Some people think that Vulk, minor god of the incurably impetuous, took delivery of a 3D printer and, while the user manual was still in its cellophane wrapper, wrote a ‘Hello, World!’ programme – the starting point for learning every new computer language – but not before tinkering with the printer’s constants; the world as we know it came into existence when he printed it.
They say the world is flawed because Vulk didn’t initialise the printer correctly – you were supposed to set the values for a number of universal constants before hitting the ‘Print’ button.
Perhaps Vulk’s biggest mistake was accidentally swapping some of the chemical properties of carbon and silicon with the result that all life forms in our world are carbon-based rather than silicon-based, which is the almost-universal norm. Nowhere with silicon-based life suffers climate change because silicon dioxide is not a greenhouse gas – it just sits around in the desert as grains of sand.
Surely, the acceleration due to gravity was meant to be exactly 10 metres per second per second, not an unsatisfying 9.81? Indeed, there were some obsessive-compulsive physicists who argued that the length of the second should be increased to make it so.
And how many of us sitting in a noisy bar trying to have a quiet conversation have wished that the volume of sound diminished with the inverse cube of the distance from the loud-mouth at the next table, rather than with the inverse square? We might also blame Vulk for that.
Finally, we simply don’t know whether the product of pi and e is a rational or an irrational number. Current thinking is that pi.e must be irrational since, when you divide pi.e by two, it is always the case that one half is larger than the other, but you can never tell which; Vulk may be responsible for all those endless sibling squabbles, and the argument continues to rage. What kind of creator being would be so cruel as to leave such a question unanswerable?
Thank you, Vulk.
Yes, Vulk would have a lot to answer for – if there were a grain of truth in the myth.
Complete understanding of our origins may never be achieved, so what follows may be as good an explanation as any. It begins with the story of how man came to Erd.
*
There was a time when Earth shone brighter than Venus; a time of ice; a time of endless snowfall that filled valleys and drowned mountains until vast and desolate fields of windswept whiteness were all that remained.
To say that the surface of Earth was inhospitable was like saying it hurts a bit when a woolly mammoth stands on your foot, but there were survivors – mostly the creatures who migrated towards the tropics as fast as their legs would carry them. The primates among them had the sense to follow the four-legged food – animals as small as rabbits and as large as aurochs and elephants.
One tribe, however, lingered too long in its traditional hunting ground in the northern mountains. At the end of the season, which turned out to be the end of all seasons except for winter, they were trapped in a high valley. Encircled by impassable mountains, their only exit was blocked by avalanches and rockfalls.
They found shelter from the wild snowstorms in a cave and felt themselves lucky to come across a family of hibernating bears – a mother and two cubs; it was a gift from the gods of fur and protein that they would need if they had to overwinter here.
The tribe was a collection of families which were closely related by wedlock. Their leader was Egil and he took the title Fyrberend – the fire-carrier. He looked out at the snow and pulled his cloak closer round him; his hand rested on the head of his favourite hunting dog, Buccwellan – the deer-killer.
Egil frowned. Something was wrong; something had changed. It was his responsibility to keep the tribe safe; it had been his decision to stay another month – until the next full moon – and he was worried that his mistake might cost them dearly. They had not seen the moon for fourteen days and the sun, if they saw it at all through the continuous snowfall, was pale and weak.
Egil’s brother, Grim, approached with Egil’s youngest son, Ketil. Egil had two brothers Grim: there was Grim the Honey-Worded and Grim the Reaper. At this time Grim the Reaper was shape-changing, and also cross-dressing, as Grimgerde the Valkyrie, and was busy in distant battles choosing and despatching recruits to the Hall of Fame.
‘Winter is come,’ Egil said.
‘And early,’ Grim said. ‘Only three moons have passed since mid-summer.’
‘We will need food for our people and wood for the fire.’
‘We have meat enough for two moons, and we have what fruit and berries ripened before the snows came.’
‘It was a cold, wet summer and the fruit is poor. It will not be enough. We may have to kill the slaves.’
Ketil went pale. ‘Kill the slaves? Why?’
Egil looked at his son and realised that, since Ketil was born, life had been good; there had been food enough that neighbouring tribes did not need to fight. Ketil had not known the times of hardship when a fierce hunger gripped your belly and you had to be constantly on the lookout for raiding parties.
‘The slaves have mouths that we cannot feed,’ Egil said in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘They also have muscle and marrow that we can eat. You are too young, Ketil, to know that this is how it is done.’
[Some world-building here describing how the tribe made their way into the series of tunnels accessible from the back of the cave. The tribe thrives underground and makes rapid technological advance using the readily available resources they find. They call their world Erd.]
With each successive generation, memory of the surface of the planet diminished, and the life the tribe had lived there was forgotten; they were entirely self-sufficient in their subterranean fastness. Eventually, awareness of the surface faded altogether and the stories of the old times were abandoned. A few artefacts remained like animal hides and stone tools but they lay forgotten in a dusty storeroom in a museum.
A person born and raised in Erd had never seen the sky or the horizon; a sun had never risen in their world; they knew nothing of solar systems and galaxies; they knew only that rocks surrounded them in all directions and the world was flat, as witnessed by the observation that wherever you go a plumb line always points in the same direction – straight down. They thought the world was unchanging because the teeming civilisation that supported them had existed for countless generations.
*
Two hundred thousand years ago, the energy from a near-Earth supernova ripped through the solar system. The shock wave struck a weakness in Earth’s crust and opened up a fissure all the way down to a tunnel in Erd. A stream of atomic nuclei from the supernova penetrated the crust and its high energy bombardment created the only atom ever to exist of monolithium – the element with atomic number 149.
{The name is pronounced monolith-ium rather than mono-lithium – the committee governing atomic nomenclature were avid readers of science fiction.}
There is no Greek prefix to express the brevity of the half-life of monolithium but the shortest-imaginable-part-of-a-second later, the atom began its cascade of decay into an atom of lead. By a twist of fate the atom of lead that was once monolithium was mined, refined, and added as an anti-knock agent to a gallon of petrol that the omniscient third-party narrator pumped into his 1968 Triumph Spitfire. He ingested it while trying to fix a leaking exhaust manifold gasket and it lodged in his brain where it deprived him of the sense not to buy another Spitfire three years later. As far as we know, it’s still there.
The brunt of the spray of radiation from the decay was borne by a virus living in the slime that clung to the wall of the tunnel. The radiation caused a mutation in the tail-end of its DNA – its telomere – which made it into a radio receiver. The genetic code of the mutation included a sequence beginning ‘AAA’ to show where the battery should go. This in turn caused the virus to convert anything it picked up from its rudimentary antenna into a string of nucleotides tacked on to the end of its genome.
*
Niamh Spinel would be a dream come true for any anthropologist who found her skeleton, say, two hundred thousand years into the future. Her long, slender bones, her rather high forehead above a diminutive brow ridge, the volume of her cranium – whichever characteristic you chose to measure she was in one or other of its most extreme percentiles. You could say she was the individual who was closest to not being in her own species; one small genetic nudge and her offspring could no longer be classified as Homo heidelbergensis.
Niamh was certainly striking to look at in her tight-fitting jumpsuit, causing a lingering gaze from the kayak rental guy as he handed her the paddles. She was used to this kind of attention but it had little effect on her; she had no sense of belonging to society and had no intention of conforming to its norms; in any case, she was not interested in a relationship of that kind, at the moment.
She grinned instead at Ruby Maser, her cousin and children-hood friend, as she handed over one of the paddles. ‘This is going to be the best time; I’m so happy you’re here.’
{chīl'dren n. (pl. chīl'dren) Unborn, new-born, or young person. [OA cild womb + OK ren person] [Gabbrograd Anglish Dictionary] Anglish follows the pattern, found in many languages, of creating new nouns through the gradual contraction of an adjective-noun pair; thus 'child ren', literally 'womb person' first became the hyphenated 'child-ren' and finally 'children'. The plural is invariant: one children, two children}
She checked that the chinstrap of Ruby’s helmet was tight, then tested the short-range radios. Together they launched the solid-diamond two-seater canoe and climbed aboard; Niamh made sure that each parachute ripcord was attached securely to an anchor point behind their seats.
‘That’s it, we’re good to go. Are you ready?’
‘I’m a little nervous,’ Ruby admitted. ‘Why you choose to do these crazy sports is a mystery, and why I agreed to join you is an even bigger one.’
‘It’s just so much fun!’ Niamh replied, almost giggling with excitement. ‘I’d rather be here than in boring Gabbrograd, stuck in the Erd mentality: work, pray, work, pray; I don’t even know who it is we’re forced to pray to or why.’
Ruby looked nervously at the ren who had given them the paddles; he seemed to be out of earshot. ‘Careful what you say,’ she whispered urgently. ‘That sort of talk could get you arrested. Anyway, it’s not boring if you’ve got the right job; maybe you just don’t know what you want to be yet.’
‘That’s exactly the point,’ Niamh said, ‘I don’t want to be anything; I just want to be.’
A whisper of sound became a distant rumble.
‘It’s starting,’ Niamh said, squirming to settle in her seat. ‘So, get in position and when I shout “paddle” go for it with everything you’ve got; let me do the steering; you just need to keep us moving faster than the water.’
‘Got it,’ said Ruby who always looked outwardly calm; not even Niamh could quite tell what she was thinking
Niamh sat behind Ruby, both of them holding their paddles at the ready. The canoe rested on the floor of a dry lava tube – a tunnel which had once been the conduit for a flow of searingly hot lava. The jagged walls of the tunnel were home to billions upon billions of light-emitting diatoms – the bioluminescent microorganisms that pervaded Erd and which, when pressure was applied to them, gave off a soft light such as you might find in an intimate wine bar or the contemplation room of a spa hotel.
The distant rumble grew louder.
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