Fraxinus

The Abyss

They say when you look into the abyss, it looks back.But they’re wrong. The abyss is an empty thing, nothing but space, searching for ways to fill itself anyway it can. When you look into it, it doesn't look, it just copies whatever it sees, and endless mirror held up to reality.

For millions of years that was fine, an image of the stars, the planets and the entire universe, softly spinning away in the blackness. But then humanity came along.

Everything else in existence was fine just being reflected in the emptiness, but humanity looked into it, far deeper than anything else. Inside they saw things, reflections of everything that was, echos of everything that had been, and shadows of things still to come.

And we reached for it. We, with our feeble grasp of science, with our greatest achievement being the near destruction of our planet, sought to take hold of something that was older than time itself. It didn’t matter that we didn’t understand what it was, or even what we tried to do. We simply saw something greater than what we had, and tried to claim it for our own.

Every resource we had was poured into the task, every man, woman and child committed to the task, to reach through and claim our prize. It didn't matter that we died by the million, it didn't matter that we stripped our world clean of everything our ancestors had fought and bled for. All that mattered, all that would ever matter, was what we saw. With nothing else would matter, we could replace what had been lost, and claim what had never been.

But when most our a planet was left a ruin, when only a few score of people were left, it was done. It was a tiny thing, an opening no bigger than a child, but we had done it, we had opened a way through. We went through, desperate with our need, our hunger for what lay on the other side.

And when we looked back we realised the truth and wept. The abyss mimicked everything it saw, perfectly. It didn't matter what it was, energy or matter, it was there, an identical copy. But some things don't exist in any way that can be measured, that could be copied.

So when we looked, when we saw the destruction, the hunger and the pettiness our needs had brought us, we knew. We hadn't spent all of our time to reach the abyss, we had been fighting to leave, to reach that perfect reflection, from the inside of the mirror.

And so now we few survivors remain, with no purpose left to us, our only goal now proven to be a lie. We sit and wait, waiting for the universe to cast us out from where we don't belong, back to the emptiness of our false existence.we look all around us at what we have been denied through chance and luck and we are numb.

They say when you look into the abyss, it looks back.But they’re wrong.

We looked to you first.