Absolute 1: WAAAAAAARAAAAAWAAAAAAAARAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Absolute 2: GAAAAAAARONNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGGGGG

Absolute 3: *falling pitch* BEEEJEEEZEEEFEEEELOOOOGEEEENAAGAAAARAAAAAA

Absolute 4: *vibrato* KEEEEEYIIIIIIIIIYEEEEEEEEEEAIIIIIIIIIIIIIXIIIIIIII

The resonating truth filled even the void of space and caused the four famous rocky worlds of Techara to shatter in their orbits.... becoming the exceptionally dangerous asteroid belts of Techara.

And without the mediating flow of the golden chord, many new and strange forms were born in the now unconstrainedly varied cosmos.



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Yes other theorists were disappointed. The ridiculous one electron theory proved to be total nonsense. Toilet bowls produced the same spins. Cats and dogs did not lay down together. People still refused to raise their taxes or cap their salaries.

Death still came and went to a rhythm that only he seemed to understand. Famine visited when most unwelcome. Relatives would still arrive unexpectedly in the middle of Tuesday night looking for a free overnight stay.

Tyrants still duped their subjects and made them miserable. The nature of man did not change.

But misery was greater. Worry more pronounced. And in all but one universe posterity itself was threatened.
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We all owe... every last one of us great and small... we owe... one death... to the gods. One that may not be exchanged for any other. Our own.

There will be an accounting... a look at a ledger with cold eyes... and then our existence will be filed away forever... lost to the ages... in danger of passing out of even memory.

In the cracks and empty spaces of the multiverse... in the vacuum haze of the cosmos... there may be some perceptible resonance of a life lived largely. A blaze so temporary may leave some trail no matter how thin in the reaches of eternity.

In fact our heroes do perceive such things as they make their final march to their destiny. In that moment they feel the fleeting wonder of synchronicity with all there is and ever was. A wave goes forward and back, a tether reaches through some higher plane, and all these great moments are linked and lived simultaneously. The life debt is cheated and all of creation bucks up a notch.

The kinship of heroes. The bond never breaking. The tale never ending.





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great stuff Dudley! Quote

great stuff Dudley!


Thanks : )

Hope your eyes are full of beauty and your ears full of their kind words...


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Thanks : )

Hope your eyes are full of beauty and your ears full of their kind words...

...always





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He had hardened... been shaped and hammered into his final form... our paparazzi. A big part of it was the acceptance... the final acceptance... that this was what his life was about... his mission... his destiny.

Those of us who have fought for years the devastating effects of uncertainty, of purposeless existence, may be jealous of the peace from that struggle. To know that the mundane was no longer his concern. To know that this was his one important fight to win. To be cut free from relationships he couldn't control. To drop countless responsibilities and focus on the one important life defining battle.

Yes his path was clear. The outcome of his life easy to score. But even if it ended in complete victory it meant a countless chain of goodbyes. Gone forever was his former life. His former loves. His dreams. There was sadness in this. The familiar smart that duty stings us with.

There was also a gentleness to it. For now he could see the species in a new light. He could see the suffering around him. He understood the consequences of defeat. He now felt the current of his age. There were so many things he wanted to say to his loved ones now that he had his new perspective... so much to pass on... but he was now wise enough to understand why his words would have no weight, no meaning even to those with the most... empathy.

It was now so clear that each man, though depending greatly on the teaching of others, must fight and win his key individual battles. The sum of these, though many are unseen by the masses, are crucial to our outcome as a species. Not a fight against personal enemies, rivals, but against the deeper, often unseen foes that we all share in common. He never felt such a closeness to all of mankind and a desire to aid the important struggles, to help see and avoid the wasteful warring over trivial things.

In short he never understood the difference between the Good and the Evil... never felt so completely aligned with the Good... than at this stage of his existence.

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There was a sudden bright burst in the void and a form hurtled through.

The absolutes broke huddle and went into a wide array.

The form zigged... it zagged... the void contorted in agony.

The absolutes, in perfect synch, filled the plane with their awful Truth.

There was a keening high screaming terrorized thought that filled all plane...

then...

nothing

The absolutes broke array and went back to huddle, giggling.

* meanwhile, via astral projection *

Banzai: Wow that was short. How'd ya know it was not him?

Ride: Parted his hair on the left.

Banzai: Ah. Well that takes care of universe 4237G. Got a long haul ahead of us.



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And so the battle raged. The down side of a plan to sever the universes from each other is that you tended to make a lot of enemies. The up side is that they tended to come at you out of synch. They also tended to fight the same way. After all it was just the same enemy from each universe, except those of course in which the enemy decided it wasn't worth the fight or had more important things to do or ...

Another important up side is that the absolutes loved fighting. Each destruction of a life force made them shake with joy. It is hard to explain why. Truths gone bad. Taking sides. Not a good scene man.

They were quite prepared to deal with an eternal struggle. A never ending challenge in the void.

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Hollywood.... pfffah... have you noticed how they play games? They promote the dream of true love. Love at first sight. And they love parallel universes. Alternate realties. But they never fully explore the consequences... the horrible consequences of rash decisions in matters of love.

A hero just barely gets the girl. The music swells up. Some happy, tear jerky song kicks in. Everybody in the audience leaves the theatre holding hands, feeling that all is right in the world.

But the reality is that in an infinity of other universes every possible disaster befell the hero and he never got the girl. The hero dies in some. The girl goes lesbian in others. Madness in some. Plague in others. Mafia hitmen in a countable infinity of others.

The carnage is beyond belief. The consequences spinning out of the disaster epic. No k1ds together. Wars started. Banks failing. Ships sinking. Skies falling.

The gods tell us that the safest possible course is chastity. Minimization of romance, marriage, procreation. Letting all the universes slowly become depopulated. Governed by only physical forces.

But we don't listen. Damn our other selves. Hurl our fates into the breach.

This of course is exactly the process that Banzai and Ride observed in the Battle in the Absolute Void. The vast majority of heroes would fail. Their universes suffering horrible fates. If our particular reality won out... what a hollow victory it would seem to those patient, sad observers in the void... Their very other selves snuffed out in countless worlds.



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Boss: It is nearly lunch time. You coming in today?

Employee: Hello boss. I am thinking of the greater good.

Boss: Hello. Greater good?

Employee: Yeah. I figure that one of my infinite number of other selves has it covered in a different universe. I'm going for a strategy that is lower risk for our universe.

Boss: Don't explain. I get it. If you come to work you have to get in your car, for example, and drive here. If you manage to k1ll someone on a bike by your carelessness you could greatly alter, even destroy, our reality.

Employee: Wow that's right!

Boss: I can see that the very preservation of the universe demands that I fire you. Glad we had this talk. *click*
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There is something that bothers people about "parallel" universes. If each decision or contingent outcome really is random, then after a short time the universes wouldn't resemble each other at all. After a million years you'd have essentially unrelated universes. In what sense are they parallel?

This is where the golden chord played a role.. until severed by an Absolute. The universes would grow more and more different until some threshold difference was realized and then the chord would pull them back within bounds. It did this by modifying event probabilities. This is the very thing that ignorant people mistook for miracles. They sensed that somehow probabilities were stacked in favor of some outcome. And they were right. Only it wasn't a deity... it was a physical force that was merely acting like some thermodynamic principle to keep some mean trend in the universes going.

So that millions of years, or even billions of years after their birth, the universes didn't fill out a uniform and wide distribution but instead showed obvious signs of correlation

Now this too was changing as the golden chord flailed... severed by an Absolute... and true randomness reigned.

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A legion of heroes one by one. One set of truths. A void that once was peaceful now shriven by the sounds of countless battles. A chord floating free... spewing forth wasted correlation into nothingness. Ride and Banzai by projection, astral, peering into it all. The universes of the defeated winking out into blackness... overcome by horrible truths. The universes of those not yet engaged winking with hopeful celestial light.

In this awful moment there was yet a beauty. Something the artist would understand. This was the struggle of us all. Distilled into a single defining moment. Yes there were other important battles to tell of and look forward to... but this... this was all existence... the part that we care about... justifying itself in the face of terrible truth.



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The paparazzi, our paparazzi, hurtled into the void. Now was his time. And he had a plan.

The absolutes were in their array as he expected. He could feel all their truths pushing into his mind. But he easily pushed them away. He didn't even bother with the old truths, the ones not born with the new absolute. He knew that things were okay before the newcomer and that somehow the new absolute was the problem.

He heard clearly in his mind the new absolute's strident demand to contemplate his truth. For he had but one. The paparazzi, from long material experience, new this was a trap. He did what he did a million times on earth. He refused to grapple with the logic. He refused to seriously consider it. Instead he reached around for the equivalent of dust to throw in its eyes and found it, The Contradiction.

Thing was, he didn't even need to fully understand it. All he had to do was know it was there and thrust it in front of the absolute. Because he wasn't hobbled by that need to understand and wrestle with it, or the truth behind it, he did this effortlessly and too quickly for the absolute to bear.

Ride's advice about the contradiction was right on. Ride couldn't have done what the paparazzi did however. The paparazzi did it with a finesse and speed that was developed from his life and work. This was critical because like pulling a gun from a holster speed was essential to hobbling a truth with a contradiction.

The other absolutes were annoyed at first... because they were ignored. Then they were amazed to see their brother in trouble. They briefly considered helping him somehow but then sensed that the game was up. They betrayed him instead and vanished into other planes.

The dying absolute... flailing out tendrils of contrariness to try to trip up the death grip of the paparazzi... released his hold on the golden chord. The great god Shiva appeared then, the danger now remote to him, and joined the golden chord back to the cosmic manifold with a thrumming gonging. The chord once again cut the universal circle and hummed its majestic unifying, correlating theme.

Ride and Banzai beamed like proud parents that their hero had been the one to save all that remained. There was much carnage to repair but already the One True Sperm had returned to ours and other universes making all fertile and happy once again.

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