Welcome to the April A to Z Blogging Challenge! Every year, bloggers from around the world commit to posting every day in April (except Sundays), working through the alphabet one letter at a time. This year, I’m visiting twenty-six fictional alternate Earths — worlds that diverged from our own at some crucial moment and became something wonderfully, unsettlingly different. Think of it like the TV show Sliders, which followed a group of travelers “sliding” between parallel dimensions, never quite knowing what version of Earth they’d land on next. Each day, we visit a new one. Today: Z.
The World That Is Ending in the Wrong Way
There is a city on Zero Earth — or there was, a moment ago — called Merritt Falls. Population: somewhere between eighty thousand and none, depending on when you ask and whether the question itself persists long enough to be answered. The city has a courthouse that has been under construction since 1987. It has also been completed since 1987. Both things are true. Neither thing is more true than the other. The construction crew shows up on certain mornings and finds their scaffolding already down, their work already done, the mayor’s plaque already mounted on the limestone facade. On other mornings, they arrive to find the foundation freshly poured, waiting again. Nobody has been fired. Nobody has been paid. The paychecks clear anyway, in amounts that don’t match any timesheet.
This is Zero Earth, and the problem — if you can call it that, if the word problem retains meaning in a place where cause and effect have started leaving gaps between themselves — is not that something terrible has happened. It is that the rules by which terrible things happen, and then stop happening, and then leave traces that can be studied and understood and eventually fixed, have begun to fail.
The Texture of a World Coming Undone
Most apocalypses have the courtesy to announce themselves. A comet. A pandemic. A political movement that everyone saw coming and half of everyone voted for anyway. Zero Earth’s ending has no announcement. There is no event horizon, no ground zero, no date that will eventually be circled in history books as the moment things turned. This is partly because things are turning in all directions simultaneously, and partly because the history books themselves have become unreliable witnesses.
The anomalies began — insofar as “began” has traction as a concept here — small. Residents of Merritt Falls and the surrounding region reported, in the early documentation phases, experiences that individually sounded like nothing: a conversation that doubled a sentence, replaying a phrase with the mechanical exactness of a skipping record. A glass of water set on a countertop that was found, some time later, already in the cabinet, clean, dry, as though it had never been used. A woman in the Terrace Hill neighborhood reported that her daughter called her on the phone to say she’d arrived safely at college, and then, four hours later, called again with the same message, the same pauses, the same small laugh at the same small joke, not knowing she’d already called.
The daughter, when asked, had no memory of the first call. The phone records showed only one. The mother kept both in her mind like two photographs of the same moment taken from slightly different angles, and for a long time she told no one, because she could not find a framework in which what she knew to be true could also be said.
That is, perhaps, the most precise description of what Zero Earth feels like from the inside: the constant presence of things that are true and unsayable at the same time.
What the Researchers Think (Several Conflicting Versions)
There is a university in Merritt Falls — Aldenmoor University, founded 1921, still there on most mornings — where a team of theoretical physicists, philosophers of science, and at least two people whose credentials have become difficult to verify (their diplomas keep changing dates) are attempting to document and explain what is happening.
Their theories have diverged considerably, which is either a sign of rigorous intellectual independence or a sign that the phenomenon is affecting their ability to reach consensus, or both, or neither, or a sign that the category of “both” is itself no longer stable.
The leading theoretical framework — “leading” meaning it was agreed upon at the last meeting, which may or may not have happened yet, which half the attendees may or may not remember — is something called Chronological Saturation. The basic premise is that reality is not infinite. It is, like any complex system, finite in its capacity to hold information about itself. Every event that occurs, every choice that is made, every state of affairs that comes to exist and then changes — all of it writes something into the structure of the universe, a kind of record the universe keeps of what has happened and what therefore shapes what can happen next. On a stable world, this record is maintained without difficulty. Events occur and are absorbed and the universe continues.
The saturation theorists believe that Zero Earth’s universe has been overwritten. Too many states. Too many revisions. Too much history pressing against the available space until the record can no longer reliably hold its own entries. Events don’t disappear — they simply stop being singular. A moment that was supposed to happen once is found to have happened twice, three times, in slightly different configurations, each version claiming equal validity, none of them able to explain the others.
A competing theory, advanced by a philosopher named Dr. Senna Holdt, who may or may not still be at Aldenmoor depending on which morning you check, is simpler and considerably more disturbing: Zero Earth was never supposed to exist. Not in the sense that its existence is unfortunate, but in the structural sense — it is a reality that emerged as a kind of statistical artifact, a universe that formed in the space between more stable configurations, a gap that briefly held the shape of a world. Dr. Holdt’s view is that what is being called “unraveling” is more accurately described as resolution — the universe correcting an error, returning toward a more stable state, which happens to be a state in which Zero Earth is not there.
When asked what “not there” means, she has several answers, none of them reassuring, all of them technically consistent.
A third faction — smaller, more vocal than its numbers would suggest, operating out of a converted hardware store on the east side of Merritt Falls — believes the explanation is human in origin. A specific experiment. A specific date. A specific choice made in a basement laboratory by someone who understood most of what they were doing and misunderstood the part that mattered. This faction has documentation. Some of the documentation has dates that haven’t happened yet. Some of it describes experiments that, as far as anyone can confirm, were never conducted. When pressed, the faction’s members say: that’s consistent with what we’re claiming. You’d expect the evidence to be unreliable. You’d expect the record to be compromised. The fact that you can’t verify it doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
They are not wrong that you can’t verify it. They are not necessarily right about anything else. The honest position — which Dr. Holdt will tell you, on mornings when the honest position is available — is that all three theories could be correct, all three could be wrong, and the framework required to determine which is which may be one of the things that has already started to go.
How People Live Here, More or Less
The thing that undoes visitors — the concept of visitors being a complicated one, given the sliding-scale reliability of travel on Zero Earth — is not the anomalies themselves. It is the people.
The people, in the main, are fine. This is somehow worse.
They have developed, over the years since the anomalies became undeniable, a set of adaptive practices that look, from a distance, exactly like ordinary life. They keep journals, obsessively and in duplicate, because a single record is a record that can be revised without warning. They make phone calls and immediately send a text saying I just called you so that there is a second artifact of the fact. They have become, as a culture, precise about time in the way that people who have lost the ability to trust time always become — not anxious, particularly, but deliberate. The clocks in Merritt Falls are reset every morning at seven against a shared reference signal, and everyone knows the clocks are reset every morning, and everyone knows the reset doesn’t guarantee anything, and everyone resets them anyway.
The three categories of resident that the Aldenmoor team identified early in their documentation work have proven surprisingly stable:
The Deniers are not, it should be said, stupid. They are doing something more sophisticated than simple refusal. They have selected a version of events and committed to it with the same fierce concentration that a sailor uses to hold course in a crosswind. They choose one timeline, one set of facts, one coherent narrative, and they live inside it with a discipline that looks, to the outside eye, like ordinary confidence. Many of them function extremely well. Some of them have begun, quietly, to document the version they have chosen — to write down what happened this morning, what they had for breakfast, what the news said — as though the act of writing it could anchor it in place. It can’t. But it seems to help.
The Documenters are the ones you see with the notebooks and the duplicate texts, but also the cameras, the voice recorders, the hand-drawn maps that get redrawn weekly because the streets have a way of not quite matching what was mapped the week before. They are, collectively, producing an archive of a world in the process of losing its own record. Nobody knows if the archive will survive in a form that can be read. They are producing it anyway, because documentation is the only form of resistance available to people who cannot fight what is happening and cannot outrun it and have decided that bearing witness is, at minimum, more honest than looking away.
The Accepters are the ones who sit quietly on porches in the long afternoons and watch the light change in ways that light should not change, and do not seem troubled by it. They have reached some private accommodation with the unreliability of everything, and in them — this is the thing that the Aldenmoor team finds hardest to write about in their reports — there is something that looks, unmistakably, like peace. Not resignation. Not despair dressed in the clothes of serenity. Peace. The genuine article. They have found meaning that does not require the universe to hold still.
When asked what they know that the others don’t, they tend to say something quiet and unhelpful, like: It’s all right. It was always going to be like this eventually. The researchers write this down. The researchers do not know what to do with it.
What Is Actually Happening (Probably)
Nobody knows. This is the one thing the three theoretical factions agree on, and the one thing the residents — Deniers, Documenters, and Accepters alike — will confirm, when pressed, in their various registers.
The anomalies are spreading outward from Merritt Falls at a rate that is difficult to measure because the measurement instruments are affected by what they’re measuring. The Aldenmoor team’s best estimate is that the radius of reliable physics has contracted by roughly forty percent over the past decade, which either means the phenomenon is accelerating or means the instruments recording the contraction are themselves contracting, which would make the forty percent an underestimate, which is not a reassuring thing to consider at length.
The sky above Merritt Falls is normal most mornings. Some mornings it is the wrong color — not dramatically, not violently, just slightly, in the way a room looks slightly different when you’ve moved the furniture two inches and can’t quite identify what changed. Some mornings there are two moons. Some mornings the second moon is where it was the night before and some mornings it is somewhere else and some mornings it was never there and the residents who saw it the previous morning simply note it in their journals and move on, because this is Zero Earth and the only options are documentation and peace and the choice of which moment to anchor yourself to, however briefly, however incompletely, while the record revises itself around you.
The courthouse in Merritt Falls is still being built. The courthouse in Merritt Falls was finished thirty-nine years ago. The construction crew arrives in the morning and finds the work done or not done and goes from there. On the mornings when it is done, they have coffee on the lawn and watch the light do what light does here, which is more than it used to do and less than it will eventually do and different, always, from what anyone remembers.
They don’t talk about it much. There isn’t much to say.
If you’ve enjoyed the A to Z Challenge here at The Confusing Middle, I post new content every day! Check back tomorrow for more.
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