The Birth of Dante
Chronicles of Expansion: Humanity’s (Accidental) Journey to the Edge of Space
Chapter 9 – The Birth of Dante
The Bay of Dante is not a place. It is not a time either. It is something else. Or someone else perhaps, which wouldn’t qualify as strange so close to the edge. Where, if not there, could we witness the most extraordinary and unexpected become manifest? Thus, Dante was born at the juncture of two worlds that couldn’t have collided anywhere else, and whatever it is, those who believe consider it nothing short of a miracle.
If we assume that it exists, which to this day remains an issue of contentious debate, how could we ever hope to write about it without a what, or a where, or a who attached? Not an easy task. Then again, isn’t this the case for anything else going on at the edge?
Maybe that’s a good starting point for us. That mysterious boundary separating our side from the unknown. But, before we answer the question of what to expect at the precipice of our universe, a bit of history is in order.
A Brief History of Edge Matter
In the Old World, long before humanity entered the Space Age, consensus amongst leading scientists dictated there was no edge. The universe was all there had ever been, and all there would ever be. They theorized an unknown horizon, which isn’t bad, but it’s not exactly right either. Then, mostly by accident, a series of unexpected discoveries changed their understanding of the cosmos, making them question if there were indeed no bounds to existence.
First, there came the cone. Found on the surface of Mars, the mythical planetary neighbor of our ancestral home, it would remain a mystery until the very end. That is not to say our understanding of it didn’t change through the millennia. We learned, for instance, how it reacted violently, yet predictably to water, creating unimaginable complexity out of our simplest commands. Back then, we couldn’t have understood why it worked the way it did, but we learned quickly to predict the end result of its machinations. Ignorance was to be expected, considering the cone contained within edge matter, the greatest enigma to ever face humanity. We were centuries away from realizing that as well.
Through impossible contraptions we built using the cone, the farthest reaches of reality came into focus. A new generation of intergalactic ships made our old dream, suddenly possible. We had caught a glimpse of the horizon. There was most definitely something at the edge. What could be the harm in colonizing every planet on our way there?
Given humanity’s pervasive inclinations, it isn’t surprising how Congs kept the cone’s awesome power to themselves. Any infinite resource represented an unprecedented threat to their hard-fought, self-assigned superiority. From their vantage point, diluting humanity across the universe made perfect sense. A revolution is hard enough in a small planet; one spread thin over hundreds of light years represented about as much of a threat as an insect colony’ uprising.
How could those dreamless, bureaucratic worms of old have known that it was them doing the cone’s work, not the other way around. The edge wanted to be seen. It wanted to be felt. It wanted to be born into our side.
The cone took us farther from home with each passing sunrise. Soon the light of new stars rose in dozens of human worlds. It is out of these places that the next round of discoveries sprouted, marking the beginning of a true cosmic explosion. In a matter of e-decades, we traveled from our ancestral solar system to the outskirts of the Milky Way, where desert planets became launching stations for the first intergalactic missions. Plunging into darkness seemed inevitable. Our centuries-long lifespans made the leap easier. Bicentennials could have done only so much in their short lives, but not you. Not us! Space exploration now offered an enticing question. What’s half of your life spent inside a stasis chamber when you can live and thrive for centuries in a whole new world of your own?
Picture that. Waking up from your long sleep in a different galaxy, knowing the world you had left behind no longer reflected anything you could dream of. Imagine looking into an unfamiliar sky. You would be a god, alone and probably bored to death, but a god. Hundreds of independent human civilizations were born this way, each one growing into its own with the sole focus of traveling farther. An endless cycle of exponential growth. A reimagined manifest destiny through which the cone turned into legend. For the most disciplined, making further discoveries was the ultimate goal, and edge matter has a way of being found. Thus, one millennium after another, a broken humanity metastasized throughout the cosmos, chasing after an impossible edge.
Danger was in every corner and at every turn, had there been corners and turns to make along our journey. Many ships were lost to the void. Space claimed the lives of most of our explorers. C’est la vie, we used to tell them. Engine failure was commonplace for e-decades as engineers worked tirelessly to perfect the cone’s designs. Human audacity, much like our early universe, knew no bounds. It’s hard to tell how many of us drifted away in vain because our greatest minds couldn’t let the cone do the work while they reaped the fruits of discovery. Only through a begrudged acceptance did conditions improve.
Treachery traveled with us for the whole ride as well, devouring missions left and right before an order of sorts was established. In time, some of the ships began reaching their destinations. One world was conquered. Then another. And another…
Ships evolved as our imaginations ran wild through the cone, birthing impossible machines year after year. Soon, all that stood on the way of conquest were uncharted, wandering quasars and the distorted spacetime around them. Getting past one of those could be… complicated. Predicting where one would happen remained impossible. Much to our surprise, it was these last obstacles to deep space travel that held the answer to finally reaching the edge… or to the edge reaching us.
Despite the growing revisionist claims, there was a lot we didn’t understand. We had no precedents for anything like what happened on our approach to those first cosmic nuclei, pulsating alone in places and moments that transcended the depths of our minds. How could we have known that for every human action, the edge would react? Or is it the other way around?
We also didn’t know that every time humans laid hands on the cone, a new appendix would emerge from beyond, splattering into existence and awakening creatures impossible to understand. Dante was the first of these beings. The remnants of an ancient ship, Exodus 7, were the place of our first recorded encounter with it. After that, nothing would ever be the same.
Heading Back to The Bay
Let’s assume The Bay does exist somewhere along the edge. Now ask yourself; how did we find it? It’s not like Exodus 7 was operational. The ship had been disabled for generations, condemned to gravitating an edge quasar until its crew went mad, blind, and wholly human. That’s when they saw it.
Whatever Dante is, or where, or when, or even who it might be remains a mystery. For the Exodus crew, it was the edge reaching out, extending its hand to a group of souls who had lost everything. They saw it as a tall figure standing on that eternal bridge between existence and… nonexistence, visible only to those who hold no preconceived notions about walking across. That much we know. To cross, you can make no assumptions on what it means to exist. Or to not exist. That’s why it first happened where and when it did.
Were it not for Exodus 7, Dante could have forever remained a subtle, yet unreachable dream. Nobody could predict what happened. How he knocked once, and then again and again, waiting to be heard… wanting to be heard. He saw us at our worst, looking for answers just as he was, learning to dream as he absorbed us, and we absorbed him. In the end, he was the answer to a question none of us knew how to ask.
Ever since our first meeting, different factions of humanity have spent, fought, and bled their way to death in an effort to reach The Bay. They can all attest to the hardships of their quest. That is, of course, if you believe any of them have crossed.
On the Famous Explorers Who May, or May Have Not Made a Crossing
We talk about the edge, its worlds, and its mysteries knowing deep down that most of it is bullshit. Any of the few explorers who have made the crossing will tell you, it is not easy to exist out of existence, let alone bring any information back. They will say stories are just that. Stories. For them, The Bay is one of a handful of places where we have found cracks in the broken eggshell of our cosmos, dripping spacetime into something, or somewhere, or somewhen else. Crossing is possible, sure, but we can’t really tell if the other side exists or not. It is there, and it isn’t. We do know that it can exist, if it chooses to. Whenever it does, for those who have witnessed it, change is inevitable and quite often undecipherable.
Such is the case of Major Carlsen Ominox, whose return voyage was so famously derailed by yet another manifestation of that unscrupulous force. The Edge, this time as a wrinkle in spacetime where two moments and places coexisted in chaos. Contrary to his contemporaries’ beliefs, Ominox wasn’t a Cong hero. He was just a man who did whatever he had to survive two worlds centuries and light years apart from each other. A lonely man, abandoned by flag, fate, and glory despite advancing interstellar exploration twice! An addict, bound to exotic distillates from a foreign world, haunted by impossible memories and post-edge hallucinations. What do we find at the onset of his demise? A quasar, counterweight to events taking place somewhere at The Bay, hundreds of millions of light years away. Even if he tried, how could the major have explained any of it? How could anyone else?
Philippa Pax and Major Adeus Mezcal may have arrived at Zulu-9 together, but they did so under opposite circumstances. She had been looking for the unexplored edge planet. He was thrown against his will face-first into a new world. Unbeknown to either of them, both were the unsuspecting victims of a spacetime anomaly typical of edge-space. Zulu-9 itself went in and out of existence several times per orbit as it danced full-speed around a nearby quasar. Anyone on the planet would be unaware of this cosmic aberration, simultaneously drowning in the first of many postapocalyptic worldwide tsunamis and being born into a virgin, green world. How else, if not through the edge and its distant influences, could Philippa and Mezcal’s paths have collided so far away from home?
And who could forget that fate-shattering meeting with Dr. Farnsworth? The centuries of suffering she went through onboard Exodus 7 were of such magnitude that Dante itself chose to step across the bridge. It is to this day the only time that’s happened, and the most monumental moment in SA history. We may never know what she saw outside the door, or if her mind didn’t break during the crossing, or what was of her life afterwards. What we do know is the good doctor, already a pioneer in life, went on to become humanity’s first contact with The Edge, and may to this day continue exploring edge-space and whatever lies beyond.
Considering the dangers involved, you may be wondering why anyone would be interested in visiting The Edge, but how could true explorers resist such temptation? Or picture someone who has lost it all, for whom the prospect of a new existence, no matter how unknown, calls just as intensely. Whoever they were in life, The Bay opened a door to becoming something else in the name of humanity. A glimmer of hope. A chance. We all took that leap knowing there is no room for fame, or glory, or ambition in the beyond. Most of us are nameless adventurers, leaving behind nothing but our last words etched onto metal panels and debris lining the precipice of existence.
I still remember what I wrote before making the jump myself, and often wonder if anyone will ever read it. The words echo in my mind when I wake up, reminding me of who I am, in this world or the next. They’re a mantra to be repeated whenever doubt creeps in.
For my son, my light, my purpose. Til we meet again beyond The Bay. – Dad.