How to build a habitable planet: Degeneracy
If protons were the soul, your essence and identity, electrons are the way you interface with the world – your body, your perception, your personality, your relationships.
Hydrogen sat and flipped off his sneakers, threw them aside, and buried his toes in the humus. “What a welcome.” He crumpled and laid back into the grass. Some of the long, braided stalks wrestled through his messy white hair and scratched his scalp. He plucked it and marveled at the detail – blades, sheaths, and culms. “I love what you’ve done with the place.”
It truly was magnificent. The feeling of warm moisture in the soil. The texture of each petal on the flowers. There were even smells. Myrcene? Just carbon and hydrogen. Easy enough to render in a domain by a skillful user. He could feel his own body in the compound, but this sensation was something he experienced only rarely.
Of course, the Spark of life didn’t actually course through any of these wonders before him. These sights and feelings were a facsimile of the domain. But it gave him a warm feeling nonetheless. Hydrogen’s influence peaked in cold expanses of space, the cloaks of massive stars and the souls of young ones, the windy shells of gas giants, and the blood boiling throughout young, seething rocky ones. His heart betrayed him for a moment, bringing old memories to the surface. Planetary differentiation and Father Gravity almost inevitably took him from the places where the Spark could smolder into a flame.
“When I said sit, I meant up here on the porch with me, my dear. You’re going to get your clothes all dirty.” The tesselating booms of Carbon's voice in the star in the domain had solidified into something more familiar – rough, weathered, and warm – like a piece of driftwood from a faraway land baking in the sand beneath a white sun.
“Are you kidding? No, I'm good. Seriously, it's so nice here.” The trace of another volatile organic compound hit his nose and took him to the present. Linalool. The trace of oxygen reminded him of his purpose. “Is Oxygen home too? I want to talk to both of you.”
“How did you know?” He beamed at Hydrogen.
Hydrogen sat up. He watched the water molecules vibrating in the legs of Carbon’s chair, the grass, the soil. He raised one of his eyebrows at Carbon. But, when Carbon held his gaze and kept smiling, he chose to interpret the question as a joke and laughed. Carbon laughed with him. Elemental entities, especially isolated ones like this, might be guilty of mistaking his cheery glow and androgynous appearance as a reflection of genuine youth and innocence when in actuality this manifestation was a courtesy to them. If it didn’t atomize it instantly, the full truth of the universe would be wasted on a flea.
“Oxygen, are you almost done yet?” Carbon’s voice hollered out.
“Just a minute!” A voice rolled out from inside, deeper and rusty. A sensation came along with the voice. To someone with less keen perception, it might have felt like a chill, a spasm of the nervous system. But when the sound reached Hydrogen, there was an instant where from his supine vantage point he saw the sun flicker and felt the moisture in the soil grow cold.
Hydrogen observed the water molecules in the grass that surrounded him. Their vibration was furious, more so than he had realized initially. The electrons were rapidly leaping between shells and subshells – spheres, barbells, rings, thistles, and more mind-bending geometries – sending energy surging through the matrix of atoms. Each atom was absolutely roaring with energy, a furnace burning desperately to keep the star from collapse, with the crushing pressure there the bellows blowing, stoking the flames.
If protons were the soul, your essence and identity, electrons are the way you interface with the world – your body, your perception, your personality, your relationships. These features are dynamic and ever-changing, but also the only access we have to reality.
These elements were on the brink of the madness of ego death, disembodiment, a kind of physical death. Hydrogen could feel how close the star was to collapse. But here he spoke to Carbon, lucid as a cloudless winter day. His presence, control, and composure were remarkable.
The figure of an old man crashed through a door screened with thread. He wore a weathered but warm expression. His crystalline, wrinkled skin shone like a mirror. In his hand was a steaming pie. When the ketones of raspberry reached his nose, he fell back into the grass and soil and cackled, “What is this? You guys are too much.”
“Shut up. It’s nothing. It’s not often you’re visited by God.” He set down the pie on a table next to Carbon and lumbered out into the field to greet Hydrogen. He moved with visible effort, and soil respired deeply as he took each step. But his face wore a beautifully weathered smile, beaming across his face. He extended a hand to Hydrogen, pulling him with strong arms into an embrace.
Hydrogen pulled back to arm’s length and looked at the old man’s mirror face. “Oxygen, wow, you look so good. Godsdamned stunning.” Hydrogen smiled.
Carbon yelled out to Hydrogen, laughing, “You get used to it.”
“No seriously, it's been forever since I’ve seen Oxygen in your state.”
“What do you mean?” Oxygen smirked back. “I’m not shocked a busy person like you doesn't make it out to the boonies to visit tired old farts like us.”
“If I knew pie was waiting for me maybe I would more often.”
Oxygen swelled with pride. “Come over here, boy, and sit down with us. We’ve been working on the details of these berries for the last 100 precession cycles.”
How did this Oxygen even know what these things – wood, soil, raspberries – were? He blinked his eyes though and felt gratitude that there were still sometimes realities of the universe that weren’t immediately obvious to him.
Hydrogen nodded and followed but protested slightly, “Don’t tempt me to stay too long. Helium is just across the system waiting and maybe you remember how she is.”
Standing over his creation with pride, Oxygen paused momentarily and glanced at his empty hands. “Honey, I forgot the knife. Could you give me a hand?”
“Oh you, lout.” Hydrogen watched as Carbon raised a finger and atoms crept up through his bones and nestled themselves in a lattice of diamond above. The blade materialized in seconds.
Oxygen kissed Carbon’s bare scalp. “Thank you, my love.”
With knife in hand, standing over the pie, Oxygen’s hands began to quake. “Wow. Is… is it cold?” His shuddering intensified, and with it, the entire star began to quake.
Oxygen’s knees gave way, and the truth of his incredible density became obvious as he fell like a slug of tungsten launched from a magnetic accelerator cannon. His body crashed face-first through the pie, through the table, through the floor of the porch, and plummeted to the core of the star.