The world is flat.
It’s hard to say whether it was always flat. Over the years people had advanced various theories about its shape.
Then it started to crumble.
We saw it fall away into the abyss.
And with it went all the various shape-theories, leaving us with definite flatness.
The crumbling itself has a technical term. Temporal Erosion: “reality—or at least some integral part of it—beginning to get worn away by the constant and unstoppable flow of time.” (Balakian-Barnes, Studies in Existential Infrastructure, p 13)
Unstoppable because no one has yet successfully stopped time. Yes, there have been numerous attempts, but they all failed, and likely for the best, because who would want to be stuck in a moment forever? There is, speculatively, a temperature so low that it would freeze time, but it is practically impossible to achieve. Attempts to alter time’s flow rate have had some success, most famously by damming it, but that led to various unwanted oddities (it’s my personal belief that the human mind does not adapt to changes in timeflow) and no further attempts were made. Besides, slowing time would not solve the problem. The goal is not to crumble more slowly. It is not to crumble at all.
This goal is especially important to people like me, who live on the precipice of existence, in a city called Edgemonton.
When I was a kid, my friends and I would bike along the edge of the world, suburbs on one side, the abyss on the other, taunting one another, screaming into the black unknown and feeling our voices become disappeared into nothingness.
Edgemontonians have perhaps understandably developed a particular mindset.
Visitors often find us odd, oscillating between irony-laced fatalism and an iron will to re- and persist.
Edgemonton has also became a magnet for the suicidal.
Why jump off a bridge or office building when you can jump off the edge of the world?
Having thrown rocks into the abyss, I can answer that: because bridges end in water and office buildings in asphalt. The abyss might not end at all. Somewhere deep within my mind, those rocks are still dropping. Imagine feeling so tormented and unhappy that you want nothing more than to end your life, and ending up descending alive for eternity.
I knew a girl who leapt off the edge.
The idea that she’s still falling, drowning in the infinite depth of time without dying, alone, except for the very thoughts which drove her to suicide, fills me with what psychologists call dreadsympathy.
Sometimes I have dreams in which she appears in the sky above and falls into me, after which I continue living as we, an incongruous whole that decides to take the leap themselves—to later fall into someone else, and so on and on, the selves accumulating, the whole becoming increasingly chaotic, until we are all nothing but a single madness.
Then there are the abyssineers, people who explore the abyss by lowering themselves down the crumbling edge of the world.
It is thanks to them we know the world has a thickness.
27.4 kilometres.
The bravest of them continue even lower—
on ropes of ever-greater length.
Although it hasn’t yet been done, it even appears possible to cross the world by going underneath it, but I cannot imagine that journey, hanging for months or years on end from the bottom of existence, inching across it, and for what purpose?
Neither can I imagine living there.
But some do, in various underoutposts that have been established over the years for scientific, religious and other reasons.
To study the crumble. To test yourself. To reach enlightenment.
These days, I live a fifteen minute walk from the abyss because property values are lower here. My kids go to school in a building that was moved inland from a place so far north it no longer exists. I walk my dog along the edge and think nothing of it. On weekends we often pass tourists seeing the abyss for the first time: screaming, backing away, taking selfies, losing consciousness, losing their grip on the nature of reality.
Most of the latter, the so-called edge cases (technically: desanitized) end up in the Edgemonton Psychiatric Institute, which has a wing specializing in psychological disorders of abyss.
What’s interesting is that reactions range from debilitating, existential fear to a kind of hyperproductive euphoria, during which mentally ill individuals come up with all sorts of possible and impossible ideas. We owe the discovery of naughtmatter to an edge case, and there’s currently a patient in the Institute developing a theory of time travel based on the liquid properties of time: time-sailing.
Galleons once sailed the seas.
Spaceships, the cosmos.
Perhaps one day timeships shall set sail across the passing of time, themselves flowing onwards while, aboard, everyone and everything is relatively static, unchanging. A clock floating across a bathtub. It: moving. Its hands: not.
Perhaps that shall be our salvation. A mass migration from the crumbling shores of a doomed world—but to where, the crumbling shores of another? Is that what life is, perpetual world hopping?
Nothing lasts forever.
Only nothing.
Or is the abyss a thing that, in time, erodes too? Would time itself evaporate in the heat of some unknown source of energy?
These are the kinds of questions that run through my head in Edgemonton, while my dog sniffs a fire hydrant in the suffocating dusk, while my kids play hockey on a frozen lake. In cities farther from the edge, friends meet in cafes to talk about their lives. Here, we drink black coffee and discuss the difference between zero and null.
Sometimes I feel jealous of the edge cases. They have experienced the infinite. They say—the ones who speak at all—that realizing the immensity of nothingness, the illimitability of nature, unlimited their minds, allowing them to imagine without boundaries.
Reason, like reality, crumbles, revealing both madness and genius.
I heard it said recently that sleepwalkers in their sleep never walk toward the edge, but that must be incorrect. Maybe they don’t walk toward the closest edge, because edge and abyss are in every direction. The world crumbles from all sides.
Everyone moves always toward the edge.
There is no escape.
We are all gradually being herded into a smaller, more densely populated space. Those ruthless or lucky enough to survive will find themselves eventually on the last scrap of existence, but that scrap is nothing more than a trap door, and when it opens, they too will plummet.
Sometimes, staring into the abyss, I wonder why we fight so hard to delay the inevitable. The dogs run happily, enjoying life day by day, but we are cursed with an understanding of past and future.
How sweet would be unknowing that we have no future here—
on this, our flat, diminishing world.
When I arrive home in the evenings, hang up the leash and peek into my children’s rooms to see them sleeping, I pray for peace and lunacy, for if we’ve still any hope of deliverance, it must originate in the desanitized minds of madmen.