Mail from the Ungrund: A Tardy Preamble

From a planet never glimpsed by human eyes, circling a sun that had never been catalogued, in a galaxy itself never detected by ocular telescopes, spectrometers, radio telescopes, or any other astronomical observation apparatus constructed or conceived on the earth, the decisively fatal fate of life on earth had been unleashed.

The occupants of this planet were themselves unaware of just what they had accomplished, but had they been, they might have opted to've unleashed the menace some centuries or millennia earlier, by local reckoning. Still, it was a major feat but one that would never earn this crowd a Nobel Prize in any domain, as if the taxonomy of prizes and awards would have meant much.

No, this crowd was only conforming to what an earth-bound thinker would have recognized as “ontology”: ethics as we know it did not infect or afflict this planet, “good and evil” had never seriously been broached, only states of being, non-being, and un-being could claim relevance to the minds of these inhabitants, whose physiologies and somatic configurations defy all human understanding: nevertheless, this crowd had come up with a universal cure for humanity, and regardless of consequences, not only did they unleash it but, though themselves quite unaware of the existence of Planet Earth (a miniscule speck equally invisible to them, but they had no dire need to explore the heavens with astronomical apparatuses), they sent it directly to the locality where it might do some good (well, you see, I err already, since I've already explained that this crowd did not observe the categories and taxonomies of good and evil, right and wrong), that is to say, to the exact locale where it might consign the human race to extinction and expunction within the vast realm of baryonic matter, where of course they themselves did not reside entirely.

This crowd was thorough, too, by the standards of earth-bound logic, with a thoroughness that would have earned them the appellation “evil” (again, wholly by terrestrial standards, or more specifically, by the terrestrial standards that might have been operative in the scores of centuries and handful of millennia immediately following the advent of human civilization, by the end of which such categories and standards were no longer operative. [Logic, the reader may have long since guessed, did not strictly apply to this distant crowd, either, since without the benefits and limitations of temporal sequence, they also had no use for the namby-pamby causes and effects and mental sequences dictated or required by earth-bound logic.])

Come to think of it and truth be told, this crowd failed to work with other familiar earth-bound notions and even some other concepts or conceits discarded by earth-bound humanity: but despite the conspicuous absences, who could fault them for their aesthetic sensitivities?

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