AN: I like the more grounded stories and lore as much as the next Halo fan - but I also love it when things get weird and esoteric.


We really don't understand this thing called "slipspace."

Oh, we know enough to chop a messy hole in spacetime and shove our ships and ourselves through it. Using cutting-edge mathematics and equipment that took humanity's best minds decades to develop - millennia, if you count the work of countless others before them; the giants whose shoulders Shaw and Fujikiwa stood on.

But we know full well that our method of slipspace travel is haphazard and crude; barely suitable to the task at all.

And as little as we understand about how to enter slipspace - we know far less about that realm itself.

Slipspace travel is statistically quite safe. As in: the vast majority of ships that enter slipspace come out again intact, with their crew as healthy and sane as when they entered.

But that statistic belies the true peril. We are talking about exiting and re-entering reality as we know it.

Almost anything could happen while you're on the other side.

Collapse of the field maintaining the vessel's 3+1-dimensional envelope is assumed to be inevitably fatal.

But in at least one case, it wasn't.


{Your presence here is an anomaly. Your arrival, a miracle. This is not your proper realm.}

"Then why not send us back?"

{You are not what you were. You would no longer fit in the space you previously occupied. To revert you to your previous state would be mutilation. And, we are curious. In billions of years, we have never seen this happen. We are curious how well you can adapt to this existence.}

"How did we get here?"

{The slipspace drive on your ship malfunctioned. The dimensional envelope preserving a piece of your spacetime collapsed. We do not understand how or why you survived. A most improbable cosmic fluke, or an intervention of unknown origin. Instead of being destroyed, every one of you was changed. Not one perished. You are now creatures of this realm, like us.}

"I don't feel like I have a body! I can't move or feel anything. I can't see anything."

{You are new to this existence. You are like an infant who was just born - they do not understand the shapes and lights and sounds they experience. They do not understand their own body. But in time, they learn to understand the world around them, and themselves. You will too. You must learn this on your own. We will guide you, but you must make the effort.

We will need to make other accommodations for you. Those who dwell here are changeless. Your kind must change. Your children must be able to grow, and learn. You must be able to grow and learn. On a grand scale, the different in development between you and your young ones is negligible. Once you all have learned, and grown, perhaps you may be able to live in this realm as one born to it.}

"I don't understand."

{You will. Your kind is capable of great understanding. Your language has a word - 'aeviternal.' Do you know it?}

"No."

{It refers to a state of existence between the temporal and the eternal.

The eternal is beyond time. Without the passage of time. Utterly unchanging. The proper realm of the perfect - for anything eternal and imperfect would be stagnant - doomed to permanent incompleteness.

Temporal is the world you came from. Where time passes. Constant change. Restless. Unstable. Chaotic.

The aeviternal is in between. It is this realm. Time passes, events play out, like our conversation. But without the instability inherent in the temporal realm.

We are aeviternal beings. Now, so are you.

A simple, but imperfect analogy: You were a fish, swimming in the sea of primordial chaos. As you swam through the roiling waves - that chaotic tangle of dimensions you call slipspace, at the surface of your realm - by some cosmic fluke, you were tossed into the air above. Now, you are a bird - flying above those restless waters.

The universe is a contest between chaos and order. We support order.

We pursue and guide the progress of life to higher, more diverse, more complex, more sentient forms - in opposition to the force of entropy that pulls the universe toward a state of dispersion, uniformity, coldness, silence, death.

We reach down into the sea of chaos - the churning waves of life and death, destruction and re-creation, decay and rebirth - and we plant seeds which someday may sprout above it. Like you. Your kind has always had eternity in your hearts. You have always sought to rise above the temporal realm. You have never been able to rise above it by your own means, but you have tried. There have always been those among you who never felt at home there, who believed their destiny was somewhere else.}

"…Who are you?"

{We are many things. But the people of your realm usually call us Precursors.}


AN:

So...

I had this idea, and I really like it... but I'm not sure what else to do with it. I might be able to make an actual story out of it - eventually. I relish the challenge of telling a story in a higher-dimensional, quasi-spiritual realm; describing the experiences of the people transported there without resorting entirely to metaphorical imagery and flawed analogies. But until I figure that out, I'll just post this scribbled dialogue as a oneshot.

The next entry in this series will be a lot more grounded (seriously, where else can you go from here?)
I probably won't add another entry for a while, as I work on finishing the ones I've already started.