Pyrrheica Transit

Up until this point in his life, Jonah had never experienced a dream. Of course, he knew what a dream was and when it was supposed to happen, and all those other details constituting a familiarity with the concept. Due to his condition, though, he had no memory of ever dreaming. Nor of sleeping, really, as being knocked unconscious shouldn't be counted.

The dream went something like this.

Following the darkness that followed the deathly hand's grasp, he had a brief vision of Earth. The vision was of an intersection at night somewhere in a bustling city, giving off that uniformity that seems to make every city look like every other city if you only see a random part of each one. Which is exactly what this place was – generic, arbitrary, possessing nothing which suggested Jonah had a city life which had been stolen away by head trauma or squid-sorcery (or both). The scene was nothing but a slowly moving slice of time, absent of the reminiscent tone found in a memory.

There were traffic lights dangling above the streets, holding a red color on one side, seeming to be turning yellow on the other. The asphalt was cracked and broken around a central pothole, but those cracks were filled with stagnant rainwater, and the reflected light from nearby buildings made those sprawling clefts look like an oversized spiderweb. The rain had stopped a while ago, though, as evidenced by the half-dried sidewalks which were spotted with slowly evaporating puddles. The moon brightened the night enough that to a passer-by, the dry parts looked white and the wet ones deep black, making the pattern look more like something one would find on a cow from a milk carton.

Jonah could make out plenty of passengers riding the moment of that dream. Each one was a unique shadow, unrecognizable to the dreamer. Looking down the road showed them acting out the forms of the lives humans would lead back on Earth – couples embraced in a brief moment of tenderness before a goodbye that could last minutes or lifetimes; despairing salarymen bent over on the steps of their workplace, buckling under the weight of exhaustion brought on by another day and half-night of grinding labor; elated drunkards, reveling in the freedom of a night cut off from the yoke of the world, grabbed their fellow wanderers out of love and desperation; children, excited and terrified at the prospect of grasping all that the world could offer them, stared out from second-, third-, sometimes tenth-floor apartments, all-seeing but oblivious of the people and the currents which pushed them this way and that.

Then time grabbed hold of the dream and tore it from the moment. The traffic lights flashed, the couples separated, the salarymen stood again, the drunkards fell too, the children fled to bed, and an unknown woman with very dirty blonde hair grabbed Jonah's hand, pulling him into the dream and suddenly out of it, back into the darkness.

After some time, the slice of city life was replaced by a dream which took place on an entirely different level. It felt as though an entire universe had all its parts blended together to make a horrifying reality-sausage, with that sausage then being stuffed down Jonah's mental throat. Images of a multitude of strange, unnatural planets, each one careening around a blazing star in tightly knit orbits, overlaid one on top of the other and pulsed. The pulsations swelled with turbulence, until the star systems exploded out from a miniscule center. The center was a system of its own, with an extended family of planets flashing by in a blur, until things slowed down and the sixth planet from the bright blue star grew to take up all the space in Jonah's mind.

The planet froze its motion momentarily and then began moving in reverse, faster and faster, until all the changes blurred into nothingness. The feverish time-travel stopped suddenly, with the planet having been replaced by a speck of dust. Now, moving forward through time once more, a microscopic dance was put on display. More specks would come together and merge with the one in focus, forming a loose agglomeration which slowly built mass. Occasionally, it would fly past larger blobs of dust, making it twist its path in response to their gravity. At times, these passes would rip the loose clod of dust into pieces, the heavier lump stealing some mass and sending the rest careering off into space. But some part would always remain, and the dream would keep following it along.

These clumpings became more and more frequent, as the passing of time accelerated in the dreamscape. The clod reached a roughly obloid form, which sucked in material at greater speed, eventually collapsing under its own weight to produce a sphere. It grew larger and larger, and now the encounters it had with the competing infant planets were battles instead of careless slingshotting. If a chunk much smaller got too close, it might slam right into the surface, or would be violently shredded as it passed by, briefly forming a beautiful swirling ring of rock and ice. When the dream's protagonist mini-planet swung too close to a much larger planet, however, it would in turn be warped and cracked, getting dangerously close to suffering the same fate it had handed out to its lesser kin. But each time it survived. Most impressive, though, were the battles held between planets of equal standing.

In those cases, the two contestants would slowly spiral into one another, circling one around the other like gladiators in a fight to the death. They would follow their mirror-image spiral courses, first slowly, as if sizing up their opponent, then faster and faster as the thrill of the fight grabbed them and drowned them in its oppressing flows. The planets-to-be warped each other, each one struggling to survive the warping of space during that fatal approach, until, in an orgastic burst of fiery destruction the brawlers collided, spilling their molten gore over each other and into the heavens. Out of the battle would come one larger, violently spinning planet and occasionally, a moon or even two.

The primordial chaos in which the planet grew eventually began to wane, and its molten exterior, pimpled with spastic volcanic eruptions and flows of lava while cloaked in a smoggy, dust-ridden atmosphere, slowly dimmed as it cooled and solidified. The new peace would be interrupted briefly when hot magma once again broke its stony cage and exploded into the sky, or when massive cracks opened and shook the landscape with fury, or when great clouds of ash and steam shot swarms of lightning bolts into the earth and across the sky, or… come to think of it, it really wasn't peaceful at all. As these fires raged across the planet, they seemed to scream and laugh with delirious fervor, exploding in great orgies of formation and annihilation. Time continued to pass, though, and all this chaos settled down.

The smoky atmosphere then cleared, leaving behind a planet-wide ocean and an orange sky full of clouds and tempestuous winds. Storms would come and go, raining down upon the great sea and blowing hill-sized waves across the surface while they lit up the sky with cacophonous electric blasts. All across the planet, the air and the water conversed, quarreling sometimes like angry lovers, at other times carefully caressing each other, leaving behind smooth ripples instead of tsunamis.

Tectonic plates left over from the planet's cooling process had pressed against each other in the meantime and started raising continents from the seafloor. The land was barren, rocky, and prone to eruptions, but was solid ground, nonetheless. The storms carried water up over them, dropping it back down to populate the surface with its first rivers and lakes, which then bit into the earth to make canyons and valleys. The dream showed how these great landmasses started small, just as the planet did, and slowly made themselves vast through collision and combination.

Below the surface, though, something much more interesting was happening, which the dream now turned its full attention to. Undersea volcanoes spewed fire and air into the water, muddying up the ocean floor. Amid this churn, all the elements combined and split and mixed about, occasionally forming strange bubbles of earth which burned the volcanic gasses to fuel their aimless movement. Most lasted for less a moment, a fraction of a scrap of a blink in time. But miraculously, some held on longer. Some began to divide… and then to spread across the oceans, now burning the sludge dissolved in the primordial ocean.

Life had emerged and had done so multiple times across the planet. As these progenitors copied themselves, they gave birth to the first lineages, each of which held their own microscopic secrets and peculiarities. Though they had families, these self-sustaining vortices of elements had no communication, no emotion, were without bonds and trust, without feuds and hate. They lived in the simplest way possible, eating sludge and copying themselves without consideration for another purpose. But the ocean could only host so many residents no matter how tiny they were, and the families had to learn to wage war on each other to survive. Each lineage armed its members with tiny weapons, and an all-consuming war spread across the ocean, turning the waters red.

Some families destroyed others. Some merged with others, whether by force or agreement. Some tore themselves apart without any help from outside. The world-ocean was now filled so full that the possibility of a new bloodline emerging was zero. All that could come forth now could only be built from the life that was already there. Life naturally divided into two main factions: those that learned to eat the dead bodies left behind by the never-ending war, and those that grew by eating other lives. The former led to plants, and the latter led to beasts.

After some time, the simple lifeforms learned of symbols and representation, and by these tools they began to communicate. Organized groupings formed on a microscopic scale, growing and complexifying with incredible speed, and the cells bound themselves to each other in great masses, bringing forth for the first ever time life which was visible to the naked eye. The constant strife over the last God-knows-how-many billions of years had always rewarded innovation, and so this change spread rapidly through the ocean. Animals, plants, came and went, slipping into and out of existence, doing their best to succeed but all too often getting snuffed out by the next competitor to find a cheat-like ability or weapon. They would be buried by the pressure of constant change. The great war in the great ocean went on, and on, and on. For a moment it seemed that it would be all the dream amounted to.

But Jonah's dream vision, which had been frantically following the flashing images of life's genesis, started to zoom out, and shifted to look at things in a completely different way. The planet darkened into the background and was filled with streaks of light spinning and branching at break-neck speed. The color spectrum had exploded into infinity, adding an endless variety of hues to the relatively simple list taken from human standards, filling the bundled blazes with a breathtaking vibrance. When seen up close, the alien strands looked like the clouds of interstellar nebulae, billowing and flowing along their winding paths. The dream then zoomed out to depict the whole globe once more, showing how the pretty lights filled the waters from top to bottom. They had yet to encroach on the young continents, leaving them as negative spaces on the surface.

Time sped up once more, and the lights, seen as a whole now, pulsed at a slow and steady tempo. The planet-wide heartbeat was underset by a low drone which shook the dream to its foundation. The tempo increased, picking up speed like a runaway train while the drone turned into a rumble and then a scream. The lights tightened and flared up around the boundaries of those landmasses. Magically, they then started to shift the huge plates towards new positions! A peculiar formation revealed itself as the goal of these movements. At this stage of the planet's development, there were still too many minor continents and islands to count, but four major ones were clearly visible. Two of the major continents got pushed to the northern and southern poles whereas the others moved to opposite sides of the equator. The minor continents and islands then were nestled on the lines drawn between all the continents, seaming the planet like a volleyball.

As the two great circles filled in with spots of islands, the lights' undulations synchronized fully, filling the ocean with great tidal waves which converged on the continents and washed up on their shores. Somehow, the concerted thrashings of the began to draw in primordial energies from space, the atmosphere, the oceans, and the planet's core. It mixed them together, sending them out towards the greater continents and concentrating them into four focal points of blinding power. Each one settled into the center of its continent, biting into the ground, and shooting out energy into its surroundings. The web of life, no longer confined to the ocean, began conquering the terrestrial expanses.

When the blazing furnaces took form, the dream began to lose control. The vision of the planet split in half, with one half sprinting forward through time in a blur and the other regressing back through all the development seen so far. Then the dream cracked into four, then eight, then sixteen pieces, and so on with increasing speed. Each shard of the dream moved through time at its own pace, making a complete mess and contorting the planet beyond recognition. Then, the swarm turned into a swirl, sucking the dream-pieces down into a whirlpool like water being emptied from a tub. As the eye of the spiral opened wider, the skeletal hand emerged once more.

It grabbed the edge of the whirlpool and pushed it open still further, until another hand could fit through, which joined in the effort of its counterpart. When it seemed the vortex could get no larger, through it peered an enormous skull. The edge of the whirlpool bent and contorted as some shards were sucked into the skull's vacant eye sockets. Its jaw hinged open and spewed out an alien tongue in the voice of a mountain.

"Iyon-ha, urthokaon Opurekaunon pzion."

The skull clamped its jaw shut, biting the edge of Jonah's soul, and dragged him into the whirlpool, sealing the dream shut before vanishing. Left alone again, Jonah's thoughts spun around in fits of muggy confusion, reflecting simultaneously horror, curiosity, and amazement at the image of a new world's creation. He slowly began to sense his body but could barely differentiate his limbs from his torso. A warmth enveloped him, while a steady pulsing and whooshing sound filled his ears. All his senses were dulled, softening what otherwise was a very a rough awakening.

Jonah tried stretching out his limbs, finding that they barely budged from their position. The harder he pressed, the more resistance he felt, heightening his frustration. He kept trying to move, tried opening his eyes, failing each time. Then the world around him started spinning and shaking. He felt as if he were locked inside a huge ball floating on a stormy sea, getting tossed this way and that. The sudden movement shocked Jonah into submission, forcing him to gather his thoughts, which took much more effort than usual. His mind seemed to be overwhelmed with cognitive static, drowning out the slightest attempt to formulate thought. Continuing to press up and out with his limbs, he felt something return a push softly. After feeling the maternal nudge, his world settled into calmness, allowing him to push one word at a time through his fuzzy consciousness.

'Wooo… womb!' he thought.

'I… I… Baby?'