It took two-hundred years of work before the Ectopids hit the limit of their computers like a brick wall had sprouted up in the middle of a galactic bypass. Two days prior, they discovered electron doubling and they went from simulating two red giants to twenty. Yesterday geometric inversion theory – as invented by Professor Galapticus-9 while she was idly sorting plastic plates – was applied in such a way that more space was made by utilizing the negative space of holes and their chip boards became well aerated cheese. Not one grand design though came today, which had been on the daily up until now.

The mountains around Ectopia where the Ectopids lived, they shook like on a hot plate, for the frenzy of the Ectopids was so desperate the morning of their failure, the mountains so loose. Someone in the town hall yelled, “Stop!” for out the window they could see that a mountain that shook like that would endanger the city of Ectopia. Everyone in the town hall stopped running around and looked.

“This is,” said the one who now had the attention of the rest, “a disaster on the order of the extinction of Dodo Nebula.” Those on the town hall jeered and lowered their heads, not to look at their shoes for the Ectopids lack feet, but to show shame and sorrow.

“Today we have learned that progress is not exponential, nor linear, not even sub-linear – not a hair monotonic actually. Like the waves of our great three oceans, it goes up and down, and we have been blind to the fact that such a great crest we have been gifted over the last centuries that the drop seems oh so very high.” The speaker stood up not to raise a presence, but to waken his legs.

“Since I heard the news this morning, I spent the day in complete meditation, until I came here. Like all of you now, I was hopeless but hopeful that the brilliant multi-minds among us would have cracked the problem and this would be the past. I recalled Herbor the Great, who after an hour short of sunrise, with the city in an epileptic display of anarchy, discovered the left-handed frame – the complement of the right, being us creatures of two-right hands. This was the greatest chip size increase – a whole doubling! – since their conception.” With his four eyes in all directions, the speaker asked his listeners how they were feeling. Many still rippled with apprehension.

“Ternetty-Tix the Tinkerer! My-oh-my what a thinker! Our well was full with thirty simultaneous improvements of chip design and this had kept the Ectopians happy for twenty days and nine more and on that last day when the sky itself seemed to be alight with the flames of despair, did Ternetty-Tix return. On that first day of the Thirty Great Days, Ternetty-Tix had taken twelve parts of his mind and thrown them to twenty tips of the galaxy, two-a-piece. There they gestated and learned from those who occupied the points, like the Kullics and the Ococulators who only consisted of a hundred ears which they tickled to invert sound waves. Through each mind, he learned of the nuances of other civilizations, each limited in one way, but by bringing these together into his one mind found no limitation at all. And the computer chip size tripled!”

Here the speaker raised his arms as if to push that word right out of his mouth. Some couldn’t help but raise their heads and cheer and get caught up in the story. But the story, they remembered, was not now. How with a chip the same size as the day before, could the Ectopids function? Think, for it was not a matter of personal taste, but an intergalactic matter of mayhem. The size of a chip is not to woo thy neighbour with transistor-based delights, not to hold up high and blot out larger suns and smile. The entire economy, the business forecasts, what and when the healthcare will administer what and when drug to what and when persons, the political manoeuvrers, prices – the rolls of the dice! – employment, deployment, and universal enjoyment – their crux and foundation is settled upon the Golden Rule, which for all their time has been one and true: when the sun sets once and rises then after, the chip will have grown slightly wider. But for this to have not, for a chip that grows to a chip that stows, well, that’s like putting dough in an oven and expecting dough after. What a world that would be where an Ectopian couldn’t break bread with thy neighbour but had to break dough. How messy! How thoughtless of the creator! Mandibles and feelers would be sticky to the end of time and no one could open their front door for fear that they’d get dough all over the doorknob. No, it wouldn’t do.

And here, the speaker closed his mouth so that no more would be spoken and this pause surprised the listeners for they had grown used to the comfort of the past. Each lifted their heads to gaze upon him and it created the effect of a wave moving through the town hall. The speaker then took a mandible to his forehead in salute, ran from his place to the door, where outside was a ship warm and ready. He hopped aboard and from the port window called, “Good luck! I’m out of here!” And as the flames of the engines licked the grass and the town hall fell back into chaos, one person on the ground asked, “Where to?”

The engines were loud but still some could here his reply: “To the surface of the sun!”