Taxes & Taxonomy (Sample 3)

First Written    Tue Sep 14 02:20:51 2021
File Modified    Wed Feb 14 18:32:26 2024
Latest Upload    Thu Sep 19 03:09:54 2024

"One of my first attempts at pressing my own paper. All local pulp," Nanosh said, his eyes still trained on the words in front of him.

"What are you reading anyways?"

"I'm re-reading an old favourite. Just trying to inspire myself. So far all I've done is shake my own confidence."

"How so?" Juan found himself holding the notebook longer than he had intended to, and the thought of gifting it to Dea crossed his mind. Worse, the thought of her stumbling over her first sentences in the thing seemed too fun to avoid.

"It's an old parable about expansion of spacetime and exponential energy costs. And romance, of course. The ancients were weird like that. It's called The Immortal King. It's about a fictional king from old history who falls in love with his best general. In these old stories, everyone was immortal. The ambitious king conquers his whole world, then turns his eyes to the sky and starts sending ships to the whole universe. One by one he sends his generals, until he sends his lover, with the promise they'll see one another again one day."

"Then what happens?"

"The king's wars are a success. But one day, millennia later, he grows tired and wants to complete his promise. By now, the general is so far away, that the energy needed to reach them is astronomical, pun intended. So the king sets out to capture whole solar systems to fuel his travels. 'I will shatter the stars for you,' he writes in his memoirs. But the more time he takes to conquer stars, the faster and faster the universe expands. Soon the gulf of space between him and his general is growing so fast, not even travel at the speed of light could reunite them. It's horribly tragic, as with all good parables."

"I agree, that doesn't sound very inspiring to me either."

"No, that's not the problem." Nanosh began to wring his hands and shake his head. He set the arash staff back on the counter, and its display flickered off. "It's the honesty. The old, dead Arash'Mi who wrote this thing is a master. They've gone and conveyed all this emotion and done it in the context of a physics student's guidebook. I use a dozen flowery metaphors and can't even manage a fraction of that."

Juan paused, unable to think up a response on the spot. His mind cycled through people he knew who might better be able to answer such a question. "Misaligned goals."