De Facto Times

Heather looked at the ground, because that was all there was to look at it. The rest of the universe was completely empty – a rather small sphere around two light-years wide, occupied by black space and a single, perfectly round rock floating in zero gravity. It was on this rock that Heather lived, and she awaited the return of her father.

Her father’s name was Edward, and he had travelled outside of the universe. It was easy for him to do so, for it was his power that had formed the universe to begin with. He had told his daughter the story several times:

“What do you see when you look up at the sky?”

“I don’t see anything.”

“What? Yes you do!”

“I mean, I see the blackness. It looks very dark. I don’t think there’s anything there at all.”

“You don’t think there’s anything there at all? What about the space? The empty space?”

“I suppose there is empty space up there.”

“When I was born, there wasn’t any empty space. There wasn’t any full space. There just wasn’t any space at all. There was just nothingness.”

“But isn’t there nothingness in the sky right now?”

“Not in the same sense. It’s hard to explain, because you occupy space yourself and so I don’t think I can make it so that you can comprehend the absence of space the way that I can. It’s something I’m afraid you’ll have to take my word for.”

“That’s ok.”

“So back then, I was born, and there wasn’t any time or space at all. But I dreamed of this universe you see, a realm of space and time, and I formed it using my own energy, of which I had a lot. I still seem to have a lot of energy, some of which I used to make you and your rock, but most of it I haven’t used at all yet. We’ll just have to see.”

This seemed completely reasonable to Heather, so she sat patiently on her floating rock and she wondered what else Edward would use his energy for. Maybe he would make more glowing caterpillars like herself. Maybe he would make more rocks for her to play on. Or maybe he would make something completely different, something so weird and unique that her imagination would never arrive there on its own.

Heather was a caterpillar, but she sustained herself from the nutrients of the rock, and the rock was large enough that it would be thousands of years before she made any kind of noticeable dent in it, so she was content. She was only a few weeks old anyways, and she was bioluminescent, so she amused herself by crawling across the surface of her round floating home and bringing light to the darkness that was everywhere. When her father was away, she was the only source of light in the entire universe, and that was something she felt proud of.

However, today she had come to the conclusion that she had seen the entirety of the surface of her rock, and while she could always continue crawling across it, the novelty of discovery was now worn off. She knew what to expect, and couldn’t help but feel bored when she crawled over it again and again in circles.

She looked up at that great black expanse that her father had built, and she tried her best to admire it. It certainly was impressive; she knew that if she lived a million years she would never be able to construct anything of that scope. Her father possessed many gifts that she never would, and he was off doing very important work, and she tried to consider herself lucky that all she had to do was live on her little rock while the big decisions were made elsewhere.

So on she crawled, gazing and waiting with great patience.

High above her, but also below her and all around her, and nowhere at all at the same time, Edward was searching and searching endlessly.

Edward’s powers were unmatched by anything he had encountered, though that wasn’t saying much as he was yet to encounter anything at all. Everything that he had seen was something he had built effortlessly by using his vast reserves of energy – first there was the great black space, replacing the nothingness that had been there previously. Next he had made the nutritious rock, and then birthed an intelligent glowing caterpillar to live on that rock. He had named the caterpillar Heather, and he came up with his own name, Edward, last. Prior to Heather’s creation, he’d had no reason to identify himself by a name.

He didn’t know how long he had existed in utter nothingness. Before his first act of creation, he hadn’t really had a sense of time; it was only when the blackness first appeared before him that he had become conscious that he was living second to second, millennium to millennium. He had an excellent sense of time; he could tell that there had been exactly twenty-nine billion years between the birth of blackness and the birth of Heather. But he had no knowledge of the time between his birth and the birth of blackness.

Now he was back beyond the blackness, in the realm of nothing, where he could not tell time nor space nor anything. He peered and listened and felt with every fibre of his ability, desperate to come across something that was not himself or his own. All of it was in vain, and he grew more and more distraught as he continued to find more and more nothing.

Back in the world he had created, Heather waited for Edward. He knew she was waiting, and he knew how much time was going by on her rock as she did. He felt bad for keeping her waiting, and so he eventually concluded his fruitless search and returned. From Heather’s perspective, a tremendous hole of blinding light widened in the middle of the sky, and her father climbed out of it in the form of a slightly shorter and male glowing caterpillar.

“Hello, Edward! Thank you for coming back!”

This actually surprised Edward.

“You don’t have to thank me! Of course I came back, why wouldn’t I?”

“I don’t know, I was just thinking. Because you can leave all of this” and Heather gestured all around, “whenever you want, I was wondering if you’d even want to come back at all.”

“I will always want to come back, my child. Don’t you worry.”

“If I could leave this place, I definitely wouldn’t want to come back. That’s all!”

Heather’s tone was conversational and pleasant, but what she said alarmed Edward.

“You don’t like your rock? You want to leave?”

“I love my rock! You made it just for me, I wouldn’t trade it for anything! I just mean that here all I see is what you make for me, which is all beautiful, but you get to see stuff that you didn’t make, and I just wonder what that’s like, and I’d want to see it too. I know I can’t and that’s fine, but if I could do what you do I would. That’s all I mean.” Heather said this rather hastily, trying to make sure her father’s feelings hadn’t been hurt.

“Heather, I am not seeing anything that you don’t see. When I leave this universe, there isn’t anything out there waiting for me. I have tried everything I can to find something in addition to what we see here, but I have tried in vain. This is all there is.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

They were silent, their skin humming as the fluorescent power pulsed beneath it.

“I’m sorry, Edward. I know you wanted to find something.”

“Thank you.”

“I wanted you to find something, because I want you to be happy. Do you know what my favourite memory is?”

“What is that?”

“It’s when I was born, and I’ll tell you why. So I don’t remember anything before I was born, because I wasn’t here so there was nothing to remember and nothing for me to remember that nothing by. So when I opened my eyes for the first time, and I saw the blackness, and I saw my own lightness, and I saw you, it wasn’t that I had suddenly gotten what I’d wanted after all this time, because I hadn’t wanted anything up until that point. The truth was that I had suddenly gotten what I couldn’t have even known I wanted. It was through your genius that space exists, and my rock exists, and I exist. It has been the pleasure of my life to witness your incredible mind at work, concocting gifts beyond my possible imagination.”

Edward tried not to get emotional at hearing this. “Thank you, Heather. I created you because I was lonely, and I wanted another soul to interact with. It has been and will continue to be the ultimate highlight of my life to raise you and love you and watch you grow. I hope you know how much you mean to me.”

“I want to give you a gift, Edward. I want to do to you what you did to me.”

“Thank you, Heather, I would appreciate that.”

“Will you have the same experience I have?”

“…Well, I don’t know about that, because you can’t exactly surprise me. I made you, and I know how your mind works and everything else about you. I don’t think you can conceive of anything that I haven’t already. Sorry.”

Heather was sad about this. “So you can’t get a surprise present?”

“That’s why I was away so long, Heather. I thought that maybe out there, beyond the universe I created, I would find someone that made me the same way I made you, and that someone would be able to give me gifts beyond my imagination and surprise me and care for me. Do you like it when I do those things to you?”

“Of course!”

“That’s why I wanted the same experience. I wanted to meet my mother or father and tell them what an incredible gift my birth was. The fact of the matter is, though, I don’t even remember my birth, so that wouldn’t be entirely true. And I have been looking, looking, and looking, and if I do have a parent, they clearly do not want me to know about them.”

“You think so?”

Edward nodded, and they didn’t really continue this particular discussion. They went off and talked about other lighter, more fun things, just the two caterpillars on a rock floating alone in an empty young universe. In the back of Edward’s mind, though, was the firm belief and understanding that he had no parents at all, that he was the first.