Page 16 - Extraterrestrials, Foreign and Domestic

The Cosmic Bore

from the fermentation farm in which they were all employed as
bacterial hosts, invaded the palatial stronghold inside barrels of
pickled produce, with no clear plan other than a fight to the death.
The need to engage in direct combat was obviated, however; an
airborne disease imported by the rebels felled the effete aristocracy
within hours, and the planet was theirs. Valgus Varus soon
established a reign as oppressive and unjust as his predecessor’s—
that much could be read between the lines of shameless boasting
and inflated self-bestowed honorifics polluting the airwaves. He
demanded, and received, total allegiance from everyone. His
nascent megalomania having grown to near-limitless heights,
Valgus Varus began to erect monuments to his glory. To this end
he engaged much of his planet’s resources and brainpower.
As mortality slowly impressed its inexorability upon his minimal
intelligence, he tasked his advisors to find a method of ensuring
his fame forever. They tried to explain the impermanence of all
material objects, how time and space conspired to destroy
everything, even if it took billions of years before the dissolution
occurred.
The despot would not hear of it. The life cycle of his galaxy was
not an insurmountable obstacle: had he not overthrown the
mightiest tyrants in all of history? Was he not the greatest single
figure in the annals of Unog? Undeniably, so the scientists were
sent back to their computers, thinly-veiled threats urging them on
to a solution. At last they presented their plan to Valgus Varus.
Eternal memorialization could only be achieved by means of a
monument capable of escaping from a dying galaxy into others
still young and growing. In theory this could be accomplished
within a reasonable span of time through a wormhole, a
passageway out of one region of spacetime into another. The
intense relativistic distortions defeating such a transit could be
offset with a null-string graviton field generator, a device
considered hypothetical at that time—and unbuilt because of its
cost and the necessity of testing it in the one-way environment of
a black hole.
Valgus Varus evidently approved the project and set about
recording his version of Unog’s recent past for the wandering
cenotaph. The ruler, in his transmission, bragged about the

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