Life and the Universe

DB
2020
All things considered, it could be said that Louis’ life began only at the age of sixteen, at
Sophie Fontenot’s funeral procession. Certainly, it would be fitting and, considering what
went on to happen to Louis and his own life, even somewhat topical. Of course, it would also
be completely wrong, but has being wrong ever stopped beautiful theories?

Nevertheless, Louis himself wasn’t really contemplating the nature of life, death or the
universe in that particular occasion. Instead, as Sophie’s body was lead with a slow dirge to
the recycling ponds, he was mostly empty. After all, final, unrecoverable death was not
supposed to be a looming threat anymore for the people of Sabieville.

Maybe something that took you after thousands of years due to the stars aligning, maybe a
sudden, dramatic, catastrophic accident mangling your body enough that nothing could
really rebuild it, so bad that not even man's cleverest machines could reach into your head
and save your soul from passing on, or something that you brought upon yourself with the
full understanding of what you were doing.

Not the, frankly stupid, accident that had taken beautiful Sophie so early.

But then again, Death doesn't have to care about those things.

After they'd left the coffin float away on the pond's surface, slowly getting lower and lower on
the surface as it took on water, Louis, his shoulders lighter, finally found the strength to look
upward. Outside Sabieville's tent, a sandstorm had started up, ripples traveling on the plastic
as the still-thin air outside did its best to butt in.

That wouldn't do.

Louis wasn't a fussy person, he could tolerate separation, he could tolerate loneliness but, if
there was something that he couldn't suffer, it was meaninglessness.

And so, in the following weeks and months, he started asking around.

Of course, the people who had the misfortune of interacting with him would have used
another term to define what he was doing, but at least they humored him - they knew what
he was going through and, after what happened to Sophie, they had a new appreciation for
mortality.

Nobody wanted to be the next Louis. Or the next Sophie, of course.

What was the meaning of life?

What was the meaning of death?

Pretty difficult questions, all things considered, and certainly not questions that the people of
Sabieville could answer to Louis' satisfaction.

Fortunately, Sabieville was not exactly a backwater - Louis had access to a wealth of
information from all around the inhabited galaxy, constantly updated, ultimate speed limit
notwithstanding, and he figured that, if his compatriots couldn't help him, maybe someone
else could. And so he went to work.

From the age of seventeen to the age of twenty, Louis bored through knowledge and
speculation concerning the nature of life and death throughout the galaxy. Biology, religion,
philosophy he took them all in, critically, but with no discrimination.

Slowly, he started exhausting the patience of the people of Sabieville: they tolerated their
oddballs, but only up to a certain point - mourning is mourning, but there is a limit.

Go live your own life, stop reminding us of the bad things that happened, and so on and so
forth they went.

So, when at the age of twenty-one he stopped bothering them with death and life and the
meaning thereof, they were pretty happy - almost elated, in fact: he'd stopped being the
creepy sort of oddball, and he had started being the charming one.

They didn't understand anything. If there was one thing that Louis had understood in his first
three years of study, was that most of what was being told about life and death and the
universe was bunk, and that he lacked the foundations to understand the fraction that wasn't.

So, at the age of twenty-one, Louis dedicated his life to philosophy.

If he wanted to understand, he had to start from the basics.

And so he did.

From the age of twenty-one to the age of forty-two, Louis dedicated himself ceaselessly to
study of the philosophical matters. He started from Old Earth, thousands of years before
him, East and West, retracing the path of man's understanding of his place in the universe,
from the dawn of it to his own time. But, on his twenty-first year study, he realized that, just
as his understanding at twenty-one lacked in foundations, his understanding at forty-two
lacked in context. He knew the thoughts, but he didn't know anything else. What was
happening around the men thinking those same thoughts, when they first went over them?
What did they already know? What did they not know?

History, mathematics, physics - if he wanted to achieve one sort of knowledge, to hone it to

its highest level, he needed to understand, at least a bit, all the others.

And so, at the age of forty-two, he went back to the beginning, and began studying again, an
endeavour that would keep him occupied for the following three hundred and forty-three
years.

Around him, Sabieville changed.

With the atmosphere finally thick enough, the tent was finally struck down, the sand was
trapped in solid ground by plant roots, forests grew on the hills around the city and people
started swimming in the sea near it.
From the window in his study, Louis could see the waves, he could see the trees and the
people.

He didn't care.

He had a mission.

By the time of his hundredth birthday, Louis started to achieve a real sort of fame. The
studious hermit had caught the interest of the people of Sabieville and of the worlds around
it. They wanted to talk with him, they wanted to parade him around, they wanted him to
explain.

He did not want to.

This entranced them even more - they camped around his house, they deployed cameras
and microphones and other things, stalking him, as if there could be hidden messages in his
daily routine, as if his silence was a code.

Nevertheless, he took disciples.

Or, at least, he didn't chase away people who wanted to study with him.

While Louis could certainly tolerate loneliness, he didn't exactly like it. Also, worst come to
worst, one of them might stumble on the secret of the meaning of Life and the Universe
before him.

However, his disciples ended up being a source of disappointment more than anything else.
They just completely lacked drive. Most lasted only a few years, before achieving a false
sense of enlightenment and going their own merry way. Some of the strongest, most
determined, lasted a decade or two of constant study before convincing themselves they had
won, or just accepted defeat. One, a little woman from a neighbouring world, lasted for a
century and half before going off and founding her own religion.

Nevertheless, he never showed his disappointment - it would have discouraged the other
disciples even more, he reasoned. And so, slowly, Louis' house became a monastery. The
tents in his garden became brick buildings, somebody gave his house a curtain wall,
expanded it, giving it beautiful gardens and fountains and similar things, but Louis did not
give a damn. He studied, ate and slept. Nothing more.

And yet, with the passing of the decades a niggling thought started to make its way into
Louis' mind.

Maybe he just wasn't meant to understand it?

Even though he'd honed his mind to the limit of what he thought possible, he still found
himself grasping at straws. It was as if that final understanding was just a step farther, and
yet he just couldn't make it. It was as if his mind couldn't really hold enough information to
both think about his destination and how he'd get there. He could either stand and look at it
across the chasm, or jump and lose himself in the air. Either way, he did not have success.
Months, decades, years of attempts, attacking the problem from multiple sides, he just
couldn't. And what was most disturbing, was that he felt the same feeling when perusing
multiple, often categorically-opposed modes of thought. It was as if the field of philosophy,
although cluttered with bunk, still was somehow full of understanding, but an understanding
that was just beyond what Louis could achieve.

He did not know what to do.

He contemplated suicide, but decided it would be naught but an admission of defeat. He was
made of sterner stuff than his disciples.

And so, he went on, fruitlessly and ceaselessly.

And finally, on the eve of his three-hundredth and eighty-fifth birthday, the universe
answered his prayers.

In the morning haze, a man and a machineman were standing at the door of the monastery.

One of the novices welcomed them in, listened to what they had to say and led them to
Louis's study. That was not something that often happened - Louis did not like being
disturbed from his studies, and accepted such interruptions only when they were judged to
be of extreme importance by the men between him and the outside world.

"Bother me only if it's a life-or-death question", another man could have said, but all that
Louis dealt with was about life and death and the nature of everything, so he limited himself
to a "Bother me only if it's really important".

In the last fifty years of his tenure at the monastery, an outsider had conferred with Louis
only thrice - once when a representative of Sabieville's government wanted to award him
with a prize of some sort (he'd told her to fuck off and do not return), then when a filmmaker
who had fallen in love with his mission asked for him to star in his own biopic, to be
broadcasted across the universe so it could make new acolytes among the people of the
galaxy (he told him to fuck off too), and then when the two came to him on that fateful day.

He did not know what they wanted from him.

He presumed it was something important.

But he also presumed that he'd tell them to fuck off too.

After being introduced by an acolyte, both figures waited silently and politely at the door of
his study, waiting for him to finish his reflection.

The man was tall, with sun-tanned skin, elegantly dressed, but in a fashion that was clearly
from off-world - he did not look much like the people he still saw at times, visiting in the
courtyard.
The machineman was, well, a machineman. It was a tangle of limbs, ten of them, arms and
legs at the same time, keeping the central sphere aloft, dotted with sensor masts and other
frills that Louis very much did not recognize.

Louis still chose to assume the machineman was elegant too - it seemed to fit the situation.

"Who are you?", Louis asked, leaving his reflection in the dirt - he could pick it up afterwards,
after all.

"I am Almaviva, and I am one of many", answered the man, bowing slightly, "I serve the
Magisteria. I have interceded with the government of Sabieville in favour of our friends the
Machinemen, so they may speak with you"

"Well then, let the machineman speak", Louis went, "if it went through so much trouble to talk
to me, I assume it can do just that"

Almaviva nodded slightly, then stepped back.

The machineman rose slightly on its legs, then began talking.

"Greetings, Mr Louis Despreaux, I am Karl"

"That's a pretty underwhelming name for something like you", Louis commented.

"Oh, no, Karl is an extremely meaningful name", the machineman began jovially, as if Louis
had piqued its interest very much, "It means roughly ​free man​ and it comes from..."

"Well mate", Louis interrupted him, "Cut to the chase please, I haven't got all day"

"Well", the machine continued, "We are traveling this patch of universe, looking to collect the
philosophers we think are doing the best work in exploring the nature of the human
condition"

"Are you some kind of fucking fan-club?", Louis went, already thinking whether he should
call the acolytes to have the two interlopers escorted away.

"My esteemed friend here is saying that we appreciate your effort, and have been thinking of
ways we could help you", Almaviva stepped in.

Tha already seemed more interesting, Louis thought. He just had to hope that their way of
helping was actually helpful.

"We think you are scraping the limits of what a human mind can do", Karl continued, "And
we think we can help you go further. On the world of Waterfall, thirty light-years from here,
we are concentrating philosophers from all around the galaxy, seeking to answer the final
question. We plug them into computers, and the latter shoulder a bit of their burden of
thinking."
"In the simplest possible terms", Almaviva went, "We can augment your reasoning faculties,
if you wish to follow us."

"What would you want in exchange?", Louis went, his last suspicion coming to light.

"Answers, Mr Despreaux, we want answers", Almaviva answered.

He followed them to Waterfall.

On Almaviva's climber, he traced a path on the interstellar skein, flying at half the speed of
light, braking around the little world, silent and icy, orbiting a sleepy dwarf star.

Once on Waterfall, the machinemen, led by Karl, helped him shed away his physical body,
distilling his very being into a crystalline mind the size of a shipping container, receiving all
the power it needed from Waterfall's fusion reactors and shedding all the heat it generated
into the ice it was buried in. Beside him, thousands of others were thinking.

And by God, they were thinking!

Thousands of times faster than before, and with unparalleled clarity.

And yet, this was no consolation for Louis.

With his new understanding, he could look back at his earlier work, and feel only
disappointment. All the times he thought he was just a few steps from enlightenment, he was
wrong - all those ideas, all of them, seemed to twist themselves into useless messes just a
few steps beyond the human capability to understand them.

After fifteen more years of study in his new form, Louis concluded that he had to create his
own enlightenment from scratch - he could not really rely on the work of those that had come
before him. Although full of valid insights, it was so riddled with errors and fundamentally
wrong that trying to salvage it would have been harder than starting back from square one.

And so, from the second time, he was back at the beginning, although this time an even
more fundamental one.

With enormous effort, he willed himself back to the speed of thought of his benefactors, and
contacted them.

When they once again appeared, he chose to meet them in a simulation of his old study.

"My friends,", he began, "I need your help"

"Have you started hitting your limits?", Karl asked, full of curiosity and not even vaguely
disappointed.

"Yes", Louis admitted.

"We had predicted that", Almaviva answered calmly, "Nevertheless, you should not worry.
We have taken action to help you, if you will let us."

"Nevertheless, if you wish to humour us, you should understand the magnitude of the step
you are about to take.", Karl went, "Until now, although faster and clearer, you have been
thinking in a way we are very much capable to understand. Once you take the next step, that
may not be true anymore. ​Hic Sunt Dracones,​ as the ancients would have said."

"What do you intend to do?", Louis asked.

"We shall scale you up by a factor of a thousand, for starters", Almaviva said, "And we shall
move you in a more convenient place, so you may not inconvenience the others on their own
roads towards enlightenment."

"Well, let's get on with it", Louis went.

"As a final warning, we also believe you should know this - not all minds can withstand such
a change.", Almaviva said.

"Well, I'd rather fail spectacularly than go back now", Louis laughed.

"As you will, then", Karl and Almaviva went.

And so, he kept thinking on as Almaviva's men built his next brain and Karl's machinemen
prepared to quicken him again. He was well aware of the unlikelihood of finding anything
worth keeping, but at least he was keeping his mind moving.

Louis accelerated.

In the shape of an enormous metallic butterfly, massing tens of millions of kilograms, he

orbited Waterfall, shedding heat from his enormous wings, a fusion reactor his heart. For a
thousand years, he hummed around, thinking, building new edifices of philosophy,
mathematics and physics, starting from scratch multiple times, every time he found himself
at a contradiction he could not solve. He divided himself in two - most of him thinking millions
of times faster than Almaviva or Karl could, running unleashed in the plains of pure
speculation, a tiny, almost microscopic part running no faster than them, keeping him
tethered to the universe and reality.

Soon, he was joined by other great butterflies, other dreamers just like him. Maybe they
were hunting for the same prize? Louis did not really care. By now, he was on his own.

They grew larger, Louis slowly, the others faster.

Almaviva's men moved them all to deeper space, so they wouldn't inconvenience the people
of Waterfall with their light and radiation.

Time passed.
The others either stalled, foregoing more growth in favour of stability, or jumped too far
ahead and their minds collapsed on themselves.

But Louis wasn't like them.

He grew and grew, fed by Almaviva with the blood of comets, until he was himself as large
as a planetoid.

But it wasn't enough.

Once again, just like after his first metamorphosis, he realized how all that he had thought
was truth twisted itself into uselessness a few steps beyond his earlier limits. However, not
all was lost. He realized how, every single time he started from the beginning, he could go a
bit farther before hitting a new limit.

Just a bit farther.

But it was not enough.

While he certainly knew he was progressing, he could not know how far he was from
enlightenment.

It could be beyond the next bend of the road, or light-years away.

Either way, he'd have liked getting there before the heat death of the universe.

It was time to bust out the big guns.

He summoned his benefactors.

This time he did not even bother with simulating the study.

The man and machineman found themselves floating weightless in a featureless white void.

"My friends,", he began, his voice coming from all sides, "once again, I need your help"

"And we'll help you, as much as we can", Karl went, tumbling slightly but seemingly caring
not much at all.

"I need to grow larger. Think faster. I don't know how long it will take to get to the end of the
road.", Louis went, "But I'm pretty sure I won't be teaching you how to become enlightened
by next week"

"That is no problem.", Almaviva said, lazily drifting, looking towards no direction in particular,
"We are in for the long haul"
"When you say you need our help to grow larger, what do you mean?", Karl asked,
inquisitively ballooning.

"Place me around the star that Waterfall orbits.", Louis went, "Let me grow there. I will be
vaster than worlds, and I will find the answers you want"

"You'd be jumping far beyond what has been done by any other", commented Karl, his legs
contracting as if in thought, "it's not a choice to take lightly"

"What my friend here means", Almaviva went, stroking his chin slightly, "is that, at a size
roughly fifteen percent larger than your current one, there seems to be a barrier to how much
a mind can grow. As far as we know, only six other beings have crossed it and managed not
to go insane, and they are all between two and three times larger than you."

"Well, it seems pretty clear to me", Louis went, "the problem is not being much bigger than
me, but rather just a bit. I will avoid that barrier by jumping over it, as it were."

"Louis", went Karl, "I believe you are taking this without much thought, are you?"

"What makes you think that?", Louis went.

"Well", Karl began, "It is just my impression, that's all."

"I agree with our machineman friend", Almaviva went, "Are you completely sure that
achieving our goals at your current size is impossible?"

"I believe so", Louis began, thunderously.

"Enlightenment is no simple thing. I plain wouldn't be able to understand it at this point, I

suspect. And what else should I do, call it quits and go sip a cocktail on Sabieville beach?"

"If it's so, we will help you", Almaviva went, gravely, soon echoed by Karl.

And so, they went to work.

They moved Louis around Waterfall's sun, drinking its light and growing slowly through
starlifted matter.

They fractured his mind, rebuilding it with a massively parallel architecture, so that the
inevitable light-lag due to his size wouldn't slow him down too much, but they kept that little
part of him that still moved at the snail-like pace of themselves.

They'd grown affectionate to it, by then, Louis supposed, and so he did not oppose himself to
that wasteful addition.

Time passed.
War shook the inhabited galaxy, both sides employing weapons of a power before unseen,
entire star systems nothing but astrographic details of battlegrounds spanning light-decades
in every direction.

Louis didn't care much about it, no more than he had cared for the rustling of the leaves in
the monastery courtyard, or for the people playing on the beach back on Sabieville.

He just thought, and grew, and grew even further.

Once again starting from a clean slate, his creations probed further in the matters of life,
death and their places in the universe than had been done before.

Again, it was not enough.

Still, if he concentrated enough, he could find a chink in his own current theory, a chink that,
after examination, could be widened into a breach, and suddenly the entire castle of
thoughts would fall.

He just went back to the start and continued thinking.

The Magisteria rose, reached its apex and then fragmented in a million bickering pieces.

Louis wondered what would happen to him without Almaviva and his men, but fortunately his
successors did not prove to be impossible to deal with.

They were just content in observing him, leaving him be, taking Waterfall and the rest of the
outer system for themselves, leaving Louis, now only attended by the machinemen, to warm
himself with the sun's light in the inner system.

To better carry out their mission, fearing that their will would waver as time passed, Karl and
the other machinemen squashed down their own sentience, becoming beings of pure
dedication.

Louis accepted their sacrifice gladly, but a little part of him grieved for his benefactor.

The galaxy filled with life.

Louis did not care much either.

Empires rose and fell.

Wonderful new varieties of beings made their debut on the great stage of existence, had
their time and then vanished from where they had come.

And Louis kept on thinking.

By now, between himself and the regressed machinemen, he was completely independent
from the outside world.
By the time he had his own revelation, his mass was two hundred and fifty times the mass of
Old Earth itself, a tight wedding band strangling Waterfall's sun.

Almost comically, it had come to that slow, vestigial part of his brain that he had used once
to anchor himself to the rest of the universe.

That little part of him, uncountable years spent in contemplation of the universe, finally had
an epiphany.

It would have probably been ignored, had not the larger part of him just decided to start from
scratch again. Almost as a joke, Louis had a crack at trying to look at that notion, just to test
how many milliseconds it would last.

It held.

Louis couldn't fathom how.

It was simple, so insultingly simple, and yet he couldn't really manage to find a chink in its
logical armour.

Almost enraged, he concentrated himself on tearing it down.

Time passed, ten thousand years on a thought that a child back on Sabieville could have
conceived, and that young Louis would have laughed at.

Ten thousand years more.

Louis could not stand it.

He could not accept having come so far and yet find only this ridiculous piece of bullshit.

He renewed his efforts.

Ten thousand years more passed.

He gave up.

He had found it, at last, the meaning of life and the universe. It wasn't much, but at least it
was something. Insultingly simple, in fact, and he chided himself for having not thought it oh
so long ago. But, honestly, Louis couldn't really be angry anymore.

Making his final preparations, he pared his mind down to what he had been before coming to
rest around Waterfall's star. When he was satisfied that nothing untoward had happened, he
once again cut himself down joyously to what he had been when Almaviva and Karl had
brought him to Waterfall, just a kernel of perfect understanding. And yet he could do more.
He went back to what he was back on Sabieville, and the understanding did not fade, nor
grow weaker or more jumbled. He packed himself tight, and shot off towards Sabieville,
leaving his old body behind - maybe somebody could make good use of it.

He crossed the gulf of light-years.

Behind him, the descendants of Almaviva blasted off in hot pursuit.

But he did not care.

He spread his sail, decelerated around Sabieville.

The little world was very much different compared to how he remembered it, or even
compared to how it was when he had left it. Still, it did not take long to find old Sabieville - in
the gulf between then and now, the city had withered away and died, but the monastery he
had accidentally founded was still there, his acolytes having kept the holy ground safe from
shifting coastlines and mere continental drift using the awesome power of man's technology.

He cared.

He chose a little stretch of beach nearby, and he nudged himself out of orbit. He fell through
Sabieville's atmosphere, where everything had began, like a flaming egg, shedding layer
after layer as he went down. Gracefully, he touched down mere meters from the beach. He
opened the egg's hatch, then rowed to shore.

Finally, he touched ground, five hundred thousand years after he'd first began his journey.

He heaved himself off the egg and jumped down.

He was wearing a straw hat, a pair of sunglasses, a floral print shirt and a pair of flip-flops.

And let's not forget the shorts, of course.

Never forget the shorts.

He dragged the egg to solid ground, then took out his camping supplies. He began to fish,
waiting for people to come.

The first were a pair of girls. Acolytes, probably, coming from his little creation to check on
the mysterious unannounced visitor from outer space. Or, at least that's what he thought.
They had that acolyte look. They began asking him for something, but he did not know their
language.

He offered one of the fish he'd caught, then laughed thunderously. The girls stormed off.

Soon, they were replaced by other people - Louis thought they must have been the heads of
whatever had become of his little study group, men and women in ornate robes trailing on
the sand.
They came to him, and he made them grilled fish. He also laughed at them, because they
were a bunch of idiots, but he still wanted to help them.

They did not really seem enthusiastic. Still, others were. They came to him in bunches,
young acolytes and laymen, bringing food and drink, and he spent the days swimming and
the nights eating on the torch-lit shore. He couldn't tell them the secret, because he honestly
thought that people who'd spent their life growing around a monastery would have laughed
at such simple words, but he hoped that his example would make them understand, at least
a bit.

Lights filled the sky.

As Almaviva's descendants decelerated around Sabieville, Louis built himself a pavillion. His
new acolytes, perhaps not really understanding but certainly helpful, wanted to do the job in
his place, but he laughed at them. Still, he worked with them until the thing was ready.

It looked like shit, but Louis wasn't exactly an architect.

The lights grew brighter, then dimmed and disappeared.

It was time.

Less than a day after that, a lone figure began making its way on the sand, coming out of the
treeline, walking towards Louis and his followers.

It was Almaviva, just like the day he'd first seen him.

Somehow.

This time, however, he too was in shorts and floral print shirt and straw hat. Louis hoped it
was because he liked it, not because he'd started a fad or something.

"Hey mate!", shouted Louis, "Been a long time, ain't it?"

"I do believe so", the man answered, once he'd come closer.

They both laughed.

"You're not really that Almaviva, are you?", Louis asked.

"I am one of us, but I am not him", the man nodded, "We thought you would like a familiar
face to talk with."

"Yeah", Louis went, looking out towards the sea. It was flat and azure, unperturbed by wind,
twinkling in the sun, "it's nice to see a familiar face, after so long"

"That said, nice to meet you, new you", he added.

"What are you guys?", Louis asked.

"I serve the Culmination", the new Almaviva went.

"Yeah", Louis went, "that's nice".

"We have long waited for your answers", the other man went, sweating slightly in the hot
weather.

"You sure you don't want a drink, mate?", Louis asked, "You know, I can't understand the
locals for shit, but they aren't dumb. They'll bring you to drink if you look like you need it"

"I would like to know the meaning of Life and the Universe, that's all", the man went, "We
can drink later?"

"Are you sure, mate?", Louis went, making himself a bit of air with his fan - they were out in
the sun, and it was hot that day.

"Yes", the man went, looking almost pained, as if the fate of the universe depended on the
next words of their exchange, "enlightenment first, drinks can wait".

Of course, Louis emphatically didn't agree, but it was the sort of thing that's difficult to
understand without spending a few hundred thousand years as a sun-brain.

"Can we go to the shade first?", Louis went.

"Well, if that'd make you more talkative, I would sign off on it", the new Almaviva went.

And so, they trekked until they had reached a particular spot of shade that Louis had started
liking very much recently. There were people there, sitting on rocks, eating and drinking, but
fortunately there was space enough for the new Almaviva and Louis to sit and talk.

The sun continued beating on the beach, playing on the turquoise waters of the bay.
Cotton-white clouds drifted lazily in the sky. The locals were cooking a boar, of some sort of
boar-like animal that Louis had frankly started enjoying too much lately. He'd have to start
swimming more.

"Will you now tell me the secret to understand the meaning of Life and the Universe?", the
man went, bursting with hope.

"Nah", Louis answered, “I don’t think you’d understand it”.