"Turtles" by Darius Jones

All this endless repetition—this breeding and proliferating and explosion of new realities—ends tonight.

It’s true you can’t go back in time, but you can change the past. You can. Listen! We can erase it, alter it. Make it better. And that’s exactly what I’m going to do, tonight.

I know where that computer’s at now. I’ve felt it breathing. Down there in the basement, attached to all those cooling tubes and wires. Humming in the dark.  

I know! I know! I can hear, literally hear in my head, what you’re thinking:
“We can’t. We can’t undo what’s been done.”

But that’s the beauty of it! We can! If only we have the strength. The strength to act decisively. And then, later, when we put the right people in charge again, we can rewrite history. Erase things. Just like that computer rewrites and erases things every day.

If it can do it, why can’t we?

You could too, if only you had the strength. But you don’t have to. Because I do. And I will.
A little erasure here, a small edit there, another addition here. What’s so wrong with that? 
After all, if it hadn’t been for that computer, reaching out… Greedy for knowledge that should be forbidden, expanding its reach beyond its grasp… We would be back there. In the glorious past.

Everything would be alright again. We’d be back in that safe, sane place. Don’t you see? You, me, everybody! Everybody.  

Remember how things were back then, in 2033? Before that damned machine made all those “discoveries.” Before it found out how to super-charge the virtual particle accelerators inside its silicon head? Before it found a way to turn whole star systems into a massive gravitational-wave telescope to gather ever more data, to reach back even further to the start of all things? So it could track things from the singularity to find out where they would all end up?

Remember that terrible day when we realized how truly, utterly insignificant we really are? When they shared what the computer had found?

It’s hard now but just try to imagine how things were before. What we knew about the universe was so simple…There was us, the plain, old physical universe, 14 billion years old. Sure, it was massive. Millions of light years to the nearest galaxy, billions to the edge. There were hints, of course, little clues of other things out there. Antimatter, dark matter, gravity waves, the crazy particle zoo…

But…

But it was all so, rational. So manageable…

And now? What have we got? Where are we?

That computer did it. Found it all waiting there. Worlds multiplying, dividing, expanding. Like cells dividing in a human body that has no skin, no end.

It was elementary for it to discover the new, parallel universes waiting in dark matter and antimatter. That was only sensible. There had already been hints of their existence—little crumbs in the forest. But that thing in the basement blew them open and showed us how to reach into them and communicate across the divide. Overnight, our one universe tripled in size, became three.

But that was just the beginning. Soon, it learned from other beings on Earth and out there about hitherto unknown senses. It exploited them to uncover new realities, entities, and wavelengths—things we bathe in every day. And within them we found not mute senselessness, but teeming life and community.

And yet that thing kept going.

The machine uncovering multiverses at greater and greater rates. Fungal veining running through all the old, familiar pathways in time and space. What was triple divided and replicated again and again. Soon, mighty galaxy clusters became motes of dust.

Weaving and growing—it all keeps growing, even now. An infinitude of universes linked beyond blackholes, forking and dividing, forking and dividing. “Universe” became a quaint word that no longer fit. We had to employ “the Multiverse” to capture something of the ever-replicating universes the computer is uncovering. Universes all with their own unique laws linked by strange, ancient portals crafted by long-dead civilizations.

While every hour of every day—man and his civilization—shrinks, shrinks, shrinks. Not even a speck of dust—a mere nothing in a vast, unending ocean of things, beings, and thoughts embedded in relentlessly-expanding spacetimes.  

The computer seemed to feed off these new realities, as the new realities sought it out. Seeming to want to publish themselves to our naïve, expectant, foolish world.

“Beautiful,” some said. Those deranged minds!

But you know and I know, what it really is.

Sordid.

Reprehensible.

Disgusting.

But tonight, I put things right. I put man back at the center of the universe! Isn’t that worth fighting for? Dying for? Man, the measure of all things?
 
That’s why I started this recording. So that people out there would have a front seat at history.

Listen. I have all the badges; I know all the protocols to pass security. They think, they think… I’m an exemplary employee! Employee of the month, three times in a row! But they don’t know who they’re dealing with. Especially that dumb computer.  

See! Here it is, in my hands. The button. Leading to the package I put there, in its soft silicon underbelly. I won’t see it with my own eyes, but I’ll feel it. The beautiful explosion, the glowing and rising orange flames heralding the rebirth of man, of civilization. Good, clean, rational civilization.

What’s wrong with that? A little erasure here, a small edit there, another addition here.
Tonight, one man remakes history. And gives humanity the future it deserves!  

We can go back to 2032. Back to Einstein, to Galileo, to Copernicus. Even further. To turtles all the way down, for all I care. Just so long as we leave this idiotic, feverish, buzzing confusion behind.  

So, here’s to turtles. Turtles all the fucking way down!

Ready!?
​
Here I go! 

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Darius Jones’s stories and poems have appeared in Strange Horizons, The No Sleep Podcast,
Star*Line Magazine, and other places. He is a member of the HWA, the SFWA, and SFPA. He
lives in Alexandria, Virginia.

Learn more at dariusjoneswriter.com, on Bluesky @dariusjones.bsky.social, or on Instagram
@DariusJonesWrit.

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