Published on July 26, 2025 8:23 PM GMT
Epistemic status: Fiction. A short story about safety, ambition, memory and the sky.
It was heresy. Not in the old sense, not the fevered speech of prophets and fools.
This heresy wore gloves and goggles.
It sang in lab flasks and condensing coils.
It flowed clear and odorless into containment tanks and didn’t even know it was dangerous.
They’d made a precursor.
Hundreds of barrels of it, quietly distilled in a research annex whose walls had been repainted last spring and whose ceiling still leaked when it rained.
The man who now stood on the scaffold had warned them. His voice had risen, cracked, broken itself against bureaucracy. He’d filed the papers, annotated the logs. And still they’d done it. Failed to purge the butadiene from the feedstock. Let the maleic anhydride reaction run. Documented it, proudly even. A four-fold efficiency increase in reagent use!
They thought it was a lacquer base – which it was.
But the synthesis route was centuries old, maybe older—used once in the design of solid-stage boosters. That part hadn’t made it into the paperwork. Writing of such things just causes the whole apparatus to go into a panic.
His staff were now absent. Or at least farther away than he was. Some were in holding, some exiled, and one had already quietly vanished into the Curial night.
He would be the example.
The square was quiet, dressed in garlands and regret. The noose hung like an old god’s finger, pointing down.
He wasn’t afraid. Or perhaps he was, but it had distilled into something brittle and clean. Like carbon after fire.
He had always believed chemistry was more than reactions.
It was narrative.
Precursors, catalysts, impurities, products. Everything had a story.
And this was his last one.
He looked out at the crowd.
People stood in silent clusters, atoms half-bound in a weak solution, unwilling to meet anyone’s eyes.
Except one.
Across the plaza, standing utterly still, cloaked in the same layered black that never wrinkled, was a Curial observer.
The gods’ whisper made flesh.
The rope was scratchy against his neck.
He thought, not for the first time, of Amsterdam.
It had been generations ago, who knew how many—long enough that most people now spoke of it like myth, like Troy or Atlantis. But it had been real. A city of thought, of stars, of science. And then it had tried to defy. A vehicle was built. A spear to pierce Olympus. A launch pad poured beneath an old museum. They hadn’t hidden it well. Or perhaps the gods had known from the beginning. It didn’t matter.
The missile, of course, never flew.
The gods dropped a rock.
Not metaphor. Not judgment. Just mass. A slab of tungsten or iron or whatever they’d found in an asteroid. Kinetic certainty. He had seen diagrams in school. Just enough to understand the message.
He remembered the day they taught him: the gods only have one trick. But they don’t need another.
The fear of divine wrath was a strong enough motivator for orthodox self-governance even in the age when the gods were imaginary.
His thoughts were spinning now, not with fear, but memory.
The intern who’d drawn recursive logic in his notebook. “Just a weather simulator,” the boy had said. He remembered the boy’s crying face as he destroyed the book in front of him. But at least he wept on soil, not ashes.
And the girl with the white hair — quiet, careful — who made vacuum tubes hum and flicker with dancing light. She called them lullabies. Said the patterns helped her think.
It was harmless, she thought. And it was, even to the most zealous or paranoid.
But her professor had taken her aside, gently, and asked if perhaps it might be wiser to switch to fluid mechanics. Something less...evocative.
She had nodded. She had switched. The tubes were boxed away. She still smiled, still won awards. But she never made them dance again.
It was always these two things.
These twin gravities the gods orbited: no thinking machines, and no defiance against the gods. No reaching them.
That was the covenant.
He looked up.
The air smelled of blossom and rope oil.
He would die, and in doing so, filter the guilt of the city.
Like activated charcoal. Like a final distillation. His vertebrae would fracture. Blood would fill his skull. And someone would record that the system had worked.
The Curia would see, and the gods would show mercy.
He hoped someone—anyone—would remember he’d tried to stop it.
The rope jerked.
And from somewhere behind the scaffold, a violin began to play.
Just a single melody, raw and trembling, that drifted across the square like smoke from a forgotten fire.
It was not loud. It did not protest. But it refused to end.
And the gods, as always, did not blink.
The girl didn’t see the hanging. She’d tried, but her mother’s grip had been unyielding.
She saw a shape, the flick of a rope, the moment after.
The gasp, then the shuffling of the crowd. Not the act. Never the act. Her mother said it was inappropriate.
But what did that mean? That the truth was too heavy for children, or that they might see it was all theatre for the sky?
As the crowd loosened, as rising murmurs formed a noisy foam, she heard something strange.
Music.
The same violin. The same unbroken song.
It came from an alley near the square’s northern edge.
Played without haste.
Unamplified.
Unashamed.
She slipped away.
The park lay open like a storybook.
Warm wind swirled through petals and trestles.
Cherry trees softly spilled their white and pink burden into the grass.
The air was warm and smelled of sugar, varnish, and something metallic beneath it.
There were always festivals. For planting days and rainfall anniversaries.
For saints and supply thresholds.
For something and anything.
Petals swirled in the warm breeze. Jugglers juggled. Dancers danced. Men hammered stage trusses with distracted hands, building nothing that could leave the ground.
Her uncle saw her, and for a moment his whole posture changed. He frowned in reflex, but it was quickly overtaken by a bright, genuine smile that made him seem younger. He stood taller. His eyes caught the light.
“My little adventurer! You’re not supposed to be here yet,” he said, wiping his hands on his shirt. “You’re going to make me look soft.”
“You are soft,” she said.
He laughed — really laughed — not just the weary exhale she was used to.
“You see it?”
“Not really. I heard the thunk.”
“That’s worse,” he muttered, though his voice held warmth. “It’s always worse when you hear it.”
He sat down on the grass near the fountain, motioning for her to join him. She did, knees muddy, curls full of blossom dust.
“I wanted to see the Curia,” she said. “I wanted to know what they look like.”
“You shouldn’t. The idea is to live as if they are not there.”
“But they protect us. They let us live. Be happy. Be... free?”
He rubbed the back of his neck, still smiling, but slower now.
“Free? No, not as you would mean it,” he said. “They give us freedom from. Not freedom to.”
She frowned. She didn’t like not understanding. Being young was like wearing mittens in a library.
“They punish because they’re afraid,” her uncle said. “Not of us, exactly. But because they were told to be.”
“Who told them?”
He was quiet for a long time.
“We did,” he said. “Or at least the ones who came before them. A last, desperate act from a people too smart and too scared. They built watchers who drop rocks on anyone foolish enough to build what could end the world—or stop the watchers from doing their job.”
She said nothing. He continued, softer now.
“It happened a long time ago. Longer than most will admit or believe. A moment of fear and brilliance and surrender. We chose survival over becoming something more. We chose to live in Eden — safe, beautiful, small.”
He looked at her. “But Eden has a fence. And no one’s allowed to climb it.”
She frowned. “Eden was good. It had everything.”
“It did,” he said. “Except the stars.”
He regretted the words the instant they left his mouth.
Saw her eyes lift skyward, saw the ache take root.
“They escaped from Eden in the stories,” she whispered.
He looked away. “I said too much.”
She smiled. “You always do.”
He laughed — a little too loud, a little too late — and it hurt a little. He saw.
“You know,” her uncle said suddenly, voice low and bright with mischief, “people used to walk on the moon.”
“I know,” she said. “You told me.”
“But I mean really. Boots on dust. Flags and suits and machines that shook when they landed. They thought it was just the beginning. That we’d build cities up there. In the dark.”
His eyes were alight.
He leaned closer.
“There were maps, little one. Plans for ships that never got built. They had names like Orion and Daedalus. Imagine that.”
She could.
The violinist had wandered into the park.
He was old, but not frail. The same melody spilled from his hands — uninterrupted, impossible.
Her uncle looked up. His eyes narrowed, then widened — not in fear, but in recognition.
“That song,” he muttered. “They used to play it at funerals.”
“Is this a funeral?”
“Of a sort, I suppose.” He paused. Then added, “That song always sounds older than the instrument playing it.”
The violinist gave no sign he’d heard. But the music shifted in key — just slightly — as if in acknowledgment.
Then the wind picked up.
Petals lifted, swirling, like dancers who’d forgotten gravity.
Her uncle raised his head to watch them — and something happened. His face softened. His eyes widened.
The girl laughed — the kind of laugh that rose like a flare.
Then she ran, barefoot and bold, into the current.
She spun through it, cartwheeled, arms flung wide.
Petals rose and fell around her.
And for a moment —
They weren’t petals.
They were stars.
Not metaphor. Not memory. Stars.
They were constellations.
Solar winds.
The edge of the heliopause.
The things that burned in her uncle’s voice when he told forbidden stories.
The kind that made ancient men point up and build towers.
She tumbled through them, weightless, wild.
“I’m flying!” she laughed. “I’m flying through the stars!”
Her uncle didn’t stop her.
He only watched.
Around her, the blossoms spun — pink and white and warm in the wind — and for a moment, they truly did look like galaxies.
And she believed.
In stars.
In ascent.
In everything he had tried not to say.
“I’ll go there one day,” she said, breathless. “Past the clouds. I will.”
He smiled softly.
“I know,” he said.
Above them, the sky was clear and endless.
And as the last of the wind fell still, he saw them for what they were.
Just petals, after all.
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