A Single Speck (first published in BlazeVOX)
Imagine a speck smaller than the eye can see suddenly become the Universe and everything in it. That is one infinitesimal thing becoming every other thing.
If I look around this common room, there is paper and wood furniture and a telephone and ink and dirty clothes and bottles and toys and books and dirty pictures and even particles of light coming off the top light bulb.
Now, the scientists say that the speck must have been pretty dense.
I calculate for a moment about how many specks I can fit in my room. Then, I mentally look out my window and imagine all the things around the corner of my perception and then mentally fill it up with specks.
The picture I’m getting includes layers of sky and beyond, with the idea of spinning globes separated by gases and rocks and things that may not even have names yet. There are more corners and layers in these places, and well…
I fill everything up with specks. It is unreal, but I am a sorcerer for just this moment, and I conjure specks as clearly as the actual spaces they fill. And over my shoulder, I feel the presence of a number that no human concern has ever encountered. An eerie feeling takes over. The entity introduces itself, and this is the number of the specks that fill up all the spaces in this universe of ours, the one that resides in our minds if nowhere else.
Now, I understand I’m doing this backward, because I am filling the spaces and not the objects which actually derived from this one speck at the beginning of time. But that is not important because human comprehension can go either way it wants, and it won’t go very far.
Eventually, the question I get, when the entity takes its leave and all is back to normal, is how much larger can the universe actually grow, and just what kind of density are we talking about here?