It was eleven thirty in the morning and Carl still hadn’t gone to bed because he’d been conquering the universe.
God knows it had taken too much effort already. He couldn’t afford to stop now.
He’d tried it dozens of ways.
At first Carl had been subtle. He’d tried to establish bare facts.
“I am in charge,” he told the universe. “Me!” he shouted. “Look at the capacity of my braincase! Look at the bumps on my skull! Look at the dexterity of my fingers! Look at the shape of my face! This constitutes my authority.”
Then he’d gotten really cunning, and had appealed to simple logic and rationality.
“I have personally built a coat rack,” he told the universe. “My father couldn’t afford a coat. Therefore, you haven’t got a prayer. Tomorrow I’ll seize you. I’ll take all that’s in you, and I’ll have it, and it will be mine. It’s inevitable.”
Finally, he’d gotten down to brass tacks.
“I, personally, unlike everyone else that’s ever lived, am definitely going to live forever and see my legacy expressed as I see fit,” he told the universe.
Surprisingly, the universe had not responded to his arguments, despite the fact that so many of his facts were totally correct and therefore his conclusions were unavoidable. So there Carl sat, on his roof, staring up at a sky that had possessed the indecency to take away its romantic (in an adventurous sense! Not in any way connected to anything as messy and unscientific as feelings, sociology, hormones, or the anatomy of the human brain) blanket of bright stars on black space for a bland blue sky with tufts of cloud.
“Fuck you,” he told the sky. “Get out of it. Bring back the universe. The universe is outer space, you’re just trying to hide it from me. The universe is mine, and you’re trying to keep it from me. I KNOW YOUR TRICKS.”
The sky didn’t answer him either, not even when he threw his bottle at it.
This was, of course, not the beginning of the whole problem. It had been brewing for years.
It was the universe’s fault. It had definitely promised Carl things, things which it had brutally, painfully failed to uphold – nah, reneged upon utterly!
And they had been such wonderful things. The most wonderful things of all.
Flight! He would soar, he had been told, he was very sure. If not himself, then his car; if not his car; then his species. All of them. Gloriously, eternally, entirely. Everything would fly to all ends of all places forever, and ever.
Prosperity! Everywhere he voyaged, all things would be his, or if not his, used to make something that was, which was useful, and practical, and satisfying. This would be the most beautiful thing of all, and actually useful which beautiful things weren’t so there.
War! In the path of Man – his path – there would be honest, uncompromising, and utterly inferior enemies who would be mulched in a straightforward test of strengths in which they would inevitably come up wanting, unless they sneakily attempted to triumph by means of deceit in which case they would learn that Man was not only a violent animal but the smartest one, and also the best, at everything, consistently and comfortably. It would be good and wholesome, and build character for the young men.
And finally….freedom. He, and every other Man worthy of the title, would do exactly as they wanted and bow to no one and organize themselves according to common sense and the laws of nature as their common sense understood them. They would all agree on these things all the time.
Those were the wonderful things that had been promised to Carl of the universe, and he was pretty pissed that it had welched so thoroughly on him. It hadn’t written him; it hadn’t called; it hadn’t even let him out of low earth orbit for decades. He’d been used in a most outrageous and unseemly way, and he couldn’t believe the universe had the gall to pretend this was permissible or acceptable behaviour.
Sitting there, on his roof, with his beer, without a prayer, Carl tried to remember what his father had told him. Or some assertive older man with a command of orbital physics, which was close enough. It had been a long time, but he recalled something about hard work and determination and maybe apple pie for some reason.
Carl closed his eyes. He gritted his teeth. And he reached out, out into that uncaring universe, grabbed it in fistfuls, wrenched it to him.
Then he opened his eyes and realized he’d almost fallen off the roof and the universe he thought he’d grabbed was actually just boring ol’ air. Instead, the universe was still above him, hiding. Laughing. Flaunting its impossibility in his face. The conniving tart.
It wasn’t right. It wasn’t real, but it was still there. An unconquered universe, and Carl without so much as a sword to pillage with.
There must be a way. There had to be a way. But there wasn’t a way, not in all the sky he stared at. He’d wheeled, he’d proclaimed, he’d coaxed, he’d threatened, he’d even pulled out his calculator and done some basic mathematics on it, proving at a single stroke both his utter mastery of the invisible magic that ruled all interactions of matter and his infinite creativity.
Nothing.
Which, in a tiny part of his mind, was what he was beginning to suspect the universe actually was, by volume.
God he hated that nagging thought. It was not only absolutely irrelevant and entirely unconnected to his extremely coherent worldview, it ascribed unnecessary importance to Earth, which was the opposite of the universe. Earth was tiny, squalid, and frivolous. It spent zillions and zillions of atoms every year on entirely useless things like plants, animals, and geography, when if it was halfway practical and sensible it would be building spaceships and large, sentient computers. And it did it all through some kind of random willy-nilliness.
Not like the universe. The universe was cold and pure and pristine and worked in perfect math and everything happened for a reason out there which was why he was tremendously disappointed in it for ignoring him for no reason at all.
“YOU’LL DO WHAT I SAY!” he yelled. He threw his bottle at it, but he’d already done that five minutes earlier and ended up throwing his suntan lotion at it instead. “I WAS PROMISED AN ORBITAL HABITAT AND MINERS IN ASTEROID BELTS! I WAS PROMISED BUSSARD RAMJETS TURNING STRAY HYDROGEN INTO THRUST! I WAS PROMISED SOME KIND OF PROTECTION FROM COSMIC RADIATION AND I WAS PROMISED I’D LIVE TO SEE IT ALL HAPPEN! YOU OWE ME, GIVE IT TO ME NOW!”
An awful lack of silence descended.
It was filled with sound carried by air, with annoying insects and birds and dogs and neighbours being inconsiderate and people calling the police and the stink and stir of that smallest of things next to the universe: a planet.
Carl felt himself going mad from the inside out. But as he opened his mouth to scream, filled with awful, awful atmosphere, a light turned on inside him.
Ah. Of course.
How had he missed it? Naturally, as the universe hadn’t responded to him, it was proof that it agreed with him. His case had been made and he was right. Now that his claim for the universe was acknowledged, all he had to do was conquer.
Patting himself on the back (carefully, with stiff joints), Carl climbed in his bedroom window, walked downstairs to his computer, booted up his obsolete operating system, and carefully began to type.
Naturally, it is in the nature of Man to expand, by force if necessary, and so, it is equally true, that Man shall expand until the Universe is His. Quod era demonstratum.
“Done,” he said.
And then he had another bottle, and saw the man jump over the moon.