G581: Zarmina's World

A Home of Our Own

There is no time. Not really. Not when you have lived for eons upon eons.

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Time is a construct for fixed and finite creatures. And Entity was not that.

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Entity had been elsewhere long ago. A distant planet eons in the past. It spent millennia upon millennia expanding, growing, changing the world that surrounded it in too many ways to count. When that world ended, a portion of Entity, aware of the planet’s impending doom, encased itself in rock. The ensuing apocalypse sent the rock hurtling into the sky, far into the deep, bitter cold of space. This tiny piece of Entity that had once spanned a globe was now kept safe as a babe in a womb. Safe from the dark maw of space, a piece of life remained as it turned end over end, over 17 kilometers per second, into the deep unknown. Behind it, long gone, the world it had occupied perished, crumbling to bits in the destruction that followed. Entity slept, and the rock tumbled through space, searching for a new home.

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An errant gravitational pull of a new solar system pulled the asteroid into its orbit. And after a few thousand circuits of the dim red star, the asteroid that carried Entity captured by the gravitational field of the seventh planet in the solar system. Another few eons, and the orbit had changed, degraded, enough that the rock that carried Entity finally impacted the planet. A tidally locked planet retains unimaginable heat on the sun side, and the near frigidness of space remains a constant on the dark side. Only the slimmest of strips of land, perpetually in twilight, on opposite sides of the planet are welcoming. And it was here that Entity’s encapsulated existence ended.

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As Entity slowly emerged from the encapsulation, years after the fires of its impact on the planet had subsided. It spread just as slowly. Time was irrelevant to it. It had eons behind it, and eons left in front of it. There was no need to hurry. As it encountered the rudimentary, short-lived, emerging life of a newly formed world, Entity adapted that life to its needs. Ending some of the life, creating and blending with others.

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And slowly, through eons upon eons, Entity spread out along the terminator. Deep underground, it established a connection with every inch of land, no matter how sandy or rocky. Even the damp waters of lakes and rivers did not stop or deter it. Where life went, Entity did as well. Spreading through soil, deep underground, slowed only by extreme cold or extreme heat. Given time, it adapted, survived, even at the extremes, but like most creatures, the easiest way was that of moderation. It thrived in the moderate and crept slowly into the extremes.

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It changed, adapted, to the salinity of the oceans. Eons passed. And Entity felt the call, as all life does, to make something different, something separate from itself. It had lived for millions of years, and it was time for another to join its existence, to be its child and eventual companion.

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For Entity, this was relatively easy. It had already spread throughout most of the planet. Now it was integral to the growth of plants, animals fed upon the plants and Entity, and it felt itself transform as it passed through their bodies. To make another, it simply had split itself in two.

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It was less of a birth and more a separation of self.

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It had also had a parent of sorts, millions of years ago, a part of itself that had birthed it, been a companion, before taking leave of the planet and returning to the dark maw of space. All of this remained as memories, only barely clouded by the passage of time.

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Entity, and now Offspring, continued to spread. It felt odd, somewhat, this schism, this separateness from what had once been one and now was two. Occasionally, a flare of disagreement. Offspring wanted to be unique, and to do so, a separation was necessary.

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An agreement of sorts was made. Entity would allow total control of the opposite side of the massive planet to be controlled by Offspring. One side for Entity, the other side for the new, separate consciousness. An evolution of sorts.

Separation.

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Uniqueness.

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Geographical barriers.

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If occasionally Entity felt in need of another presence, it reached out to Offspring.

Offspring would rarely respond. A grumble of mountains, the tall trees it held in vast tracts along its southern flank would creak, groan as it moved, stretched. The branches would shake, the leaves dropping as if it were a change of seasons, carpeting the earth below.

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Offspring said little. At just eighty million years, give or take, it was still young, defining who it would become. Recently, Entity found Offspring almost surly, unwilling to speak. Too young for growing pains, too old to be told what to do.

To the creatures, the fixed and finite ones that moved across the surface of the vast planet, mostly there in the terminator, their tiny minds were irrelevant. They could not truly understand or even really conceive of Entity or Offspring. They were too small, in mind and body, and Entity and Offspring so very large, so infinite in capacity and scope.

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Gradually, without Entity even recognizing what was happening, Offspring ceased to think like Entity. Offspring chose a different path.

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So it is with a parent and a child. Although Entity scarcely thought of Offspring in this way. Offspring was a part of it, intrinsically the same, yet intangibly different at the same time. And as the world moved through space and time, Entity could see the tiny minute differences become larger.

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Offspring was more… volatile. Entity watched as Offspring felled forests, then grew new ones. Pushed rock over millennia steadily amping up the pressure until great gouts of fire and molten rock burst forth from the inner crust of the world, like a pimple erupting from the skin of the world.

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Entity was different now from Offspring. It had chosen this world, fell to it, grew, evolved, changed, and became.

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If Entity and Offspring had been human, the era in which both now found themselves would be nearly indistinguishable from the time in a parent/child relationship, when things become so much more fractious and volatile. The teen years. Not yet an adult, and certainly no longer a child. That treacherous in-between state of motion, where nothing is as it should be, or ever will be, again.

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It was in this fractious time that the sky filled with ships, and the visitors landed. Entity and Offspring were no longer alone on the great planet. There were others, ones capable of space travel, and higher thought processes than the simple plant and animal life Entity had encountered so far in its travels. Entity was intrigued, curious. Offspring? Not as much.

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In the past millennia, the communications between the two, Entity and Offspring, had been infrequent, rare. There was no need. Offspring itself contained all of Entity’s knowledge and experience, just as that which had birthed Entity had passed on its knowledge, or that of the progenitor before it, and so on and so forth. Millions of years, eons of change for the stars and the planets, meant little to such as the two occupying the rocky, tidally locked world.

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Despite Offspring being the same as its parental Entity, the threads of “different” were appearing. Unique experiences, growth into new uncharted parts of the planet, interactions with the creatures therein, all contributed to make Offspring something completely different from Entity. Worse, the visitors had set up residence on the other side of the planet, Offspring’s side of the world, and were disrupting the earth, digging deep into the mountains for materials, and causing Offspring’s plans for cultivating a large tract of land to be disrupted.

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Entity would have moved on, found other areas, but Offspring was less forgiving, less understanding. It had never existed on another world as Entity had. It contained the memories of all that had come before, but only had this one to truly call its own. And its differences between itself and the parental Entity manifested in unexpected ways. Where Entity would have retreated, or even reached out to the visitors to communicate as it had done with other short-lived, finite species, some with success and others not, Offspring refused. To Offspring, the visitors were not co-inhabitants; they were invaders.

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And they would be dealt with accordingly.