Firewielders

By Dean Vincent Houvardas

In the ultra mega far future, some guy gets bored of existing, so he accepts a job in a different universe described as: 'the perfect excuse to throw your life away for a cause you barely understand' in search of purpose.

instead, he finds a world devoid of it. The sun itself refuses to shine, but sparks of meaning still remain.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dean Houvardas
• Release date: Dec 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9781738239009

Book preview

        Chapter 1 .

Through the window is a universe in its early stages of development. An uncountable number of stars explode in any given fraction of a second audible even through the vacuum of space, sound traveling through thick omnipresent clouds of gas, which bring enough color to the black abyss for black holes to be commonly visible throughout.

His coffee, he just noticed, has no sugar. He takes a few satchels and pours them in.

College was dull enough, but the job Mcname replaced it with is literally worse than watching paint dry. His official title is Outer Shell Quality Inspector & Surveyor, and he is supposed to be looking for damage from stray asteroids and radiation exposure, but in reality, there isn't going to be anything other than background radiation this far out for billions of years.

The only reason this job even exists, he thinks to himself, is because people don’t understand how stuff like this works. This space station is only in this universe on paper, skirting just along the edge of it. Any matter or radiation would need to outpace the exponentially expanding universe for millions of lightyears. Billions of years it would take in some estimates. Impossible in others.

Moping, he takes a sip of his coffee, sickly over-sweetened as he discovers. He takes this as an excuse to dilute the cup with a free refill; one of the few things he likes about the job.

Most actual jobs have been replaced by robots or AI, the remaining work being done by only a handful of executives. People still need stuff to do though, so jobs like this one get created, paying probably less than being unemployed with all the grants the government has been giving out. The world evolved past the need for humans.

 After a hard day of not seeing anything outside, or in modern film, He goes home via the subway. Tens of thousands of years and nothing better has been invented yet. Outside, a sprawling old european style town covers the artificial landscape, with an artificial sun in the center, lakes and farmland folded on top of each other like stacks of pancakes. A kilometer thick sphere of a glasslike substance covers the star, converting most of the light into energy, with the added bonus of preventing sunburns. The station isn't big enough yet to justify building a full dyson sphere; the modified red dwarf star at the center- Shaded to look yellow, and to give off more visible light- is plenty enough.

There are hundreds of these types of stations. Some for mining asteroids, yanking stars away from their systems for power, and some just stepping stones to reach other universes interconnecting between each other in a web of wormhole based travel.

Whatever the reason, whenever a station is made, it is immediately flooded with people, all swarming around the wormholes to go to work in another universe. Travel is expensive, jobs are scarce, and wormholes are a free public service that transports you within a thousand miles of your destination instantly.

Cars are awkward to transport through wormholes, so they have been phased out of general use. When cars were abolished, roads were narrowed, closing in, the concrete walls of skyscrapers growing more claustrophobic.

Rather than create new styles of architecture, the designers of this station decided to go back to their roots, taking inspiration from Britain, France, and a bit of Italian thrown in there just for fun. The Cathedrals, 3d printed gilded fences, and an intricate network of water channels throughout the town where a boatman would serenade you with songs from his homeland (usually not Italy for some reason), make it look and sound like a marketplace of different cultures and ideas.This confusion is only multiplied by hundreds of layers of town folding on top of each other, making any map into a 3d maze, turning waterfalls, ladders, and elevators into staples of modern architecture. The rich culture and history of the world are all muddled together into a chaotic mess. On the ceiling of each layer is another street; a byproduct of the gravitational manipulation causes  you to be able to walk on the ceiling of most areas, which is cool.

 The lakes outside the town are also built 3 dimensionally, taking the form of floating islands, with waterfalls cascading like rivers down a mountain, only to fall into a massive sea with a wormhole that ‘teleports’ the water back to the top in an enclosed loop.

Inside the train looks like a grimey alleyway.

Uninterested at the view outside-- he’s seen it all before-- and not wanting to pay attention to the view inside, he takes a pamphlet from one of the shelves. ‘The ins and outs of cultivating a universe of life; He opens the pamphlet he begins to read--.

This station is only a few decades old but it had been planned to be built for tens of thousands of years from when the first multiversal life seeding operations took place. They used the edges of black holes -wormholes- to send small capsules holding seeds, eggs, and most importantly moss to other universes that they deemed fit for their purposes.

To the right of the paragraph is an image of an anthropomorphic hotdog  wearing sunglasses next to some moss with the word ‘radical’ written in large bubble letters above.  

Without an exit portal, sending objects more massive than a few grams is near impossible. This isn't a problem for machines, as they can be sent in parts, but large biological organisms need to be grown on site.

After a number of planets were successfully seeded, humans were added to the ecosystem in the form of embryos plopped into existence inside of large bird eggs in a process not dissimilar to brood parasitism. After hatching from the egg the human would, similar to in the natural world, be adopted by the host bird and raised as their own. There is little risk of the bird rejecting the human, because they are very stupid as we have genetically engineered them to be. After humble bird based beginnings, the humans will leave the nest, burn down the forest that they were raised in, and prepare the planet for assimilation into our undying empire."He doesn’t know what to do with this information.

        The walk home after the subway is usually nothing special. The subway opens up to a large mall where the stores are lined with cheap multiverse based knick knacks: A keychain with an entire universe at the end, a hotdog with sunglasses, almost sold out, and an egg with a human jumping out of it, completely untouched.

The wormhole he was gushing about earlier stands in