Birthing a Universe before School

Teenage kid in his attic, scribbling madly. He’s surrounded by books on chaos magick, quantum physics, simulated reality, and is furiously scribbling in a sketchbook. Crumbled up pages surround him in little piles.

We move through a few flashbacks:. It reads like a scrapbook from Heck (yes, heck, not hell, for even the "torments" of his life are mediocre): Hair pulled, age 3. Nasty wedgie, age 6. Dodgeball bashing into his face, age 8. Shoved against a locker, age 12.

He’s in 7th grade, probably returning from the bathroom. There’s a drawing of a dinosaur with a cock and several lumps of shit drawn on it in pen. The teacher tells him that it looks evil, so of course he deserved it.

Gym class embarrassments.

Girl trouble.

Comics thrown out.

Beat up.

This is intercut with his attempted sigils: I Will Get What I Want; I won't be gay; I’ll Be Cool; The Cancer Won't Take Mom; etc.

Misery.

He's 15, now. He's tried every combination, but nothing works. Magic are bullshit. Self help books are nonsense. What’s the point, woe is me, bla bla bla. He turns to his dirty playstation to play “Robot Slaughterhouse” when suddenly he gets an idea:

UP, UP, DOWN, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT, B, A

He slowly, methodically forms a complex hypersigil out of the Konami Code, using the arrows as the trajectories of alien moons orbiting a vast star, their orbits crossing endlessly in a dance of near-misses and mathematical precision. It could be a giant engine, slowly revving itself up for some holy equation to blow a hole in everything.

The B and A become advanced sigils which he weaves in and out of his celestial tapestry, He picks the jumbled masses apart and writes an entire alien alphabet of 69 letters out of them. Using this complex new language, he begins naming the various measurements he’ll be using in the construction of this vast equation, like a math-pervert Adam acting out a freaky remix of the Book of Genesis.

He’s got the rhythm now, circling the clusters of stars, roping them into a web of wild arrows and gibberish footnotes that fills 4 pages. Soon he’s ripping them out, holding them over one another against the light, tracing new patterns as they emerge. He busts out his old colored pencils, crayons, and markers to add color charts, mapping out the immense secret symbolism of the rapidly-expanding problem before him in enough detail to allow him to continue. Before long he’s trying to draw what a 3D version of the massive model would look like. Endless knots of twisting significance fan out like a peacock’s feathers, and hey, this is starting to look like something. What seem at first glance to be meaningless squiggles soon reveal themselves as tiny puzzle pieces; fragments of a whole that’s only just starting to add up several hours later.

It’s 3:00 in the morning, and he’s just getting started. Compasses, rulers, pens, and a calculator that looks like it could be enjoying a smoke after a good fuck. The kid’s eyes are red from lack of blinking. Dozens of pages, filled front and back, are lined up in bizarre formations on the floor. Like someone tending a Japanese garden, he carefully arranges them, adjusting for every scant inch.

Slowly but surely, something starts to take shape. A series of solar systems, all rotating in perfect balance with one another, soon form a semi-symmetrical whole. But something’s missing. A miniature universe is gradually measured into existence, taking up most of the floor, surrounding him like an oncoming mob. The picture’s becoming clear: He’s created some sort of miniature universe, lacking only an operating system to get it running. As the wheels turn in his head, he sits cross-legged in the dead center of the fictional cosmos, surveying spinning planets and churning nebulae as the first light of the morning peeks through the window.

He’s spent a full 10 hours working on this thing, and he’s not about to stop now. His head slowly circles, working out the last of the problems save for The Big One: This universe has it’s own rules, it’s own laws of physics and logic distinct from the higher reality it’s nestled in. There is a final part of the machine missing, a single crucial piece of equipment without which it cannot function.

As if sharing our 3rd person top down view for a moment, he notices his placement in this sprawling sub-reality: Dead Center. Magic Bullet. Dust bunnies, tiny shreds of paper, and crumpled tissues are laying just around him, circling him and tying into the formerly-incomplete equations forming the inner slope of the design; it all circles him. He’s the fulcrum at the center of everything. His mind makes it run. Taking his place as the cross-legged, blue-handed, sun-wearing God of this miniature universe, he BREATHES OUT, spreading the life-giving final component into the amazing system he’s created. The Engine Revs. The machine runs. Bang.

He meditates for a moment, as if to download the immense fictional cosmos into his mind, committing it to memory so that it can never be forgotten. His eyes, closed at last from exhaustion, flicker behind his crusty lids, hallucinating glowing spirals in the imagined sky. This is Big.

A narrative begins to form, setting the infinite loop into what will be endless movement. The equation completes itself, and at last The Universe is Born. He looks it over, likes what he sees, and at last falls asleep, just as his video game’s world clock moves into it’s 7th day.

His nose will begin bleeding as he nods off. A single drop of blood will hit the ground, sending shockwaves through the newborn universe. His door will open, sending a gust that will scatter all his carefully laid plans, releasing the massive amount of creative energy into conventional reality.

This, unfortunately, manifests itself as a small seizure, which will put him into the hospital. It was for the best, really: he got all that Jesusy shit out of the way first. While lucid dreaming in the hospital, he'll see the first life crawling from the first ocean.

All and all, there are worse ways to begin a universe.