the "How?" (to travel around the Universe and some other things)

Last Monday I met Mr. Mobius again. He looked quite like his old self. His mole had shifted back to the left side of his face. And his squint was back in his left eye instead of his right – which is where it had been the whole of last year.

He shook hands with me, a little disorientedly. “I’ve been using the other one for a whole year,” he said, after mistaking my left for my right.

“That’s not the only thing you’ve been doing that’s strange – ”

Mr. Mobius looked around quickly and then smiled innocently at me.

“Sharp, aren’t you? Was it the mole you noticed? Or the sudden bouts of ambidexterity?”

“Both. Well, specially the mole. You’ve – you’ve changed. Twice in the last year.”

“Not changed, child. Just laterally inverted. Like what happens to you in a mirror.”

All sorts of strange ideas floated around my head.

“You’ve been through a mirror?”

“No,” he said. “Through is difficult. Around – that’s an easier trick. I’ve been around.”

“Around a mirror?”

“Just around the Universe.”

I stared.

“How?”

“In my Expansion Capsule. It uses a plane of relativity where there’s no such thing as the distance around the Universe.”

“So this spaceship – your Expansion Capsule thingy that bends space to nullify distances – ”

“It doesn’t bend space, child. Gravity does that. It just spaces out your molecules so you can become comparable to the size of the Universe – which has a pretty spaced out molecular structure – and you can slide across the gravity curves.”

“…bends space to nullify distances, it – it inverts you?”

“No. It’s just space that does that. The Universe twists before it loops back in on itself. So every time you travel around it – you come back laterally inverted. (And upside down too – but that’s easily corrected in an upside down world.) Your mirror image comes back instead of you. It’s like traveling around a Mobius Strip.”

“Seems to me that you’re the one who twists everytime you travel out there. Not the Universe.”

“That’s it. I’m the man who likes to twist around the farthest reaches of the last collapsible dimension and come back to tell the tale.”

“Also twisting himself a little bit in the process.”

Mr. Mobius smiled his strange lopsided smile and said:

“You look older today, child. You’ve had a long year, too, haven’t you?”

The Which?

Quark A stood on the quivering brink of time and looked around at quark B, whose eyes – well, no, call it consciousness – hovered over the distant horizon of squiggly shapes and colours.
“Is it time?” it asked, the question traveling on invisible matterless waves of the primal ether over to the other quark.
“For what?” Quark B whispered.
Quark A wiggled its eyebrows – very figuratively. The equivalent in the quark world was a series of short continuous waves that would look like an earthworm if someone chalked the waveform on a blackboard before physics class. Or a kitten playing with wool, of course.
“What?” Quark B said.

Good morning reader. This is a hypothesis. It is not real. It is as unreal as the supposition that it is morning – whereas, more likely than not, it is after sunset.

At the dawn of time…there was a light. It wasn’t a light really, more of a Light. And there was an inability to pronounce capital letters. And then there was a need to pronounce capital letters – well, a need to pronounce anything, so that the light could become a light, you know. The need became a Need and manifested itself in matter. And then the fun started. The Light and the matter sent giant waves of improbable instigation towards time and the fun began before the fun began – before there was anyone to say that it had begun – or notice that it had begun.
And chance after chance after chance after chance later, quark A stood on the quivering brink of time and asked quark B a question.
Quark B misread it, as I’m sure did all of us.

The question floated all over the primal ether and burnt into the quantum foam of the brink of time – to be etched there for all eternity – or even a moment, which is the same thing.

Or was it there from before – a question – not The question – the answer to which, as we all know by now, is 42 – but the Question. A hovering uncertainty that doesn’t come from anywhere and doesn’t really go any where but lies dormant and restless in the heart of matter across the multiverse.

An intransitive. Quark A sighed and shook it’s head. It looked at the brink of time – at the edge and beginning and end of history and prehistory and chronicles and timescales – and asked the funny little shapes and loops of colours it could see whether they were time. Time. And they didn’t answer. At least in Quark language.
And Quark B just took the question as another question and paid no further attention. And the question – as with all questions asked at the beginning of cosmic history and cataclysmic follow-ups – stayed there forever, to subconsciously plague all consciousness for all eternity, at least, all eternity before the end of all things. After that, we’re told, things… change.

But which question was it? What is the question buried in the hearts of all consciousness? Is it the eternal Question that asks Time whether it is, in fact, Time? Or is it the more mundane unromantic (even if Quark B didn’t call it that) question that asks the next consciousness whether it is time for the next thing lined up in everyday history to happen?

Which is more important? The transitive or the intransitive? The Light or just the light? The Question or just the question?

Put it this way – an earthworm…or just a kitten playing with wool?

I don’t think anyone except that environmentalist with grubby gloved hands and soil-smeared goggles will differ.

Primal ether did a few more cosmic rifts and catherine wheels and smiled. Quark B edged a little closer to quark A. It was a beautiful brink of time.