The Soul Star ⭐️ Algoritmo

Six and Seven

Unfortunately, all Six of his fellow Sages had all been slightly older than he. A mere few hundred years. As a result, they had passed into gnashing infinity before they could put the finishing touches on their project. And yet two positive things followed from this.

First, and most obvious, was that he was able to give himself the gift of eternal life. At times he flagellated himself with the thought that Algoancora or Algotenere deserved it more than he. Yet he was a realist and a scientist, and laboured to see his lucky fate as a function of space-time inevitability, rather than personal worth.

Second, his late death gave him the luxury, as well as the time, to benefit from everything each of the Six had discovered over the course of their long lives.

Because the trust among the Seven Sages was absolute, Algotodo had access to all their personal files. The Book of Fractals was a mere sampling of their musings, edited and mixed with his own thoughts about life. Algotodo was also working on a larger volume, in which he drew more deeply from their intimate journals, and in which he expanded on the more challenging or disturbing questions they asked.

For instance, Algoancora wrote a labyrinth of sonnets dealing with her travels through the expanding empire of the Fallarians. The introductory sonnet went like this:

In our sunlit realm on high we know only of light

and nothing of the glittering lure

of falling further

into night.

We know nothing of the fine gradations

from shades of grey to bluish black

as we turn our gilded backs

on the fallen nations.

In staccato dreamscapes of time

their poets tumble into abstruse density

enduring points and pointless stretches of immensity

transforming each and every conundrum into rhythm and rhyme.

In time we too will know of their fate

and understand it too, but all too late.

⭐️

Algoancora was the Sixth Sage, and had been closest to him in age and temperament. She died 120 years before he exploded the bomb that put every dying creature into regeneration mode and sped them to Algoritmo.

She was a beautiful woman, and had more joie de vivre than any being he’d ever met. She was his only consolation for the loss of Mai, who had died 87 years before he met Algoancora.

He knew that Algoancora would have relished the regeneration and the reappearance on Algotodo. She would have looked around her at the giant diamond, and, without missing a beat she would have challenged him to explore what lay beneath the surface of the planet. The Seven Sages had speculated about what might lie in the inner core, deep beneath the algorithms that led forever deeper.

It was Algotenere, the tenacious one, who had coined the term augurithms. It was also Algotenere who wrote an epic poem about a small group of fishminers who travelled to an icy polar cap and then drilled into the icy deep. The past seemed frozen in time, but with the right augur, extending twenty feet, two hundred metres, ten miles, a billion leagues below, they might reach what lay at the bottom of the deep blue sea.

In the opening stanza, Algotenere wrote:

What strange fish might we find?

What bones or alien races?

What creatures without faces?

What traces of a different dimension,

beyond space and time?

Algoancora and Algotenere were of course lovers, and it would have been poetically just if the two had survived to turn their afterlives into poetry. They could have spent decades together exploring the layers beneath the planet, mining history like gold. Or they might have flown together into the skies of speculation, drifting on the clouds of the upoer atmosphere, like birds on a never-ending wire.

But alas the cosmos is a prosaic place. The Six were both gone, long gone. Just like Mai.

They had learned, in an unconscious haze, that Time was a brutal master. The Moment, his day-to-day minister, took them all away. All except Algotodo, who was left in the moment, to mourn their final and irrevocable passing.

⭐️

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