Leftovers Story
Matthew Ryan Fischer
It was a universe full of leftovers – elements, energy signatures,
planets... life. All leftovers. Remnants of other pasts and places and of other
universes. There was the new amalgamation, and then there were the bits and
pieces that didn’t fit in anymore. Leftovers.
It there were Big Bangs and Big Crunches and Big Collapses, then
what was this? The Big Merge? The Big Crash? Multiple existences collided
together and blended and blurred and reorganized and came out on the other side
as something more. Maybe it was a Big Shuffle. And those that didn’t quite make
it? Maybe that was the Big Splat. Their energy was ripped and torn and
destroyed and nothing but a big mess was left.
In a random moment two universes appeared and overlapped. They
intermingled and then their energies tore into each other. They got all mixed
up. It was messy. It was violent. It was creation and rebirth and renewal. It
was life and death and once and then a chance for something new, something
more.
Which was the original? Which was lost? Those were the wrong
questions. There was no one or the other.
There was what was before and then what came after. There was only
existence – now, before and forever.
How many times had this happened before? That was unclear. There
were elements all around. Signs. Leftovers. How many crashes? How many mergers?
How many splats? It was incalculable. It was forever. It was infinite.
Quinn liked the mysteries. He tracked them down and documented
them. He researched history and mythology and looked for clues. And he
explored. He was always exploring. He knew he couldn’t solve them, but he knew
he could find them and document them. Maybe that would help someone in the
future. Maybe it would bring new things to light. Maybe there would be an
answer somewhere inside them. Maybe.
He found a cavern where gravity worked sideways. There once was a
sliver of something where a person could walk though it and time didn’t pass,
it shot around and bounced all over the place, slowing and speeding up
indiscriminately. Once he had traveled a mountain pass where water boiled and
froze backwards at opposite temperatures. He had found a tiny spring of
perpetual energy strong enough to light one light bulb. He had heard a story of
a place where the laws of thermodynamics did not apply. He didn’t have the
tools to test that one.
Quinn called them the mistakes. They were the oddities of nature.
That which shouldn’t be there, but was. That which shouldn’t work, but did.
They were glitches. Leftovers that were bound by other rules. Quinn had no idea
how many there were. The mistakes seemed endless. They probably were.
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