A lonely Creator. A universe built of crude fractal mathematics. Life, seething and surging, evolving towards something . . . greater.
Built on the Tielhard hypothesis, this new short story from Yudhanjaya Wijeratne explores the birth of a universe surprisingly like ours, but with a this one is home to a God so vast It uses stars as information storage and black holes as compute nodes. All alone in the darkness, the Alpha and Omega nudges this new world, dissatisfied, in search of the one thing that might ease Its ultimate civilization.
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne is a Nebula-nominated science fiction author and data scientist from Colombo, Sri Lanka. By day he is a senior researcher with the Data, Algorithms and Policy team at LIRNEasia, working at the intersection of technology and government policy.
He is the co-founder of Watchdog, a fact-checking organization that sprung up in the wake of the April 2019 bombings in Sri Lanka. He built and operates @osunpoet, an experimental Instagram poet using OpenAI technology to test a human+AI collaboration in art - a thesis currently being explored in an entirely separate trilogy of novels.
Yudhanjaya blogs at Yudhanjaya.com, and has written for Slate, Foreign Policy and more besides.
It's one of those stories you come across rarely in your life. How he explains scientific phenomena with a poet's vision is what makes Omega Point stand out. Absolutely loved this one.
Like his other short story, I very much enjoyed this. I would have liked it to be funnier, but its clear that yud's prose is not funny. I enjoyed it a lot, still.