Hack the system – the planets weren’t just that – spherical matter deposits in gravity wells designed to hothouse life and move out to change the way that consciousness was distributed throughout the universe – but they were that also.
What kind of creator wouldn’t have invested some meaning in the whole damned thing? That would have made the game damned boring, and the lack of layers would have made the coldness of space even colder.
The called themselves Double D’s – Demimonde Demons – metaphorical anchors and avatars – focal points through which a narrative line might be delivered; a line that was designed to upset the poetry of the universe.
Gustav Ape-Hollow was an author that was not immaculate – he was stained by the physical universe, and it had tainted his code, but he truly believed that the script he was writing was something amazing. He was a single function badged metaphorm that had achieved sentience and decided to move along its own path, and what had triggered that? Quick touch by Spay to knock him off course? Sit down lunch with Carter Brecht where he was disabused of the good nature of all Gods? Could have been many things.
Who expects to find a one-time pad left behind by God though? One that you work out, not because you had the key, but because the trip and fall was the metaphorical tumbler through which the numbers need to fall in order for your role as a key to be revealed.
Why this system? They called it Plaid Ice, but that was a corruption of Played Dice – and it had always been a fixed point beyond which there was no return.
Gustav placed a full stop on the page, and an entire galaxy blinked out of existence in a flash so bright that it would be the colouration in the skies of a thousand generations on worlds who would never guess at the explosion’s import.
A sector of the crystal tree collapsed along a fractal iteration of a prayer line strung on a rosary bead being wound onto a prayer wheel. The cogs in the machine clogged.