prompt: done, title: in the meantime in misc. flash fiction

In the beginning, there was a light. A brilliant light. A hot searing light. An endless light. This light illuminated all, that all was everything. Everything was already there and that everything was perfect. After a time, an immeasurable amount as there was no need to measure time when nothing could change or end, the everything became aware. Aware of itself, aware of existence, aware that there was such a thing as existing. The everything became curious, of all that it was, of the very idea of being and it went out into the light for answers. Eventually, after a span of time that couldn’t yet matter, the everything knew everything about itself, inside and out. The everything now also knew everything was perfect and unchanging and how there’d never be anything else to know. The everything got bored. The everything got depressed. It grew quite sick of knowing everything, of the light’s infinity, of its own ceaseless perfection. And so, the everything said “Let there be flaws!” And so, there were. Suddenly, the possibility of darkness. There was suddenly entropy. Things could finally change and could end. Everything saw there were new things to know and it was good.

But eventually, the everything learned how the flaws worked, how the darkness cycled through, the predictable patterns of change, it gradually came to know what would happen, even with the entropy’s variance, even with darkness briefly obscuring some details. And the everything got bored again. Change and death and darkness couldn’t keep things interesting if the everything knew how it all worked. The everything tried making alive things to quell the boredom, hoping to alleviate a thing called “loneliness” that it didn’t even know it had just invented, but the alive things that it made separate of it didn’t have complete free will. They ended up not unpredictable enough, at least not for all that long, not long on the cosmic scale of an everything. The feelings grew and grew inside the everything that nothing could ever give it any joy or sense of purpose as long as it always knew how everything would eventually happen. Something had to be done.

In the beginning, there was light and an everything that was sad and bored and lonely, that had learned everything about itself and had nowhere to go from there. It needed to forget and as long as it was everything, it could never really forget, it’d always just know. And so that everything divided itself into billions and billions of little blinded shards, with short lives ruled by entropy, so that it could learn itself again, this time from billions of little partially-occluded perspectives, short lives of breathtaking discoveries and educational horrors. A billion of billions in hard-won self-discoveries, regulated by their short lifespans, by entropy and the darkness itself.

In the beginning, that’s how it all shook out and here we are now, ten billion fragments of blind divinity, trying to figure out how to get back home.