The Soul Star ⭐️ The Planet of Algoritmo

Algoritmo

Algoritmo was the most intricate and elegant planet in the cosmos of the Kraslika. It was the chef d’oeuvre of Algotodo, the most broken and most brilliant master of infraction the Kraslika has ever seen. To those who lived there, it was a planet called Algoritmo; to those who lived outside it, it was a rumour called The Soul Star.

Algoritmo stood motionless at the exact centre of the Kraslika. It was invisible to everyone in the Kraslika, except for the departed souls who called it home. Literally a microcosm, it was so tiny that a conventional microscope couldn’t detect it, and so vast that it contained, in its fractal depths, a replica of the entire cosmos.

Algoritmo was an infracted version of the Kraslika, and was smaller than the tiniest speck. Yet the law of proportional infractions held sway at the micro-subatomic level, so that the distance between the poles of Algoritmo didn’t seem like a negative distance measured in units smaller than an angstrom. Rather, the distance seemed like 22 billion kilometres, just as kilometres are understood in the rest of the cosmos.

At their time of death, souls found their way to the planet as if by instinct — toward the Saraswati Supercluster and then through the darkness of the Local Void. It was as if they were Arctic tern, voyaging from the icy shores of one pole to the icy shores of another.

Algoritmo had a population of about 60 trillion squared. It was also a living museum, containing the infracted history of every world in every galaxy of the Kraslika. Within its seemingly hard, impenetrable shell lay sextillions of past worlds, each of which circled in its own solar system at every stage of its existence since 1 million BC. Looking down, one could see whole civilizations morphing from historic moment to historic moment, evolving upward in a seamless fabric of space-time toward the surface of the planet. Each world spiralled outward, pulsing from its Alpha to its Omega in strands that Algotodo had layered within the DNA of every citizen who made it to the Soul Star.

Travelling into the planet’s depth, Algorithmians could see the world they came from in every stage of its development. They could see where they grew up, what factors influenced them, what they did right, and what they did wrong. It was, Algotodo said, the only way any of us was ever going to get peace of mind.

The outer shell of Algoritmo was egg-shaped, like the Kraslika itself. And yet it had none of the fragility of an egg shell. On the contrary, it was harder than any known element. It was even harder than ferridium from the planet Die. And yet it was also infinitely flexible: every moment it grew a fraction larger, as the present expanded outward from the infractions of the past. One might call the substance of the shell malleable diamond stretched into infinity, or etherial gold to airy thinness beat. 

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Sitting in the front row of the outdoor seats at the Ramblabar Caffè, Algobrith conceded that in contemplating the integrated layers beneath him, it was helpful to drink several cups of strong coffee. Well, one might call it “coffee,” but it was really something like a smooth mix of caffeine, cocaine, and alcohol, brewed to perfection. It had a lustrous brown shine and a full body that danced all the way from the tongue to the amygdala, like a line of samba dancers in Rio. After two or three of these “coffees,” the Plaza expanded even further, folded in on itself, and burnished every sunlit tile into every corner of Algobrith’s mind.

If the front row was occupied, Algobrith would wander around the etched and gleaming marble floor of the Plaza until the right outdoor table became available. He did this because the Ramblabar Caffè was the closest caffè to the centre of the Plaza, which was dominated by the pulsing 80-metre diamond called I Wish You Were Here. The Diamond shone so brightly that it almost seemed to be a sun, yet it never blinded whoever looked at it. It was rumoured to open the mind’s eye to other worlds, ones that never got included in the infractions of the Soul Star. It was also rumoured to possess occult powers that allowed its viewer to commune with the dead.

Algobrith wanted to be as close as possible to the Diamond, because perhaps in this way he might be closer to his brother Claret, who died on a planet in the Aatari universe thirty years before Algobrith’s death. Algobrith hoped to communicate with his brother, who for some reason never made it to the Soul Star.

Algobrith wore thin-soled shoes, so that his feet felt the planet’s shell beneath him. The closer he got to the shell the closer he felt to the cosmos outside Algoritmo. He could almost intuit what was happening in the Kraslika by feeling what was happening in its continual infraction beneath him. He also wanted to feel the rhythm of the spiral energies of time as they shot up from the centre, infusing him with a living connection to the past. 

Algobrith directed all the energy in his loins downward toward the Aatari planet, Tarry Doom. At the same time he focused his coffee-drenched eyes on the centre of the pulsing incandescent Diamond. And yet he couldn’t hear or see Claret, who was once a great lover of coffee, café tables, and poetic dreams.

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Dimensions

Algobrith conceded that it was always a tricky business trying to navigate the world below. Talking to its shades was even trickier. So he turned his mind instead to the beauty and miracle of its present construction. If he were to graph even the tiniest fraction of the algorithmic propulsions beneath him, it might look something like this:

Above Algoritmo’s shell was the world of the Algorithmians, which was the most complex world in universe. It incorporated every species from every world of the Kraslika, from 1 million BC to the present.

On the distant plains or cities of Algoritmo, the diverse populations reworked the dynamics they had known during their lives in the Kraslika. None of these dynamics, however, involved war or violence. Algotodo had seen to that. Algotodo had aimed all of his algorithms toward eclecticism and fusion, toward unity in diversity. Those who migrated (or some might say transmigrated) to the capital Algodad were encouraged to ponder idealistic philosophies which posited a fundamental unity in the cosmos, and to explore the endless manifestations of science and art.

As a result, the Algorithmians didn’t spend their time fighting, or scheming how to fight. True, they spent decades, and sometimes even centuries, working out the conflicts they once thought so important. Yet over time these conflicts looked more and more like the disagreements of senile inmates in an asylum. Once the Algorithmians had worked through these conflicts, they were free to pursue the things that had made life worth living, such as love, football, art, design, cuisine, blue martini parties, theatre, car racing, literature, music, or golf. 

Looking out over the Grand Plaza in the centre of Algodad, Algobrith shook his head at the things he had read about in the daily papers of the Kraslika. 

Instead of that senseless carnage and intrigue, he saw artists and philosophers next to him in the cafés. Or he saw them up in their garrets and penthouses, writing, drawing, thinking, experimenting.

Algobrith was especially fond of the philosophers, who discussed everything from the spin of an atom to the curl of a hair. They were like the philosophers of the Middle Ages on Earth, who wondered how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Such a description wouldn’t insult the Algobadian philosophers at all. Instead, they would wonder what the angels were wearing and what music they listened to. They would suggest that perhaps it wasn’t only harp music, but a symphony of the spheres, with guitar and gittern, timbrel and tambourine, pandeiro and psalterium, fiddle and flute, zither and viol, crumhorn and citole, naker and zampogna. Perhaps these unearthly, sensual melodies blended into greater harmonies and were unified by the background drone of bagpipe and hurdy-gurdy — who knew for sure? 

The Algobadian philosophers had a poetic sensibility, and could stare for hours at the curl of hair as it danced in the breeze. Hypnotized, they wondered if all of their philosophizing wasn’t just another way of not getting entirely lost in beauty, the beauty of the dark-eyed Algobadian nymphs who winked at them from the other side of a cafe or bar, or who looked down at them from their tree-house dorms, or who looked across at them from a side-street, longing for an afternoon in their cot or on their carpet, with the soft winds of Algoritmo swaying through the trees outside, and the soft light of the sun filtering through the trees, through the window, and onto the face of their lover. 

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The Layers Beneath

Immediately beneath the shell of Algoritmo was an immense infraction of the present Kraslika, while each layer beneath that was a continuous series of infractions of the past. For practical purposes, the Algorithmians split up the continuous infractions into decades, so that a “time traveller” could specify which of the layers from 1 to a million he might like to visit. 

Yet the planet also had two other layers, one deep within it and the other far above it. The inner layer was the core of the planet, and its depth was incalculable. This hidden, internal layer consisted of projected, hypothetical infractions, starting one million years ago, and going deeper and deeper, smaller and smaller, into the mists of time. This layer was called Al-Principio, and contained not only the origin of the planets of the Kraslika, but also the origin of the stars and the great clouds of ether that preceded them.

The outer layer started about one hundred meters above the surface of the planet. It looked like a bank of clouds, a series of indeterminate mists, ocean currents, overlapping auras, or a latticework of crystals, depending on how you looked at it. Referred to as Al-Futuro, this layer contained future projections, radiating outward to the End of Time, which infracted infinitely into the billowing clouds and crystals of Space.

Within the meteorological grammar of Al-Futuro, Algotodo had woven a conditional tense. This allowed the Algorithmians to roam up into the clouds and from there to go wherever they wanted. They could go into something so deeply that it were as if they had entered a black hole. Or they could take flight from one distant galaxy to the next, without passport and without fear. All of these worlds were within Al-Futuro, wrapped and deeply layered with infractions that expanded and contracted, all according to the arcane calculations of Algotodo, the god of all algorithms.

The Algorithmians roamed freely in this marvellous ether, without ever fearing that some fallen angel might hook them with its spear or drag them down to some boiling lake or icy dungeon. Yet in this the Algorithmians were naive. Because their afterlife was so perfectly constructed, it seemed more real than the Kraslika they came from. Many of them even believed that they’d arrived at the end of history. They felt that everything that could once hurt them was now just a mirage, just an echo of the bad old days when they knew war and scarcity, enmity and rage. They were completely blind to the possibility of these things ever returning. They told themselves they had nothing to fear. They had within them the entire history of their cosmos, and felt that they had learned all the lessons they needed to know.

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The Algorithmians always felt at home, largely by virtue of the positive algorithms that permeated the atmosphere of Algoritmo, and floated into every cell and every DNA molecule of their beings. These algorithms encouraged them to appreciate everything and to explore beyond who they once were. This was the ultimate gift of the ancient sage of Vicino Prossimo: Algorithmians not only got to live an afterlife with all the memories they could possibly want, but they also got to go off in new directions, making new memories and finding new ways of being. 

Paradoxically, the same luxury didn’t apply to Algotodo himself. Although he was a citizen of Algoritmo and had a deluxe condo on the seventh floor of Royal Gardens, he remained fundamentally unhappy. In the last several hundred years he had taken to reading nostalgic Chinese poetry and parsing the lines of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Algotodo had lived on Algoritmo for a million years, and it had taken him almost as long to find the perfect articulation of his grief. Was it mere chance, or was it serendipity, that Earth was so close to what other people called the Soul Star? Or did the Star itself cast a spell on humans, so that they were the only ones who managed to guess its heavenly nature? In any case, their poets had managed to express with precision the deep longing he had for the woman he had lost so many years ago:

She's so conjunctive to my life and soul, that, as the star moves not but in his sphere, I could not but by her.

And yet while the Soul Star didn’t move, neither did the melancholy that persisted in Algotodo’s heart for a million years.

Beneath his plasmic scroll of a mountain landscape, dripping with the spray that hid his tears, Algotodo looked up at her likeness as she spoke the words he felt and would have her feel:

… indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'er hanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me, than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man; how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty; in form and moving how express and admirable; in action how like an Angel, in apprehension how like a god. The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals. And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

While Algotodo gave his fellow Kraslikans everything, he lacked the one thing he needed. Although almost infinite in faculty, he had an empty hole at his centre. He was living proof that mind doesn’t matter if the heart is empty.

The exact reason for his predicament was that his brilliant construction, fretted as it was with golden fire, could infract anything except whatever came before it. There was no way he could infract a person before he discovered the technology that made such an infraction possible. No matter how deeply Algotodo went into his algorithms to mine what she once was, and no matter how high he went into the clouds to find what she might have been, he still couldn’t bring her back to life. 

Looking down from his library on the seventh floor, Algotodo was relieved to see that he couldn’t make out the taut ankles of the girls walking down the street in their light summer clothes. Still, he closed the blinds and tried to think of something else.

What came to his mind were two other things he couldn’t do: fathom the craft of the Fallarians, and tame the pride of the Vicinese. And yet he knew somehow, as sure as he knew that he would never see Wei again: they were coming for his sunken realm.

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Next: 🎲 By the Light of Fractals 1: The Orb

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