God's Womb
an existential story by Scare in a Box
The following story is a deep dive into the nature of a fictional universe that may or may not be our own. Despite the apparent pen name, Scare (as we call the author for short) is a real human with a real everyday name, and not AI (so far as I can tell.) Check out his story below the jump!
Also, Happy Father’s Day, belatedly! We shout out to mothers in May, and would be remiss to skip the day in June where we can exalt and lavish love upon those who raised us, taught us, explained the mysteries of the world to us.
And finally, check out my poem “A Discourse on Time,” a reprint from Contrary, at Autumn Sky Poetry Daily. Maybe it pairs well with the story?
God's Womb
by Scare in a Box
“I’ve just crossed into the hatch,” he called out into the static and silence, floating through into the minuscule metal cone, pulling himself in by handles to find Bakelite buttons and sterile systems, clean and pristine as the day the module was launched. Pulling the door shut, he peered through the porthole above it to bear witness to the blue-green planet he called home so far below, only to be met with nothing. No stars, nor sun, no light, nor discernible distance, as though the universe itself had vanished.
“Yet again, there is nothing. I know this thing will run out of recording time soon, but uh… I’m struggling here.” Silence. Painful silence. “I just want to hear a human voice again. Somebody—anybody, I don’t care if it’s English or Russian or… Zulu or whatever.” He trembled in lost desperation, still staring out the porthole, hoping something would change, wishing that something would be.
“Even if it’s my own voice… I know it’s stupid. I’m losing my mind here… I just don’t want to be alone anymore.” More silence followed. That’s all that was left in the empty space outside of the capsule.
“I don’t think anybody will find this. Hell, I know nobody will find this, but just in case…” The recording captured the sounds of him shuffling into the seat at the control panel followed by a long sigh.
“It was in the early twenty-first century, not that I have any idea what the year is now, but I don’t suppose it matters, and … something appeared in Earth’s orbit. There were whack jobs who instantly thought aliens and took to their bunkers; people panicked and governments tried to keep it hush-hush as they always do but—everyone had phones, the internet, it was on the front page of every newspaper from Washington to Wuhan…”
He clicked a few buttons on the console to see if anything would change this time. Flicking switches and turning knobs didn’t seem to do much of anything.
“Well, it wasn’t aliens. It was us. Apollo One—there was never any fire. They lost the damn thing in space and tried to cover it up.” He gave an anxious chuckle. “After all that time, it came back; it found its way home. You’d think maybe it got… more than extremely lucky and swung by a planet’s orbit, or… got pushed back by some magnetic force out there or… I don’t know, something, but that’s not it.”
A deep breath. A staggered, hollow laugh.
“No—no. I’m not going to say what brought it back ‘cause I don’t know, but there’s something different about it. The powers that be—the powers that were, I should say, sent me and the crew up to investigate. Check for damage and find out why it was back here hanging in a geostationary orbit and bring back the bodies of the crew. There should have been three guys in here, but it’s like they were never here in the first place. All the food is untouched, the water tank is full, power is nominal, it doesn’t even look as if it left the ground.
“When we made our initial approach, it was a bit dirty on the outside, kind of a rusty brown, but the inside was immaculate. I went in first to find the seats empty, and when I turned around, the door was closed. Heh… I thought it was a prank at first, that those clowns had shut me in there as a bad joke. So, I tried to open the door from the inside, but there was this… well, it was an infinity symbol, but it wasn’t painted on, it… eh, it’s hard to describe—it was kind of like how water refracts light, only with more depth, like there was a whole other dimension in there. I could tell it was flat, but at the same time, it wasn’t? I wish I had the words for it. Of course, I start freaking out and just rip the door open as fast as I can. I fly through the hole and I’m back inside the pod.
“So, I start freaking out. I can still see the other guys outside, just floating there, pointing at the pod, looking around as if they can’t find me. God, it was so long ago now.”
He got to his feet, hunched over and took another look out the porthole, just in case.
“Of course, they left. Floated right back over to the craft and went back to Earth without me. I tried the radio—it was the first thing I did—Houston, Pasadena, Kennedy… when they didn’t reply I tried Madrid, Sydney, Moscow…”
He pushed open the hatch door again, turning the handle and pressing it open to reveal another copy of the pod on the other side. Floating through, he found the same as before, the same as every time, with the door already closed behind him as though he’d never opened it in the first place. He spun back around, already resigned to the fact that it would be shut tight.
“I didn’t get a reply, just static. As time went on, I tried every frequency—and I mean every frequency. Again and again and again…
“Nothing but static. They couldn’t hear me, and I couldn’t hear them. It was like I was in a Faraday cage, only worse and I had no way of getting out of there. It must have been years before I heard the radio crackle back, but… I remember how excited I was to hear a voice on the other side after so long in solitude. It felt like being released from prison, or hearing you were free from cancer, or giving birth to your first child; it was that level of excitement a hundred times over. I listened intently but… Ahahah… it was me. It was me. Those messages I sent to mission control had shot off into space and come right back to me just like the ship had. God, I sounded so desperate. Just hearing the tone of my voice, I relived the fear I had at the time, and the frustration that it wasn’t Earth calling back broke something in me.”
He began to sputter and sob softly as the memories haunted him, still staring out into empty black space.
“I couldn’t do it anymore. I smashed that pod up, I smashed it good and proper. I tried to crack the windows open and get myself sucked out into space but they were too strong. I bashed my head against the walls but I did more damage to them than myself. I… I remember my fists broken and bloody after that. I could barely open the hatch through the pain.”
Looking up from the porthole he stared at the symbol before him, a tiny squiggle of numbers too massive to comprehend. The infinity symbol was long gone, replaced by a number within that infinity.
“I got through, though, only to find my hands fixed and the pod the way I found it in the first place. So, I smashed it up again. I pulled out the electronics, I tore at the cables and poured water over everything, I tried everything I could… and then I cried.” He gave another weak sob and sniffled through the whirring background noise of fans.
“Every time I go through that damn hatch the number changes. For a while there I tried to keep a track of it, watching as the numbers swapped and changed but it honestly meant nothing to me. I couldn’t figure it out. I doubt Einstein could have figured it out. I thought maybe there was some kind of trick to it, that if I could solve it then I could claim my freedom… Even with all the time in the world, I couldn’t bring myself to work it out. Math was never my strong point.
“It took me longer than it should have to figure out that I wasn’t aging. My nails and beard stopped growing, but I watched the world go by below me. Twinkling lights at night growing bigger and brighter as the world’s cities grew, hurricanes and storms creeping across the oceans—I saw the ice caps melt, lands flood and vanish beneath the waves. I saw the green vegetation covering the planet grow brown while the seas grew dark... Those lights from the cities dwindled.”
“I realized I was watching civilization pass by before me–oh, not in a flash or anything, no… day by day, week by week, year after damn year… I was the same, but before my eyes I was watching in painfully slow detail as humanity ruined itself and there was nothing I could do to prevent it.
“All I could do was think. There was some paper, so I took to drawing the things I saw and what I imagined was happening down there. As soon as I left through the hatch again it would be gone, but… at least that gave me something to do. I would write messages, even though I knew nobody would ever read them. I… hah, I wrote to my wife. A lot. I knew after a while she would have… found somebody else…” He paused, contemplating his memories with her.
“I don’t even remember her now. She’s long dead; they all are. I hate that I can’t even picture her face anymore. I can still feel what she was like, but, I wish I brought a photo up here with me.
“We had an argument before all this happened. She didn’t want me coming up here—of course she didn’t. She couldn’t have known it would be this bad, though.” He shook his head. “I should’ve listened to her. I tried to reassure her; I trusted the guys on the ground. It wasn’t like I was going to Jupiter or anything. It was just an orbit. I’d done it before, I wasn’t afraid.
“Eventually… ship after ship left the planet. Everybody who was still left alive fled. I saw them leaving in different directions, so hopefully there are still people out there somewhere. I wish I could have moved this thing and followed them. Sometimes I wonder what happened to them all. When you have all the time in the world and only yourself, you have a lot of time to think. Thinking is all well and good, but I just wish I knew for sure that humanity continued.
“Anyway, the sun began to expand. I couldn’t really tell; seeing it every day you don’t get a point of reference for the difference, but it completely swallowed Mercury and Venus, eventually becoming a red giant and taking what was left of Earth into itself. I had to wait billions of years, but I got one hell of a view when it collapsed. It left a white dwarf behind and a cloud of nebulous gas. Billions more years later it changed into a brown dwarf, then a black dwarf.
“I’d taken to counting the stars left in the sky. The light traveling across the sky for millions of years eventually twinkled out, star by star until there was nothing left. I’m… surprised I’m still this lucid, but I think each time I cross over the hatch it somehow keeps me going. I wish it could stop the suffering too. I wish it could just set me free.
“So that brings us to now. I keep hopping through the hatch, hoping that something will change. I keep looking at the numbers, but they’re not much help either. The only thing I can do is wait until a black hole comes along and sucks me up, but even then I don’t know if I’ll be allowed to die or not. Maybe this stupid thing will still be intact inside there.
“I’m going to end the recording here. I might listen back to it, maybe it’ll be some comfort. I want to tell myself that I can do this, but… I don’t know what it is that I’m doing. I don’t know why I’m trapped here. I don’t know if I’ll ever get out, but I wanted to just die and get it over with billions of years ago. If that’s not suffering, I don’t know what is. Godspeed, rocket man. Find your peace.”
The recording ended with a click. Years passed, decades and eons soon followed. Millenia passed by in the blink of an eye compared to the time he’d already spent aboard the craft, and black holes collided distantly, undergoing atrophy into radiation as they crawled across the sky. Everything was dark, cold, dead. He was all that was left of any rational universe, the final testament that humanity had existed. Proof that mankind was there as an immortal reminder of our arrogance.
He spent his many days much the same way, drawing and writing, singing to himself, trying desperately to stay busy or sleep the time away. He tried hovering between the hatches, closing the door on himself as far as it would go but nothing ever changed.
He awoke one morning to the same things as ever; a pristine cabin and endless night. The disorienting space around him offered no solace. The universe had ended; not with a bang but with a whispered whimper as space arrived at its terminus, the state of maximum entropy.
Click.
“I just woke up and something changed. After all this time—oh god, it’s different!” He sounded elated. Nervous, anxious laughs burst like rising bubbles from his chest.
“I’m seeing a… a zero with a line through it. Kind of an oval, really.”
ϴ
An Inaccessible Cardinal. A number that cannot be obtained from smaller numbers, no matter how many you add. A number so large that it exists beyond and above infinity, unobtainable through ordinary means. Infinities added together still cannot reach it, even when combined when put into different orders and added on top still—truly, unfathomably endless.
“The numbers have gone and that’s… all that’s left. It’s small but it’s something different. It’s different. The universe is dead, yet here I remain. Maybe it’s my turn now. I have no idea what’s waiting for me on the other side. The porthole is still the same. but the number has never looked like this before. Should I bring something with me? Will I need the food?” He paused for a moment and shuffled around in the cabinets next to him, taking down dehydrated meals and pouches of water.
“Alright, I’ve gathered up what I can carry. I’m bringing the paper with me as well. I’m hoping that it’s just death on the other side, but who knows? I’ve lived up here longer than all the lives of everything put together, every person, every animal and insect, every plant—stack their lives together and I’ve still been here longer. Just me and empty space.”
“I’m ready to die, I’ve been ready for… forever. This will be my final recording. If anybody but myself hears this… well, I don’t know what to tell you, really. Nothing matters? Everything dies in the end? Love conquers all? No. There’s no point to life outside of what you make it. Up here for so long, I can tell you there is no God, not from what I’ve seen—and I’ve seen everything…”
He placed his hand on the metal pole and pushed it down with a quivering hand. The metal thunked and echoed through the craft, reverberating softly back into his hand.
“I’m going through for what I hope will be the last time. Wish me luck.”
Click.
He pushed his way through the hatch with trembling anticipation. There could be anything on the other side, or everything—it could be a new chance at life or the sweet release of death. Whatever awaited him, he was ready for, as long as it was something other than the timeless prison he’d endured.
As he floated through, he couldn’t quite understand what he was seeing; in the distance was the hatch of the pod from the outside with its brown, dusty coating and gentle light radiating from the porthole. At first glance it seemed reasonably normal, with the exception of the number now shining from the outside of the hatch.
א0
Aleph Null, the collective sum of the set of all integers, containing all possible cardinal numbers and arrangements of infinity. It gleamed and glistened with greater depth than should have been afforded it, falling back and forward as if it were a hologram but also aging and renewing seemingly at will as it caused the surrounding metal to corrode and shine, to buckle and bend and straighten out again. There was a rippling gravity to it, bending and warping the very nature of reality as he beheld its mysterious properties.
He moved towards it only to notice that his body was no longer there. The consciousness, the ego, the self that made up who he was and the collective experiences that shaped him had become liberated from their physical form. Either he moved, or the space around him moved as he willed it, he wasn’t quite sure which, and the position of the pod changed with him. It faded from view like a lenticular print being viewed at a different angle. At the same time, another version of the pod faded into view with a slightly different symbol, Aleph one. An equal, but separate infinity.
א1
The distance between the hatch and him was indeterminable. It could have been right next to him or on the other side of space, moving against a background not of light nor dark, not of space and distance, but nothing. True nothing beyond human reasoning, without height or length, distance or time, as though everything was fixed into a single point that was both everywhere and nowhere all at once.
As his consciousness continued to flow through this strange place, if it was a place at all, an infinite number of apollo pods flickered in and out of reality, the number below the aleph changing as his psyche traversed this bizarre realm.
He’d grown accustomed to looking through the porthole of the capsule in his timeless solitude, perhaps in unwitting preparation for this very moment, as though each one of the beginning and end of the universe passed by in an instant, and from it, he knew all that each hatch held within. Each version of the pod held within it its own probabilities, its own infinity, a different version of the events that had transpired within the history of the universe. Some were similar, but the higher the number became, the more twisted and warped the world had become. There were even worlds where humanity never emerged, where the earth never formed, and some where the laws of physics were gnarled and broken beyond recognition.
Every arrangement of every possibility presented itself before him, sharing their secrets with an instantaneous, unspoken understanding transferred directly to his psyche with little more than a glance through the glass. Through this maddening amount of information, he observed a purpose; the intent of all of this.
He didn’t know how, he didn’t have to know how, but he knew that he caused it to happen—another pod, another hatch appeared. Like the true original, there was no number. But unlike all the rest, nothing came from the porthole. No view into the birth and death of the universe, no understanding of the possibilities within it, no intimate view into every minute detail. As with the area around him, there was no light or dark, no space on the other side; just the purest, most concentrated nothingness.
This was why he was here.
With sheer force of will alone, he pulled down the bolt and pushed open the hatch slowly, picturing in the greatest detail the world that he wanted on the other side.
From nothing came everything. He emerged into a dense explosion of super-heated plasma containing all matter as dimensions ballooned out from the hatch and he followed its rapid expanse and cooling. He witnessed gravity pulling matter together to form clouds of hydrogen that ignited into stars; he saw those same stars burst into vibrant clouds of dust and form new stars entirely.
Around him, the universe took shape. Stars churned out denser matter and dust clouds formed asteroids which in turn formed planets. The cycle went on and on until he had formed his ideal Earth, setting into motion the events that were to unfold as he saw fit. He shaped the first proteins, clinging to volcanic geysers underwater that formed into cells, guided the evolution of life into plants and animals, and followed their progress into more and more complex beings.
He had the arsenal of a God in his imagination, and through simply wishing something, it would become so. Unhampered by the complex systems of human physiology, unburdened by a finite brain, he was free to act as he wished.
He walked, unseen, across the face of the planet with time an irrelevant aspect to him, bearing witness to the world and people he had created until finally meeting his mother. His time was at hand, and his work was complete. He wasn’t sure if he’d remember the pilgrimage he had taken, but it didn’t matter; even Godhood couldn’t avert the solitude. He was ready. His rebirth had been one part of his plan for this universe, relinquishing control over it so that he could live and one day die in peace.
He rendered himself to nothing more than an egg and waited, growing, biding his time, until at last he took his first screaming, wildly gasping breaths of the air he’d willed into existence.
He was home.
Meet the author:
Scare in a Box is a Brazilian computer programmer who enjoys creating horror and sci-fi stories and also crocheting amigurumi. His work can be found on his Reddit profile by the same name.
The underside: “A cemetery near my house has a statue that is reputed to be haunted, “The Copper Woman.” The statue portrays a lady that lived at the beginning of the 20th century and had an aversion to taking photographs. The only photograph of her, taken by surprise, was used to build the statue after her death. Walking in front of the cemetery I can see her, turned, looking at me. Is she really seeing me?”
If you liked this, why not try:
OK, I guess. Next time try something a little meatier. You know, with cool superheroes and stuff.