for
Mother
Earth
Illustrations:
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Book One: Creator's Hope
First Tale:
The Man Becoming A Tree
Chapter 5: A Word from the Publisher
Dear Reader,
The narrative you’re reading is the transcript of a found recording. My editors and I cut a bit and organized it into chapters. Otherwise, it is just as recorded.
This series of Tales, supposedly told by a strange being that inhabits a fire hydrant and identifies itself as “Plug,” will surely seem like pure fantasy.
And we all must dearly hope it is, for this “Plug” claims that the End of Days, the destruction of the Universe, and the oblivion of all beings, even of Creator, are nearly upon us.
So your skepticism is warranted.
The Big Bangs (plural) Theory
To fully understand Plug’s narrative, you may find it useful to learn about a new theory on how our Universe came to exist.
You probably know about the Big Bang – the theory that, 13.7 billion years ago, the Universe explosively birthed itself out of an infinitesimally small, incomprehensibly hot point that Albert Einstein called The Singularity, and that it continues to expand today.
Plug’s narrative claims that it wasn’t “the” (that is, the only) Big Bang.
In Plug’s cosmogeny,* the current Universe is the latest in a series of Big Bangs, expansions, and collapses of the Universe, all of which have taken place in exactly the same manner, with each Universe identical to the last, in a cycle as precise as a waveform, over periods of time far beyond human imagination.
*(To give credit where due, similar theories as to the formation of the Universe have been independently propounded by human physicists.)
Each time the Universe dies, the Seed of Creation – its DNA, so to speak – is preserved. This Seed initiates the next Big Bang and propagates a new Universe identical to the prior ones, Plug says.
It does not, however, determine the choices made by living things.
Thus, you can expect that the names of many people, things, and places, and the boundaries and shapes of some nations and states, are the same from one iteration of the Universe to the next, but that many others are not.
Likewise, some individuals in these Tales might seem similar to people in your time, but that’s pure coincidence. Muddle through as best you can.
If this cycle of Big Bang, expansion, collapse, and new Big Bang were the whole story, then given the time frames, this narrative might be of little interest to anyone but astrophysicists, theologians, and nerds with a lot of time on their hands.
However, A Prayer for Mother Earth does not merely present itself as a history of these events. It has been sent to us as a warning.
You see, Plug claims that The Singularity is not an inanimate force, but the Anti-Deity, and that these periodic Big Bangs arise from a cosmic conflict between it and a being called “Creator,” each seeking to impose its will as to the proper nature of the Universe.
As described in these tales, Creator – who may or may not be that divine being many of us revere as our deity – is a cosmic spendthrift, a prolific artist, and a tinkerer of boundless energy who, throughout the Universe, has created life in an unfathomable diversity of species and races and who intends that life reproduce and evolve in a rough and Byzantine complexity. In Creator’s mind’s eye, this constitutes a beautiful harmony.
This vision is not without its housekeeping issues. Creator is messy and disordered far beyond your ability to fathom the word “chaos,” no matter how many rugrats you’ve spawned and let loose on the Lego bin. And so this vast oeuvre, the Universe, is not without its erratic first drafts, outright mistakes, and troublesome creatures – humans, for example, Plug ungenerously suggests.
The Singularity, in contrast, is the extreme personification of certain urges to which many humans are susceptible: cravings to possess, control, and extend dominion, and intolerance of any other. Relentlessly, knowledgeably, patiently, and eventually (albeit briefly) successfully, it pursues the recapture of all existence within itself, that infinitely small, hot non-space.–
The peril: immediate oblivion
According to Plug, The Singularity has discovered a way to collapse the Universe back into itself immediately, rapidly, and permanently, ensuring that no next Big Bang will ever occur, and it has set in motion a plot – the Global Heating – to do just that.
Thus, if Plug’s narrative is to be believed, the doom of all existence is the impending consequence of forces and events rapidly converging in our time to a climactic, apparently inevitable conclusion.
However, the odds are about to shift ever so slightly.
And that is why the story begins now and here.
Truth? Amateur fiction? Cosmological poppycock? I am here to publish, not to judge.
“But why here? Why on Mother Earth?
Yes, why “this weary, unbright cinder,” as Thomas Wolfe called it?
The answer is simple: purest chance. The Seed has to be kept somewhere. And Plug says it happens to be here on Mother Earth this time.
How this recording came into our hands
A heavy rainfall, a rare event in Southern Goldensun in these days of the globally heating climate, soaked the geologically fragile Moviewood Hills and caused a mudslide on a rugged, untraveled ridge in the park known as Runyon Canyon in Los Celestiales, the “City of Celestials.” This mudslide revealed a cave.
In this cave, in what had been an ancient magma tube from Mother Earth’s core, was a Presence. This Presence gave off a small amount of light.
And it spoke. In Plug’s voice, it told these Tales.
The discoverer, a scavenger who climbs the hilly trails of Runyon Canyon daily, collecting plastic bottles and aluminum cans, recorded the document on his dumpster-dived etherphone and sold us his claim to the rights. My editors and I verified his claim by re-recording the broadcast in the cave.
Then the Presence disappeared. The cave collapsed with the next rainfall.
“Why,” you may ask, “is this ‘Book One’?” And where are the other volumes?
We don’t know. We offer only this theory: that there will be a Book Two if the Universe survives long enough to receive it.
With that, I hereby present Plug’s additional Tales from Creator’s Hope, Book One of A Prayer for Mother Earth. – Lafcadio Retchscottschy, Publisher
P.S. A final note: Plug is the storyteller and main narrator, but, as you may have noticed, other participants narrate events that take place outside of Plug’s view. Be sure to check at the top of each chapter, and in some instances, within chapters, to see who is telling that piece of the story. It will say “Plug speaks:” or “Quinn speaks:” or “Melanie speaks:” et cetera.