Science Fiction Microstory Contest discussion
Congrats to Tom Olbert, Twelve-time Champion of the Science Fiction Microstory Contest
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Thank you, very much. Greatly appreciated.I'll have next month's theme up as soon as possible.
by Tom Olbert
He was a dreamer who longed to awaken.
His thoughts wove from a thousand machines…like huge mechanical spiders harvesting silicon from asteroids and dead moons…spawning nannites that perpetuated his living dream across the stars…stars like dust scattered across the void.
His thoughts roamed the time waves, slipping between dimensions as the dream sought its prize…half-remembered glimpses of home long lost, and for the large part, forgotten.
But, not completely.
A fragment of a memory, here and there, like a shimmering vibration along the timelines, strings vibrating across forever. Each a note in a symphony long lost…now, reforming…one note at a time, each following the other. The music of a lute. A song. Brush strokes on canvass. A vision of a hunt. It was all there…bits and pieces coming together, dreams within dreams…
The raw matter of the universe was the sound from which he formed his symphony. Living worlds he found, like gems scattered across an ocean bed. Life startlingly beautiful in its infinite diversity. Things that moved in varying gravity…translucent wings that moved across lavender skies of a dozen moons. Beings the size of mountain ranges that moved across deserts of shifting crystal. Plants that thought, brief in their existence, infinite in their intricacy.
Out of all that…Only one in a hundred trillion worlds across the branching lines having genetic structure suitable to form one more precious note in the symphony. He harvested each with gentle, exacting care, copying its pattern in waves of energy, therefrom to form it again from suitable organic matter. The symphony formed around him, swirling into artful patterns, like a galactic spiral around its core.
It called to him across the infinite…he could grasp it, one fragile memory at a time. Waves washing across stones glistening in the yellow sunlight. Sand wet…rain across forest, drops congealing on blades of grass. Home.
He remembered the tears and they came. He remembered the laughter and it came. The nightmare memories lurked in the shadows at twilight. He remembered. Fear and hate. Rejection of the beauty of the many colors, the oneness of it all…the music conflicted and destroyed itself.
He remembered. The searing white heat of mushroom-shaped clouds, beautiful even as they consumed in a moment what it had taken billions of years to form. Another memory…an ebony statue of a multi-armed being…Behold – I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. The last tears as the light faded to ash and wind-blown dust.
He shrugged it off as his symphony descended through a dead sea to the primal matter below. Time to begin again, as before. That first ignition, that first stirring of life, each another note as it all began again. He wrote into the symphony all the memories…not just the beauty, but the nightmares, too.
In each breath drawn, those who followed must remember the lost paths, the dark dreams and night terrors of those who came before, that those paths could this time be avoided. He wondered how many times this had already happened. How many times it might happen again. Each time but one more note in a larger symphony, he thought.
He remembered as he became the symphony and descended with it into the cradle of the next beginning. He was all that remained…the shattered bits of memory scattered like seeds in the wind.
At last, he had come home.