© NASA/ESA/Hubble.
Imagine a vast reality, (just) one of infinite possibilities. A universe, so to speak. From nothing to something in a fraction of a moment, it defies causality.
Time begins. What might have been cold, dark and stagnant is inexplicably animate, punctuated by bursts and streams and pockets of warmth and light.
In a corner, arbitrarily at best, a pathetically small ball of energy burns, its glow illuminating a set of even tinier spheres, its gravity keeping them in motion and check.
It seems innocuous, this little system. Yet something about its particular conditions allows for an anomaly.
Matter, otherwise shaped and guided strictly by inertia, begins to act on its own accord, growing and moving and multiplying without explanation or aim. Precisely 93 million miles (no more, no less) from that ball of burning hydrogen, energy perverts into life.
The impact is systemic. Birth, pain and death poison the purity of reality. The universe, otherwise pristine in its order and objectivity, is corrupted by a single, cancerous blue node.
Time goes.
Slowly, out of the same absurd process of production and reproduction that polluted the essence of existence, an antibody emerges. Upright. Walking. Thinking. Talking.
Consuming.
Compelled by the relatively simple neurochemical reactions of “hope,” “ambition,” “love” and the like, swarms of unwitting soldiers commit themselves wholly to the gradual eradication of the disease.Their success is by no means certain, but the probability is high.