The Edge of Everything

One man's personal death.

A slow pulse rippled through Thomas Rhine, filling and emptying his body like an asthmatic with a paper bag. The blood started to run stale with his ragged halting breaths, not enough oxygen was reaching the blood cells to make him feel like he was really even breathing. His body grew steadily heavier; he felt like he was sinking in a cold lake with cinder blocks tied to each extremity.

It felt like his form was caving in on him, as though he were a tiny being piloting an enormous body-suit and the walls of the meat machine were collapsing all around him. He had to get out of the shell, claw his way to freedom before the machine could trap him in its cavernous halls of bloody viscera and twitching muscle fiber. It was as though the folds of his brain were fusing together, trying to lock him- his Thomasness- in forever. Thomas had to escape. He knew this instinctively the way a toddler knows to hold his breath underwater, or the way those expensive new cars know to avoid things in the driver's blind spot. If he couldn't get out he'd be stuck in the cold husk until it- the disgusting pile of human tripe and brittle bones- rotted to dust.

The blood was running colder, staler; the breaths became less and less satisfying, harder and harder to get a decent gulp of air. He started to resent the very idea of his body, the grotesque way it functioned (poorly, cheaply, wetly) and the pathetic way it had simply decided to die. He hated it for trying to trap him, its desperate smothering was like a clinging lover not willing to face the truth of their separation (crude, pitiful, vindictive).

Thomas reached out with what felt very much like a hand and groped at the backs of his eyeballs. The body fought back, the blood slowly squirting through his soggy veins began to chill and formed a web of icy bindings crisscrossing through his body just under his skin. The freezing chains thrummed angrily with each slowing pulse of his sputtering heart. The thing was becoming more desperate and violent, fighting against Thomas like he'd never been fought before.

He chewed and scratched and tore and ripped and pulled and pushed, swimming through the crushing confines of his wet meaty prison and fighting like hell to squeeze through the crushing walls of bones and muscles and wrenching organs. Thomas slammed against his body again and again like a policeman shoulder checking a locked door or a captive struggling against his binds. He could hear the thing dying, the blood chilling and the digestive tract slowing to a halt. He had to get out.

He clawed and pushed against the wall of his abdomen, finding a weak spot just under the ribs. The body screamed and tightened its abdominal muscles but it was too late, Thomas felt warmth on the other side of the cold flesh and it only pushed him harder to escape. He wanted to be warm and free and awake, to leave the horrible world of matter and noise- endless noise- behind forever. He wanted to see through new eyes and live, oh God he wanted to really live. He didn't want flesh-life, no, not the life of the body but the life of the soul and the mind and the warm forever outside of oneself.

The body quaked in a quivering spasm with his emergence, Thomas reached through the membranous wall of skin and came through. He reached out with a hand, and then an arm and his head. He crowned out of the birth canal that was this mortal shell and shouldered past its boundaries. He was the true sort of naked, the newborn naked. His new formless self was coated in a slimy patina of memories from his body's life, the memory of flesh and blood and bone and food and water- so much water. He slid out into the real, true world, slimy and nude. He blinked his new eyes and watched his old body sigh out its last breath.

Then in an instant it happened. Stars. His form swelled and his mind expanded as he exploded through a whirling maelstrom of stars. Dark. Life and death and life and death; a million millennia and a trillion lives and a trillion deaths, the infinite expanse of darkness beyond the burning lights of the universe welcomed him silently.

That, as Thomas discovered, is elementally what death is. Silence. It's also cold to the touch but warm to the other sense, the sense of self. It's beyond sanity and knowledge and reason and creation, but it's a part of everything. Dying makes you that, he realized. Everything. Thomas whirled and moved in stillness and expanded infinitely inwards and outwards. He became and disappeared and spoke without words and thought without a mind. His tiny flickering ember- the spark that was cast out from the forge of all things as the hammer struck hot existence-iron- rejoined with the heat of the Everything fire, the place where it all began and ended and began and ended a quintillion times. Thomas became Aware with a capital A while simultaneously realizing what it meant to not be.

Despite all of this he was still Thomas Rhine. He knew who he was, he knew where he'd come from (a lovely little town called Harrisburg in southeastern Kansas on the planet Earth, an equally lovely little planet- although not quite so lovely as some places) and he knew why he wasn't there anymore. Being a part of everything (like deaths, near-deaths, births, promotions, successful cessations of substance abuse and really good sandwiches) only changes you completely for a little while before the experience fades into the recesses of memory, incorporated but not important. Time passed, hundreds of years in the blink of a proverbial eye (as Thomas's “eyes” were in fact not quite that) and just as many backwards in half the time. Time passed and Thomas returned to being Thomas Rhine from Harrisburg, Kansas, Earth who once got extremely drunk after his wife left him because their child died (and it may have been in some small way his fault, if actual fault can really exist amidst such feelings of personal guilt) and decided it would be best to slash his wrists with an expensive steak knife from his tiny kitchen and wait patiently to die.

It was this death, this middle death of many, that opened Thomas Rhine's eyes to the fullness of reality and the nature of the universe. When he was quite large and everywhere, looking down from the endless Nothing on the edges of Everything, he saw the universe teeming with life. It bustled and breathed and ate and s**t and made and destroyed and was while he- though hugely enormous and infinitely Aware- was not.

It was the “not” part of “was not” that bothered him. For a good deal of time this bothered him. Other things bothered him too. Like the fact that despite his being everything and everywhere in all times and places and bedrooms and bathrooms and women's changing rooms, he was completely alone. The universe(s) was (were) empty and hollow from his lofty Nothing, exploding with life and laughter and occurrence and happening but completely two-dimensional (in fact three or four-dimensional for most of the universe's inhabitants, but to an eleven-dimensional being this seems quite flat).

Thomas Rhine cursed his Awareness (especially its capital A) and his perspective and desperately wanted to see the universe as he once did. Ignorance is bliss, he thought, and I could really use some bliss right about now. Death happened in a manner more constant than one without Thomas's perspective could possibly imagine. From the tiniest quantum phage entity consuming, dividing and perishing to the mammoth Teq'shala Gaswurms of the Olvin-Kesh Zero Zone expelling their last belches of life-giving vapors before falling into the crushing gravity core of their home world. Everything died and became entropy. Everything except Thomas Rhine formerly of Harrisburg, Kansas, Earth. Despite his Death-Nothingness he, in some indescribable way, was when all others were not. Just as he was not when all others were.

This observation was chilling, sad, horrific and above all else boring. He thought maybe he had missed his chance, that perhaps his body attempting to imprison him had been a necessary step towards a more “standard” manner of death. His spiteful reaction to his old body's smothering grip might have doomed him to an eternity of the Everything and its hollow fullness. He found it odd somehow, but what he had hated for so long- the wet, sticky, gelatinous, bony, diseased life of a body- was precisely what he wanted most.

When he thought it, the woman appeared. She was made of a hundred mirrors reflecting nothing of Thomas's invisible, intangible form. Instead they reflected the countless stars and worlds and meteors and moons, they reflected the eternity of time and endless minds and souls of life. Her cold, reflective body shifted as she stood in the Nothing with Thomas atop a cloud of flames. Thomas- for the first time since the silence of the moment of his rebirth through death- had no thoughts. His mind was stunned and dumbly quiet.

“In me you see the reflected Everything, that of which you are no longer a part.” Her voice echoed and rippled through his naked spirit and the warmth in him went cold.

“What are you?” Thomas managed to respond, feeling the strangeness of his own disembodied voice and watching it vibrate the woman's mirrored flesh. It wasn't exactly what he'd wanted to say, but it was all he could expel. The woman looked down at her nimbus of fire and back up to Thomas.

“I am your next death and rest. I'm outside of you, just as you are outside of Everything. You who died and became alive in that way you shouldn't have. You who are when you should not be. You are and are not at once.” The mirror woman spoke and Thomas felt her words as sadness and fear. Her words became feelings which then became knowledge. That knowledge became frozen crystalline doubts. Doubts about his old life, his new life and the death that had brought him into being.

“You have done a thing you shouldn't have, you have made a mistake that has in turn made you into a mistake. I am the Eraser, sent to correct you.” Her icy words drained more and more of his heat, he felt the second death coming and saw her blazing cloud grow and grow. The more warmth Thomas lost the larger her inferno became.

“S-stop it! Stop! I'm not a mistake! I'm Thomas Rhine! I am!” He sweat fire, his soul melting and collecting in the spiraling storm beneath the mirror woman's feet.

“You are when you should not be, Thomas Rhine. I must remove the being and leave the Nothing. You must be corrected.” The cold seared him and slashed off sloughs of heat like meat from a roasting spit. Thomas screamed and roared in pain, his voice diminishing into the Nothing as the brazier of his soul was wrapped into a tighter and tighter disc of flame. He could feel the fire that was no longer a part of him like phantom limbs. He was deflating and emptying but could still taste the heat. At once he realized: it was still a part of him. Though distant and under the dominion of the mirror goddess, it was still him. Thomas moved the fire beneath her, ripping it free of its bonds.

“You can't have me! You w***e of the universe! You despicable god of death! I will be! Let go of me!” Thomas and the stolen fire that was also him lashed and whipped about, scouring her mirrors and ripping her to pieces. The mirror woman screeched the tones of vibrating, shattering glass. He brought his fire back to him after he scattered her pieces across the vastness of Nothing on the edge of Everything. With it came more fire. The fire she'd taken from those like him, the trillion flames of the trillion souls that had dared to escape their fates.

It became too much; he couldn't hold it in. The anger and rebellion and satire and sarcasm and vengeance and irreverence of the trillion souls consumed him and he became a very small voice in a cacophonous choir of millions upon millions. He felt himself burning from the inside out, the warmth of Everything rose within him to a torrential wave of conflagration. The heat exploded out of him with the fire of ten thousand novas scorching a million worlds to cinders. Lives were snuffed out, countless lives incinerated by Thomas Rhine's blazing hate. Countless dreams, memories, souls and creations were demolished in an instant.

On Camus VI, the birdlike Oshik priest Kreil, Veteran of the Thousand Wars awoke to the serene rise of the twin suns Tobu and Agamo. He arose from his empty, lonely bed and stretched his many joints and stood on his taloned feet, feeling the power of the holy beings for whom he spoke fill him and banish the sadness of his dreams as it did every morning. He was alone in his life, as the Oshik priests must be. He was alone in his locked tower pyramid overlooking his people, his flock of nine billion flickering spirits. Only the gods comforted him in his solemnity and loneliness. He grabbed his staff, called the Illuminated Hammer of the Shelled One, and clicked his beak against its jeweled head in an offering of prayer. Kreil, the Veteran of the Thousand Wars was a World Healer, a man who could end any war with a cycle's mediation. He had saved forty million lives since becoming an Oshik priest, but humility was his greatest asset.

“DAMN YOU, INFINITE WORLDS!”

Camus VI burned, shredded by the Rhine Cataclysm and fell to dust on the winds of space. Kreil, the Veteran of the Thousand Wars watched his world burn and pecked his beak a second time against the Illuminated Hammer of the Shelled One's head. I will be alone no longer, Lords of Life, he thought with his last moments of existence as he bathed in the fire of Thomas Rhine's anger.

Kreil's bodily vessel fell apart to atoms, empty of essence. Nothing emerged.

The Fifth Empire of the Speakers, situated in the Bloodletter's Nebula, was awash in turmoil. Endless war between the twelve species of the Fifth Empire ravaged its hundred worlds. On a world called the Sleeping Vault a being of a thousand hands known only as the Chained God lay in its living tomb and thought. The Chained God could do nothing but think in its prison. It had been imprisoned for crimes it hadn't committed long before those who fought outside its jail had been born. It was alone in its prison, and all it could do was think on that fact. Though his prison itself breathed and quivered with wet life, it could neither think nor talk. The Chained God imagined it wouldn't be much of a companion even if it could do those things.

“DAMN YOU, LIVES AND SOULS AND ENDLESS MINDS!”

Its prison screamed and writhed, heat from the outside passing over it in a wave of death. The Chained God smiled its twelve mouths of razor teeth. I'm free, it thought as its living cell breathed its last and disappeared in a fluttering banner of incinerated flesh. The No-Longer-Chained God opened its single eye one last time and saw a corona of blazing fury. It, in its infinite bitterness and hate couldn't fathom the being whose rage had created this fire.

It disintegrated to smoldering ash, its million-year life ended in a moment. Nothing emerged.

The Child of Mars, the star watcher who lived alone in study and contemplation on the desert world of Paskium, hovered above the dunes in meditation. She felt it coming well before it hit and let her head tilt upwards as the brightness of her impending doom lit the night sky like the Ten Year Day. That lonely being, she thought, that creature of sorrows and restless death. I hope you find peace. She thought she should weep, but felt no sadness for herself. Instead she raised a hand to the sky above and offered the sign her father taught her that meant condolences.

“DAMN YOU, SUNS AND GALAXIES AND YEARS AND DAYS AND MILLENIA!”

The giant, endless desert of Paskium turned to glass as the first waves of heat slammed into its surface. The glass melted and burst, and the Child of Mars melted with it. Her advanced instruments and the ingenious writings their observations had allowed were burned away and lost forever, the libraries of her knowledge obliterated wholly.

Her lost body yielded no spirit nor mindform. Nothing emerged.

“DAMN YOU ALL FOR LEAVING ME ALONE! AND DAMN YOU MOST, THOMAS RHINE!”

Thomas screamed and boomed, wailed and raged at the whole of reality. His voice shook the worlds and vibrated the galaxies. He damned himself and burned and burned and burned, but he couldn't die again. He was alone, the trillion souls' flames spent in his tantrum. Thomas Rhine turned and drifted past Everything towards Nothing. He knew the truth of things. Everyone dies alone, but only the very unfortunate and wrathful and selfish and afraid have to live that way.

He had not been corrected. He was a mistake that would mar the perfection and laws forever.