In the NBA’s hibernation complex, located deep in the desolate sands of Death Valley, I flipped off the TV with satisfaction, but also with sadness. The Cavaliers had proven their tenacity with a Game 7 Finals win, but with the culmination of that tenacity also came the end of the NBA season.
So enraptured had I been by the spectacle of the best basketball league in the world that I had forgotten the reason I was there. Now, looking at the instrumentation panel in front of me, the memories rushed back into prominence: the previous off-season, I had been taken to this place and forced into hibernation in order to preserve my creative powers for the coming NBA season.
But the induced hibernation had gone awry; the instruments measuring my body’s timeflow had given inaccurate readings, and I had endured over two centuries of dreams, which had, over time, morphed from placid normalcy, to scenes of a horrifically alien quality. When I was finally reawoken for the beginning of the season, Adam Silver and Dirk Nowitzki divulged their mistake, and, in my rage, I had overcome them physically and strapped them into the hibernation chamber. Their timeflows I lengthened to ludicrous ratios; for every thirty minutes I sat in the Earth’s normal timeflow, the men had aged, and dreamed, for ten million years.
Now, it was the end of the season. They had been in hibernation for over 100 billion years.
I looked into the chamber, filled with an anti-aging fluid that had a nearly undetectable effect when the chamber’s settings were set to such extremes. What I saw inside surprised me. Draining the fluid and zeroing all the relevant time-control knobs, I noted that Dirk’s body had succumbed to the forces of time, leaving behind nothing but the white scrubs he had been wearing at the time of his chronological imprisonment. Not even a wisp of bone or organ remained. But Adam Silver’s body had apparently undergone billions of years’ worth of evolution, leaving behind an organism which in no way resembled the ordinary human which had entered the chamber over half a year before.
The commissioner’s body had been replaced by (or morphed into) a kind of orderly crystalline structure, cloudy grey in color with inner wisps of dull blue. The straight lines of crystals spiraled and branched like a fine specimen of bismuth, forming a complex machinery that, even as I watched, pulsed with light at its various intersections. I wasn’t sure if I was looking at some kind of computer or an actual biological organism. I wasn’t sure if there was a meaningful difference between the two.
Walking into the chamber, I winced at the stench of the strong-smelling anti-aging fluid, now vanished into drains on the floor. The biomechanical mass that once was Adam Silver, however, had no smell, and also made no noise. Its spindly tendrils of crystal had spread across the floor away from the main body; whatever the nature of the being was, it seemed to explore its surroundings not by movement, but rather, by expansion. Whether this was a sign of extremely advanced intelligence beyond all human reckoning, I did not know. All I knew was that the anti-aging fluid had done its job on Adam in a way that it had not on Dirk, and Adam’s body had been kept viable for long enough to allow this astounding mutation to take place.
I peered into the obscure tangle of glowing prisms that seemed to comprise its “head”. As I gazed into the transhuman complexity, I wondered if Adam’s consciousness was still alive somewhere in the organic circuitry of the thing, and if it was, whether it was there willingly. I wondered what it had been like to be utterly subsumed by that which was Earthly in origin while also being so horribly unearthly.
Unknowingly, I had placed my hands on the smooth, yet convoluted, surface of the structure. Feeling an odd creeping sensation on my forearms, I looked down to find that the crystal strands were slowly and inexorably moving across my skin, regularly branching off each other and sometimes even making tight, square spirals in the air. After a few seconds’ dumbfounded staring, I returned to my senses and attempted to jerk my arms back, only to have the skin pull uncomfortably. I was trapped.
A small part of my mind expectedly panicked. But there was a large part overcome by curiosity. I had unleashed an ultra-advanced being onto the world, and I would be its first (second?) victim. One hundred billion years ahead of its time, it was a symbol of what humanity would likely become if left to its own devices, for Adam had been left to nothing but. As the orthogonally perfect fingers of the thing spread over my chest and face, I considered whether it would, in time, devour the earth itself and all organic matter residing thereon.
Whatever the outcome was, I wouldn’t be around to find out.
Or, then again, maybe I would.
————