ʜᴏᴛ ʙʟᴜᴇ, ᴄᴏʟᴅ ʀᴇᴅ

[altiora]

hot blue, cold red

Name: Genesis (nickname: Xivi)

abiogenesis by carbon based lifeforms
please listen while reading

all art pieces by yours truly
[~2500 words]

[altiora]

//☆════ ⋆★⋆ ════☆

'I woke up disoriented on the first day in a small rundown hospital, confused and cold. Kind nurses gave me a blanket as I couldn't stop shivering, and small clips to keep my hair out my face.'

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You still find it hard to hold their faces in your memory. You look at them - their eyes staring deep into your own, so bold you could fall straight through their depths - and you don't know if you've ever seen so many colours before. You didn't even know that they existed. But then you look away, and their image fades, ghostlike; but it leaves a residue of swirling colour on your eyelids, hypnotising and soothing.

You can't understand them. You can't get any further than their language, which comes to your tongue eager but soulless, lacking important subtext which leaves you driftless in the wake of anything other than the most basic of exchanges. Their emotions are indecipherable, the changes of pitch in their voices an impossible puzzle. They move in a chaotic order, a movement driven by unknown causes with unknown consequences. You are, in both a literal and metaphorical sense, an alien.

You're told the face-blindness has a name, prosopagnosia, but once the doctor was out of sight the words slipped from your mind until you were stuttering frantically in an attempt to remember something important, what was it, what was it? Too complex, too long, too much, so much all the time - you felt humiliated at your shortcomings.

They are so kind to you, regardless. They keep giving, and you have to keep taking. You have nothing, not even a name, to give back to them.
★

[altiora]

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Time passed. Weeks. Or was it months? One of their seasons, a curious thing called winter, entered your life gently - then with a harsh and unstoppable speed. It would bring a gift; a memory that returned with the same ferocity as the cold snap.

Snow. This is how it started. This was snow, they had explained to you. This is water so cold it solidifies, they said, and you were astounded at its existence. Despite its disconcerting familiarity, you were sure you had never seen such a thing. It was so gentle, so soft and peaceful, though you found a fear inside you every time you accidentally looked outside.
★

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You were struggling. You had problems. It was hard to cope with being so different, no matter how compassionate this world was. It was hard to cope with the number of people around you and the noise they make, and how your senses turned against you and noise became pain and sights became overwhelming, and how sometimes you couldn't talk even when you wanted to. Even as you grew used to this world, even in your growing fond familiarity, you felt such a paradoxical disconnection and belonging. You wanted to scream, yet you found no mouth to scream with.

Instead, you learnt how to smile. You learnt how a smile looks upon the faces of those around you.

You didn't want to smile. You didn't know how to stop.

It was a harsh feeling inside of you, that kept building and building. It came to a crest one night as you found yourself watching the snow outside. It terrified you.

It was a horror that was almost satisfying to feel, against the softness and confusion of your current existence - a shining, blinding light in dull pacifying darkness. And it made you realise, you couldn't take it any longer. That feeling built to a crest, to a wave, and it washed over you and you needed something.
you had to get away.

You stepped outside -
★

[altiora]

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Slow, soft drifts of snow. Gentle winds. They caressed your face with apathetic care, an absentminded hand that held affection and freezing cold in equal measure. That growing feeling inside you didn't abate, but you felt it shift as you stepped into the fierce yellow lights - like something cracking, and moving. Something great and immovable, moving. Like an iceberg cracking and moaning, as you had read about; large crystal structures, so familiar and novel.

The world was transformed. A monochrome blanket of snow and slush. Air that froze in your throat and nostrils. Eyes that kept blinking, misting up, crying - seeing snowflakes and yellow lights that stole the stars away and made you so, so lonely.

And you were on the edge of a knife. You stepped further into the pathway, onto the crackle (snap) of snow as the ice (glass) under your paws, and you slipped on the knife and you were-
★

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-suddenly back home. The falling shards were calm and deceptively soft, glimmering in the dull blue light, and it had been the first time you had ever seen it like this. Usually, the wind was sharp. And when it rained, the shards blew maliciously across the land, so fierce and fast it was if gravity itself had fallen to its side, and dragged the shards until they were glinting horizontal lines creating a living image of the wind, looking all the while like falling stars that were desperate to reach a ground that they could not touch.

(They could cut like knives, something said to you, a small reflective inner voice that still partly resided present, but you were too deep in another time. A different time, without knives or faces or snow.)

Didn't you dare to step forward that day? You dared to put one paw in front of the other, and the shimmering powder supported your callused paws. Rough, like sandpaper. Soft, like sand. (Frightening, like snow. Snapping, like ice.) You wanted to see what everything looked like in this world, your world, turned gentle and unfamiliar. You walked forward.

Crystalline structures, sharp spikes with a trailing edge, mattified and rough by the usual shard-full winds. For something so dangerous, the rains were the architects of such wonderful creations. The structures captured the faint light, and held it until they glowed. They held the light, and they guided the light through them, focused to a blinding beam of light. You used the structures to navigate; you knew every projection and reflection and bleeding sharp spire that spun from the ground - and though you didn't know this new mood of the place you called home, you still knew where you were. This was simply a new perspective, a new love and adoration to hold.


You loved the light. You loved how it was captured, and how it was guided. And most of all, you loved the potential it holds. The potential for life.
★

[altiora]

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You had discovered in your youth, the facts of your creation.
And here once more, in this new-old world, you could imagine.

Your planet had an unusual relationship with light. Everything reflected, refracted, and it could be resolved into a single, focused point. And occasionally this point would burst into flames, and the flames would burn and burn and burn. They would burn for many rains, and long silences, and through this rare stillness where the rains become safe in an unforgettable moment.

You knew the secrets behind these flames. You knew how your planet held onto light and sound and emotion and everything until it burst into something else. Into something beautiful. Into life.
★

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You were consumed with love.

The planet held, in arms so dangerous that they would cut you into magenta droplets, held the collection of thought and ideas and life that would combine into something so wonderful, the culmination of life itself. The crystals focused all, birthed from blue fire into a blue world of shadows.

They were rare - so rare - and you rarely encountered them after their hatching from the flames. You knew this is where you came from. And you knew you came from More. That something was taken, and bounced from one crystal to another, a light holding information in its warmth, that built and built in a recursive reframing until flame burned and you Became.
★

[altiora]

★

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It seemed cold to them, your land, despite its oppressive heat. They asked if you were lonely, and you replied that loneliness didn't exist until you had something to miss. They asked if you wanted to go back home, and you said that you didn't even know where home was, so how could you go back to it? They said you misunderstood. They asked, "do you miss it?"

You didn't know how to answer, so you didn't answer at all.

But you had to explain, you had to convince them. When the snow melted, and one season slipped into the next, your mind started to align once more and you had to tell them. You had to make them understand.

"Your sunsets are lacklustre," you began with a haltering breath. For on your planet, you could walk to the edge of the world; marked by the horizon that glowed. The world was bordered by a wall of heat until the floor itself melted and your fur charred and smoked. The wind would be your enemy, pushing you backwards. But, one day, so long ago, you lifted your chin and walked through it, refusing to be trapped. You were scared - (aren't you always scared?) - but you were in love with your world, and desired to see all corners of it, even the most foreboding and painful. You marched forwards, into the searing pressure, until you reached the sky alight with flames: a brilliant red world, painting the sky in violent violet and blessing the liquid ground with iridescent rainbows.
★

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-"and your oceans are timid," you continued with shy and lowered eyes. Because on the planet you love, you would walk. Walk into the darkness, step by step. The wind would be your friend, pushing you onwards, deep and down and into the depths, until the dark holds a pressure that feels like comfort.

Until you hear the difference in the wind. and feel the difference on the ground. And the fog would thicken and thicken in your lungs and bead upon your fur.

Then, with a dash of luck, the air would clear the fog and reveal all.

The cold ocean, the small and delicate life that exists on your planet of knives. Waves of all shades of blue, and the littlest creatures that burn so brightly. And in the sky, and the eternal battle that rages in the vast above. Throughout it all, a cold so cold it burns.
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But cold is relative. Their ocean doesn't even steam, and you worry that if you stepped into it you would become a different entity in its absolute chill, like water becomes ice. Their yellow sun circles their planet like an eye that blinks, void of any planetary rings that might provide some shelter from its gaze and searing rays.

In the end, your blues are hot to them, and their reds are so cold.

You don't fit in here, despite their best efforts.
You know you must return, and when you tell them so, they nod and understand.
★

[altiora]

★

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They discovered your planet, through the clues of your memory.

The ever-present sunset, unmoving and frozen in time: the winds that rush from the dayside to the nightside: the goldilock zone of comfort between heat and cold - all indications of a tidally locked planet.
The knife-like snow and their crystalline structures, revealed to be glass; pointing to a planet of extraordinary heat and a high silicon atmosphere. The ocean similar to our own, that steams into fog like saunas; hinting to the presence oxygen, supporting bioluminescent forms of micro bacterial life.
The entire composition of the planet indicating the colouration of a deep cobalt blue.

The first hit was a miss. A planet that matched most of this criteria was the planet of HD 189733 b. It rained glass (albeit it being molten), which was pushed to the other side of the planet due to the harsh winds directed by day to night heat transference. It was a lovely, beautiful blue. The only issue - it was a gas giant, with too much heat for any sort of ocean or life.

This planet provided more answers, even if it wasn't what they were after. The foggy atmosphere - everything slowly connected to a singular picture. More planets, more questions, more hints to the history of the planet. A portfolio slowly built. They realised what they were looking for

A gas giant, that had strayed too near to the sun, and had its atmosphere mostly ripped away. A collision, freeing the planet from its destructive orbit; leaving behind a rocky core, and enough gas to create an atmosphere. Eventually, it becomes layered, and expells heat and reflects their suns radiation. Hot enough to create glass from silica; cool enough for it to solidify like water to snow as it reaches the cooler night side on the back of the wind. The remains of the collision, creating a disc around the planet.

A recently discovered and largely unknown planet, found by an exploratory Terran space probe. A spacecraft holding the kalon language and physiology, knowledge and stories and dreams and information, that was thought to have been caught in the gravity pull of the last planet it had caught a glimpse of...

And perhaps this planet had crystals. The steady build-up of crystals of glass and silicone and other unknown substances, that captured light, reflected and guided light, built and played with light, played with light and thoughts and emotion and knowledge, until it focused. Until it Became.

It's called abiogenesis; life arising from non-living matter. New life through glass and fire.
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Leaving was bittersweet. You were born of this place; from the life inside every kalon; from every story in their hearts; from every discovery they made that allowed them to send of the probe - named xii.vii.GYR, nickname Genesis - that had been pulled towards your planet. It provided the necessary materials that gave you life - and its final destination would provide the address to your home, to be programmed into your ship. Before you left, you took your name from your origin. Xiiviii Gyr Genesis would do, you thought - but then the nurses that had been so compassionate had said, with a sad smile, "that's a bit of a mouthful, how about Xivi?"
You nodded slowly. Xivi Genesis.


Their parting gift was a name. Your parting gift was tears that came unbidden from tear ducts you didn't realise you had.

There would be no suitable ending to this story because things never end, they only change. You didn't found out how you arrived at earth; maybe one day you would return, to finish this mystery. But as much as it hurt to leave those who helped you recover what you had lost, there was still one more piece of you that you needed to gather, up in the sky.

You left for your ship quickly, unable to say goodbye. One day you might return, when you were ready. One day.


★

[altiora]

Gyr is an abbreviation of giga year, meaning that xii.vii.GYR is another way of saying 13.8 billion years ago - the theorised age of the universe, its genesis. The lyrics in 'abiogenesis' repeat the drake equation, an equation to estimate the chance of finding intelligent life in the universe. Xivi's planet was inspired by this hot Jupiter planet, one of my favourite exoplanets. It was featured on NASA's galaxy of horrors. When a gas giant gets too close to a star, it can become a rocky planet.
While I kept the formation of the planet as scientifically accurate as possible, I used some artistic license on the actual creation of Xivi being that it would be (almost) an impossibility for any separately developing creatures on different planets to be of the same species, especially without identical environments. In case I wasn't as clear as I hoped I was, I'm proposing that Xivi was created from the focus, reflection and distortion of the information within the Genesis probe due to the planets unique properties. How they arrived on earth is an adventure for another time!