The Soul Star ⭐️ The Planet of Algoritmo 

Nuovaroma

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The free-thinking humans have long laughed at the cultish mystics who think themselves at the centre of the cosmos, as if the cosmos could have a centre, and as if deep within humans there was a knowledge of all the creatures till the end of outer space. But the far-off sages know what the free-thinkers mean. They known what they mean.

— Algotodo, from The Book of Fractals

Heaven is a place where everything always happens.

— “Heaven,” from Fear of Music

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Heaven is a Place

Algotodo was the last of the Seven Sages of Vicinese Antiquity. It was up to him to put the finishing touches on the heavenly planet of Algoritmo, which many called the Soul Star.

Having given up on the notion of Heaven, the Seven Sages conceived a planet where the body of dying beings could be infracted and live forever. Yet six of the Seven Sages died before the project could be completed. Algotodo was therefore the only being in the thirteen universes of the Kraslika who knew the secrets of its tiny, eternal heaven.

In the final three passages of The Book of Fractals, Algotodo gives us the most lucid account of which he seems capable:

In time, the echoes of the Creation Gong fell silent upon the ears of the Seven. We wondered about the sound waves we could no longer hear. So we searched for them in the meters of poetry and in the meters of our instruments.

Exceptionally fine in the mathematics of space and in the rhythms of time, echoes imploded into the finest dimensions of matter, the most intricate of fractals.

Echoes exist at the boundary between that which changes and that which has always been and has never been.

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As mortality advanced upon us, we imagined a heavenly planet, so that all beings could retain the sacred knowledge and so that they could pursue the most infinitesimal and rarified of fractals, perhaps one day to enter Infinity itself.

It’s our hope that at some point we’ll merge into the finest wavelengths and pulses, arriving at last at the Beating Heart of God. We hope to hear once again the primal drumbeat that started our cosmos. Perhaps this beat will take us to new dimensions. Perhaps not. We remain optimistic.

To make sure that succeeding generations cannot disturb our work, we’ve placed the planet deep in the centre of the universe, where nobody can find It.

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My colleagues have all died, and soon I too will leave my home in the ancient cave.

Unlike my dear Six, I’ll travel to the heavenly planet. There I’ll live forever in a replicate world, together with trillions of beings who will remain in the Stream of Time, in the Open Field. And yet they’ll no longer be merely replicate. They will defeat Death itself.

There I’ll stand next to a second Golden Hill, and look once again into a lake of emerald waters.

The city of Heaven will have apartments and leisure centres, tennis courts and gardens where blossom many an incense-bearing tree. Pleasure-domes will overlook deep romantic chasms. Tennis courts and playgrounds will dot the inner city. Golf courses and meandering rivers will link the City to the sprawling megalopolis.

May it be done in Heaven as it’s done on Vicino Prossimo.

There will be universities and cafes, night clubs and fine restaurants. A young man will meet a young girl in a cafe, and they will fall in love.

Overwhelmed by blind optimism, we refer to our resting place as the City of God.

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A million years ago, the Seven Sages mastered the art of infraction, the replication of larger structures into smaller spaces. Using quantum algorithms, AI, and sub-angstrom bots, they infracted the structure of whole galaxies into spaces that were invisible to the naked eye. The planet of Algoritmo was the pinnacle of their art, since it infracted the past, present and future of the cosmos into one unified planet: ❧ it infracted the Kraslika’s history into the planet’s core and inner layers; ❧ it infracted a luxurious afterlife present into the surface of the planet; and ❧ it infracted speculative futures into the planet’s clear and cumulous skies.

Because Algoritmo existed at a sub-angstrom level, it was almost impossible to locate. It was rumoured to exist in the Local Void, in the Virgo Supercluster of the Violet Hoop universe.

Some people went so far as to say that the Soul Star must lie close to NGC 7077, a lenticular blue dwarf galaxy in the constellation of Aquarius.

Algotodo was content to let everyone think that his afterlife planet was a star and that it was located in the Local Void. Yet only the ghost of the Soul Star floated there — a decoy Scarlet Pimpernel Star — now here, now there, now everywhere. As far as the astronomers knew, the Soul Star was now in the dwarf galaxy of Pisces A, now in the dwarf galaxy of Pisces B, and now, somehow, simultaneously, also in NGC 7077.

Algoritmo was in fact on Earth, that heavenly planet that reminded Algotodo of the forests and the clear running streams of his youth. It was perched high in the mountains of south-western Alberta, in a stretch of land called Eden Valley.

The surface of Algoritmo was modelled on the surface of Earth. It was of course immensely larger, since it had to accommodate all the people in the cosmos. But each people found their own spot on Algoritmo — a town, village, or rural landscape that made them feel at home. The Fallarians flew immediately to the lands on either side of the Ural Mountains, while the Frozen Skiffers naturally spread out into the wastelands of Siberia. The Blue Dreamers drifted to the tropical Spice Islands and the archipelago that swept from the Mekong to Bali. The Vicinese landed softly in Southern Europe.

The Seven Sages had devised algorithms which allowed Algoritmo to develop in synchrony with the actual realities of Earth’s geography. The big difference of course was that Algoritmo was a sextillion times larger than Earth. For instance, the distance from Piazza Navona to the Trevi Fountains was about 500 kilometres. Within that distance, Algotodo had coded things so that the Algorithmic Romans could develop the space as they saw fit. So the space was now Italy, but not quite Italy: ice ages had come and gone; the trappers and traders had turned into baristas and gondoliers.

The capital city, Algodad, was situated on the banks of the Tiber. Algodad was in fact a mix of Vicino Prossimo, where the Seven Sages concocted their algorithms, and an enlarged version of Rome. For hundreds of thousands of years the city was called The City of God. Then in the early Neolithic period it was called The River Crossing. For the last thousand years it was called Algodad, a subtle homage to the great Arab mathematicians and cultural syncretists of the Medieval period. The name also suggested the far-away imprint of the Fertile Crescent, southern sultans, Spanish caliphates, and Saracen raiders of Sicily. Still, the name seemed outdated to many, and there was a motion put forward to change it to Nuovaroma. Yet as soon as this was proposed, a long line of protesters marched through the centre of Palermo demanding that things stay just as they were.

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The Seven Sages’ choice of Earth may seem an odd one, yet Earth lay, just as the old dogmas asserted, at the centre of the cosmos. Of course, it was impossible to say exactly where the centre of the cosmos was, since the great universes of the Purple and Black Pulses themselves shifted in relation to one another. Yet in general terms, Earth was, like the Local Void and the Virgo Supercluster, pretty much in the centre.

Earth was also a fascinating, paradoxical planet. It was beautiful beyond words, yet its inhabitants often treated it like a grocery store and a trash bucket. Its inhabitants had no clue about the trillions of alien life-forms in the cosmos, yet almost all these aliens knew a great deal about Earth. Each alien race saw something of itself in that tiny blue planet. For hundreds of thousands of years the Kraslikans from all corners of the cosmos learned human languages, quoted human poets, and built entire cities with names like Shanghai, Rome, Uruk, or Babylon. They watched human telenovelas, listened to Eurovision competitions, danced to Korean pop tunes, and followed human political events as if they were happening on their own planet.

One of the great mysteries of the cosmos was why Earth and its humanity appeared to be refractions of the thirteen universes that surrounded them. Perhaps it was caused by the shifting of galactic walls, or by the will of the gods, or by the black matter of outer space that mirrored the latent matter of DNA. Who knows? Qui sait? 谁知道 ¿Quién sabe? či vie? कौन जानता है?

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Algotodo lived in the centre of Algodad, in a cedar-lined suite on the seventh floor of an enormous apartment called The Vale. Only about a hundred suites in the Vale faced the caffés and ristorantes of the Piazza Grande, also called Piazza Nuovanavona. About three thousand faced in the other direction, toward the enormous park, the Cortile Grande. Algotodo’s apartment overlooked the Cortile, with its Teardrop Lake and cedar forests, its rose gardens and meandering streams, its golf courses and pleasure gardens, its spas and walking paths, its condo palaces and arboretums — all of which stretched 200 kilometres to the city’s main church, the Pantheon.

Most days Algotodo could be found sitting at the end of a long dock leading into its green calm. Often he paddled a small canoe onto the lake, which was about three kilometres wide and twenty kilometres long. From the middle of the lake, he looked around him at the cityscape of lavish apartments, gleaming skyscrapers and lush gardens, and sighed.

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Next: ⭐️ Algoritmo

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