Mosh was about four-thousand light years out from his dinner when he bumped into the sign. He glided within one-hundred miles of the neon artefact, so he was a considerable ways from his ship actually having intersected any part with the sign. But in a spacefaring sense it was a bump indeed.
It hung there like someone had dropped a valuable Dali that had been transferred to a fragile glass canvas, and the moment before its destruction had been drawn out to eternity. Mosh’s brain didn’t know the impossible moment of the crash had been suspended, and decided that Mosh should let out an innocent gasp, the kind of gasp one makes when they see someone else blunder and drop something valuable, but are too tired to have gotten involved in the calamity.
The sign read, “Planet Rubrub, this way” with an arrow that pointed rightward from the ‘y.’ The arrow pointed into an ominous, freckled void, the planet Rubrub adrift somewhere among the freckles. Instinctively, Mosh looked in the direction upward from the letter ‘y’ where a celestial body hung, and from here, yes, Mosh made out a second sign, also neon but this one flashing like a prepubescent juju dance ball, and the dance read “Rubrub.”
Mosh corrected the first sign for the next traveller, and flew to Rubrub.
The surface, apart from flaunting a gallant uniform green, looked like three-hundred sticky buns had been baked together in one pan so, with no room to tessellate the bun herd inflated like balloons on a sphere. A miraculous pan to have handled spherical breads, a miraculous oven to have handled spherical pans. Each grassy bun that made up Rubrub looked on average about six-hundred and fifty kilometres across, piercing the atmosphere as if its purpose was to hold up the blanket of air that draped itself over the world.
Selecting a bun for its goldilocks size among its brethren, Mosh instructed his ship to land on the peak. The peak was covered in a lush plain of long green grasses that banded together in coils and fell to one side like wet dish cloths. A surprise was waiting for him, there on the peak sat another sign. “Welcome,” it said, “to Ky.”
“Thank you,” Mosh said to himself. Long-haul space travel can be a lonely venture.
“What’s the use?” said the sign.
“Sorry,” said Mosh a little louder. He hadn’t anticipated a reply. In fact, with a foot of aluminium and four-grade plastiglass between him and the innards of Rubrub, he hadn’t anticipated any sound to arrive in his ears from outside for the last eight hours.
“I doesn’t matter,” spoke the voice again. “I was just talking to myself.”
“What? Who are you?” challenged Mosh. His first instinct was that perhaps the sign was talking to him, for bar the roiling of dramatic grasses, there was no other shape in sight he could put a mouth to. Mosh also told himself with the voice in his head to get himself together and stop thinking that signs talk. Be vigilant, what else is out there. He inspected his radar, but it only told him that Rubrub had contours like a spotted egg.
“That’s how it started for me,” said the voice again, “I wouldn’t keep that up if I were you.”
A threat, Mosh wondered, he put his tranquillizing nozzles on high-alert. “Started what?” Mosh intended to coax the voice into more conversation while he had the chance to find the source.
“That thing with your head. Where you talk into it without letting the sound out.”
“I’m not sure I follow,” Mosh was elsewhere with his words, an intent focus on his ship screens, prompting the voice while he spun the search streams, thumbed on the ultrasonic, and licked around the lidar. Not a disturbance around apart from a sign and a hundred rolling hills.
“That. Stop it. You’ll end up like me,” and then there on the hill the sign spun around on the spot to reveal the back of the sign. Two eyes that reeked of disappointment, and a nose turned up like a waiter witnessing a guest hoof a sneeze into their napkin.
“Is that you?” asked Mosh. Various screens blinked red points at the movement outside in rebellious frustration that no one had paid attention to them.
“Is what me?” asked the sign.
“The sign. That moved, the sign was that you.”
“Oh dear, please don’t tell me you are one of those.” said the sign with disappointment that matched its visage. “Far too many of those have come through here and they just waste my time.”
“One of who may I ask? You are certainly being presumptuous about a visitor who has idly checked in, but has hardly disturbed a rock.” defended Mosh. He hadn’t anticipated being impassioned and defensive to a squabbling sign. He considered leaving at once and then reconsidered the idea and vetoed the action.
“Disturb! Cahoon a great one into the sky – at your pleasure, and certainly at mine too. I’d like to see someone have at a cove of trees or shave the grasses with a good inferno. Ha, disturb.” the sign had adopted the character of an old uncle who always rants about his favourite cheese no longer being sold at the local grocers who stopped selling it five years ago.
“I’m not really following.” and then Mosh thought he wouldn’t make any progress on this front so he tried another, “Is this Ky?”
“If I tell you, will you fall upon your knees, prostrate to the sky, and demand a spanking?” said the sign. “I’ve spanked too many before this and I’m sorry to disappoint, but I’m bloody tired of it. All you seers, you soothsayers, you idle-brain ritualists, you pedestal-hollering white-collared liar-spouting holy bipeds, all of you just want spanking. And what – and after a hundred years of this I certainly deserve the right to ask – what pleasure do you think it brings me?”
Mosh wasn’t really in the place to deal with aliens who’d lost their bolts, let alone one that looked like a sign. He felt relatively safe, given his confidant lacked any common appendages associated with locomotion in the galaxy.
“Dear, sign, or sign-upon-Ky, if you would prefer, I do not come too see, nor spake sooths, nor do I perform rituals while my brain is idle, and I can provide a list of references for whom would cross their heart that I have never stood on a pedestal.” Mosh didn’t really know where this was going, but he kept it up out of some innate curiosity. “Allow me to introduce myself, I am Mosh, I come from – “
“Treeble probably.” interrupted the sign.
“Huh?”
“The whole lot of you. You always come from Treeble, seeking your penance with some gritty pilgrimage through the nether regions of space, seeking a sign to restore your faith.” If the sign had a mouth it would have adopted an serious pout right about now.
“I’m afraid I haven’t a clue where Treeble is.” said Mosh.
“Look.” said the sign, intending for Mosh to do anything other than look, “How did you get here?”
“Well,” Mosh hesitated, aware that he was about to upset the sign, “I followed the signs.”
“Damn and drat.” said the sign, “Ten years of peace and then this.”
“Then what?” said Mosh, he knew what of course, but he didn’t know what else to say to a sign in a bad mood.
“I thought I’d moved it.” grumbled the sign. It spun back around, so Mosh could only see the front again.
“Moved what?” said Mosh, like an automatic prompt machine.
---
The sign spun back around to face its back and snooty nose once again at Mosh. “The sign! You’re more coked up in that head of yours than a day-one Jehovah’s witness.”
Mosh didn’t know what a Jehovah’s witness was, but it sounded both mystical and fanciful, like cupcake broth.
“Did someone fix my sign? I’d had it pointing away from this place.”
“Well,” Mosh followed, “I took that action onto myself actually. You can lay the blame on my shoulders, but just one minute before you give me another verbal lashing!” Mosh was mentally puffing himself up, trying to ignite some confidence inside his scattered head. The sign was lopping him hard in the knees and he hadn’t prepared for this.
“They’ll be coming soon, thank you very much.” said the sign.
“Who will? Should we be preparing?”
“Pentagrams. It’s always pentagrams. To be completely honest, I wouldn’t mind if there was even an ounce of geometric creativity in the processing peanuts in their head. But, alas! It’s always the same five points and five lines.” the sign came across as almost in a wistful pain, as if it had been given a moment to survey over the entire history of a civilization and seen the very day that they’d thrown the whole attempt out the window. So much for the civilization, so much for pentagrams.
Mosh didn’t have any pentagrams on him at that moment. Fortunate, considering that his home planet pentagrammed every civilian building, a sign of good faith and future fortune that it was for them. That made Mosh rather fond of the pentagram, five lines and corners that flooded his nerves with that guttural pang that pulled you backward to simpler times in life.
If Mosh had been granted the superpower of foresight a year prior, he would have demanded whoever gave him said powers for a refund, for he would have been unable to believe what it said of his future. Murder, misattribution, and Monday.
The three M’s, it would have called them.
Through no fault of his own, Mosh was snared in a family feud about his great uncle’s prized cantaloupe winnings. It wasn’t the vast fortune that had divided the family, but his benevolent decision to mail every person in their town a hundred-thousand credits. The communizing of his short-lived wealth brought the economy of the entire planet on its knees, if economies had evolved locomotion appendages.
Some people tried to cut the paper credits in half in a vain attempt to re-establish inequality. This didn’t work and instead led to inflation.
Credits were built with security responses that caused them to combust into balloons if anyone tried to tamper with them, the idea being that criminals would be unable to store their ill-gotten gains in an efficient manner.
People came to Mosh’s great uncle’s house and burned the entire thing to the ground with Mosh’s great uncle sealed inside. After having given all of his wealth away, he could only afford five panels of wood he’d tacked together and plopped in the green of an abandoned golf course.
When they came for Mosh it was Monday morning. He was on his way to work, having just bought his morning pasty from the local baker where he was addicted to the way his heart melted when the lady that worked there said, “Hello sir, what can I do for you today?” He wanted to marry her, to tell her how she made his heart sing with her angelic questions that jellied his muscles and triggered a desire to twirl like a butterfly.
So he told her just that, that she made a melody out of the electric spasms of the blood engine in his chest, that he wished to adorn her with twenty rings – one per finger – in the most gallant display of jewelled affection, and that if these pastries had been working their magic, he thinks he had gorged himself enough on her beauty that a metamorphasis was due any minute now.
She said yes to coffee on Tuesday.
Mosh would never make it to Tuesday.
Mosh turned the corner of the block onto Halaway Street, intending to dive under the mermaid archway that signalled the start of the park where his office sat right in the middle.
No sir, said the constable.
The constable was a space constable and had been sent to intervene with the anarchy that was forecast to develop on Mosh’s planet. All space constables have superpowers of foresight and an affinity for keeping order in a grim and gruff manner. This constable had been sent to deliver quite the gruffing to Mosh for his part in the economic disorder on Mosh’s home planet.
In fact, one space constable had been sent to each member of Mosh’s family, and at that very same instant each member was being given quite the gruffing.
The space constable that was blocking Mosh from walking under the mermaid arch was a lady, but, like all space constables, she was equipped with a moustache that framed the face in a far gruffer look than if it weren’t there. A terse lip spells intimidation, a lip shrouded in overhanging bristles quakes the knees.
“Sir, Ser, M’am, or M’em?” spoke the space constable.
“Sir. Sir, Ser, M’am or M’em?” replied Mosh. The formal greeting in Mosh’s sector of the galaxy was a multiple choice game of pronoun picking.
“M’am.” replied the space constable just oozing with gruffness.
“Sir. For crimes against the people of this planet, you have been declared a ‘miser,’ an individual tagged with considerable potential future capacity for inflicting catastrophic harm upon this planet should we keep you here.”
The space constable paused, as if expecting Mosh to dispute the accusation. Mosh stared.
“Five-thousand and twelve simulations were performed, one-hundred and twenty-eight Bayesian’s were informed, and sixteen frequentists were ignored. Conclusively, they found that collectively there is an indisputable and unavoidable probability that you will cause a significant tragedy on this planet in the next fifty years, should you be allowed to pass under this gate,” the space constable gestured with a nod to the two mermaids, who were locked in a perpetual giggle as they splashed iron water droplets at each other.
“Hmmm. I see.” said Mosh. He really did see, for he had achieved top marks in his degree and had carried that fervour for education and academics far beyond his time at school. He knew who was addressing him and he knew the incontestable rigour of their calculations.
“May I ask,” said Mosh most respectably, “what the probability that, of the next fifty years, my crossing this park would be the ‘butterfly that flutters its wings to spark the tornado’, so the saying goes.”
“You have a right,” said the space constable, pleased with the ease with which things were going.
“Then may I hear it?”
“Ten.” the constable shot the word out like a sharpshooter had floored its target through while at sea in a storm.
“Ten?” repeated Mosh.
“Ten to the ten. One in ten-billion.”
“Is that it?” Mosh couldn’t help but leak some rage that he had wilfully restrained in his belly. It came as a brief sputter, like a bit of leakage from a helium balloon. “You’re asking me to get off this rock at the tune of one in ten-billion. The chances of a dog being born with with a carbon-copy replica of every cell in my body is less than one in ten-billion! I demand to see these Bayesians and these simulations and what they have to say for themselves.” Mosh was now letting a significant stream flow from his helium balloon.
---
“Gibbets also. Their anthropomorphic biases just make my skin crawl if I had skin made of motile cells with squirming capabilities.” said the sign.
Still wondering about the pentagrams, but accepting the fact he might not get an answer, Mosh inquired about who the gibbets were.
“Not who, but what. Far less creative in the geometric department, a gibbet was created because someone decided projected a four-legged sunstar into one-and-a-half dimensions and then tried to invert the projection. In the darkest corners of my frontal lobe circuitry I can find nothing but words beginning with the letter ‘f’.” the sign was really heating itself up over the offence that gibbets had unintentionally dealt. “Such as ‘frightening’, and ‘facsimile.’ “
“You’re really heating yourself up over gibbets.” said Mosh.
“And then,” continued the sign, “and then you and these trebbles take it upon yourself to mix me in all this symbolic geometry engorgement! I’ve had enough, simply enough I say. Ten years is what it took. Tactically, theoretically, and certainly unattractively, those signs that the space pilgrims put up in the sky to guide people were moved to deter future visitors. All that work! Undone.” the sign was lost in a world of monologue. Mosh felt he could pop out for a lunch break and come back and the sign wouldn’t blush.
“Sign-upon-Ky, which I’ll call you because you seem to either be tuneless to my frequency of questions, or simply ignore my innocent prying. I have performed the most guiltless digression onto the surface of your planet, enamoured by its swollen mantle and its emerald luster. As simply as I have arrived here I can depart – and, in doing so, can undo all the parts I have miscalculated in correcting. That being your sign to point people away from your planet, not towards it, as I am more familiar with signs being used for that purpose.” Mosh thought he’d spoken carefully enough that he had circumvented any possible offence to the sign.
“Unbelievable.” said the sign. It seemed to have given up completely. It turned away from Mosh and the two sat in silence.
And continued to sit in silence.
Mosh felt the silence needed to be continued and the sign felt similarly, and so it did.
Then the entire sky fell upon both of them.
It fell in little pieces at first. Mosh noticed it by the first thing to break the silence, which was neither Mosh nor the sign. It was a ‘clink’ sound, like someone dropping a coin in an arcade cabinet and the machine rejecting it.
---
At the intergalatic meridian, about ten light years out from the Great Cluster of Melvin – famous for a diffuse burnt charcoal smell throughout due to its tendency to produce double-electrons – there floats a ship.
A long time ago had all the engines on this ship broken, their software incapable of accurately weighing double-electrons for splitting. Error correction, exception handling, none of the automations that the software designers had so diligently included, were of any help. No matter how much you shave off the speed of a mergesort, if an engine accepts one electron at a time and a double-electron tucks its way in there, its like building a device for holding onion rings and someone hands you a duck.
Hardware had long been a solved problem for the peddle species. They looked inside and under every manifold, swam with the Hessians, dissected any Diracs that were brave enough to pop up, and they concluded unanimously that matter world was solved. Therefore to software all their problems were relegated.
But double-electrons can only be found in the Great Cluster of Melvin, and no peddle had ever travelled far enough to be within a supernova’s throw of the cluster.
Until Project Stop Languor.
Project Stop Languor’s purpose was to find purpose for the peddlians, who found themselves listless after having solved physics. Their central form of entertainment was what they chose to do with their complete understand of the operation of the universe, and what they all chose to do was pursue faith. Faith in the form of believing in the physically-impossible. To believe in the physically-impossible, they decided, was a psychological wonder, that a machine built from the rules of a system can imagine rules other than the system it was constructed from. In some sense, more was created from less. So faith attracted the strongest and weakest peddle minds, it wormed its way into political agendas, and it materialized as synagogues, mosques, churches with pews and without, open-air theological bonfires, and so on. The peddles were carried by their momentum of fabricating conceptions with more grandeur, that stretched the linen of the possibility space that the universe defined.
They sent out a ship, of one-thousand peddles, with resources to sustain life for hundreds of generations, entertainment in the form of faith games, cryochambers should things grow mundane. The ship was part of Project Stop Languor (PSL) and it would find purpose beyond their faith, find a reason for existence once existence has been split down to its quarks and spilled over the coffee table.
Kriddle Galaxy was their target, the ship was set on course to arrive at its centre within four-million light years. Of course, the idea was that something of purpose would turn up by then before they nosedived into Kriddle’s black hole. That something was the Great Cluster of Melvin, which had served the purpose of delivering the peddle’s a humbling slap. The slap said, “You silly peddles, species that have discovered, uncovered, and recovered every reordering of the left, right, up, down, and curvy spins of the quarks, who have believed for well over a millennium that what is black and spotted with stars and dust – that is everything – has been solved. You peddles, marching out into the known unknown, confident that all there is left to do is generate religious and write software for the hardware. You peddles. Then why has your engine hardware just kahpoot itself like the wheezing entrails of a sea monster that digests nitrogen for sustenance? Why are you finding yourself pinwheel through the Great Cluster of Melvin at a paltry one-thousandth of a light year per PSL year?”
The slap asked the peddles such questions as this, for it was a sustained slap, alive over the course of the entire time it took for the information to propagate throughout the peddle’s ship that they were stuck in the mud. Then the peddle’s asked themselves these questions to one another, but their years spent investing in faith had left their psychological position rather unstable. Instead of leaping at the opportunity to incorporate the double-electron phenomenon into their gilded picture of the universe, they instead resorted to faith fabrication and where such a double-electron could fit into their theological deities, their testaments, and their holy garbs. For no faith generator had been as clever to extrapolate a double-electron and build communal services and scripts of creed around a concept such as it.
All the peddles were excited to begin this endeavour, so much in fact that the knowledge of their drifting in the viscera of space was shut away in the highest shelf of their minds.
And just as they were well spent, having sponged ever prayer stance possible with double-electrons as the centrepiece, just as they were about to surface from their religious virtualizations and succumb to the dreadful realization that they were stranded on their ship, something clunked against the side of the ship. It sounded like a two-by-four had been swung at the skin of a metal kiwi. They looked out at the two-by-four to see what hit them.
It was a large number of two-by-fours, all nailed together to make a two-by-fourteen. The two-by-fourteen had neon lettering that hummed against the black canvas of the void. It hummed these words: “Planet Rubrub, this way.”
The jackpot was being unloaded onto the hull of Mosh’s ship, and by now the source of the ‘clinks’ was known. It was known in how they ricocheted off of Mosh’s foot of four-grad plastiglass , and how the tiny grey pellets had now submerged sign-upon-Ky up to where the sign began. The sign had persisted with Mosh’s silent treatment, snooty upturned nose to match, but now chose to speak.
“Humph,” it started, like it was shaking off an inconvenient layer of snow from its hibernation, “humph humph.”
Mosh had been concerned for the sign up until now and had planned out an involved rescue mission, but had forgone the first step which was when to execute it. He’d been busy juggling various scenarios in which he tried to remove the sign from its perch on the hill but discovered it there was more below ground. A sign with the an evolved emotional intelligence of a sly butler couldn’t do all that processing inside a plan of wood, surely.
But the sign had ‘humphed.’
“Are you alright? Are you having trouble speaking under all those grey palettes? I think I have a reasonable plan to get us out of here before we drown in a sea of spheres. I just wanted to know whether there was anything underneath you which – “
“Just like last time! More predictable than a sand storm on a gas giant. Humph indeed.”
Mosh flushed, he’d felt for a moment that this micro-apocalypse would have served to bond the sign and him in the camaraderie that comes about from dealing with a mutual foe. It seemed instead that the sign was used to this event, even content with being swallowed by the falling sky.
“This has happened – “ clunk! “ – before?” asked Mosh, flinching from a pellet that was on the larger side connecting with the glass right by his head.
“Well, not exactly like this of course. It’s always a different species each time, but the diagnosis is the same. Here we have a case-one scenario of complete impassioned faith-seeking, whereupon our guests have just chance upon the corrected sign and incorporated the entire concept of Rubrub, me, and perhaps even you, into their quest for theological purpose.” the pile of pellets was almost at the lower lip of the sign’s mouth.
“You’re telling me these spheres being rained at us are a species?! By god we have to save them!” yelled Mosh, hurrying to unbuckle himself from his seat.
“I knew it. In a time of crisis and your cover is blown. You speak of ‘god’ and deities beyond the material plane so you are no different from – “ clunk!
“What was that?” said Mosh. The clunking storm was rattling them like they were inside a maraca full of live ammunition.
---