and the stars look very different today | stark/strange psl

[industries]

prologue

On March 4th, 2024, a user named Astronautala04 makes a post on Instagram.

"this is CRAZY shit," the caption reads. "spent 3 months taking NASA's raw data on the distribution of galaxy superclusters thru the known universe. applied a grid, assigned x and y values to an audio scale for shits and giggles. listen."

Anyone clicking on the corresponding video sees a white bar slowly cross over a 3D image, overlaid with clouds of green-and-pink pixels. It starts to play noise -- warbled, distorted. At first blush, there's nothing there.

But then the bar crosses over more points in the cloud. Synthesized guitar hits start to play, and it soon becomes clear -- it's AC/DC's "Back in Black."

The video only gets a few thousand views its first week, until the lead singer for the indy band Jill & the Starstrucks retweets it. Then it racks up hits -- hundreds of thousands, then millions, as it migrates from Twitter to BuzzFeed to the mainstream news. It's the first thing in months to rank above hashtags #my5years and #iwasdust.

"Tell us, Cindy," a daytime CNN host talk-laughs, as he turns exactly ninety degrees away from the camera. "This has whipped up quite a frenzy, but -- can it be possible?"

Cindy Justison, paid astronomy expert, shakes her head. "There's no 'up' or 'down' in the universe, Tom. And what's represented in this model is just the sliver we can see, here from Earth. This guy probably messed with settings and perspectives before he got something that happened to be suggestive of a song. Hate to be a--"

"Kind of a downer!"

She laughs. "I'm just giving you the science. Sorry, Tom."

Astronautla04 gains a few thousand followers. There are a couple human interest stories of how he's a college kid, and now has an invitation to work at the big telescopes in Maui. Interest dies down.

A couple months later, a user named PetersonFam423 comments to the original post.

"My daughter showed me this. So cool!!!" it reads. "God is real, and he loves AC/DC."

Comments

like infinitony, i woULD WAIT FOREVER

[industries]

He's not surprised Strange is still afraid, even as he steadies his words and stance. He remembers, in moments, the fleeting emotions of finite beings, though some of them are now too distant to imagine. The idea of feeling threatened, of facing nonexistence -- it's an impossibility to him, nothing but an old memory.

And yet fear is still familiar to him, when so many other things have faded. Fear is what keeps him rooted to this spot, what keeps him speaking to this man despite the distrust, despite the fact that he could be so many other places, times, forms -- could be everywhere, and everything, rather than focused into the the tip of a needle, an infinitesimal moment in a space so small that he hums and vibrates within it.

Fear is still familiar to him, because while he no longer faces nonexistence, there are others who do. Others who mean more than the space between one galaxy and the next, than the dense center of a black hole. Whose faces and lives he has carved into himself for fear of losing them, for fear they may fall from his grasp and be lost among other grains of sand.

Fear that he may lose more than he already has. That he may forget them, and fear nothing at all.

What I am.

"I..."

On the city street, wisps of his presence draw inward.

"I don't know. I need to... remember. So I can go home."

He feels the futility in his words even as they leave him. He knows the end of this path, the chasm he walks. He will never get back what he lost. He will never go home.

But still a voice cries out in him, clutches at sunlight and tries to catch it. He needs to try. Even if it ends in failure and despair, he has to try. He owes them that much -- the grains of sand made of warmth and love. He watches them like he has for years, curled together on a bed, one holding the other, faces lit by photos on a screen. He has to try.

And maybe that's it -- the trying, in the face of inevitability. Maybe that's the part of him still...

"Human."

A hundred eye-like stars rise to meet Strange's gaze, shining from a thousand writhing tendrils of shadow.

"I was human."

GREAT PERFECT thank u infiniterin I hope you will never have to again

[rehandle]

So I can go home.

Stephen stands by, the word home no longer new in this context if no less worthy of note. This great and incalculable danger searches for its truth and his own expression remains impervious in his waiting.

Human.

Impervious until it isn't.

A crack, a muscular tic of the brow. What?

I was human.

The being looks at him with a hundred specs of light and Stephen loses focus.

His mind flies, chasing that impossible word down to its core and out into what he's seeing. Human. How? Human? We've met before. A long time ago. His vision has no strength here but his gaze flits all the same, tries to make sense, hunt for a shape that means anything or a spell that might turn something so terminable into something seemingly infinite and just keeps shuddering into nothing, nothing, finding noth—

The sharp stutter of an inhale marks the moment.

No spell. No spell, of course no spell, but -

Oh, God.

Nothing.

Oh, God.

Is this better, or worse?

He knows the answer to that.

"No."

This shouldn't be possible. But the stones shouldn't be possible. Mass genocide shouldn't be possible. Life shouldn't be possible. So many billions of inexplicable things composing a multiverse that exists all the same. This is not a question of possibility. It doesn't matter whether or not this should be possible. This should not be.

Thoughts rove on. The fear he felt moments ago is drowned by the maelstrom starting up in him. He keeps it in his chest, keeps it in his eyes. Keeps it out of his mouth too expertly, voice bereft of any color.

"I can't undo this."

If that's what's asked of him, it can't be done. This is too complete. This is too far beyond.

His fear now isn't for the retribution of a righteous god. His fear is that he may have represented hope, and he must kill that too.

steEPLES FINGERS

[industries]

Strange knows.

It was only a matter of time. He was going to find out, in this moment, in this chain of events, as expected and unsurprising as the pull of gravity in an orbit, or the phases of a moon. He's already seen it more times than he can remember, and yet...

Being here, focused in the single moment, on the man's wide eyes and clenched jaw, it's... odd. Gripping. It sends a white-hot filament to somewhere deep inside him, connects one piece to another with electric thread.

He feels a ghost of a sensation from long ago, from a body so much smaller than this one. His heart skips a beat.

This is a first time, he realizes. "Firsts" don't often come for him, not since time immemorial, so this moment -- here, braced on the needlepoint of a pin, with him more present and condensed in a single moment than he has since he was born, it feels... significant. Different.

Someone recognizes him for the man he used to be.

He takes it in for a second. Breathes it.

And yet he can't linger long, because there are things being said that don't make sense -- that betray this man's ignorance and arrogance even in this, a moment of reckoning, of naked humility.

He pulls his tendrils back slowly, along the edges of buildings. His energy and atoms ebb and flow into the world around him.

"Why would I want to undo what is?"

It sounds even more absurd, laid bare with words. Why would he cut off the hands that built spirals from plasma, heat from gas, that took a cloud of dusty matter and pulled it together because it had to be? That waited while the matter coalesced to make dirt and seas, while volcanoes blew out hot floes of land, while cells formed, and fish swam, and floated to shore and walked on legs?

That was the first time, when he became impatient, when he went to find the man in front of him and instead found the planet slowing to entropy. And here he is -- just a handful of sun cycles from the conception of it all, when a transient life raised a shaking hand and wished for the power to protect his home.

Home. The word thrums through him again, sharper this time, along the same electric thread. He returns his attention to Strange.

"There's a place, not far from here."


'Not far' is an understatement. He reaches through earth made of dirt and rust and comes up through moss, and trees, and air.

"It's warm," he says. "There's a fire and the air smells like rain. I need..."

Need? There is no need here. He tries another word.

"Want. I want to remember how to hold them."

[rehandle]

The announcement moves through him in another uncomfortable cresting of forceful tides, churning back on themselves as Stephen's assumptions are made a ramp of. Wrong, but offering exactly the trajectory needed to carry the truth bludgeoning back toward his guilt.

His family. He's speaking about his family.

(His. It's too soon to make this unfathomable expanse a man. It can't be that easy. Origins do not dictate a thing's truth and this thing cannot just be Tony Stark the second he extracts himself from the enormity of everything just to ask for help to hold his wife and child.

... )

His family.

The family Stephen last saw from a distance as he excused himself from their home on the day they sent proof of Tony's heart to float off for other shores. His home. The home he wants to return to.

It's too big to think about. If he keeps thinking this way, thinking of the death of half of all things and the price that was paid, of the worth of life and the cost of its ending, thinking of a sea of people come to mourn and a little girl whose remaining years will be spent owed to and missing a man she'll only have known for a fraction of the days she'll live— something is going to happen.

Carefully, Stephen Strange boxes himself in.

This thing beyond comprehension wishes to understand how to be contained. It's not just that he wants to see them: he wants to be there. With them. Wants to feel him home, smell it, wants go there. Physically. And if he's going to be with them, he's going to need to be recognizable. He'll need to be himself, need to seem himself. More importantly than the body, he'll need to be safe. Fortified without against what's contained within.

Looking on at the swelling, receding, stretching, shrinking mist of celestial matter before him, it's obvious what he needs to say. What actually sits within the realms of possibility.

But the box he keeps himself in has suffered too many blows. Secure as it is, he still seeps out through cracks, peers from knots in wood, whispers through the keyhole.

"I'd ask how much time you have but something tells me that's not a concern."

Time.

They're going to need it.

bet you thought you saw the last of me

[industries]

He waits for Strange's mind to process what it needs to. He knows what that might be, by knowing the causes and effects that led here. And yet, when he tries to trace the thread through Strange's mind, it becomes... difficult to follow. The twists and turns, logic butting up against the irrational only to be overtaken. This is a man with a great degree of control, but he is still a man.

He was once a man. He can remember thoughts, running up and down pathways made deep by repetition, spiked by emotion. But it's unintuitive, distant. Like trying a tetrahedal peg in a round hole.

Or maybe it's the nebulae he swirls into stars over the thousand Earth aeons it takes for Strange's synapses to fire. Or the single-celled progenitors on another dimensional plane, or the light in a little girl's eyes as she builds robots from blocks.

The girl grows older. Greyer. She dies and decomposes. A tree grows where--

He snaps back to this point of existence. The violence of it startles him.

"It is, for you," he says. "For them."

Time. He knows Strange might take it for granted, as a man who once had the means to use it. But to manipulate a thing is to admit having no control over it, itself, its natural order.

Him being here is not the natural order.

The tendrils of his existence contract further.

"The Ancient One opened your mind to me, once -- part of me. What you could perceive." Some of his eye-like spheres blink away, back into blackness.

"I need the opposite. I need... someone to show me what that might be."

He lets it sink in. The nebula's stars grow yellow, orange, red. They die, just like the girl.

"I've forgotten too much to know."