Prologue

Space, as has been mentioned, is big. Mind-bogglingly so. You might think the collected five volumes of the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy are big, but that’s peanuts compared to space. And that’s not even getting into all the ways in which space is next to, on top of, or warping around in on itself in alternate realities.

Space has often been compared to the ocean, and that makes sense. The ocean is large, blue, cold, and human beings have a truly horrendous time trying to breathe any of it. Then there’s the sense of wonder or, more sensibly, fear. There’s a lot of dark out there, in the ocean/space, and it’s tremendously easy to get lost in all that nothing. 

But then there’s the differences. In the ocean, lighter things go up, heavy things go down, and tasty things that wriggle a lot tend to go down a lot faster. In space, “up” is a very nebulous concept, and weight is only important when you bump into something. 

What most people don’t realize, however, is that space and the ocean are a lot more similar than most people think. For one thing, did you know that you can sail in space? Solar sails catch something called solar winds, and it allows you to travel at relatively high speeds. The other important thing that space and the ocean have in common is that there are very large, hungry creatures that swim around in them that eat people who don’t believe in them. 

There are things that don’t reflect light, swimming from star to star, devouring planets and scaring the bejeezus out of turn-of-the-century racist authors. These things are older than most planets, and might even be older than time itself, although the only ones who would know are those things themselves, and they aren’t likely to talk about these matters unless they’ve had a lot to drink. 

They live in Space. They also live in the space, not only between planets and suns but the space between worlds. The space between choices, between realities. What old science-fiction authors would refer to as ‘dimensions.’ 

Imagine, if you’ll indulge me for a moment, one of those things. Large. Impossibly so. Eyes the size of moons, glistening softly in the infinite dark between everything out there, blinking in what appears to be all-knowing indifference. Imagine it currently swimming between Saturn and Jupiter, avoiding Uranus because of the obvious joke. 

You can see its shadow darkening Saturn’s rings, giving you a kind of vague idea of its shape. It’s not a very good shape. It’s a shape that has a lot of tentacles and teeth in all the wrong places. If you tilt your head sideways, it looks a little bit like a very angry melting octopus. If you tilt your head the other way around, it might remind you of an angry scribble that an eight-year-old might draw in the margins of their math homework. 

It’s also swimming in a big circle, and that circle isn’t around the sun. It doesn’t really care for the sun. The sun can’t hurt it (much) but it also can’t really hurt the sun without having a toothache for several weeks afterwards. Stars aren’t really worth the effort for a planet-devouring entity. However, the solar system has other things in it. 

You can probably see where I’m going with this. Of all the small spheres orbiting the sun, the third one tends to be the most talked about. It’s blue, and it’s the only one — for now — where someone is able to watch videos of cats falling asleep, and that’s a recent development. When drawing a map of the solar system, this is the one we draw a little smiling face on with the note “Here Be People.” 

This unspeakable, un-knowable, impossible monstrous thing that could engulf the Earth in seconds is currently circling that little blue ball. I know what you’re thinking to yourself. “Either this thing is going to eat the whole world, in which case this is going to be a very short story, or there’s going to be some kind of brilliant subversion and I’m going to go ‘heh’ when I read it.”

Well… yes. You see, this creature has been swimming through the universe since the dawn of time. It has seen civilizations rise and fall. Star-empires grow and crumble. Life and death on scales unimaginable to the likes of us, barely a fleck of dust in one of its eyes. And there, in those eyes, lies a knowledge that would drive even the strongest wills mad:

Space is boring. It’s unimaginably boring. It’s pretty, sure, with all the colors and the planets and stuff. But after you’ve spent an aeon or three with nothing but space, you too will wish you had a pillow half an astronomical unit wide to scream into. Space doesn’t have a lot in it that isn’t planets, and when you’re bigger than one, there’s spectacularly little to do in it. 

I’ll be referring to this creature as Sammaël for no reason you should concern yourself with right now. Just accept that that makes it easier to talk about something in a way that doesn’t feel so objectively distant. Sammaël is bored. Unimaginably bored. 

Once upon a time, Sammaël was just another impossible eldritch being, and those are a dime a dozen. “The monstrosities from beyond the stars,” we’ve all seen them. But then its unknowable, vast intellect picked something up. 

A radio signal. It was a song, and it was coming from a small blue planet circling a little star on the Orion-Cygnus arm. Sammaël, for the first time in its life, experienced something new. Curiosity. Sure, it had seen life before, but for some reason that life had never really meant much to it, in the same way that ants don’t mean much to mountains.

But that one song had lodged itself into its unfathomably large mind. It kept playing itself, back and forth, and so, finally, the creature had swam impossibly large distances, to come look at the planet itself. To see what it is like on that little blue ball in all possible realities, and to see if there are any other fun songs to pick up on in any of them. 

Here it is now, observing the little planet, observing the little creatures on it, and wondering for the first time in its unimaginably long lifespan how it is going to get down there. Sammaël quietly hums the song to itself, making the rings around Saturn vibrate in ways that will confuse scientists for years to come. It’s trying to think of a way to set foot on Earth, and it’s slowly hatching a plan. 

Sammaëls corporeal shape has always been more of a rough concept than something explicitly defined. Its outside seems to constantly shift and change, like a cloud in a storm, and now it is considering maybe trying something different. After all, its intellect is vaster than any ocean on any world, and its mind can observe all realities at once, but it is too detached. It perceives, it is starting to understand, but it does not see. 

So, as it lazily swims past Jupiter, causing a shadow to fall across it that terrifies several school children on a field-trip to an observatory, it molds something. Not a body, no. Bodies come later. That’s just the physical. Right now it is working on something much more important: a mind that might fit inside of a body. 

It’s hard work, and not particularly pleasant. Sammaël is having a rough time trying to find and create a version of itself that wouldn’t immediately collapse if it was put into a body as small as a human’s. Its memories aren’t all that important, and take up hardly any space at all. While it might have a perfect memory that goes all the way back to the beginning of the universe, there isn’t a lot to that memory. It’s mostly Sammaël swimming and eating and, occasionally, driving someone utterly mad with its horrible visage.

The biggest issue is its perspective. It’s very hard to fit the perception of a brain the size of a planet into one that is no larger than a grain of sand by comparison. So Sammaël takes its time making its way towards Earth, and comes to a few realizations. The first is that maybe it doesn’t have to at all. Maybe it can just stay connected to the larger whole, like dipping a sentient little toe into a pool. 

The mind it creates is like a miniature version of itself that is still a part of the large whole. Everything it thinks, Sammaël also perceives. Everything it feels, Sammaël will feel. Sammaël is quite proud of this solution.

The second realisation is that it has no idea what body to take. It looks down at the planet and then looks a little closer. It’s full of people, all of them in different little colours and sizes and shapes. Barely any two are the same. It spins up, in a mind that can make thought into reality, a body that is the perfect average. It looks like a lot of nothing, like mixing every shade of paint before trying to make a rainbow. 

So it tries making a few different ones. Taking some limbs from one here, some internal plumbing from another, with the head of a last one. It doesn’t work. It looks like a broken doll. 

This is vexing. Something is wrong. Sammaël is confused. After all, it’s created life before, in some backwater dimension, slamming proteins together until something invents the hamburger, but this is different. It’s not trying to create life from scratch, it’s trying to create a person. And people are much more than just “life,” and Sammaël is having trouble understanding that. 

So, Sammaël feels, if it is not capable of creating the perfect vessel yet, that is due to a lack of information. This information is probably most easily gathered through experience. So, it needs a human body to experience what a human body is really like in order to create a human body so that it can experience… Oh dear. 

It observes a little bit more, like someone trying to go to sleep but deciding to have one last guilty little look at social media, and it notices something. A lot of people don’t use their bodies anymore. At some point, they stop moving, the light upstairs goes out, and the body just sort of starts to decompose without the mind telling it not to. 

This all seems very wasteful, Sammaël appears to think with its cosmic intellect. Have they considered not doing that? Well, it reasons, there is only one way to find that out, and that is to ask them. And it can ask them if it has a body. 

And, it seems, there are a lot of bodies no-one is using anymore. Now, it doesn’t want to use one of the ones near the ends of its lifecycle, that would greatly limit its ability to experience things. It also doesn’t want one that’s been “out of commission” for too long, for the same reason. 

So it looks around for some bodies that might not be in use. Something that’s still fairly new, but recently vacated. There might be a little bit of residual damage, but that can be fixed when it moves in. 

There. 

It’s found something. A body that has recently stopped moving, the mind now gone. Sammaël knows where minds go when they die, but it isn’t telling. Who would it tell, after all, and why? So it takes its little sculpted mini-Sammaël, a version of its mind that is capable of feeling and thinking on its own and, much more importantly, capable of listening to Jammin’ Tunes. Sammaël is so ready to experience things. 

In an alleyway on Earth, Abraham ‘Abe’ Douglas died. Not in any dignified way either. His ever-so-slightly-drunk ex-future-brother-in-law, Morris, was still rubbing his hand when it dawned on him that the other man wasn’t moving anymore, and that his head was resting against the wall in a very uncomfortable angle. 

“Abe?” Morris asked. “Abe, you had better not be fucking with me right now.” He swore to himself as he leaned in close and checked Abe’s eyes. There was no response. “Fuck,” he said. That didn’t quite do it. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.”

Morris was in the middle of a major dilemma, exacerbated by the four beers he’d had the last fifteen minutes. If he ran now, it would probably look like Abe just slipped on a bottle in an alley and hit his head. It would be entirely in character for the bastard, after all. But then his sister would find out by cop, and that was pretty awful too. 

So what, then? Tell her he killed the guy she’d been planning to marry, once? Morris looked down at the body. “You prick,” he said. “You probably did this on purpose, didn’t you?” He wanted to add something else, something glib, while processing the fact that he hit someone so hard he’d died. Sure, there were extenuating circumstances and Abe probably deserved it, but Morris wasn’t exactly killer material. He opened his mouth, just as Abe Douglas’ corpse jumped upright. 

Well, that wasn’t quite right. It didn’t jump. It went from horizontal to vertical without going through all the usual steps in between. Morris frowned. That wasn’t right. Then Abe’s neck straightened itself with the horrifying sound of someone sitting on a glass ornament, and his lifeless eyes stopped being lifeless. They rolled around in Abe’s head like two loose marbles until they finally stopped on Morris. “Did what?” Abe said. 

Morris screamed. Abe screamed too, took a step back onto a bottle and slipped. Falling backwards, he cracked his skull against the wall, and stopped moving.

Elamimax

I hope you like this! This was a commission from a patron! There are 7 chapters and the prologue already commissioned, and this will be an ongoing series in the style of Among Brighter Stars. If you want more chapters, you can always got my patreon and ask me to make more! You can find pricing here.