Microstory 2070: Godlings All The Way Down

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I’m sorry about bummin’ you all out yesterday. I’ve just been thinking a lot about my past, and my life. Why don’t I tell you a little bit about it? ‘Kay? You can read it or not. Like Superman, I grew up in Kansas. And like Superman, I had superpowers. But unlike Superman, these powers weren’t useful for flying around, rescuing people. They gave me glimpses into other worlds, which allowed me to write their stories down, and pass them off as fiction. I eventually realized that some of these stories were taking place in a universe that was located inside of my very soul. You see, that’s what all inhabited universes are; the complex development of a person’s soul, who you might call a god. We are all gods with godlings, and all godlings are gods. It’s godlings all the way down. No one knows where it ends, and no one knows where it begins. Some may want to answer such profound philosophical questions, but I am not one of them, because it would not change the way I live my life, which has always been a little less than the best I can. I’m not what you would call responsible or productive. I’ve not written any stories for a long time, because that’s not me anymore. I no longer have access to those worlds. If I did, I would be able to find Cricket and Claire. My alternate self could. He probably knows exactly where they are, and I bet he’s telling their continued story without me. He used to be able to send me messages, which we called updates, but your boring planet locks all those out. My own story is still getting out to him, but I’m lost. Alone. With all of you.

Microstory 1639: Smart Plants

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Aliens are rare. They exist for a few different reasons, the main one being that they were genetically engineered from humans, or evolved from a branch of genetically engineered humans. Or they were humans raised on something called a source variant, which basically means that something in the way they were developed—with every intention of keeping them human—altered them enough to make them a different species. Radiation is often a factor. There’s one other method of creating a non-human intelligent species, and it goes back to a multiversal maxim which states that God is human, and therefore God’s godlings are also human. This is vague, and doesn’t explain anything, so I’ll break it down. My people and I come from a god, who houses us in a special subdimension in his soul. But that god also has his own god, and he’s housed in her soul, and so is everyone else in my god’s universe. So too do they have their own godlings, running around, being human. Nothing can evolve that isn’t technically human, because they are all ultimately sourced from one theoretical universe that stands above all others. The people in this universe have no god, so they are not godlings; only gods. And from them, we all come into being. That doesn’t mean there aren’t other lifeforms; just not ones that are sufficiently evolved. These other lifeforms are often known as pets, and if one forms a strong enough bond with its human, it actually has an impact on the genetic evolution of the godlings that belong to that person. That’s what sometimes results in an alien species that is not very human. Something different has been introduced into the system. On at least one occasion, a God actually bonded with a plant, and ended up creating plant-based godlings in their subdimensional soul. So they’re aliens, and they’re not fully human, but they have to be a little human, because we’re the only species with complex souls, as opposed to the simplex souls that animals have, as well as apparently, this plant. The plant in the higher universe will not create godlings on its own.

This doesn’t mean that the hyperintelligent plant species will suddenly spring into existence either. Evolution still takes place, no matter what. It usually follows an inevitable path that will eventually lead to a version of humans, but even with this exception, it still has to follow evolutionary logic, or it won’t happen. Evolution takes place over the course of billions of years, and that remains true for Sapioplantaverse, so I’ll just go over the highlights. There was a species of plant that lived on a planet in the Milky Way galaxy. This plant struggled to perform photosynthesis, and get enough energy to survive. Trees towered above them, and blocked much of the sunlight, but it wasn’t just the lack of light itself. It takes a lot of energy to create the components necessary for photosynthesis in the first place. It’s a cycle, where the sunlight powers the plant, which allows it to build itself up, and gather more sunlight...to power the plant. This cycle was strenuous, and taxing, so this plant evolved to lower the cost of energy. It did this by eating nearby plants, and stealing their photosynthetic pigments. The individual plants who were better at leaning towards these prey plants were better at surviving, for they were able to steal more pigment. The leaners slowly got even better at this when they figured out how to uproot themselves, inch closer to their prey, and reroot themselves at this new location. Their descendants became better and better at this, until they were pretty much walking. Then eventually, they were walking. The rerooting process became so quick that they essentially had legs, and from there, the evolution was obvious. The mobile plants were able to move to areas of stronger sunlight, and better nutrients, making them larger, and stronger. The better the individual’s external sensors were, the better it was at detecting where it was going, and overcoming obstacles, so that genetic trait was passed down to its descendants. This led to them evolving eyes, noses, and appendages. They developed knees to move faster, tongues to gather nutrients more efficiently, and brains to navigate easier. After a whole lot of time, they attained human level intelligence, which made them just as skillful, and fully capable of conquering their world.

Microstory 1616: Animal Intelligence

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Some laws of physics pervade every universe in the bulkverse. They don’t allow impossible things like moons that orbit past the Roche limit, or gravity that repels objects. They don’t create cuboid stars, or flat planets. There’s no such thing as an animal species with wheels in place of feet, or whales that evolve in space. There are just some things that don’t exist, no matter where you go. Some universes, however, do have their own specific physical laws that would contradict each other, but which don’t interfere with multiversal constants. Magic is the number one example of this, but I don’t want to talk too much about that. Those universes can be paradoxically persistent, but unstable at the same time. There aren’t any rules that hold them together, but they’re extremely popular, which keeps them from collapsing in on themselves. They’re hard for me to see, because in order to avoid the collapse, aspects of such worlds don’t exist while people aren’t actively thinking about them. No, even ignoring the lawlessness of magic, there are still universes that would be considered bizarre, or even completely insane, to an outsider. Bladopodoverse is one example of this, but it’s not the only one. This next brane doesn’t have a name, like most others, but it has a little quirk that I don’t really understand. For the most part, humans are the dominant species on any planet, even if it’s not a version of Earth. The reason for this is God. God is human, God’s godlings are humans. The godlings’ respective godlings are also human. It just keeps going down the line, and if you ever meet an evolved creature that is decidedly not human, it’s just because it’s somehow related to humans, and spiritually speaking, is still human enough. There’s only one true alien species that I know of, and even that’s pretty complicated. This world is different. It contains multiple intelligent animals, with no apparent origin. I couldn’t tell you why the animals are smarter, and I definitely couldn’t give you any details about their neurology. I can see that a lot of them like to help the humans around them, because they seem so hopeless, and that there don’t seem to be a whole lot of evil animals, which I find interesting. Not all are like this, or at least they can even hide their intelligence from me. Some animals appear to be normal, or at least how you or I would use the word. The intelligent animals don’t use technology, or form human-like societies. They pretty much behave about as they would without their advanced intelligence, but sometimes exhibit traits far beyond what they should have. They communicate with each other on a higher level, and occasionally include humans in their dealings. Other than this oddity, this version of Earth is about the same as any other. It has an underworld, which only a few people are aware of, so if you traveled there, you probably wouldn’t notice a difference.