Eternals: The Unmaking of Heaven

By Sam Smith

This is what reviewer Anthony Lund made of 'Eternals'. “The unMaking of Heaven is the equivalent of an album’s title track, giving the series its title and bringing the saga to a conclusion in three separate threads covering the missing history of Space, events that have just passed and a 1st person narrative taken from the memory files of an AI robot called the Shining Knight. With hints of a future where machines have dominated life. Like a collision of tribes, the final showdown between the Shining Knight and other machines that have been deemed Abominations by themselves and set out on a self destructive mission that could almost be related to Civil War, the final connecting of the three separate story strands brings the story to a satisfying conclusion. The final book does require a little more concentration that the previous books due to the scope and expanse of the time frames it constantly interchanges, but overall the effort is more than worth it to unlock the final pieces of this awe-inspiring multi-layered novel.
Towards the unMaking of Heaven is one of the most intricate and ambitious science fiction books that I have read in recent years, and in almost all areas it pulls off being incredibly detailed and “Sci-Fi geekish” while having a page turning quality that draws the reader in and pushes them to learn more of this new creation, this new mythos almost.
For lovers of Sci-Fi, this is a book that I would recommend beyond doubt. For everyone else I would still recommend the book, as the novels are written in a way that does not seem like Science Fiction reading, and does not bombard the uninitiated with continued references to warp drives, technical matrix networks of planets and galaxies, or DNA inspections into the genes and genetics of its creations. Instead this is science fiction with a mainstream approach, satisfying Sci-Fi buffs but not alienating others.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sam Smith
• Release date: Jul 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005000325

Book preview

Book 5

the unMaking of Heaven

Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke. Hermann Hesse

Chapter One: The Recent Present

awaking

According to the absurdist laws of a ludicrous cosmology, facts persist, self-generated dreams do not. Such dreams own only a fading reality. Certainly some dreams may have a startling impact: they can, though, be all but wholly forgotten a sleep later.

I was dreaming. Was I?

Something is quickening me awake. Something new. Some thing strange. I can, though, sense nothing new, no obvious change.

Is this simply the residual disquiet of a dream buried already in the depths of sleep?

Those who depend for their continuing survival on camouflage stay still.

By any means, at whatever cost, the prime objective of any living, going-on-living entity is survival. And when one is unarmed, and lothe anyway to be as violent as one's aggressors, the first line of defence has to be camouflage, to not be seen by one's enemy. Which entire strategy depends on what one imagines one's enemy to be seeing; or smelling, or touching, or feeling, or thinking. To remain in hiding, therefore, one may have to change according to what one is imagining. The very act of changing, though, can betray one's vulnerable presence.

I was still.

Had I been asleep? Dreaming? Or had I, awake, drifted off on a fantasy float? That part puzzle started to take me back into myself.

Still my mind was urging me awake, to take notice.

But of what?

My senses tell me that I am awake. Awake to life. And life, this life, cannot be a dream, because in a dream there is no worry. In a dream there can be dread; and there can be fear, and fright enough to bring one awake. But not worry. Not this rotating about itself unfocussed anxiety — something forgotten? Something overlooked? Either of which might require action, for which being awake is required.

I am still.

My memory thoughts, inasmuch as they are conscious thinking, want to revert to meandering conjecture. To become invisible took me such a long time. I succeeded, though, and to such an extent that, emotionally, I believe that I have suffered from that very invisibility.

Of course, invisibility being my prime objective, at first my sense of humour found great delight in practical jokes — on some biological humans — as well as in the sly pleasure of eavesdropping upon my passing contemporaries. Until I grew tired of being overlooked, and became unreasonably hurt at being always ignored. And just as soon as reassured of the safety and security of my unseen presence...

Such a two-edged invisible state of existence became essential to my shutdown survival. Even when it was I, and only I, who had apparently survived.

Somnolent, introspective, I am alone. Or am I? What had caused that small rhythm-catch of arousal?

Something?

What?

Anything?

In this mutable multiverse nothing is fixed and forever. Even nothing is a variable quality and quantity depending upon perspective. (Many had looked for me, had looked at me, and had seen nothing.)

These memory thoughts, in so far as they are conscious thinking, are again edging back towards meandering conjecture. Something though, some thing won't let them...

Telling myself to come fully awake, and listening to myself give the instruction, I then ask What is here? What is new? What is different?

What was when? Elsewhere?

No elsewhere. To inhabit the same place for aeons on end is to have no easy demarcation to one's history, no change of scene with which to categories time's events.

Let me be specific. Here, now, is a land of high mountains and deep wide valleys. Streams gush white down black cliffs to form broad brown rivers, which flow into huge blue lakes, which in turn overflow into broader rives, which find their slow ways eventually to the wave-speckled oceans, which are edged, again, by high dark cliffs. Cold winds drop off the mountains and eddy around the corners of the few stone-built houses.

A young planet, one still in its first flush of greenery, its mountain peaks yet sharp and largely uneroded. The houses are all empty. In its night skies the star configurations are all as they were the last time I looked.

But something, some thing, someone, is calling me awake.

Chapter Two: A History

For those who may come after I had best explain where we were before death's rebirth.

2.i) The Need for a Record

When death was reinvented, and the I that I am realised an end to everything — to everything that was happening, had happened, that what was I would end — when I saw that, with the return of death, the whole had the shape of a story, that was when I decided that, if I should survive, then I would become a record keeper of my time. Of what I can remember of my time.

No. That last is inaccurate; and record keepers must, as befits their role, be accurate.

I have the memory of it all. Every detail. What I lack, what I am not always certain of, especially with events repeated and memory laid over/under memory, is sequence.

When one has come to believe one's existence infinite, when one has inhabited a multiverse populated by concepts occasionally made concrete, and by abstractions as tenuous as unfulfilled plans, memories of things actual can seem as remote as dreams. The measurement of time, or the use of relative time as a measurement can therefore come to seem of minor import.

I tell myself that I will have to be aware that I am making a linguistic record for minds that, in all probability, will not be mechanically enhanced and who will be reliant entirely on their own organic perception plus aptitude.

I began this section by acknowledging the likelihood of an end. Tales, though, need beginnings as well as endings. And there are so very many beginnings. Especially in a part-imagined and conceptualised past such as mine. And, within the topography of my time, of my multiverse, I am both part and whole.

Does that make sense?

No?

Let us come to the recent present as an example. I was in hiding for so very long. Part of the necessity of that effective hiding was that the multiverse was hidden from me lest what I saw/heard/detected stimulate me into disclosing my hiding place.

Have I told you this before?

'Before' — now that definitely belongs in record-keeping. I need only check.

Yes. I, record-keeper, have a record to consult now. And I am going to leave this record as hard copy. Because you, if primitive, may not even know what a machine code is, let alone possess a machine capable of decoding it. I will leave you, therefore, hard copy capable of decipherment/translation/interpretation.

Back to the recent present.

Something — some thing attuned to my near-dormant sensory preceptors — brought me out of hiding. Albeit cautiously. The summation of the events that followed are what eventually had me commence this record.

But that, again, is now. You stranger, witness to my witnessing, require a chronology of sorts.

What beginning?

That beginning must be the reason that I decided to make this story. That beginning must be the reinvention of death.

Yet, to be exact, that beginning was more than death itself, than death as a concept. It was the living fear, new-born, of extermination. I, as I, as an independent conscious entity, was in all likelihood going to cease, to not be, to be no more, to end. And that was my beginning.

2.ii) Filastre

First, though, I feel compelled to tell you about Filastre. Such was the impact that horrible event had on me that all else seems to rotate around it.

Filastre's own story has a beginning. Filastre came here, in all his magnificence, and made a gift of his presence.

Filastre had made himself huge, had composed himself of a myriad glittering fragments. From whatever angle one looked at him, Filastre towered up through the clouds. Seemingly rectangular, he appeared to float upon whatever land surface he was over. Grass nor trees were disturbed by his presence. He did, however, confuse the small insects; and he certainly disturbed those birds whose aerial territory he occupied. Although the smaller birds could, and did, fly warily through him.

For all that it wasn't his dimensions that had one lost in wonder and admiration, but the living construct. Filastre's every thought, no matter how inane or commonsensical, set in motion twinkling shards of himself — with each shard, depending on the properties of its own construction, taking the light from our sun and, reflecting that light mirrored surface to refracting facet, each sliver being broken into its constituent shades — one then beheld it disappearing in subtly changing shimmers to deep within him.

Even in planetary night Filastre, lightly silvered by the distant stars, contrived to entertain, to inspire. His autonomous systems, oscillating Mbranes, self-adjusting, generated their own soft colours in a ripple here, a slow rhythmic pulse there... With each movement, day or night, being accompanied by a mind-music more suspected than heard.

At times this music of Filastre's was the seemingly appropriate aural/visual shivering tinkle of falling crystals. At others, when for instance he might strike a philosophical posture, it was the barren lament of a desert wind through hollow rocks. It was, however, a music, whatever its emotional/intellectual source, that didn't irritate, that settled somewhere at the back of consciousness, that intruded enough only to make one glance to Filastre's heights — to see now what bright/dark corruscations were frizzing through him or shimmying over him.

And to converse with Filastre... Yes. To see Filastre become excited by the talk, to blink (metaphorically) at the flash and glint of his ideas; and to lean back from (so to speak) his big, happy, sonorous booms; to be entranced by the spangling vortex of an idea that was absorbing him; to watch it sink into a meditative glow, a sheen of near contentment, to be broken by the whistle and fizzle of a new thought. And, later, when news of killings, when death re-entered our lives, the flickering away, fading sighs of our shared sadness.

Filastre came here to me because he needed the planet-filtered light of our sun to show himself to his best advantage. His being here pleased us all. Some came here just to be near him. And now he has gone.

Ah, Filastre, I miss you... Because this is what I have to tell you, you who are reading this. They came.

They came, having made themselves into the painted stereotypes of savages, their self-made bodies and armour adorned with the pieces of those they had already destroyed.

They came. They saw Filastre (how could they miss him?); and, whooping and laughing, and with weapons concocted from some planet's prehistory, with much smoke and clatter, they wantonly destroyed Filastre. Filastre who had taken centuries in the construction of himself, tweaking a metalled mirror here, tuning an assonance there, creating inter-reactive morphic crystal fields with ever-increasing complexity, delighting in the new and wanting only to display it for the pleasure of others... Ah, Filastre...

They came. The nouveau vandals came, and they destroyed Filastre forever. And they thought well of themselves, bearing away shining parts of him as trophy.

2.iii) Truth, death, false death & Braka

We, who are a part of it, have always seen our own civilisation — no matter at what stage that civilisation might be — as being under threat. And we here, the ultimate civilisation, are under the ultimate threat.

Being the ultimate how do I describe us to you who are not? How do I make us simple enough for you to comprehend — you who I do not know and who as yet know nothing of me. I feel that I must create mental edifices for you, a virtual city here, a supposed stellar system there, and people both with recognisable stereotypes... Yet I am chary of analogies, lest the comprehensible be mistaken for the actual.

Truth untarnished by imagination, truth undiluted by supposition, truth unadorned with pleasing imagery... We, who dwell in the mind, demand truth as the first law. We, of the imagination; we, the self-imagined, demand the actual, else all that we build on is false, and we ourselves become false.

We, each in our own way, although each of us was/is/are wholly artificial, we were truth; in that, if nothing else, we were true to our creative impulses. Death came as a destroying force. Not — as they bombastically claimed — as truth to our lie, not as fact to our fiction, not as hard-edged reality to our fuzzy fantasies... I am truth. Truth is my best camouflage. And truth is circular, a vortex feeding on/off itself. Truth, too, is very often invisible, is looked through, beyond, has to be focused on. I could have easily stayed here, in full view, hidden from you.

In that case how, in language, here, do I make you, the communicant, identify with an entity who has no instantly discernible face (features, yes, but they can be changed), nor overarching identity?

Although we think that we act with knowledge, out of knowledge (you, too, who are reading this), mostly we are blind to our present. Often it is only with hindsight that we can see what was being done to us or what we ourselves were truly doing,.

The words 'present' and 'hindsight' carry their own cautionary load. In the telling of this I am going to have to assume that you, across space and time, along with the other participants, share a chronology, a comprehension of sequence regardless of time differences. (My apologies if, in this attempt at simplification/explanation, I have already confused you.)

I, singular, will record this as if narrative.

I, singular, unmet, can only ever be a concept to you.

'We' can have no useful meaning here. 'We' cannot be a construct encompassing you and I. I cannot know you. My I you can only guess at, albeit that it will be an educated guess according to the education I give you here.

Any reference to 'we', therefore, cannot be considered normative in intent. We, you and I, are apart and unknowable.

One prime difficulty, in the telling of this, is in how we — we who were here — we so often remodelled, remade and rethought ourselves, the making past being destroyed along with our many previous identities. So had repetition, even replication, of our selves in that past become a real possibility, and a fear.

Who were we? Are we?

I doubt that we, our inner selves, were/are that much different to you, curious, reading this.

All intelligent life is the garnering of experience, plus the making of decisions based on that experience, which becomes the experience, along with the worry of forgetting, of overlooking, of wilfully ignoring and repeating the experience... When faced with the necessity of making a decision we never have the knowledge we feel we need. So we often make mistakes, which becomes our experience — the experiences on which we predicate our future. The wholly unexpected, however, forces on us new mistakes, new experiences.

Until I came to write this I did not,