Story: Duality Erased

The story below is a work of fiction.

Initially, the object was only perceptible to the array of sensitive instruments focused onto the area, though it soon became visible to those gathered: astronomers, linguists, physicists. It emerged from the blankness of dead space, like a chick from its shell, at the exact coordinates and time received from the transmission of unknown origin. It spread outward in all directions, slowly, as though entertaining cautious exploration of its alien surroundings. Taking the form of a thing immediately unearthly, paradoxical, the object’s hard angles were at the same time gradual curves; its opaque, shimmering colors were transparent; organic flesh, yet mechanical. It was a device depicted from the fever dreams of a surrealist who fancied himself a medium for a lost civilization—a device unfathomably familiar, as though it contained immediate, urgent answers for all possible questions about the universe. When the object’s awful symmetrical emergence into the human world had slowed, it blossomed even further outward while the termination of its limbs seemed to arch and feed back into itself, as though to allow more space to generate and extend out from its central point of origin. A never-ending Mandelbrot set of a fourth-dimensional object projecting itself to minds in a time-bound universe. They had finally arrived.