A Hundred Thousand Seasons of Steady Wind

A story about a message in an office safe.

“On a planet billions of lightyears away a slow honey-colored syrup organism is beginning to form within a small round incubation chamber hollow in the center of an inverted igneous pyramid hovering several feet above a minor rounded peak. The outer surface of the inverted igneous pyramid is smooth and polished and isometrically perfect, but inside it is chalky and rotten, and the yellow atmosphere is pulled in and caught up in its sponge-like porous form. Reactions fire cold. The atmosphere mixes with the stone’s own rich blood within the incubation chamber and slowly condenses mass into the conscious substance growing now, beginning to stir from side to side within against the sloping walls. At the top of the hollow now rapidly filling is a chiseled chimney chute, very narrow, less than an inch diameter, into which the organism with its growing mass is bubbling, filling, being forced up through. All around the terrain is lifeless and undulating. Bare rock stretches out in infinite shades of blue-green-gray with long, wavy ridges and thin knobby towers, globular blocks and mounds, inclines steep and gradual, shallow pits, deep sinkholes, circular ports in irregular walls. Everything is chaotic but eroded and smoothed, every edge and corner rounded, softened. There has been a hundred thousand million years of gentle, steady wind and it has made the whole terrain like a landscape seen through a window smeared in petroleum jelly. Clouds of corrosive gas race endlessly slowly across the sky. The horizon is an enormous lithium cliff a thousand miles tall, shining glassy-cold in the light of this galaxy’s twin suns. Before it a hundred other inverted igneous pyramids can be glimpsed, each hovering above some raised convergence in the landscape. These pyramids and only these pyramids retain defined edges, crisp lines and sharp points capable of scratching the rock, capable of puncturing the surface. Everything else is like soft vegetables, like a bruise, like heavy rags soaked in milk. The syrup organism grows to the point of being forced out, extruded from the top of the chimney chute and begins to spread outwards in all directions purposefully and simultaneously. It spreads slowly, coats the igneous in itself and feeling for itself the polished flatness of the surface over which it slowly secretes. As it spreads outwards and over the surface it perceives the directions in which it moves not as discrete motions or trajectories but a single unified development of itself within space, a single continuous motion with a single continuous contour. It spreads as a thickness of some inches, the edge curving down to kiss the rock like a wave meeting the shore and its center, above the aperture from which it first emerged, the chimney connecting its incubator to the exterior world, bubbling slightly higher to accommodate the extrusion of still more of itself onto the exterior. It does this with no hurry; the days on this planet last hundreds of hours, and the nights are a long oblivion which is unspoken and quickly forgotten. Across an amount of these hundreds of hours, the syrup organism extrudes itself, spreads out, and comes to learn the dimensions of the inverted igneous pyramid’s smooth, flat top. Then, having determined this, having made all the assessments and determinations physical chemical mathematical and philosophical necessary to proceed, it begins to slide itself down the sides of the pyramid, clinging with sticky density to the inverted faces, resisting gravity, coating these surfaces just as it has coated the one above. It descends slowly, moving down each face simultaneously, careful to distribute itself evenly, to allow no part of itself to drip away prematurely to the ground below. Above, within the incubator, it continues to grow itself. It grows and extrudes as much of itself as is needed, as much as is necessary. Finally, it meets itself at the tip of the pyramid, the inverted igneous point pointing downwards towards the planet’s surface, ignorant of heaven and the stars. Meeting itself here, the syrup organism stops. It restrains itself from further accumulation, sticking itself tightly to the tip and resisting the urge to collect and begin drizzling downwards. Instead, it holds itself still, and, having now coated the entirety of the pyramid in itself, begins to work. This work is evidenced by the slow emergence of a light, a light which grows brighter and seems to fill the rock. I am forced to look away, and when I look back, the pyramid is gone. The organism, free, now, of its birthplace, falls to the rock below and flows quickly into a well-worn channel. From this channel it flows into a larger one, and still a larger, which feeds it finally into a great basin where it mixes with other syrup organisms and becomes indistinguishable from them, becomes part of them as a unified consciousness. This is only one case among many more than can be known. At times, the basin is filled with an overpowering light, a light far greater, even, than that of the sky’s two suns.”

This text, written and meticulously illustrated on a series of napkins originating from a nearby cocktail bar, was discovered in the office safe of a Mr. W___, shipping magnate, following his suicide at the age of 59. His death is believed to have occurred around 22:00 on the day before he was scheduled to be arraigned on charges of fraud and money laundering. State prosecutors alleged numerous large shipments of unknown materials were made by his firm to nonexistent addresses, the shipments paid for via untraceable “World-Ghost” intermediaries by parties he had refused to identify. The last napkin of the set featured an illustration of the so-called “light-filled basin”. At its center was a blotch of dried, crusty substance which laboratory tests revealed to be human semen. Further testing determined the semen was not Mr. W___’s own, nor that of any immediate family members. Beyond that, the individual’s identity remains unknown.