IMPERIUM

Mass Gap


Mud squelches into the spaces between her toes as she wriggles them deeper into the cool earth. Sun-bright air glows between the gaps in the trees, crescents of gold forming intricate patterns on the shadowed ground. It smells like summer is fading; nights sneaking into the reservoir after 10:00 when it finally got dark, dares and shy kisses, naked knees scabbed over; the high sweet note of adolescence transforming into the crisp apple smell of autumn and responsibility.

"Would you say that you are alive?"

She gulps back berry sweet air and laughs.

"My existence is immortal, but not what you would consider to be 'alive'."

A pebble bites into her heel but she doesn't stop. Air streams around her body and she can almost feel it lift her off the ground, she's running so fast.

"Why is that Shepard?"

Her lungs expand and fill with wind-whipped oxygen, it circulates through her veins, effervescent and heady like a sip of champagne purloined from a parent's secret wine stash. She feels it tingle through her brain.

"You believe that you have a soul, Liara?"

A vista of soy fields meets the edge of blue, two hemispheres welded together in the distance. Grass pillows her fall and she gulps down huge drafts of summer sky.

"Yes, I do."

Underneath her back, she can feel the vast movement of the planet, tectonic plates shifting miles and miles below, rumbling in vast muffled echoes dwarfing her very existence.

"The ghost in the machine."

Gluons glide along tensor fields set into quantum foam. Collision. Antimatter and matter in the turbulent wash of spacetime. Ripples with no distance, consequences delivered at command into an obscure corner of the Horsehead Nebula. My control is unlimited. They continue to build.


Sorry for the delay in updates, the past month of moving and preparing for this semester has left me with intermittent internet access and a computer that did not very much like being relocated out of state. I've also realized that Math departments at any and all universities are out to ruin lives, I imagine this is how people who do math all day get their kicks.

Thank you so much to the people who left me reviews! I was quite reluctant to actually post my little headcanons for others to read and your reviews made me feel less like I was making a huge mistake. Thanks again!

-Dulcidyne