“This limousine is endlessly long. Relativistically speaking, were you to somehow reach the driver’s seat, you would be at the end of space and beginning of time.”
“But there is a driver?”
“That depends on what you mean by driving, but yes— and from our perspective, they’re frozen in a perpetual state of stepping on the pedal. From theirs? Anyone’s guess.”
“And, uh, if the driver crashes?”
“Then, I suppose, I might spill my drink.”
“Speaking of, can I get you anything? I think we’re going to be here for a while.”
A marble statue of an angel hovered over the lagoon, with no physical connection to the Earth below. Water poured forth from an amphora in her motionless hands, spilling endlessly down. “From this point, the potentiality of all creation spills forth. New species of microscopic life come into being and disappear in moments. Only a fraction of a fraction can survive, but every few centuries, one endures, and begins to spread through the waters of the world.”
The Fountain of Youth. And in fucking Florida, no less.
“This limousine is endlessly long. Were you to reach the front, you would be at the end of space and beginning of time.”
“But there is a driver?”
The antlion is unique among modern animalia in that its evolution resulted not from a mutation within its genetic code, but rather, within the spelling of its name. Sometime during the legendary translation of the Septuagint from Hebrew into Greek for Ptolemy II, an old Hebrew variant of 'lion' used in the Book of Job was warped into the bizarre word 'myrmecoleon,' a portmanteau of the terms for 'ant' and 'lion.'
"Before paper was easy to come by, scrolls and books would be rinsed of their ink so that their pages could be reused when the original copies no longer had an audience.” A dash of lampblack bitters left a squid trail through his whiskey and vermouth. "Even after their removal, however, the molecules of ink would continue to cluster in a similar geometric manner. Because of this, most of the information was retained in the ink itself long after it had been wrung from the text.
Geogaddi, Boards of Canada’s sophomore album, was engineered so as to last for exactly sixty-six minutes and six seconds. Their fixation on the repetition sixes is clear throughout its content, right down to the title of track sixteen: “The Devil is in the Details.” Even the cover art is composed entirely of six-sided figures, a seemingly endless kaleidonoid procession of hexagons within hexagons. When the LP suddenly emerged in 2002, it debuted at a collection of six churches worldwide, in a ritual of unknown intent.
The average seashell found along a shoreline is fixed at the same frequency as the body of water that birthed it. When held to the ear, the same, steady undulation of waves can be heard, sliding in and out of time. For this reason, they make excellent souvenirs for tourists, providing instant access to memories of better climes.
Meanwhile, the spiraling apex of a black conch’s shell can be twisted in several places like a radio’s dial. The larger the mussel, the more precision that can be attained while tuning its abandoned hermitage.
Among alligators and crocodiles alike, there exist elders who remember the flavor of mammoth's blood, and even some whose gnarled backs bear scars from the fire of an asteroid's impact. Their kind have persisted for untold millions of years, long enough for evolution to nest their brains within our own like matryoshka dolls.
The human body is not a mere brain-driven machine of nerve and bone. Every subsection of its anatomy is an independent ecosystem of organisms (or organism-like structures), each with their own motivations and metabolisms. Though much of this zoology occurs beneath a veil of skin, it is still a phenomenon that can be seen with the naked eye. When one looks upward into cloudless daylight, they just might see the spectral outlines of lifeforms known as lucigens.
In the lands east of the Ural Mountains, there is said to have once grown a plant whose fruit was a fully-grown lamb fastened to the soil by its umbilical stem. To some, this beast was known as the borometz, and to others, as the Yeduah. It survived by grazing on the grasses surrounding its roots, though it could never wander beyond its own tether to the earth below. Any separation from this stem would result in its immediate death.
"From what you've described to me, it sounds like your brain is undergoing rapid shifts in chirality." The doctor's eyes were focused on his tablet. “Like you’re suddenly trading places with the other side of the mirror, yes?“
“Yeah, that’s one way to put it. But what could cause something like that?"