The 12

Buck understands that if you want to be a writer, sometimes you just have to start writing even if you have nothing to say.

Take today, for example. Buck doesn't have squat to say, but if you're reading this, then he's already taken up a few moments of your precious time for nothing. Are you entertained? Do you find this intriguing, or even mildly interesting? Doubtfully. So if you don't want your day to be a total loss, it is in your best interest to read no further.

You have been warned.

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"To provide some context for Buck's situation and the epic struggle he was about to face," typed Buck shortly after conquering a programming bug at work that had been bothering him since the previous day, "it is convenient to introduce a new term to represent a time scale that 21st century readers weren't aware of prior to its discovery in their future. The unit of time is called the g-pon*, equivalent to the average lifespan of known universes. A g-pon is roughly equal to 32.71552 x googol-plex Earth years, based on the precise duration of an Earth year on January 1st of the year 2237. When g-pon is used in the plural sense, it sometimes takes on a slightly different meaning, referring to an instance of a specific universe that occured sequentially prior to our own (see entire footnote below). For example: the phrase 'three g-pons ago' would indicate any time within the lifetime of a universe Alpha-3, which ran its full life cycle before our current universe (Alpha-0) began, and also indicates that two other universes (Alpha-2 and Alpha-1, in that order) ran their full life cycles before our universe began its first iteration.

Buck decided not to go into a universe's iterative properties. Some things were better left unknown.

"Anyway, eleven g-pons ago, an intelligent entity capitalized on the dark matter energy transfer betwixt universes to translate himself from one universe to the next in an effort to elude his enemies. This intelligent entity was the last of his kind, and in fact wasn't truly alive in any conventional sense at the time of his escape. Technology had enabled him to preserve his memories and thought patterns in a device which resembled a small orb, even as the horde of evil beings which had wiped his own race out of existence had brought death to his physical form. It was all part of a carefully orchestrated plan which required him to penetrate to the heart of the enemy home world. When he allowed himself to be captured and executed, his memories transferred to the orb which was hidden on that world. The orb served a dual purpose: not only did it contain the elements of his identity, but also it was a vessel devised to slip into the dark energy nodestream moments after its initialization. Slipping such an object through to the next universe brought no harm to the object itself, but as he well knew, such an action was best practiced deep in the vacuum of space, far from populated worlds, due to the dark energy anti-matter after-shock event that occurred in the source universe when such an event took place. In other words, when the evil beings executed him, they doomed their own home planet and its star system, wiping out a healthy chunk of their civilization along the way and leaving the scattered remnants of their species to pick up the pieces and figure out what happened."

Buck then decided that this was a patently ridiculous literary path to follow. He wasn't about to argue that memories and thought patterns (or general disposition, brainwaves, etc.) were equivalent to the soul, which is really what he'd want a character to have. So he found himself at a place where he was hypothesizing an immortal being (more like an "identity") who more or less latches onto the bodies and souls of those who happen upon the vessel. In other words, these beings who find the vessel remain true to themselves and their general nature, but they absorb his experiences and ways of thinking, along with those of anyone else who found the orb along the way. This goes on for several g-pons, of course, which brings him into the current universe where the orb manages to slip into a black hole, the same black hole, in fact, where Buck's ship is being smashed into plasma.

Does Buck obtain the orb and the memories of trillions of beings who have shared the immortal entity's life across the universes and use the knowledge contained therein to escape the fate of which he isn't even aware? Is it what makes him aware of his true, external circumstances? Or is some other character in Buck's life the keeper of the orb? How did the sinister beings track the orb down across the cosmos in their effort to seek revenge for the destruction of their civilization? Is the intelligence mentioned in last week's post behind the black racer snake's eyes one of these aliens out for the entity's destruction? Are these the same evil beings who were Will anyone really give a rat's ass?

How does dark energy create an explosion of any magnitude when it's really thought to be nothing more than the residual negative energy of empty space, containing an almost unimaginably low quantity of energy per cubic centimeter? You see, Buck actually went and looked this stuff up a few days after drafting the premise above. It turns out that dark energy accounts for something like 74% of the universe's mass, but it's homogeneous, spread out equally in little tiny portions throughout the void between the planets, stars, galaxies, clouds, clusters, and all the other stuff that's out there, a good 20% of which is called "dark matter," a blanket term used to refer to a whole class of invisible objects which scientists are pretty sure is out there (one example is dead stars which no longer produce light). So anyone who reads Buck's account of the dark energy anti-matter explosion is going to think, "Huh?" Buck doesn't want that: he's hardcore. He wants his science fiction to be possible.

So he decided, at least for the time being, to abandon this possible thread of fiction on his blog, but he did chose to go ahead and publish this entry. If for no other reason it's because he liked the footnote that he wrote below. Meanwhile, all that was left to do was explain the title, "The 12." At the end of each universe, or when the time is right, the entity creates another orb, and sends it and all the previous orbs through to the next universe. This is to propagate the new life form he has essentially created via the use of this technology. So there wasn't going to be just one entity, but in Buck's time, twelve (with eleven orbs, the orb for the current universe not yet created). The experiences and memories associated with each are wildly different, and of course each can come into the possession of any manner of intelligent being, so that equates to twelve bad-asses running around the universe alternately wreaking havoc, playing hero, or just plain wandering.

Of course, this too was full of holes, since the number of orbs could grow exponentially, since each possessor could make a copy and send it through. Buck considered that maybe there was some logical rule enforced that required all orbs to be brought together for another to be created. This would force the beings who possessed the orbs to seek out the others, possibly fighting for control of all of them. Naturally this reeks of being like the standard "Highlander" premise, unless Buck writes it more as a cooperative venture, which would allow for the revenge-seeking aliens to play a more serious role as potential spoilers of the original entity's grand plan.

Maybe Buck will take up this idea again one day, but what he really feels is missing is the human element, and how to make the reader give a flying fuck about the original entity and his mission. That, and what to call the bad beings. The right name for that species could make or break it...and what makes them special? What separates them from the orcs of the literary world?

"Cheers, oh faithful reader," writes Buck as he returns to work.

* Footnote: From the Encyclopedia Galactica, ST 3260: g-pon is pronounced /jē'- pŏn/, or alternatively, /jə - pŏn'/. Etymology: A form of snigglet combining the terms "googol-plex" (10 to the 10th to the 100th power) and "eon", an ambiguous measure of geologic time. The term was coined by Buck 99 in the 25th century but discovered by 21st century readers via a web log ("blog") that he somehow published on an actual, real-world blog on 21st century Earth's primitive Internet network from a nearly identical network located within a fictitious LifeNet© simulation context aboard a private spacecraft accelerating into a black hole's gravity well. How he managed to pull this off is a matter of continued speculation and arguably the most brilliant technological feat in the history of the human race. It is conjectured that he used the black-hole's x-ray emissions as the means to transmit the data, but how he mastered an understanding of singularities and their effect on time to deliver a message to 21st century Earth, and how he managed to ensure that a mechanism existed in the real world of 21st century Earth to receive the transmission and upload it automatically to the necessary network servers, remain enigmas that defy mortal comprehension.

The term itself did not come into widespread use until the 23rd century when scientists finally proved out several key facets of the nature of the cosmos as described in 99's blog. Prior to these proofs, it was widely believed that 99's blog was itself a hoax. This skepticism had persisted for several centuries due to 99's lack of advanced mathematical theory which rendered him unable to articulate in his blog the mathematical concepts scientists would need to understand commonly accepted facts that he had been taught in grade school.

A useful analogy taken from an actual event in human history would be to take a star Blukker player in her prime, stick her in an ordinary Plonomax Node Generator field, send her back to Medieval Europe armed with nothing more than an embedded universal translator so that she could communicate with the natives, and have her try to explain to them how to design and build a machine to return her to her own node. Impossible, right? Indeed it turned out to be, as was proven when archives came to light revealing that this exact experiment was performed by scientists under Hung-Xao's regime. It is believed the Blukker player was none other than Linda McCallister who is famous for having disappeared without a trace at the height of her career in the WLBS during the Shanghai Olympics, and that she was ultimately found guilty of witchcraft and burned at the stake.

At the heart of it, what Buck 99's blog revealed was that over cosmological timescales (which are non-linear, since universes are born and die sequentially in relation to each other yet exist in parallel), a universe's dark energy component fluctuates wildly, since dark energy is shared across universes while associating with only one universe at a time. 21st century scientists knew that the universe's expansion was accelerating and that the dark energy seemed sufficient to ensure a universe that expanded ad infinitum, but they failed to account for as-yet unobserved binding of dark energy by adjoining universes.