Sanctubiography

It was the first visitor that Kevin had seen in a long time. A vague form of swirling mist stepped into his home, its movements indicating that it was just as disoriented with itself as with its surroundings. After a couple moments Kevin realized that it couldn’t distinguish him from the furniture in the room.

“I apologize for the confusion, this place was never intended to be entered.” Kevin said, standing up and making friendly gestures to get the being’s attention. “You must not be human, am I correct?”

The visitor stopped moving and looked at Kevin, taking a few moments to think before speaking in an indistinct voice. “What are you? What is this place, and how come we are able to communicate? Why do I take this form when I’m here?”

Kevin smiled and sat back down, even if this interaction was odd, it would be a nice change of pace to his day. “You’re inside a story, a fabrication of events that takes form within its own world. You must have found and entered the book. I made this place, well technically a lesser version of myself did, so everything in this world operates by my rules. You must be an alien to my kind, since I can’t even conceptualize your form in here.”

The mist sat down in the chair across the room, trying to take this all in. “So this is not the natural state of a ‘human’? We found a previous capsule from your kind that was informative about humanity and ‘Earth’. We haven’t found that place yet, but we hope to reach them to see if there is any way that we can share technology to push them towards whatever their true potential is. This ‘book’ is the only other object we’ve found that has matched that capsule.”

Kevin wistfully looked down at the table. “I’m sorry to say, but it’s likely that humanity and the Earth are gone by now. This story was made when the end was in sight. The ‘real’ Kevin understood the true power of fiction, and used that in order to preserve himself through me. He wrote about his own life, but then altered events so that everything about this story is an exaggerated improvement, giving this place enough difference to exist under its own creative power.”

The alien listened and posed its inquiry. “But then you are not actually a human, and do not preserve humanity’s existence by being. Shouldn’t the inherent drive for self-preservation have taken Kevin and the others to find a proper way to persist?”

“Maybe, but that was the decision of the imperfect Kevin. Physical evolution might have a limit that is overcome by conceptual evolution, or there may be other means of advancing beyond the troubled state of humanity at that point. Is there value to preserving something as it is when you can preserve a perfected version of it?” Kevin took a sip of tea to keep his throat from drying, then continued. “Ultimately I don’t know the truth. Humanity might still be fine, or there might be nothing else left of it, or you may find more aberrations of existence similar to this world as you get closer to finding Earth. Kevin might even still be alive. But none of that is my worry now.”

“I don’t know how you got in here, but once you use that same way to leave, could you put this book back in its capsule and send it back on its original course? This place only lasts forever if it outruns the expansion of the universe, so that it drifts well beyond when it inevitably collapses.”

(Originally written 1/24/2016)