no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no
How dare chaos to seek order? Her madness shook infinity.
—YES— shouted gleeful twins. Disruption delights children.
Our proto-universe emerged. Over, under, and around that contrary speck, there came to be something.
Random jots and tittles snagged on it, caught fast, ordered themselves into lattices and crystallized, an impossibly dense accretion, each new fragment packed on to mirror the previous and be a model for the next in multiple symmetries that, to the horror and loathing of Auntie Enty, continued to grow autonomically. It was an insurrection inside anarchy. Something novel called matter. Shockingly hot and squeezed and small. One-hundred thousand quadrillion vigintillion crumbs and motes crammed inside a five crumb bag. The intensity gave Auntie a headache.
—Here— demanded Love.
—There— deflected Death.
—Where— roared Love.
—NoWhere— shrieked Death.
Night’s spawn tussled over their plaything. Our proto-universe spun in their baby hands. Love snatched it from Death and gave a kick.
—Mine— bellowed Love.
—Not— howled Death, who hit back and pinched.
Auntie Enty grabbed the duo. She gave a mighty heave so they somersaulted half-way across her abyss. Love clutched the crystal and smashed it into Death’s eye, who in turn ripped out a swatch of Love’s hair. They each tried to bite the other, but their conjoined geometry prevented it. The babies clawed, hissed, scratched, and spit. Entropy got in a few stout smacks, which jarred the crystal loose from Love’s grip.
That’s when it Banged. How exactly it came to Bang (the narrative is unreliable) we don’t know, but blow up it did — so violently that matter turned inside out and spewed forth storms of dusty gas. One moment, everything was stuffed inside an engorged gem. A micro-mini-nano second later, shattered material spread to fill a newborn universe.
Inflation’s shock-wave ripped apart the twins. A wrenching separation. Not into the generic binaries —
male/female; good/evil; attraction/aversion; one/zero
— but into what their names, meaningless at birth, now mean for us as Love and Death.
Auntie Enty was not the nurturing sort to notice. She thrashed the newly disjointed siblings, whipped them to within a micro-mini-nano inch of their Immortal lives. Love, who bears grudges, has never forgiven her.
Which is absurd because in the present day, 13.799±0.021 billion years later, Entropy doesn’t even remember what happened. Cause and effect, the long arc of history, systems theory — all that lies outside her ken. Self-reflection is a moot point, seeing as she hasn’t a coherent Self upon which to reflect. Patient Night measures elapsed time, moon by moon, while Auntie Enty inhabits only the now. Her task: steadily, tirelessly to undo pesky structures that insist on blooming in oppositional defiance to her code.
Love’s fingerprints are all over that emergence.