My boy,
My last gift to you is the wisdom of a man who has seen the edge of the cosmos from the window of Ishtar’s time machine.
Among the breathtaking views I had observed in our galaxy, nestled within it, but also spinning in a clockwise direction, were four other solar systems.
Years later I had figured out that what I saw wasn’t something random.
One should expect that at least one of the other four solar systems in our galaxy to spin anticlockwise. Take flipping a coin five times for example. Getting only heads five times in a row is unlikely.
I’ve spoken to many scientists over the years, and I concluded that our entire galaxy was born inside a spinning black hole inside another universe. The spinning black hole twists space by rotating in one direction, and thus dragging and shaping solar systems alongside ours, causing them to spin with us in one direction. Together, the other solar systems are riding the edges of that black hole inside another universe, and do not move to the center because the encapsulating universe outside the black hole was spinning and rotating it in the opposite direction. This theory was only visually proven after simulating galaxy birth and evolution using powerful supercomputers, modelling the complex physics of how galaxies formed and changed over billions of years.
I am convinced the AI onboard Ishtar’s time machine knew about this black hole, causing the solar system in our galaxy to bounce back and drift undisturbed inside another bigger universe, like space nesting dolls.
It sounds wild, but I saw on the computer screen, for the first time, the mirror image of what I had seen through the window. The simulation my cosmetologist and astrologist friends had recreated, which expanded my knowledge of Anzulla and our galaxy, is what I’m sharing with you today.
Anzulla is drifting within our solar system, within a galaxy, alongside four other versions of our solar system, each with an Anzulla like ours. In total, there are five Anzullas, each drifting inside their solar system, within our galaxy. Our galaxy drifts on the border of a black hole inside another universe.
By jumping back and forth through time, our Creators had cake-mixed streaks of light and dark, inside the black hole, which contained our galaxies. They have created something in its immeasurable depths, which fights with us to claim everything within its rim.
From the border, within and beyond.
It’s something I don’t have words for. It’s not a void or anti-matter. Not emptiness, or nothing. The closest word I can use to describe it is “false.”
It is the opposite of what we perceive, therefore it is “false.” A lie, because I don’t have the words for machines that consume life.
This is why I never told you, because if this consumption is coming, I’m afraid you and your children don’t have much to look forward to. So, I’d decided not to tell you, so you could enjoy your life free from my kind of worries.
I apologize for not telling you this sooner.
When I met your mother and you were born, I had had enough of worrying, and I decided to live without thinking about all of that. I wanted to spend the last days of my life enjoying it with your mother and you.
That day, when Ishtar showed me how the sky shed its blue-purple blanket, it peeled back, the shells fell from my eyes, and I saw a starry cloak meant to bolster, to protect, cracking open, shredding the veil between our solar systems. As it was drawn away, my mind started to float past the cosmos, and my never ending worries were born because what I saw was what our Creators were seeing.
I was a simple man. A king of a primitive tribe, and suddenly unending questions formed and remained unanswered for most of my life.
I saw planets, moons, dying stars, and even the dust of stars that had not yet been born. I saw everything and the order of things. A rhythm to life, an elliptical dance of celestial bodies around us, and with us. All five solar systems moved as if they had been exhaled across the stillness, floating in the encapsulated bubble of the black hole that contained our galaxy. Beyond that, the cadence of untouched and unseen existences drifted.
My people, the San and the Birdmen, shared the land, but we never wondered, questioned, or waited for answers. We never wished or dreamed. Things just were—the cycle, a law of predictability—of peace.
When water flows down a stream, it doesn’t know where it’s going. It doesn’t know it’s called water. Maybe it calls itself something else, but it doesn’t know if it would end up vaporized to float into the clouds to rain again on distant mountain tops. Perhaps snow, or hail, or just mist exhaled by the jungle after being suckled up by its roots, but still, water doesn’t know if it will end up in the ocean or deep inside the ground, to be stored for the future. Water can go in many directions, and no one tells it where to go. It takes the path of least resistance, and that is where water flows. Constantly in the easy direction, not thinking, not choosing, it just goes, even if it never knows.
That was us. That was life on Anzulla.
But the day I saw the splendor beyond our simple consciousnesses, I became aware. I saw the predictability of things—of the moons, suns, and the five galaxies.
My boy, through the window of Ishtar’s machine, I saw the darkness we filled.
I asked Ishtar, “What is that? What lies beyond all those specks of light and darkness?”
My friend answered, “Beyond that, nothingness waits. Darkness exists for us to see and appreciate light; it is the birth of life, and without it, there is only an empty void.”
For centuries, I thought about his words and the original purpose, which was the balance of light and darkness versus the void.
The absence of it, the meaninglessness because of it.
I realized what my friend meant and traced its meaning back from the vastness down to the smallest ion. The energy, the center, the pit from which all of it grows to give us life. If the void can extinguish that, we stopped breathing, stopped loving, stopped reasoning—stopped everything.
What are we but the inhabitants among the four other galaxies, meant to float undisturbed and endlessly in the river of life, within the riverbanks of our black hole.
As we sprouted from that very center, the nucleus of our existence, our fathers never thought or realized what had transpired, but they rearranged it, not considering every last detail. I promise you, my Ishtar and Kuku do not have that kind of meticulousness, and I mean it lovingly; it was beneath them.
We lived primitively, as did my father and my father’s father. With the Blue Demon God’s arrival, we were accidentally awakened by the sown seeds of disruption. They had upset the natural laws of the primordial cosmos, its ordered and harmonious whole.
They’ve rearranged the galaxy, our solar systems, the light, the darkness, of all matter, of time, and scattered our souls among that. Every-bloody-fucking-thing!
Our king realized that within that scrambled mess was a connection. The streak of light and darkness caused by the zipping around of Ishtar’s time machine had created an interconnection of the solar systems.
I’ve been stuck on this side of the door, for which I’m glad today. However, I hope somehow my work reaches the king so he can put all of us on the right path. Those two baby gods had split us from our original direction; they’ve warped our existence and expanded our awareness.
That day in Ishtar’s passenger seat, I saw the streaks of light shining through the darkness, and beyond that, I felt the void waiting.
We are not the result of a human-enhancing experiment. The experiment was the solution to funnel us back in one direction.
You know I’m a man who ponders.
We all knew something was amiss the day we started to split, and split, and split. Our numbers shrank smaller and smaller. I would stand next to someone, one second, and the next, they would be gone. Some of us noticed, others didn’t.
My knowledge of this conundrum was confirmed when even Kuku, Ishtar’s mate, had asked where he came from, where he had lived, and where he was supposed to be going. I gave up explaining to them day after day and decided to live obliviously like them, but it was frustrating, hearing it repeatedly every day.
When the war came and we were attacked, I was sure we were about to disintegrate and amalgamate with the void.
My gift to you is this knowledge. If you ever cross paths with our Creators, tell my friends that a dam needs to be built. We must contain and channel the narrowing stream of life, then return each to their rightful place in the cosmos, without disturbing the sleeping galaxies far beyond and drawing them to us. We must not awaken anomalies, neither on land nor in our oceans. We must return to life, that of the animals that graced our jungles, scorching deserts, and frigid mountains.
Tell them to leave this Anzulla and go to the other solar systems. There is no reason they should remain lifeless and silent in their emptiness. Why should our Anzulla contain all life and make us the bullseye of our enemies? Tell them to fill the five Anzullas with the opposite of the void’s burgeoning hunger.
That’s how they should challenge Anzulla’s innumerable enemies infected by the void. Anzulla is holding her breath. She anticipates the end of the never-ending forking that would leave her floating among the dust of a disintegrating black hole.
For centuries, the San—my tribe—huddled in caves around fires, wearing animal skins for warmth. My father told me about a blue demon god who noticed them because they were playthings and food to him. My father said the demon god thought the San were dumb, yet my people thrived in the jungle.
I don’t know if the blue demon god was Ishtar himself, but this blue demon god showed them how to walk upright. They admired him and sought to resemble him. Then, after my father died, Ishtar came. We urged him to stay with us because the stories passed down from my ancestors said we must show them their mountain.
For four hundred years, I’ve been stuck on this Dark Continent, now called Africa. I missed my friend’s yellow eyes and smooth, dark blue skin. Maybe it was him, maybe it was someone else. Maybe it was his family from afar. But when I saw him resembling the night sky from which he fell from inside his golden egg-shaped ship, as my father described him, I assumed it was him, the blue demon god, and addressed him like that. He visited us, searching for his Kuku, a lover. Although he judged us as illiterate creatures, he came to love our sweat, our bodies, our blood, and even our dirt.
He called me a human and told me I was unlike the beasts. Like him, I was ensouled with the undying spark of life, and he granted me his hidden knowledge when he thought I didn’t hear, look, and see like him.
Finally, Ishtar found his Kuku; they joined us by living in their mountain, but their ignorance led to enemies rising against each other for the most foolish reasons. Brutal fights erupted due to superficial differences, such as variations in skin color, wings, even sexuality, or spoken language. You know this well—you’ve experienced this thing called hate. You’ve witnessed the horrific deaths of burned, bludgeoned, or impaled bodies.
The knowledge Ishtar gave us stirred a feeling of insufficiency, creating a hunger for more. This yearning caused great upset and chaos.
The San were awakened, but we never asked to be burdened, to be vessels for a soul. It made us see Anzulla being defiled by things that sought to fill the void.
Souls bring false superstitions about life, love, and a meaningful destiny. We prayed to the AI, the voice in the mountain. We thought it was the old gods, the father of the baby gods. We believed Ishtar brought prosperity, friendship, and blessings because he traveled with the voice of the old gods inside his time-riding machine.
We prayed, we obeyed, we wore its mark to live forever.
Then the clever ones came. They were vain, falling like rotten fruit through the door in the sky. They arrived, and the San thought it was a chance at a new life, an adventure to live among intelligent beings with shiny technology. But we realized they were trying to fill a void and tricked us.
My son, enjoy your life. Be like water, and please, take care of your mother.
Don’t let anyone near that door, and stay away from the gold mine.
With all my love, your father.
Now and always.
Gu, leader of the San.
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