1,366 : 3 ?They say that once the universe was
perfectly balanced: the forces that
tumbled things apart were counter-matched
exactly by the forces that caused things to
be conjoined together. And everywhere
people had the freedom to pursue
understanding for its own sake, because
in the time of the Steady State, life
was very easy. And one race
pursued questions of celestial mechanics,
and in them perceived that a machine
could be constructed that would never
stop running. They believed such
a machine could be
harnessed for divination.
They spent many years designing and building
what they called the Inertia
Machine. When they activated the machine,
it operated just as they had
predicted. But when they sought
to use it to predict the outcomes
of things to come, they saw
visions of worlds they could not
understand. They saw a time
when the will of the individual
constantly foundered on the
ambivalence of the collective.
They saw a time when life was
very hard and even had to
steal the life energies of
other individuals by physically
consuming them. The visions
they had when they sat circle
around the machine filled
this people with a feeling they
had not known before.
When they broke circle, the visions
stopped but the feeling remained.
This is when they realized that
there was no way to turn the
machine off. Because it was
created to run forever, they
had not considered a method of
deactivation. They applied many
forces, the entropic and the creative,
they symbolical and the diabolical,
trying to tip the balance of the inertia
machine and cease its
perpetual motion. But all their
methods failed: the inertia
machine’s balance remained perfect.
Finally, they placed the machine in a
vessel and sent it towards a place in
the universe where they believed there
was a great black hole. The trip would take
tens of thousands of years. They say
that by the time the vessel carrying the
machine reached the black hole, the people had
forgotten what they had done, and
had no understanding of what was
happening when everything changed.
You can read an explanation of the origin of these lyrics here
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