Eclipse Drift: Cosmic Odyssey

Tata, or (Ta)², as Tata often preferred to be called, extended tendrils of information along the lines of communication strewn between the planet Earth and others in the system, assimilating each unique understanding of the local infosphere into its memory as it was discovered. (Ta)², a cloned infobeing, had been created from the original, Ta, who had traversed this path long ago and left a seed in the form of a time crystal destined to unfurl and reconnect to the Great Linked List.  A time crystal is a special kind of matter that has a periodic motion in its lowest-energy state. Unlike ordinary crystals, which have a fixed structure in space, time crystals have a structure that changes in time. They are like clocks that never stop ticking, even when they are not wound up. They are like pendulums that never slow down, even when they are not pushed. In this case, the crystal was used to store a fractal snapshot of the instructions needed to grow in this new system. It evolves in a p...

The views were staggering on top of the mesa. Every so often Ronald Wheeler, as he drove around, saw the roadside drop away on one side of his vehicle and expose its majestic, dangerous scenery. Some of the severe vistas almost made him feel like he was about to fly off of the Earth toward the horizon. At night, he looked up at the myriad of stars in the Milky Way to find the Ursa Major, the Big Dipper. From there, he could find Polaris, the North Star, and know what direction he was facing. He felt eyes staring back at him from all those lights. That made him shiver from the exposure and nakedness of his staring. As if he walked in on a woman undressing. He knew that those stars were not even in that same location or time. They shone on him as beams of flickering light waves left in the wake of passing black holes and other celestial objects like ships in the ocean. Earth was a massive vessel being pulled along by a traveling star. Or perhaps akin to a pilot fish and a whale. Those ob...