viernes, 14 de marzo de 2008

Ouroboros (english)

También hay una versión en español.

Nothing. Not at all. Apparently there is nothing here. And yet, it's huge. Everything that exists is there. Just there. In front. Suddenly, among all this nothingness, dots of light emerge filling all which was empty. Lots of dots. Tiny. A huge empty field filled with more than a hundred billion dots. Some are close to others and create some small groups. Others keep themselves at a distance and are surrounded only by emptiness. The dots are tiny, but each of them is made by even more dots. Clouds of dots. Dense clouds of dots. From few tens up to thousands of clouds form each of the original dots. It's cold. Very cold.

One of this groups has about thirty or forty clouds. Nothing seems to move, and yet, some of the clouds seem to move around the others. Some are big, some others are small. They have different shapes. Some seem like big fat dots of light, others seem like the scattered debris of something that fell into the floor and broke into a thousand pieces. There are also more peculiar shapes. There are whirlpools. There are spirals. There is structure.

And having so much empty space in every direction, one of the spirals capriciously decides to form a disc over a plane. Four hundred billions of bright dots, gas and dust, form the four arms of the spiral which surround the bright zone of light on its interior. The cloud of dots seems very dense, and yet, the distance between one dot to the next one is huge. The dots also move but, at this distance, everything still seems static and motionless.

But these dots are different. They aren't made of “more dots”. No. Each of them is a big sphere which constantly emits a stream of light which seems to never exhaust. They are hot, they burn. Among all this cold and empty space there are spheres of light full of energy and heat.

One of this spheres, just like most of them, is surrounded by fragments of rocks. About ten tiny rocks, hundreds of even smaller rocks, and an uncountable amount of fragments of insignificant size; all of them following complex patterns around the luminous sphere.

Movement is slow and limited. It is just in one of such rocks, the fifth of them in size, where there seems to be more activity. A blue marble, covered by white splashes without any particular shape. Under these splashes of white almost all the surface is blue, except for a few areas with a darker tone between green and brown. So many diverse colors when before one couldn't see anything but black and white. More color, more diversity, and more movement. But only a bit more.

Scattered among the brown-green areas there are also smaller sites, just a bit more than a thousand, whose tone becomes grayer. In this gray sites one can observe much more structure. Straight lines cross from one side to another, as if trying to impose some order onto something which doesn't have it. And there is much more movement. Little beings come and go from one place to another without seeming to have any clear destination.

One of those beings, hidden inside a light blue colored box, is sitting in front of a machine filled with keys imprinted with letters. He's looking directly at a screen containing a big empty white box. He wants to write something, but he still doesn't know what.

About my life? No. My life is not very interesting. How about the... weather? No, quite boring. Come one, think, you must have something interesting to say. Just write the first thing that comes to mind.

Nothing. Not at all.

Hmm. This way we're not going to get very far. An idea, an idea. Ok, tell a story about... something... about something... interesting! Lol, at this pace I'll end up writing a story about how I couldn't come up with anything interesting to write. Hmm... no, stop, seriously. Come on. An idea. I think that I've got an idea.

Apparently there is nothing here.

Nothing, nothing, nothing... and what if I write about... everything? about all the things that there are!? yes! about everything! I could talk about the universe! and about... about the galaxies, and how they form groups... and... and then we look closer into our galaxy, which is surrounded by a bunch of other galaxies, how many are there?.. well, it doesn't matter... then there is our galaxy, the milky way, and then.. well there are stars, galaxies are made of stars, and the planets, which orbit, and the moons, and the other stuff, well, all the other stuff that also orbit the sun and... then we reach our planet, Earth, and we keep getting closer and we see, well.. we see cities.. yes, one could see the larger cities.. until we reach to... well here, why not.. yes, until we reach to here, where I am writing without many ideas and then.. well I suddenly come up with this great idea.. and in a frenzy of words I write in a single paragraph all the things as they come to my mind.

And... then? What happens then? The obvious thing would be to start writing the story, about the universe and all that, right? But.. I don't know.. I have the feeling that... the story is already written. You have already read it, didn't you? But then... I? Who am I? A character of the story? Product of my own imagination?

2 comentarios:

Linda dijo...

Vi el titulo y pense en La Historia Sin Fin (el medallon en particular :)). Me recordo tambien a un cuento de Asimov, que tiene un caracter similar...luego te mando el titulo, porque viene en una de sus colecciones de cuentos sobre Robots, pero felicidades, tu cuento esta muy bien logrado!!!

Juan dijo...

Wow. Conozco a muy pocas personas que conocen el significado de la palabra Ouroboros. Pero que bueno que te gustó el cuento. :-)

Oye y sip, pásame el título del cuento de Asimov. Por ahí tengo el librito con varios de sus cuentos, pero por una u otra cosa, no los he terminado de leer todos.

Saludos!