suns, their oceans, had all been made uniquely for mankind by the Creators, and that the Creators had left a unique indecipherable secret for each race, each planet, each concept in existence. These divine laws, Edimegas claimed, governed the fundamental principles of life and fate. Every path that he had taken, that the people of this new civilisation would take, were determined by these divine laws.
To interpret and master these transcendental laws, Edimegas presented to them the Stone Machine. He claimed that everything would be found in these Hanging Stones of Terra. Looking down on the slabbed tops of cylindrical stone blocks arranged in a ritualistic concentric circle, Edimegas rejoiced with an inextinguishable laughter at the irony of it all. All it took was this single Stone Machine, created from merely several years of rock sculpting, to do what he had never been able to do his entire existence on Axace. Only time would tell the legacy of his success.
According to Edimegas himself, as he spoke to these tribes, they had almost quadrupled in size in these mere years of creating the Stone Machine. Although he spoke with great kindness, that was said to be shared with the gods, to their ambassadors, Edimegas was afraid that they would be overwhelmed by the strange philosophical advice that he has presented to them. He promised them that when their civilisation began to seek metaphysical answers, they would one day be found in this Stone Machine, which the natives had dubbed Stonehenge. When twenty centuries of civilisation would pass, Edimegas claimed that they would hear messages from places not on this planet, and they were to listen to these ideas of strange metal and glass contraptions that could animate themselves, for it would be the solution to their ambition. Finally, they were to mention neither word nor thought of Edimegas and Axace.
****
Extract of a journal from modern descendant of Druid Chieftain Erenor:
Earth’s lengthy records do not contain anything that might indicate the period in which the geological phenomenon known as Stonehenge was constructed, nor does it suggest a plausible reason for the construction of Stonehenge. I have therefore retained a budding suspicion since I first learnt of the object known as Stonehenge: the structure is evidence for the existence of other-worldly creatures on other planets. From a logical perspective, there existed no machine nor men who could bear the weight of a single thousand-tonne stone, let alone multiple. I would not make this claim; far from it. But I would leave other pursuers of my path this warning: “There is no creature alive that cannot achieve what it desires.”
The End
[1] Scholars who study the merging of science and nature
No comments:
Post a Comment