Manu Breysse Around the Universe in 10-43 second

Présentation de Around the Universe in 10-43 second

“Do you want some help?” the creature repeated with some irritation.

The overweight slug with greyish green skin surveyed him from atop its six and a half feet.

“I seek…,” Sareth began.

“That’s fine, I have what you need. Follow me!”

The Olehmite could not conceal his surprise. He had said nothing, and with good reason: he didn’t know what he was looking for! The creature halted before a hole in a translucent wall. It touched a button and a green light lit up the inside.

“Place your head within the green circle and think about what you want to look for.”

Sareth hastened to do this. Beside him, a screen lit up and the female Varlon hurriedly read him out the words being displayed:

“Duck?”

“No.”

“Knife?”

He shook his head.

“Taxi?”

“Not that either.”

A phenomenal amount of verbiage thought by Sareth was enunciated methodically and untiringly by the librarian. Sareth was surprised at the extent of his own knowledge. He became lost in his own thoughts for several minutes, amazed by all the vocabulary contained in his brain, before coming back to reality.

“House? Car? Plutonium-diabolo? George? Prefabricated? Keon? Galaxy? Nuclear kerosene? Brainsurfeitarian? Olhem? Rac…”

“Stop there!”

“At Olhem?”

“Yes.”

“Very well. Go see the archives in building 5, aisle 7, shelf 23. I hope you have a pleasant research session.”

With that, she left him. Sareth was quite excited: at last he was going to learn new things about Olhem! Things of which even the greatest sages of his world would be unaware! He got lost seven times in the labyrinthine library, asking beings who formed words in an entirely new way to him the way. Reaching his destination, he focussed on the letter O. There was a whole collection of names, but he finally came across the word Olhem. He pressed on a kind of soft, red stone, making a hologram appear in which three-dimensional letters in his realm’s alphabet started to dance before his eyes.

Olhem: a lowland desert on the planet listed as ZGFTD-0-1-2-3-5-8-13.

Features: this planet possesses no resources worthy of the name. Settlement: around twenty primitive civilisations populate its surface.

Origin of these beings: this world, originally devoid of life, was seeded following the accidental loss of a food container from a space-cruiser. The ship was host to genetically improved bacteria bred to survive ultra-high-speed entry into an atmosphere, approximately thirteen million relative years (ISM) ago.
End of archive.

“WHAT?” he couldn’t help yelling out.

Extrait du livre écrit par Manu Breysse

Sareth found another chair more adapted to his shape, sat down and left his mind to sort itself out – or at least thought he could. He didn’t know where he was as much from a geographical as from a psychological point of view. He had left one reality for another without wishing to. He had landed in an insane world, finding himself on the passenger seat of a taxi zigzagging amidst other machines, whatever George said. After that, he had been promised replies to his questions, which merely led to further, still deeper questioning. Had he found any answers? Did he accept them anyway? If he’d been in his palace, it would all have been much easier: he would have given a blanket denial and burned anyone who claimed his Gods did not exist. But he was alone, on a planet he didn’t know anything about and could not engage with a sage to help him cope with his troubles. While his mind was coming to terms, not without difficulty, with the consequences of his recent but disappointing discoveries, something attracted his attention. There was a sentence flashing red in one corner of the holographic screen:

The true meaning of life is to be found here.

The words were at the bottom of the page relating to the God concept. At any other time, a being confronted by such a sentence would laugh and then think no more about it. Nobody would take it seriously in any case. However, in the case of Sareth, who had lost his reason for living in this hope-destroying world, researching a way of giving his life significance once more was, as psychiatrists put it so well, quite normal.

Just as he clicked on the hypertext link, he had a flashback to when he first touched the web-like blue and gold disc that had brought him to this universe. Then he flashed back to the time he opened the library door: a place where the world appeared decidedly not to be spinning on its axis. He finally remembered that after pressing the button resembling a soft, red stone, his Olehmite-centric view of the universe had really hit rock bottom. When he clicked on the link, Sareth’s forebodings appeared to be justified:

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