The jelly arms of the Tartoga Galaxy can be quite the sight to behold at this time of year, when the korkosas migrate to a new star and dribble their meteoric residue right from one arm to the other, it can be especially enigmatic. Enchanted by such fluid wobbles of those galactic arms sat Tulkan, sat by a port window, admiring some dribbles, admiring an image in his head. His head had him laid flat out like a five-point star; he was in total exuberance as the excretions of the korkosas dribbled over him.

An engine shouted at him, coughed something that was both atomic and linguistic. Tulkan’s korkosallucination blinked away and he found himself accompanied by his chair and desk and a tiny port window. “What now?” shouted Tulkan to the engine.

“I told you back when we took that turn back at the Otto orgistratactic, my left hum-pump is in a cataclysmic state of rumping. In fact, it’s slowed so much its rumps are now pumps – the process of which has inverted the last two hours of our voyage.” The engine coughed again, its mouth full of bad electrons, those ones at the final valences that are first to abandon an atom when pumps call. With his tool bag in tow, Tulkan went to the back of the ship to address the engine. Atom-anatomics, which luckily Tulkan had taken a fourth-month education camp on, was in order here.

“It looks like,” said Tulkan, “that there is something jammed in here real tight.”

“Oh that explains the gravitational downpour I clocked earlier,” said the engine. “I thought we were in for a real endophorous nebulic squeeze. Didn’t mention it though because I didn’t want to scare you.”

“Yep, there it is,” and Tulkan reached a hand right through a row of toruses and plucked out what looked – to Tulkan that is – very much like a watermelon with three duck beaks. Of course, to learned spacefarer Tulkan, this was unmistakably a korkosas, one of young blood, it probably been drawn to the engine by its smell which was something most extrachemical given its need of repairs: that smell of argon and plutonium in hot pursuit.

Two beaks of the korkosas rasped in alarm when Tulkan hoisted it from its hiding spot, the third one vomited something purple on his trousers. Tulkan dropped the creature and the korkosas ran back up the hall to the engine room, tracing an ooze line with its slimy tail. “Hmph, this one’s still dribbling,” Tulkan said to himself and his trousers.

Soon the ship rang with the orchestration of the rump of eight engines. Bethoven’s Eight sympthony, a classic design choice for the astrotect’s, was the tune of good health and the ship kept on. Tulkan sat on the floor to pilot the ship, for the korkosas, with all its dribblings, had transformed his brown leather chair into a nest of spectacular purple revolt. After a few more hours, the engine whirred another monologue, this time to alert Tulkan that there was something rather large in their flight path and, after having projected the whole situation into a one-hundred dimensional manifold, it concluded that the impact would redesign the ship and its contents into an atom-thick pancake. In other words, diversion was necessary, impact was imminent. As an interstellar autodidact, especially when it came to objects of incredible sizes, Tulkan was unperturbed by this standard warning. Curiosity, instead was all amok in his mind. He had consulted the path many times with Astrodoctor Galactazor and the doctor was so certain that space was “mostly black stuff and whole lot of empty” that he’d offered Tulkan to take with him his prized, Manual of Undesired Dreams, or, Voyages Through Black Stuff and whole lot of Empty.

After a brief mis-projection and apology for a twice-miscarried digit, Tulkan’s request to the engine for the time of impact was delivered: ten hours. A wise man sleeps before he faces the astrodevil, Tulkan’s father always told him and went to his quarters to rest.

A sound awoke Tulkan, a sound that wasn’t a nebulic spray, an engine in despair, a rump in reverse, not a proton hum, a matrimony of binary stars, a torzat, a humdrum, a teritodalidron, or a cough. It sounded, as Tulkan would put it when recounting this tale to his friends, exactly like a tongue and a throat spouting English. His brain wouldn’t let him do anything other than understand it.

“Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes. How very deterministic, how fruitfully fateful. Here comes another – and it is but as it would have always been. To be different would have to have been the same. You say, ‘start where?’ I say, ‘it won’t matter, choose any point, even shuffle it by an atoms breadth, if in this universe, then by this universe it will go!’ Ho ho! Oh yes, oh yes.”

The voice shook Tulkan’s ship like a microphone and it made it very hard for Tulkan to get back to sleep. “Excuse me,” Tulkan shouted, “Could you keep it down? I need to sleep for there is a rather large object in my flight path and, as my father always said, a well-rested head is needed before one faces the astrodevil.” The shaking didn’t hold up.

“Oh yes, oh yes. There it is right there. Exactly where it would have been if you looked here a many light years gone and waited. No other sun, not since the universe spat itself all over the sky, could go here. Oh yes, oh yes. Ho!”

Tulkan cursed. Either these spits and spats about the universe came from an entity oblivious to the fact it had company, or this was an incredibly rude region of space. He trudged into the flight room, shoved the korkosas from his chair (sqwack!) and bashed away its purple slime nest for a good few minutes. When he sat down and looked out the front of his ship, where instead of black with spots of white and some thrown-about dusty bits, there now hovered a great eyeball. How unsightly and how inconvenient, Tulkan thought, for with such a large eyeball blocking his view, Tulkan would be unable to avoid the rather large object in his way.

“Excuse me,” came Tulkan’s voice in a shrill, feminine style. He fumbled with the microphone and set it to something a little more guttural. “Excuse me,” said Tulkan again, this time more aligned with the style of a butler talking through a plank of rosewood. The enveloping, vibrating alien symphony of a voice suddenly stopped mid “Ho!”. The eye, who’s great black pupil had been dancing around like a mayfly on a bowl of custard, now settled on Tulkan.

“Ah, yes.”

Tulkan continued, “Excuse me, but your eyeball, although an impressive wet sphere of gargantuan opticalism it is, and which must – in a single retinal cone alone – hold more neural circuitry than the entire civilization of the great Quergs of Ultaw, your eyeball, I’m afraid, is obstructing my flight path. A large object I am due to collide with,” Tulkan checked his watch, “Oh in say thirty minutes which I require my own optical avoid. Or I risk becoming an atom-thick pancake.”

At such a great size, every twitch of the eyeball was like a black storm glitching across the surface of a celestial mucus globe. For a moment Tulkan felt alarmed that the universe might run out of photons for this hungry pupil before him.

“Oh yes, ho yes. Not a proton out of place. How wonderfully – how metaphysically simple and quaint.”

The age of this great eye must be astrogalactanomical, Tulkan deduced, for the study of physics, metaphysics, betaphysics, and physics of the astro, mecha, onto, or alegro was of the Old World. A time when men and women threw around toys like atoms and quarks and believed they played with the raw stuff that made all the black and speckled-white with dusty bits here and there. Perhaps, Tulkan considered, a modern education in the sciences might budge his bulbous companion.

“Oh fantastic eyeball! Allow me to educate you, for you seem to be speaking fondly of what my ancient acquaintances would call ‘determinism’, that is, the theory that from A can only ever come B, and B it will forever B. This little crest of space-time geometry we find ourselves tucked within is far from deterministic, and that I could show you as easy as you cross mountain ranges with a single swing of your pupil.”

“Oh ho ho HO! Oh yes? Oh yes? Is this so?” said the eye. “My semi-symmetric conversance, please do enlighten me on what you know that my magnanimousnous lacks. An entity of yours with eyes of only a thousand cones, yes, I would find that most amusing to be a pupee of such an organism. Please, enlighten me.”

In his hand Tulkan had prepared page eight of volume thirty-seven of, A Spacepirates Travel Guide to Menskinsky Spaces and Other Trivial Phenomena. He sat up straight, put a finger on the page, for the font was quite small, and read:

Ten-thousand years ago, in a time when stars were thought to be hot ovens and the tiniest particle humankind had witnessed was an tacitron that went by the name of Greg (short for Electrogregatron), it was hypothesized – and supported by the evidence of great experiments – that what was would always be. Quantum mechanics had been put down the laundry chute, the concept of uncertainty disproven following the discovery that it was the by-product of the biology of the human brain. Porcupines, Dr. Alberta Greghyuhr III noted, did not collapse wave functions because wave functions did not exist for them. This rattled the scientific community and the porcupine population was completely culled in vengeance. A desperate attempt to ‘fix’ the uncertainty of the human brain began, but the pursuit was in vain. For how can one extract from the very matter it is made of, the very thing said matter is making?

No matter.

According to ___’s pillars, with uncertainty gone, this left only one option: determinism. A great dark period reigned for a good one-thousand years, for free will was undeniably silly, a highly demotivating state for creatures of sentience. Nothing worth the ink on this page was invented at this time, so alternatively this sentence was written to meet the word count criteria. Then, sprouting from the era of humanity’s Great Egotistical Depression (GED) came a new age of science and technology: the ‘Hivodesic Era’, wherein with the self-richeousness and individuality now tossed to the wind, human’s stopped worrying about academic credit and self-actualization, and solved problems only for the collective good of the humans. Brains, in a certain sense, melded into a single fluid space of thought that could solve problems far larger than one brain could handle – with such power the universe and all its parts were peeled apart quickly like a bereft onion. It took only one-hundred years to reverse the entire universe back to where it all began and map the events that generated the here and now. But, apart from Dr. ZeeZee whom had been outcast for his heretical belief that the universe was born from the expanding spot of a ladybird, many were surprised that when a big bang they expected to find, not even a pang showed up. Instead it was discovered that existence was a projection of a momentary sneeze from a higher-dimensional being. This was referred to as the ‘Great Dribble.’ Even more extraordinary, the sneezes of this non-planar, hyper-entity were constant and – incredibly – completely uncertain! The universe, after all, was uncertain.

Here Tulkan stopped because the korkosas had found Tulkan’s supply of dry noodles embarked on a task to moisten the whole crate with its excretions. A red light on the dashboard pinged at Tulkan. Politely, the engine wished to share some information, but did not want to interrupt. Tulkan ignored the alert. The korkosas vomited purple noodles onto the floor.

“Oh. Ho. Ho. HO! What a wonderful fable. It has been over a hundred orbits of my own head since I have been woven a yarn that grand. I only wish, that the yarn had come to me as a surprise, but alas it spatial audio vibrations were destined to arrive in these ears since nothing decided to become something. I have known, knew that I would eventually know, and now undeniably know the origin of the universe would be the nasal phlegm of a hyper-entity. It is,” and the pupil here, Tulkan noticed, almost seemed to squash a little vertically in a pensive expression, “almost depressing.”

To the left, the eye sent its glance, and for a moment Tulkan wondered if he had lost his audience and with it any hope of shifting this optic being. In that moment Tulkan recalled the third law of a space travel, a great insight by a mind of so many folds it was mistaken many times for a sage cabbage: if not it will budge in its own reference frame, budge it relative to your own reference frame. In Tulkan’s words, fly around it. Contact was made with the engine, which hinted to Tulkan it would like to deliver its message first, but manners superseded its protocol for delivering alerts. Half-protons and quarter-protons spewed from the exhaust as the ship expended great effort to reorient itself. Sat at the pilot seat, Tulkan expected the eyeball to trace their diversion around it with its deep, swallowing pupil, but not once did he glance it. He half expected to find the rest of this spacial abberation on the other side of the ball, stalk, head, and a great many necks to boot, but was disappointed when the sea of spherical mucus just continued. After a full semi-circle, the ship and Tulkan arrived back on the flight path and continued. Ahead lay a healthy vista of black and white-speckled stuff. Now was the time that Tulkan finally took the message from the engine.

“Good gostlings! May I strongly encourage you to allow interruptions for events of alert level Purgundy and above? Really, this is a matter of quantasmical emergency, Tulkan.” The engine was in such a state of haste it sputtered out the words it almost choked on the words that came before each one.

“You know, Eulen III, that I cannot do such a thing,” replied Tulkan. When the new engine had been transplanted to his ship, Tulkan called the engine Yttthg III, but the engine insisted on persisting its identity as Eulen, and so they arrived at a mutual agreement.

“Bathing with those vulumptuous Doordifum orfices was of tactical significance. Your interruption cost me experiencing a once-in-a-pentimillenium smothered self-resurection. You, my proton spewing ejector, have lost a grain of my trust enough that I must mute you at my will.” Tulkan was not pleased with the scolding he had been impelled to give Eulen III, but like an unchecked child can develop narcissism, so must engines be kept in line for fear of overriding the pilot’s flight paths.

“We can talk about it when we get to Galatron of Gordy,” said Tulkan. A stubborn wheeze came from the back of the ship. Then after a while, “Although I can’t say I agree, and that your safety measures are subpar, I can only continue to go along with this. Now if you’ll please. This emerging emergency is developing at a rate far faster than a hormonal space-maggot rave.”

Tulkan indicated for the engine to continue, but a quirk in the view out his spaceship caught his attention. There, yes, was white-speckled stuff all around a black canvas, just as the great expanse should be, but all the way to the right some of it just wasn’t. A patch of entirely deep black had begun to wash across and clean from the universe those white speckles. As Tulkan studied this slither of black to his right, it came to Tulkan that this black space was moving to the left and with it swallowing up all the white. The red light on the dashboard desperately blinked at Tulkan.

“OH. OH. HO, HO, OH-HO!” Came a voice that almost cleaved the entire ship in two so did it shake one half and then the other in violent opposition. Tulkan fumbled for his microphone. “Great eye! My oh my, you’re pace impresses me, for I had thought I had left you behind not a light year ago.”

It didn’t break for Tulkan’s words and continued over him, “OH. OH-HO. HOO. O. O! O! O! O! HH! H-O-O-H!”

“Your unbearably optical objectiveness – I hope I have not upset you in my spewings of the anti-deterministic viewpoints. I intended just to have reasonable discourse on an interesting topic and bring you up to speed on the modern state of affairs.” Tulkan caught the The Spacepirates Travel Guide as it floated past his head and turned to page eight-hundred and forty.

“Allow me to read you one more passage which I think might appeal to your viewpoints.”

“HO! I do not need to hear these words of that silly book of yours, for they would make very little impression on my current state. So uncertain as it is, this great visuo-cortical existence, I have no time for trivial toying with the metaphysical. As I cast my ignonormous shadow across your tin can, is it not completely uncertain whether or when I will arrive? You did not expect nor suspect my eclipse, and yet here I am blotting out your sky.”

The rate at which this creature had swung from complete impassioned deterministic thought to now spewing the belief state of complete uncertainty was beyond Tulkan. “Great opulent orifice of light consumption, may you not let me understand how you have changed your mind so? Not ten minutes ago were you telling me of the great certainty of the things around us – why how my very words were destined to vibrate the space around you since the first ‘Great Dribble’. What swayed you so?”