That’s earth. The used-to-be blue planet, cradle of humanity. For now, it’s infamous as a super-polluted lump of filth and rubbish-dumpster throughout the universe. Most of the earths surface is covered with an out-of-control superstructure, maintained by weird acting robotic constructors, known and the janitors. Originally designed to provide affordable housing spaces, these giant machines are gone somehow crazy these days. Each of them is driven by an independent AI based on evolving algorithms - so they just won’t come to a design conclusion at all. That’s why they just won’t stop rebuilding the whole environment constantly. But, hey, that’s not the point here. Mistakes were made, so get over it. This hasn’t been the biggest mistake anyway. During the last five thousand years, some smart-asses came up with some really dumb ideas. First of all, there was this thing they called s.m.e.t. - good heavens! Even from upon here, you will still recognize that big hole in the ground, that this supermassive piece of shit pulled into the planet. Just there, little up the formerly equator. This super-massive-earth-trabant, the s.m.e.t. was supposed to solve all the energy problems beneath his orbit. The idea was as simple as dumb: create a little black-hole that acquires all the space-waste in it’s orbit to gain a critical mass in order to manipulate the earths gravity. The only thing about this, that was ”super” was the dumbness. So it went down in history as ”the dumbest”. Of course it was devastating. Well it worked at the beginning, but soon space-littering increased and the dumbest grew and grew and began to cause tidal disasters like crazy. It pulled continental plates apart, flooded entire countries ... to name but a few of the calamities. So one had to come up with a new idea. An even dumber one, as it turned out. To prevent the earths surface to be completely drowned, the s.m.e.t-commission decided to let this clump of dumbness crash into the Atlantic. Descended to the sea ground, it’s mass should create an about fife hundred kilometer high mountain out of water upon it. Mount Exo. This worked relatively well, because this huge cluster of water was lowering the sea level in general. But the bigger - and merely intended - Impact was the slowdown of the earth rotation. Due to the mass accumulation, the rotation went into an imbalance - rotation slowed down and the centrifugal forces diminished, and so the water mass bulging along the equator did as well! So not only days became longer, but tremendous and quite habitable land masses appeared along the equator. So despite the poles are flooded, there was so much land acquired for people to live - and they could even work longer as daytime increased! Well done! Needless to say, this huge bulb that nearly reached the exosphere made the planets rotation go totally nuts. If there wasn’t already an issue well known as ”the dumbest”, this action would finally be it. Well ... as we know, idiocy knows no limits! Although the world was slingering, it was still in orbit. But why not change that as well? To stop the earth from wobbling, a worldwide project was started, to speed up the earth rotation just a little bit again. Huge nuclear powered boosters were built, and engineers promised: It’s surely gonna be okay! But they were wrong. Things gone worse. First booster launch caused the frozen top of Mount Exo to crack apart and take off. As the massive lump of ice reached recession velocity it has hit the moon and both splintered into millions of pieces. So what? The ring around the earth these fragments formed, together with all the space litter aligned to them, turned out to be a pretty nice view. The not-so-nice view came later, when the earth’s magnetic field collapsed, oceans evaporated and the nuclear thrusters frequently exploded, due to overheating. While the earth governments engineers all appeared to be complete morons, some were not. Most of them who weren’t, worked for the entertainment industries. So they scented the opportunity to use the new formed orbital ring for leisure and living. Anybody who could afford it, invested in this so called halos-project. There was everything up there: space, ice, all sorts of littered metals and a nice view of a green blazing, decaying earth. But what am I telling you? These things happened long ago. Nobody cares about the past. So this, is about the future...
Light is so marginal. I mean, look out of these windows - you can see a thousand stars glimpsing ... and that’s just nothing. Al the darkness in between, that’s what it’s all about.
When humankind realized the existence of the anti-photosynthesis-lifeforms, it was kind of an aha-effect. And it marked the beginning of the end - at least for the obsolete photosynthesis lifeforms.
Shouldn’t it have been obvious, that in an expanding universe where no additional energy will be created, everything will fade to faint at last? Well it has been obvious, but it was merely a part of the actual truth.
Let’s say all the life we knew about was feeding on photons, or at least was fueled by them. And these little cuties were released by not-for-ever-lasting sources, such as stars, or handmade wannabe-star-alike devices. They will just run out of power in no time.
Somewhere, they dissolve quicker. Therefore there will be migration, density-troubles, wars and so on. Such as the bloody-proton-war lastly. But in the end it wouldn’t matter, as the last few protons were preserved in exhibition places and museums.
So as the light fades, the darkness will take it’s place.
And that’s the story about the glimpse.
rimblethorn
The idea was born a long time ago, in a slender galaxy called rimblethorn, where the only habitable and full-of-live-planet, called rimbulon, was orbiting a brown dwarf for allegedly forever. Peace and fun and happiness under the glimpse of a mite sunlight. As the star of rimbulon was about to completely die out, people started to invent not only thicker jackets and boots, bot also turned the whole biosphere upside down.
A huge underground detonation, which used most of the available hydro- and oxygen from the atmosphere vanished most of the planets entrails. Due to the as successful as complex calculations, the rimbulonians managed to turn their planets core into a tiny but properly working red dwarf.
The whole process cracked part of the surface, but that was just fine, so all the rimbulonians could easily move through it towards the inside.
So the party went on and the photosynthesis survived in the fainting galaxy of rimblethorn.
The rimbulonians were known (or due to the fact rather unknown ) for not being very outgoing. It took them another two million years to realize, that the hydrogen supply won’t last forever either and these lazy-asses finally developed spaceships in order to get some elsewhere.
As they left their outside-in-biosphere, you should have seen their faces!
”You’ve the face of an outgoing rimbulonian” will be obtained as a saying, outlasting the whole civilization of the rimbulonians as well as the existence of rimblethorn itself.
The whole abandoned surface of rimbulon was now covered with a huge and beautiful city, with towers, rollercoasters, and all a city would ever need to be perceived as one unless it wouldn’t be made of complete darkness.
So what the first rimbulonian space travelers faces made look like an outgoing rimbulonian was the fact that there weren’t as expected tons of stars around to fly to, but nothing as pure inky blackness.
The whole galaxy of rimblethorn already faded away.
For the - by the lack of a better name - formerly called anti-photos it wasn’t recognizable either that there was something flying out of the surface-cracks.
Contraryly, the anti-photos weren’t aware of light at all: They just couldn't see it. They didn’t see the colors emitted by light, no frequencies, no spectra and they refused to believe that there are photons or rays or anything of interest about light.
So it took another three billion years for the cosmic communities of photos (which means all the photosensitive lifeforms ) and bloothys (which was a fun word, originally made up by some racist photos to blame the bloothys, but they pretty much liked them, probably because they just have a totally other way of thinking about stuff ) to realize each others.
So this is about the photosensitive-lifeforms, the photos and the darkness-dwelling bloothys, which - needless to say - are as well divided into millions of billions of different species.
And it turned out, they pretty much had the same problems, as we have.
the guesser
The discovery of the bloothys was made in the year XLKHS203i by a photo called Zerothal dalQuarsiino the XIICMth, later well known as the Guesser. He guessed, that when there were photosensitive lifeforms in the cosmos, why wouldn’t there be something completely different? And he guessed right.
It wasn’t a coincidence, that the Guesser was a photo. Since the stars of the cosmos fainted slowly, the photos became curious about how everything works and might end up. Meanwhile, the bloothys were just dwelling in the increasing darkness and mostly bothering with amusement issues.
So the Guessers guessing initiated a completely new scientific research field - though a merely theoretic one.
As there were no evidence about the darkness-dwelling-lifeforms, the conclusion was axiomatic. As a matter of fact, the photos were kind of aware of the existence of the bloothys, but for a long time they couldn't either see them nor interact with them.
So it was totally photo-alike to make them responsible for almost everything that went wrong in the photo-world.
It took another two million years, until the bloothys finally came up with the idea of supersensitive-glasses, formerly invented for high-spectral-cinema-experiences and suddenly realized the existence of light, protons, new cinematic capabilities and the light-dwelling-lifeforms, crowding around fading stars throughout the cosmos.
Again for amusement reasons, they observed, researched and studied this new discovery.
Later on it turned out super-simple, that these kind of glasses could be used in both ways. With the technology in reverse, the bloothy-world became finally visible to the photos as well.
That blew several minds instantly.
Most of the photo-worlds were threw into turmoil. Chaos began to reign. Then settled.
For the bloothys, it was just fun to watch.
But as the first research community between photos an bloothys came up, things happened to be rather gratifying.
Wherever light is, there is shadows as well. This doesn’t exactly work for the reverse. Nevertheless, somehow it does.
So what happened by coincidence upon rimblulon, was a quite nice strategy. Having photos on the bright and the bloothys on the dark side living, they won’t bother each other too much. They could barely see each other, indeed. So it became very common, to build ringworlds around suns, having photosensitives on the inside and the darkness-dwellers on the outside surface. That was easy-going.
Everyone spend a happy lifetime on each of the two sides. Until the photon-dacay ultimately started to happen.