The Fifth Expansion

The Fifth Expansion was without any doubt the biggest and most significant of all the reorganizations occurring during the evolution and devolution of the human race. Most historians link it to a group of possible futures emanating from a Quasi-Mandela event which is reckoned to have taken place in a particular cluster of possible pasts known as the Tau-Cluster. An incalculable number of alternative pasts have of course been tried out and discarded in the course of the universe’s nineteen billion year existence but the Tau-Cluster represents a unique group of pasts which gave rise to unstable futures in which the past never fully coalesced into a linear sequence of events. The Fifth Expansion represents what we might call humanity’s last and greatest hobby – the recreation and stabilization of time-lines that the multiverse had tried out and then discarded in less than no time at all, since as soon as a time-line is discarded it ceases to have ever existed. Using highly sensitive ‘sniffer-probes’ these virtual pasts were detected, re-simulated, and then colonized by hobbyists, which – it might quite reasonably be said – was clearly something that the multiverse had never intended to happen. Human beings were at their best, many historians would argue, when engaged in baroque and pointless hobbies and this was surely the ultimate expression of this particular bizarre human proclivity. The Fifth Expansion was not therefore an expansion in any real sense of the word but rather a form of virtual regression or involution that took the human race in a direction that the multiverse had itself – for its own opaque reasons – had no more interest in. This was therefore to be mankind’s final act of perversity, a fitting end to a long and strange tale that spanned five billion years. It is of course important not to personify the multiverse and attribute any form of logical ‘motivation’ or ‘intention’ to its activities – there is no aim to its play and this is itself has always been a hard thing for the human race to come to terms with. It might for this reason be argued that the Fifth Expansion represented a grand act of rebellion against the direction reality itself wished to take with regard to the shuffling and reshuffling of all the possible pasts and futures; an attempt we might say to resist and reshape the multiverse as the laws governing its evolution themselves evolved and mutated beyond all recognition, in its ceaseless drive to ‘out-do’ itself. Needless to say of course, the Fifth Expansion never occurred in any concrete sense, being rather a potential feature of one of humankind’s less likely possibly futures. It is however a quasi-event that is well worth mentioning in this compendium of ours, if only on account of the curious paradoxes it raises. The Fifth Expansion marks the limit of our knowledge of mankind’s possible futures; beyond this footnote to our necessarily speculative history of the future ages of Man, nothing more can be said.

 

 

 

 

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