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“I’m no philosopher, but the way I see it we rose in the wake of global-quantum-suicide-paradise-engineering. On we went, and on we go, and all the while the echo of screaming death drones on in the background.”

Spock squints into the scope with disgust, “you always lead up to the Birth of Tragedy, and Eternal Return… Oh Gay Science how you carry on. Easily as efficient as Zarathustra over extended distances.”

The bridge crew looked away and awkwardly down. Uncertainty rippled through the crew before the captain spoke again. “If the songs melodic, sing it—if not, speak it.”

Over all nothingness, question/problems of reasoned readers, regarding this specificity, significant or not. One’s origin is one’s pain. Reference reason, or reference regard; the moving metaphor is all the same. From nature vice and from human culture, tools all the same. Measures, brass and heavy. Referenced as union or dissonance it’s all just qualia in the Stretch.

“Ain’t it all? No need to qualify it just for Stretch”, one says.

“Unless you consider reality”, another answers.

Reality is comprehended in two camps. For Crafters it is being, for Empire it is doing. Vortex Theory held in play long enough for a melding to occur in the being doing spectrum. But with its dissolution came a resonance which allowed a fracture to take hold. When balance fell individual command/predictions toppled and hypercorrected, leaving a coarsely cut hole through the obedience substructure. Being/Doing or even being versus doing is no longer a valid discipline.

The Collapse then, the Birth of Tragedy, is an awakening awareness in each of us that what we have granted to reality is equally as inadmissible as what we have taken from reality.

At the core of this issue is the nature of FarStretch.

Heresy was unknown prior to Corruption. After the fateful heist and the rise of the NewBorn was a time of accusation and reaction. It seems like a dated concept now, but Prefall Empire was so mired in the VT framework that any stray, however mundane, observation/thought that seemingly deviated from consensus was alarming.

Alarm lead to fear, fear to antagonism, and antagonism to Fall. Many of us didn’t mind, as Fall is/was always a danger. Always inevitable. Stability is no way to measure a system of governance. A billion years or 40, cast against infinity is a vanishingly fragile number. It’s both a blink of an eye and drawn out suffering. An hour or a quarter or a single minute holds within it the majestic and the mundane of all of reality.

Empire was over, all that was left was the dying.

Emergency senior staff meeting, at an ungodly hour for the MSC, and probably for the other department heads as well, but Bones didn’t care about them, “so, you damn Vulcans don’t sleep do you? So this is just like nothing for you. That’s why you haven’t deleted the captain’s macros yet, huh, you just don’t care. You emotionally stunted selfish cunt.”

Spock injects the doctor with a hypospray and the doctor springs to his feet and serenades the Vulcan, “I treat you poorly because I hate you.”

Spock rises an eyebrow and shoots the doctor again. The doctor laughs and goes back to writing his exposition.

“Cartwheels of causality stumble out/off of the substrate. The substrate is a natural underlying principle of enlightened entanglement…” the captain reads over McCoy’s shoulder.

“That’s right captain, Causal re/actions (bundled as being/doing groups) are set into and formed from collinear tracts of Stretch…sir.”

“That’s fine, Bones, fine. You may be wondering why I have summoned you,” the Captain scans the faces of his staff. “We’re kinda floating aimless out here. With Empire gone what’s left to explore or protect? I am entertaining proposals for our next course of action.”

“Let’s just watch it eat itself out of reality and wait for the last dying ember to fade,” shouted Bones.

Spock suggested something scientific. And the chef wanted cook and the chief wanted to repair. And the helmsmen, while allied with the doctor didn’t have his patience, they wanted to destroy what was left of Empire.

“Fire at will!” the Captain shouted and the ship’s main gunports opened a wide volley on the planet below and individual gun ports opened in crew quarters all over the ship. It took three hours to pulverize the colony which popped into being at the wrong juncture of gravity/time and fell prey to a deliberate upset of the FarStretch scout.