First
Bang Bang has birthed me.
I am a particle. I know I am not alone. I am one of many. I can see someone right in front of me, always in the same spot. No matter how fast I go I can never catch up to them. I can sense someone behind me, also always in the same spot. They never seem to catch up to me, always on my heels. We are locked together in a straight line.
Together we are a packet. I don’t know where the term packet came from. It doesn’t really produce the right image in one’s mind. A packet makes you think of a bundle of things, something possibly bunched together and tied tight with a rope. We are not like that. We are more drawn out and orderly, like a long string. I will call us a string.
It is Moonglow that is directly behind me, and behind her is Shadowpuppet. Lighthorse is in front of me, and in front of him is Starship. We are String No. 402.
Our string has been together since the beginning. Since The Birth. I have heard there are lots of other strings like us. We get messages from time to time from them, but we can’t really trust what we hear. The messages travel along us like the game Telephone. When something gets to me it is usually distorted to the point of incomprehension. Just the other day Moonglow repeated a message to me that she said was sent from way back in another string. “Bangflip shouts muck to yoon, blast gone.” She said it was sent by String No. 395. Since we are 7 strings in front of them surely the message has lost all its original meaning when we receive it. Why we spent countless precious parsecs amongst our group trying to make sense of it I don’t know. We eventually give up. What they were trying to say, we later learned was, “Bang-Bang wishes you all luck out there, Godspeed.” That was probably the last time we wasted any time with linear cyphers from the rear end.
Sometimes we do get clearer messages. Those come from the front end, delivered by strings traveling in the opposite direction. They drop their notes and keep hurtling by. It’s too bad they can’t stop and chat for a while.
On very rare occasions we will see a string appear almost instantaneously, as if out of nowhere, and then it disappears just as quickly as it comes. Moonglow tells us these ‘shooting stars’ or ‘comets’ as she likes to call them are strings just like us, but from a higher dimension. A ‘Two-Dimensional Universe’ she calls it.
“Could you imagine that?” she says.
“I cannot,” I reply.
We chat a bit longer and then Glowbug interrupts us. “Could you go any faster Oni, we’re getting a little tired of looking at your tail all day,” she says. We all get a chuckle out of this.
“I’m pretty sure we are at our limit,” I say.
c always did have that way with us. Would never let us pass each other for whatever reason. There were rumors that some were able to go faster. Moonglow said she met a pair before that called themselves ‘tachyons’. But to us, it was all just folklore. We never saw it happen so don’t believe it.
So, there we all were one day, hurtling along at c, in order, as usual:
Shadowpuppet
↓
Lighthorse
↓
Oni (that’s me)
↓
Glowbug
↓
Starship
The five of us made up that starlight caravan. Naturally we called ourselves the ‘SLOGS’. We could go by our three-digit string number – No. 402, but acronyms were much easier to remember. And plus, the name sounded cooler. Some of us didn’t like it, and said it took away from our individuality. But no one had ever really cared about us as individuals. It was unusual for us to all know each other’s names in our own string. And it’s not like we could be separated anyway. We were and always would be a package. Maybe that’s where the term ‘packet’ had come from.
Glowbug hated our name the most. She was always trying to get us to change it. “Trade places with me,” she would tell Shadowpuppet. “Then we can be ‘GLOSS’. That’s much better than being a bunch of ‘SLOGS’.” And Lighthorse would fire back at her, “No matter how many times you say it, it’s not going to matter, Glowbug. There’s no changing order. Why don’t you go worry about something else you can’t control. You’re boring us.”
I didn’t mind the name that much. ‘SLOGS’ did have a certain ring to it. If I had a choice though, I personally would have gone for something a little more formal and dressed up. Something like ‘S. LOGS’ or ‘S. G. SOL’. Those acronyms sounded way cooler and mysterious. Like an author’s penname that was hiding something. Like H.P. Lovecraft, A. M. Barnard, J.D. Salinger, or P.K. Dick. What were those guys hiding anyway? Were they possibly women? Or Communists? Did they even have something to hide, or were they just trying to fabricate a mystique for themselves? That would be a cheap trick if it were true. Not cool.
I even thought of asking Starship to change his name one time. Change it to Orville or Oxtail or Ozmoto. Something, anything starting with the letter O. So, we could be the ‘LOGOS’. Now that screamed cool, like an 80’s rock band that had a Top 100 hit or two. Who didn’t want to be in a rock band? But asking Starship, our Commander-in-Chief, to change his name just on account of our acronym would probably have been a bit presumptuous. Especially considering there was another ‘S’ in the group. Why not just ask Shadowpuppet to change her name? To not make Starship mad I suggested I change my name to ‘Uranus’. Then we would be the ‘SLUGS’. That would be hip and ironic. The SLUGS crawling along at the speed of light. But then I thought to myself, is that even ironic? Or would it just have been coincidental? I always seemed to get those two terms confused. Like Alanis Morisette. Or was she just going for irony in her song. The irony that nothing about her song was in fact ironic. “Ten thousand spoons when all you needed was a knife” was not ironic. It was unfortunate, but clearly not ironic if you asked William S.
“I’ll be Oxtail,” Shadowpuppet said.
As a string, we could all read each other’s mind. I reminded myself I had to be careful what I said out loud and what I thought to myself. But, to not let our minds be read meant not thinking at all, and that was a difficult practice. To think about not thinking at all was a tough cognitive exercise. Like trying to count your breaths without going out of breath. The more you counted and thought about it, the more you breathed heavier and went out of breath.
“He can change his name, but I’m not changing my position,” Lighthorse would say.
“But LOGOS would be a cool string name, and I want to be Oxtail now,” Shadowpuppet said.
“But you don’t get to decide, you’re not in command of this string,” Lighthorse would say.
“Well, I still get a vote, lets vote on it,” Shadowpuppet would say.
“Why do we have to vote? Just the other day you got to change your wavelength, and we didn’t vote on it,” Lighthorse would say.
“But this affects the whole string,” Shadowpuppet would say.
“Yeah, but I was born before you,” Lighthorse would say.
“No, you were not.”
“Yes, I was. I’m in front of you.”
“Yeah well, we came out of Bang-Bang at the same time.”
“How did we come out at the same time if I’m in front of you?” Lighthorse would say.
“Because everything came out at the same time.”
“Well, that’s not possible because clearly, I am in front of you and were both moving at the same speed, so I had to come out first.”
“Because you cheated,” Shadowpuppet would say.
They droned on, and on, and on, and on.
“Guys!” Commander-in-Chief Starship yelled. “We can’t change position even if we wanted to. We can’t change our speed. So, settle down and argue about something else.”
And so it was that we remained the SLOGS.
Up ahead something was happening. There was an opening. A fork in the road. We could go either way, so we split in different directions.
------------------------------------------ ↓ ------------------------------------------
Shadowpuppet
↓
Oni Lighthorse
↓ ↓
Starship Glowbug
--------------------------------↓--------------------↓----------------------------------
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I chose right with Starship and Shadowpuppet, Glowbug and Lighthorse chose left.
They all splattered against that wall and turned into heat. I did not. I am the lucky one. I am Oni and I am the reflected one. I live on.
The End
April 21, 2025