On the Cultural Distinctiveness of Rocks
(original script I was reading from follows; this time, it's just a story, and not the other stuff.)
So I’m watching Deep Space Nine with my friend and I have to stop like ten seconds in to tell this story.
I don’t know if you’ve seen it. It’s pretty deep, you know, and a lot of people don’t like deep fiction. But it all starts, it all begins, in the credit sequence there, with this rock.
This rock, surrounded by a nebulous aura of importance, flying through the void.
I’m kind of assuming there’s gonna be nine of them. I don’t know for sure. Nine rocks, out there in space, and they’ve got this whole multi-season show about them. Q probably shows up at some point to make fun of rocks. The Borg attack. They add the cultural distinctiveness of the rocks onto their own. That’s why there are nine Borg, later, and how we get seven of nine of them on Voyager.
I think.
It’s still the credit sequence so I don’t know for sure.
But I wanted to tell you what I think will be the story of the rock.
I think that it’s a rock that got cursed, really early on. The youngest rock of nine rock brothers and sisters. Siblings, I guess. A lot of rocks are nonbinary even if they don’t bother putting it on their forms.
It was told, you will love fiercely, but you will ruin what you love.
It lived its life in fear of that dreadful prophecy. But as bad as it was, it still had to live.
For a rock in space, that meant ... to fly through space. To journey ever onwards through the so-called “final frontier.”
That rock flew by some planet once.
There was a prince who lived there, handsome and noble, and he saw that rock, and he fell in love. He chased that rock across the world, climbed the highest mountain in the world, to get a little closer to that rock.
And it just flew by.
It loved him too, I think. But it was afraid. It was afraid to love, when the love of that rock was dread and ruin.
The prince shouted up, after that rock:
“If you’re being compelled ...”
If you’re being compelled, he tried to say. If you leave, not by your will, but by some other’s ...
Then tell me, and I will chase you to the farthest stars.
But the rock did not reply; did not name some wizard or monster that compelled it. It whispered, perhaps, of things like gravity and momentum.
It remembered, not quite aloud, how it was its nature to whip around a star, to grow close and then grow far. To fall ever inwards towards the day, like any Icarus; to fall outwards, like the sunset, after, to the endless night.
We’re all just prisoners of gravity and momentum, in the end.
The prince in his heart he heard these words. He raged against them.
But gravity and momentum are pretty hard to kill.
He got momentum, I think. Left it bleeding on the battlefield.
Gravity was harder.
Down, down, he went, into the depths of his forsaken world; found at its molten core the citadel in which King Gravity was said to dwell; and there the gravity of his business slew him, and piled him up with the other princes, stacked like cordwood, that the divine right that lives in princes could be burned as fuel to keep the principle of gravity alive.
Physicists don’t like to talk about this. But they’ll admit it, if you know.
At least they don’t have a much better explanation of why gravity endures when it’s burning energy every moment of every day across the vastness of the stars.
And the rock flew on.
There were dolphins, I think. Space dolphins. They swam beside the rock a while, shimmering and silver in the night. They sang to it, and it echoed back their song.
It loved them, too, but it did not speak to them of love.
It shed its rocky skin, and swam beside them in a dolphin’s form, surrounded in a shimmering of starry light.
But one by one they died.
And they had children, but their children died.
And their children, and their children, on to the uttermost generations of their line.
And in the end there was just one dolphin left, that swam beside the rock. That tried to mate with the rock, but failed, on account of, it was a rock.
And then it died, and the rock flew on alone.
It curled itself around its grief. It balled up like an armadillo balls. It was a thing of grief and sorrow but even good kids when they told its story later would crack up about the armadillo balls.
Thus with every tragedy, I think, involving balls.
It curled itself up, wrapped around its endless sorrow, and the rock flew on.
One day, I think, the rock saw a distant star, and it knew, this was the one.
It saw the star and it was rapt with love, caught in the brilliance and the beauty and the gravitational well around that star. And it saw, like the jaws of a wolf that closed around it, the doom it had been given drawing near.
It would strike that star. If it was lucky, it would burn up inside it. It would die, and the star would scream in grief.
If it was not lucky, then the star would not survive, and the rock—
That had always survived; that had always been the last thing to survive, long after princes and dolphins and other things had died—
Would fly on, outwards, into space.
That’s the story of Deep Space Nine, I think.
That’s the fundamental tragedy of it, how we can’t stop that kind of thing. How rocks just sometimes fly into the stars and all things end.
This is, I think, a world driven by catastrophes. A world of death and endings. A world where the most fundamental forces are so very cruel.
In this, I think, the writers of Deep Space Nine must have agreed.
They would have wept to see the rock approach that star, knowing what was to come.
It is a dark and empty world, you see, and even the television of the ... what, 90s, was it? Had no choice but to face, to accept, that fundamental truth. There is no going forward. There is no prospect of redemption. There is no love save love that leads to ruin, and even gravity shall be our foe.
The rock flew on; drew ever closer to the star; and the people of the planets of that star were struck by fear, struck with it like pain in their abdomen, their heart, their throat, their mind. They stood in the grip of that pain, and it contorted them.
If I believed in eucatastrophe, still. If I believed in miracles, and magic, then I would say it circled round that star.
I would say that gravity, that had always been so impersonal and never kind, seized up the rock as it drew in closer. Caught it, in its hand, as the rock brushed past the star, and whirled it round, and cast it out again into the endless void. That ballistics, which has always been so cruel, was this once kind.
But we all know what really happens with rocks and stars.
We all know that falling towards a star is just an ending; that it’s laughable to imagine that King Gravity would ever throw two things apart.
Even the physicists will admit this, if you ask them. Probably. I think. I haven’t asked.
That’s the utter emptiness of space, you know. That’s the message of Deep Space Nine. The rock will strike the star, and all things end.
IMPORTANT UPDATE: I watched a little more and I was wrong.
