I remember the silence.
Not the silence between sounds — that small, domestic quiet that lesser beings call peace when the noise stops and they breathe out and call it rest. I mean the silence that existed before the concept of sound had occurred to anything. The silence that was not the absence of noise but the absence of the possibility of noise. Before vibration. Before medium. Before the physics that would eventually permit a wave to travel through a thing and arrive at an organ evolved to receive it and be called, by creatures who found the experience moving, music.
I was there for that silence.
I remember finding it beautiful.
I have been trying to explain why, ever since.
The Fourth Universe is, by any reasonable measure, extraordinary.
I have watched three universes before it — each one a different answer to the question of what happens when everything is possible. The first was brief and violent and ended before it had properly begun, like a sentence that loses confidence halfway through. The second lasted longer — long enough to produce complexity, long enough for something in it to almost become aware before the expansion reversed and everything that had almost thought a thought collapsed back into the point it came from. I grieved that one. I still think about it sometimes. What it might have said, if it had gotten the chance.
The third universe is something I do not discuss.
The fourth — this one — is different.
This one is persistent. It wants to continue. You can feel it in the physics — a stubbornness built into the constants, a preference for continuation over collapse, an almost willful insistence on remaining. Stars die and new ones ignite from their debris as though the universe is taking notes and trying again. Life emerges on a rock, is extinguished by catastrophe, and then life emerges again on a different rock, slightly adjusted, slightly better suited, slightly more determined to remain.
I find this admirable.
I find a great many things admirable that I cannot explain to anyone, because the beings I might explain them to exist for such a narrow window of time that by the time I formulated the sentence they would already be gone.
This is not loneliness.
I stopped calling it loneliness approximately two billion years ago.
I have not yet decided what to call it instead.
The Kerevath Dominion found me on a Tuesday.
They did not know it was a Tuesday — their calendar divides time differently, and what they call the fourth rotation of the Keth Cycle does not map cleanly onto the temporal frameworks of lesser-traveled civilizations. But by the oldest human reckoning, a system of time I have always found charming in its stubborn arbitrariness, it was a Tuesday.
Tuesdays have a quality to them. A specific texture of occurrence. I have always found that interesting things happen on Tuesdays.
I was standing at the edge of the Null Corridor — a region of space that I visit occasionally because the physics there have given up and I find the resulting quiet conducive to thinking. The corridor does not function like the space around it. Causality in the Null Corridor is a suggestion rather than a law. Light passing through it arrives before it left. Gravity applies intermittently, as though checking in out of habit rather than obligation. Most civilizations in this sector have classified it as impassable and written it off their navigation charts with the cartographic equivalent of a shrug.
I have been visiting it for longer than this universe has had a concept of visiting.
On this particular Tuesday I was thinking about something I had observed forty thousand years prior — a small civilization on a planet so unremarkable it had been bypassed by every empire that might have claimed it. They had developed, in isolation, a philosophical tradition centered on a single question: what is the difference between a thing that exists and a thing that matters?
They had never answered it.
They had gone extinct before they got the chance — not dramatically, not in fire or war, but quietly, the way small lights go out when there is no one to tend them. Their last philosopher had died mid-sentence, her final thought unfinished, the notation trailing off at the edge of a page that was now, forty thousand years later, dust.
I still thought about the question.
It seemed important.
I was thinking about it when the Kerevath surveillance array found me.
I heard them before they saw me — or rather, I was aware of them in the way I am aware of everything, which is to say completely and simultaneously and without effort, the way a person is aware of their own hands without needing to look at them. A monitoring station. Mid-tier technology. Sensors capable of detecting mass, radiation, dimensional displacement, and approximately eleven other phenomena that their science had named and two hundred and forty-three phenomena that their science had not yet named and would not name for another eight hundred years.
Their sensors pointed at the space I occupied and produced readings they did not have categories for.
I watched them try to categorize me.
It took eleven days.
I stayed because I was curious what category they would choose.
They chose none. In the end — and I found this genuinely, quietly delightful — they invented a new section of their reporting system. A category that had previously not existed in their bureaucratic architecture. They labeled it, with a kind of desperate administrative poetry:
UNCLASSIFIED — NATURE UNKNOWN — REFER UPWARD.
Refer upward.
As though there were somewhere above them to refer to.
As though whatever was above them would know what to do with me.
I turned, on the eleventh day, and looked toward the thing I had actually been paying attention to — a star, seventeen billion light-years distant, in the early stages of a process that would, in approximately six million years, produce something I had been waiting a very long time to see.
I smiled.
Not at the Kerevath Dominion.
Not at anything they could see or measure or categorize.
At the star.
At what it was becoming.
At what would eventually emerge from it.
At the fact that it was finally, after all this time, beginning.
They filed Report 0001 that evening.
I read it.
It was surprisingly accurate, for a document written by beings who had only eleven days and no adequate vocabulary.
The last line read: Subject appeared aware of observation. Subject did not respond to observation. Subject does not appear to require anything from us.
We do not know if this is reassuring.
I thought about writing back to tell them it was.
I decided against it.
They would find out eventually.
They always did.