Stardust or Starbucks

They built a future that could nearly last forever. I guess ‘nearly’ wasn’t good enough. It’ll happen a thousand years from now, but we can already feel the effects, seeing things that are gone or never existed, remembering things that hadn’t happened. Whatever they’ll do, or ‘did’ from their perspective, caused problems with all the timelines, this one and the ones beside us. I didn’t know we had those... parallel timelines. That’s all I can gather so far. Baffle doesn’t explain things very well. He’s a trans-human being from five hundred years in the future, a hybrid species made of flesh and machine. They’re born that way and communicate with their thoughts, most of which I can barely make sense of. I can’t pronounce their name, but to me it sounds like ‘Baffle.’ That’s fitting, considering all the timeline confusion. They give me some latitude with my pronoun problem. I get confused about who or what we’re talking about, and considering the magnitude of his visit, formalities are far less important. Baffle instructed me to choose a totem, a mental image to remind me of who I am before my journey begins, whatever that’s gonna be. This way I won’t get lost, and the more constructive the totem, the better. That’s easy.

I chose a hammer for my totem; not a big surprise, coming from a guy who built things with his hands. I specialized in reusing discarded items and refurbishing old things. Most of my clients wanted shiny new materials, though the cost was higher and the quality lower. I’m not nostalgic, but if you spend lots of time and money building something, it should last a few generations. The first hammer I bought came with a lifetime guarantee; it broke thirty years later. Sure enough, they replaced it, no receipt needed, no questions asked. That’s the world I want to live in. Every generation says, ‘They don’t make things like they used to.’ Mine got really pathetic. Everything was disposable; even people were called ‘human capital.’ That sounds more like human ‘cattle’ to me. I think corporate politics dragged my world down, hooked on power and growth, profits and control. I don’t know how we survived long enough to evolve into people like Baffle, much less a thousand-plus years after him where all these timeline problems started. Baffle says they’re fixing everything with something called a ‘next-stage migration.’ Mind you, he’s just an intermediary, literally living between now and then, a real trooper for the cosmic cause. Janet would probably like him.

‘The world was built on stardust and sleeps by the light of the moon.’ That was one of her nutty sayings. I used to call her ‘Inter-planet Janet,’ way too far out there for my comfort. Our timelines merged again just the other day. Or was it a week ago? It’s getting harder to tell now. Whenever our paths cross, she acts like we’ve been together for the past thirty years, like I never broke up with her. But the last time, she looked at me like I was a ghost. Maybe I died in that timeline. Maybe her flighty imagination got the best of her; thoughts can literally deceive you now. I used to tease, ‘The world is built on Starbucks and sleeps on moonshine.’ I think that only encouraged her to change me. But this time, she’s the one who left. The funny thing is, I started feeling really connected to her, like I missed out on something important. Maybe because it’s getting more difficult to tell the difference between the ‘real me’ and the ‘other me.’ I don’t know. There’s something about her stargazing mind. Maybe I should’ve spent more time with that astronomy kit I had when I was a kid.

Remember? I’ll be looking at a star and wondering, ‘How long does it take for the light to reach my eyeball? Is there any life out there? Are they still alive?’ I’ll be seven years old. My father will rush into the gazebo and... he’ll slap me? Wait. It didn’t happen that way. The telescope was in a catalog. He slapped it out of my hands and said, ‘Ya can’t make a living stargazing.’ He hit my lip by accident, so... that was that. My memories are really off lately, but this first one felt pretty real. Makes me wonder.... And right on cue, here comes Baffle. I wonder what he’ll think of my new project.

I’m building a model of the solar system. It started when I was shooting pool in the attic, after the cueball jumped off the table. I went to pick it up, and it got super heavy! The damn thing pushed through my fingers, cracked the floorboards and squealed its way through, clear down to the basement. Sounded like a bomb went off down there. I found it imbedded in the cement floor. It was glowing yellow-orange like the sun, or how the sun used to be. The one thing you could always count on was the sunrise and sunset; now it’s all over the place. You never know what season you’re gonna wake up to, what color the sky will be. If I’m nostalgic about anything, it’s the sun. I never really cared about the solar system, but now I can’t get it off my mind. So I’m building this wonky model on the basement floor, a glowing cueball sun with nine billiard ball planets around it. I don’t know if that’s how many we have. I probably put them in the wrong order too, but here they are.

Baffle seems more interested in my totem than critiquing my hobby. His scratchy thoughts tell me we’re running out of time, and my mind needs to be in the right place for the journey. Which place would that be, Baffle? This is the only place I know, and I barely know that! Where exactly am I going; who sets the itinerary for that? I wanna speak to your manager.... Baffle moves my planets around, correcting their positions, teaching me telepathically. I was pretty close with Jupiter, Saturn and... sorry, but Uranus was always a silly name. Whoops. Mars is farther from the sun than Earth is, but I nailed Mercury and Venus. Wait. Why is he moving them closer to the cueball sun? It’s getting really bright, swallowing them, getting brighter. Baffle sends me a vision of something that was here before this happened. I need... chicken wire! Wrap it around the planets like a sphere. But the floor’s in the way. I need three dimensions. And just like that, the balls are floating. Now I can form the chicken wire into a ball before it’s too late.

“It is not late; it is now.” Call me crazy, but I understand Baffle’s thoughts better. “You are there-then. We are here-now.” Suddenly, my brain races with answers to questions I didn’t know I had. I’m getting dizzy, finding it hard to stand. Wait, I don’t have a body anymore. I’m looking down at the enormous ball of chicken wire, bigger than Earth’s orbit. “We go where-when.” Where? When? “Remember our totem.”

Remember? I’ll be looking through the telescope, wondering about the speed of light, how I got here faster than that. Something’s going to happen that’ll blow my mind. My father’s hammering away at the gazebo again; he sounds angry, like I’m doing something wrong. My lip is bleeding, but... it’s my teeth biting into it. Damn! This memory never happened. It’s my imagination again. ‘Remember our totem.’ Was it stardust? Moonshine? Or the hammer thumping in my head? Baffle, where are we?

We are here-now. Next-stage migration. Our body is a colossal structure called a Dyson sphere that encompasses everything within Earth’s orbit. We will have evolved into... chicken wire, a disembodied mind built to last forever. Earth’s charred remains tilts along its tired orbit. Venus and Mercury, consumed long ago by the ravenous sun, its cosmic heartbeat reverberating through our skeletal sphere. We once regulated its fuel by manufacturing an array of unstable wormholes, importing raw materials from around the galaxy to increase its mass, prolonging its lifespan for our own immortality. Matter once poured systematically into it. Now the sun syphons without conscience, increasing its mass exponentially. Our reliable star has taken on a life of its own, destined to be taken away from us prematurely. Nature continues to baffle. While we successfully tampered with cosmic forces, we hadn’t considered what strange relationships would arise. I know all this now, but what do we believe? Perhaps the sun had allied with the wormholes in order to defend itself against alien control. Or it simply grew tired of an artificial existence. It may have gained our taste for indulgence, then given into darker temptation.

Remember? I’ll get tempted to look through the portal before finishing my task, hammering nails to secure a sliding wooden shutter. I’ll get it to work better and my father will holler something to me from outside. What language is he speaking? This isn’t his gazebo, it’s a handmade wooden cell. I recognize nothing in this memory, except the first hammer I had, way back when I was an apprentice.

“Where-when?” Baffle alerts us to prepare our totems as the sun is preparing to die. It will collapse on itself with twenty times the mass it was born with, reborn as a black hole that will warp the fabric of space and merge the parallel times. The past will open into the future; time will become a flowing stream. The sun thumps to bursting at our core, our chicken-wire Dyson sphere buckles and moans. A power surge animates a trillion sensors and fractal lenses to beam our essence out into the galaxy. We are merely one among trillions of minds, genetic impressions encoded into photons by our disembodied selves, to evolve again on distant proto-planets through a primordial process called geochemistry. The probability of success is incalculable. This is our only logical option to perpetuate the species. We are the raw materials for our future incarnations. We are... human capital.

I am Baffle; Baffle is me. We traveled the timestream to gather ourselves and returned with questions and choices. Do we trust in a species so reckless that it orchestrates the death of its only source of life? Are we merely a photon of humanity, streaming through chicken wire, engineered only to survive? Does the cosmos placate pathological insecurity or rejoice in uncertain bravery? When the chicken wire beckons and the black hole asks, ‘Stardust or Starbucks?’ which choice will we make?

We will have already made it.

I remember. A star died when I was seven. I witnessed it through the backyard observatory my father and I built from discarded wood. A new algorithm enhanced my view of a galaxy in the outer spiral arm, the one that always drew my attention. A strange star flickered out there, one that kept getting brighter and brighter. That night, the star pulsed amazingly bright, then... vanished. I must’ve hollered because my father rushed inside and thought I was having a seizure because my lip was bleeding. I must’ve bitten it from what I can only describe as a shockingly transcendent experience. For a fleeting moment, I received inexplicable knowledge of where we all came from and how we’d gotten here, a bizarre origin of my species that defies description. I wanted to record it somehow, but it vanished just as suddenly as that strange star did. This memory is so distant that I’m not even sure it’ll be mine. But I feel the need to remember as much as I can before everything disappears. They told me I needed a totem before my journey began. I hope this counts. I don’t think they’d replace a hammer if it broke.