Light Upon

There was no beginning. Beginning required time. There was no darkness, because darkness required space in which light might be absent. There was no silence, because silence required the possibility of sound. There was no distance. No direction. No before. No after. There was only that which, much later, frightened minds would call Logos. And even that was not its name. Names were inventions of a

The sunlight in the orchard smelled like bruised peaches and damp soil, warm enough that Jack could feel the prickle of sweat at the nape of his neck. Across the wooden table, the woman with silver-rimmed glasses laughed, her voice rich with the crackle of genuine amusement, and passed him a bowl of cherries. Dark, heavy fruit, one of them split along its seam where a wasp had tested the skin.

The point woke at the center of the plain and couldn't remember arriving. It had, it believed, always been here, a small dense node of attention fixed at the intersection of two coordinate lines drawn long ago by a surveyor whose instruments had since oxidized into the soil. Around it the terrain stretched in all directions, motionless: a drained basin of pale concrete, its hairline fractures

Electric flowers were a novelty before the singularity. Then suddenly, a frenzy of upgrades nobody truly understood washed over the world. My wife… she was always ahead of the curve. Living synthetic replacements, they called them. Said it would infuse her being with power, with wonder. I watched her walk away, her silhouette shrinking down the sidewalk. The sound of Elvis scratchy on the old