“Raymond Peers down the Well of Souls” by Gordon Cash

    When it arrived, it was sorely disappointed. The planet teemed with life, but most of it was barely complex at all. Too thin a gruel for nourishment. Rare were the species with any promise, and rarer still the individuals with the mental complexity to survive bodily death. Feeble though these might be, the ancient consciousness had no choice but to stay and try to rebuild its disentropy.

#

            Raymond had a reputation. When people couldn’t make their electronics work, they called on him. He was good with mechanical things, too, although there were fewer of those around nowadays. “Gadgetman has spoken,” he liked to say after doing successful battle with someone’s gear.

It was a mystery to Raymond why he could do this. He had no formal training as an engineer or plant operator. Some things just made a sort of elegant sense to him. Neither was it a matter of intelligence. He straightforwardly figured out gadgets that flummoxed their Ph.D.-holding owners.

Maybe it was his good memory. He began a task by memorizing the controls or instructions. Then, he rearranged them in his mind until he thought they would produce the result he was after. Usually, he got it, if not on the first try, then after a few.

It made sense to Raymond that his mind worked the same way in his job as a computer programmer. No mathematics whiz, he understood only with difficulty the requests people brought him. Still, he was the go-to man for intractable problems. If other good programmers could make their machines cough up a correct answer, Raymond made his do it in a fraction of the CPU cycles, sometimes a very small fraction.

Raymond was well aware that he never did this through mathematical insight, realizing some obscure formula was equivalent to an equally obscure, different one. He just came up with combinations of instructions no one else thought of. He could all but see the data, down to ones and zeros, rearranging itself at his commands. He took great pleasure in this, as if some whole other plane of existence honored him by allowing his presence. Accurately or not, Raymond felt special.

The hungry disentropic singularity thought Raymond was special, too, a prize worth waiting for. It waited.

#

The singularity announced its presence when Raymond was enjoying particularly pleasant, half-waking dreams facilitated by some particularly excellent marijuana. “Demon weed,” the dealer called it. And so it turned out to be.

Raymond had closed his eyes when he couldn’t shake the feeling that his bedroom was actually the inside of a 1963 Volkswagen bus. Also, the travel clock in its tan leather case looked more and more like a turkey sausage slider. Bad enough the row of CD cases on his shelf were clearly a set of teeth, unacceptable that they were grinning at themselves in the mirror on the opposite wall. He gave himself over to the images in his mind.

So, Raymond thought he was hallucinating when something appeared that looked at once like a human face and like a seething confusion of light and shadow. “Demon weed, indeed!” he thought, and smiled. He couldn’t tell if its lips moved. The whole image pulsated.

“You are Raymond. You are special.”

Raymond no sooner thought, “Who are you?” than it answered. He was not surprised he didn’t need to speak. It was all in his own mind anyway.

“I am a disentropic singularity. You can call me Knot.”

Still amused rather than alarmed, Raymond thought, “I know that’s with a K, so what’s a disentropic singularity?”

“Like a black hole, but disentropy instead of matter. Your primitive physics can’t explain it any better.”

As luck, or something, would have it, Raymond was prepared for this. He had been reading about black holes. The mathematics were far out of his reach, but the idea fascinated him.

According to latitude and longitude, the North and South Poles don’t exist. The longitude lines converge to an indescribable point, a mathematical singularity. If you actually go there, it’s no different from anywhere else. Well, maybe colder. The thing is, the singularity is an artifact of the mathematics, not real at all.

Physicists call a black hole a singularity, too, a point of zero size and infinite density. Some think that’s a mathematical artifact as well, and a viable quantum theory of gravity will make it go away. Reality or artifact, singularity is the term of choice.

Like the North and South Poles, black holes are real, whatever they are. Gravitational wave observations nailed that one. Einstein theorized that Newton’s equations didn’t quite work if conditions got extreme enough, and he was right. If you cram too much matter into too small a space, odd things happen.

“So, something that enters you never escapes?”

“Very good! Once formed, a singularity is eternal, unless a greater singularity engulfs it.”

“Let me guess. You didn’t form in a supernova collapse.”

“Right again, Raymond. I am disentropy, not matter. Every corporeal being dies. If its consciousness is complex enough, a singularity forms. This happens even with some of your own species, tiny though they are.”

“And then?”

“They persist, unless a much greater singularity absorbs them.”

“Like you?”

No response.

“So, you feast on human souls.”

“Your primitive concepts and vocabulary might say that, but yes. And whales’, and apes’, and elephants’. Even the occasional bird’s. Unsatisfying, but sufficient. Hardly a feast. Someday, I will leave this place to seek fatter fare.”

Entropy is a measure of disorder, randomness. More order equals less entropy. A future physicist will discover the analogy. Great enough order in a small enough space forms a singularity, just as matter forms a black hole. Pockets of order remain even after the forces that created it disperse. When the physicist dies, it will be her great fortune Knot has made good on that promise.

Before he could form the question, “Why are you telling me this?” Raymond remembered Knot called him special. Did Knot’s visage glow a little brighter?

“You are the choicest morsel I have sensed in a long time, Raymond. When you die, I shall be waiting. Already, I thrill at the prospect. You humans go on about becoming part of something larger than yourselves. And you will, Raymond, you will.

“I leave you now, but never think me gone. I am very old. I can wait.”

Knot vanished. Raymond slept. And forgot.

#

Raymond didn’t like office parties. In fact, he seldom went to parties at all. The coin he traded so successfully at his work had another side. Certain skills that seemed to come naturally to most people just eluded him. What was it about small talk that so entranced his fellow humans? He observed others hitting it off without effort, as though they read each others’ minds and knew each others’ interests. When Raymond tried this, he usually chose the wrong subjects, and conversations faltered. He really wondered if others had an extra sense he lacked and felt things he did not.

As best he remembered, it had always been this way. He recalled a picture his parents took on his seventh birthday. There were cake and ice cream and smiles, but no other children, as none had been invited. He got on well enough with his classmates at school, but socializing for its own sake hadn’t interested him. Adults interested him because they knew things about the larger world, which he hoped someday to inhabit.

As time passed, Raymond began to consider his lack of social skills a handicap, and he set about creating workarounds. These were not monkey-see, monkey-do, since he had no clear idea what people were actually doing. They were more like monkey-see, monkey-pass, devising imitations that passed for the real thing. He took pride whenever these succeeded.

More recently, he realized passing was a skill he could learn and practice. It was different from programming and gadgeteering, but not completely unrelated. Instead of instruction sets and users’ manuals, he studied behavior cues and facial expressions. Patterns emerged. Practice made better, if not perfect. A new sort of interface with the world formed, not unlike, he thought, the more familiar plane of ones and zeros. He could all but feel his brain forming the countless new synapses it needed so he could exercise his new abilities in real time. His mind advanced boldly in complexity.

If Knot had possessed lips, it would have licked them.

 END

Gordon Cash is a lifelong professional scientist. He lives in Annapolis, Maryland, with his wife and their six cats. He has never actually wondered whether his travel clock was a turkey sausage slider, but has on occasion claimed the title Gadgetman.