sabrajan S. Abraján

Strange blue plates begin to appear around the world, containing collections of stories collected under the name ParalefikZland. Eventually, these stories will be published in several volumes, when the plates are collected, translated and organized.


Bilim Kurgu 13 yaşın altındaki çocuklar için değil.

#writing #stories #tales #literature #mystery #paralell-universes #world #universe #reality #fiction #332 #381 #philosophy #psichology
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Blue plates I

That blue plate I once owned read as follows:

From now on we present a compilation of stories whose contents have been witnessed by my fellow travelers and myself, as well as my alter egos. We have agreed to name this anthology ParalefikZland.

In order to share these events with beings from other realities, we have chosen to transcribe them as faithfully as possible as they have been witnessed or perceived. We will use, as a medium, blue plates made of a material of our own invention, which has been created to be imperishable in as many realities as possible. Each one of my alter egos and fellow travelers will decide on the way they will expose their set of plates to the beings in the infinite realities; I know of some who will make them appear suddenly on the face of some important figure of great power and influence in their worlds; others will do it little by little, following a previously planned or completely random order; others will hide them thoughtfully somewhere inside those vast universes, expecting to be found out by anyone. As for me, I will make them appear in different regions of a small planet, without many specifications about the sequence in which these plates should be read (should there be a sequence, as some of my colleagues intend, there would be no difference if they started reading from this prologue or from the last of the chronicles). I must clarify that, despite all my colleagues and alter egos having decided that the way to make these chronicles known would be through these plates, it will never be possible to trust them completely, so I will not be surprised if any of them decides to transmit these experiences in another way, either by means of signs in the sky and on land, or by speaking directly into their ears, or through dreams.

Shortly before, the news of the blue plates had attracted international attention. Reports of people who had come across one of them multiplied throughout all continents. The places where they appeared were sometimes so random, so unsuspected and impossible, that they seemed to have been hidden by ghosts. For example, the plate I have just transcribed was found on the chair in the study of an acquaintance of mine, who had had to interrupt his work for a moment, and when he returned, he found it there, shining with an opaque blue, a piece of frozen ocean (just looking at it produces a sense of calm). On it, the words in perfect Marish were engraved as finely and detailed as the handwriting of a god. Other plates were found in doorways, under beds and pillows, on roofs, inside new and sealed boxes, inside closets, in the arms of the dead in their graves, in the middle of abandoned roads. Among the strangest cases, there was one found inside the stomach of a beached whale, others were found in the Mariana Trench and on top of Mount Everest, one had to be pulled out of an ice cap, another one was accidentally dug out by a couple of murderers when they intended to hide a body, and one that suddenly supplanted a consecrated host in the hands of a priest. In addition to this, not all the plates were the same size; some were so small that they contained only a short paragraph, and there were also some so long that they looked like surfboards, in which case the letters were the size a beetle would write them. The language also changed according to the place they were found; I don't think there was any writing system in which the plates were not written, not even artificial languages, dialects, or endangered languages escaped the plates; as long as at least one person spoke a language, the plates could choose it.

My friend trusted his in my care, claiming that having that thing near him gave him a strange feeling, as if something emanating from that plate caused him a drowsiness from which he feared he would not wake up if he succumbed to it.

After having it with me for a few days, I decided that it would be better to hand it over to a group of volunteers who had set out to find all the plates worldwide to later hand them over to scientists who would submit them to studies. In Shórsta they had set up a small center where the owners of the plates could donate them. These centers had been set up very quickly all over the world, and their members often used to go from house to house asking if anyone had found a plate. Each was then carefully packed and sent to one of the different centers around the world, where hundreds of researchers had conspired to try to solve its mystery.

People who refused to hand over their plates without receiving a reward in return were not few; the volunteers often had to beg for them; they argued that these plates could be the first proof that some higher force (some said it came from gods) was trying to communicate with them in a way that left no doubt of their divinity. It took some time, because of the massive refusal of many greedy citizens, before some institutions agreed to grant a monetary reward for the plates, some particularly large ones were valued at as much as thirty thousand Marish yáos.

The plates were thus able to reach the centers where they were intended to be studied. Cities such as New York, Tokyo, Paris, Vienna, Moscow, Helsinki, Dyánz, among many others, had agreed to research and translate the plates and make the contents known to the whole world. The part concerning the research, I must admit, caught my attention the least; they only confirmed what we all had already assumed: the plates were not made of any known material; moreover, a deeper study proved that they were not even made of atoms. Not even with all the experiments they had performed could the scientists get more properties that could have been discovered in an amateur laboratory. The only thing that surprised everyone regarding this part of the research (or rather, the only thing that was not so uninteresting) was that the plates were apparently immune to all attempts at destruction, but this endeavour to assess their durability was quickly criticized and stopped almost immediately.

Everyone was highly expecting the moment when the content of the plates would be released. Those who had owned them were constantly interviewed to get an idea of the general account of the writings. However, even when the plates found had a lot of text, it was almost always decontextualized and did not make much sense, as if each plate was nothing more than the fragment of a story whose parts had been scattered around the world. The former owners revealed many names of characters and places, the glimpses the gave sometimes of the still unclear plots were small, but it was enough to keep expectations high.

The process of translating and determining the sequence of the plates was also covered extensively. Translators and editors were (and still are) faced with the task of piecing together a huge jigsaw puzzle in which fragments were jumbled together in a chaotic array of languages. But regardless of the language problem, they soon discovered that the plates did not form a single document, they contained (as my plate said) a whole series of stories, short and long, whose correct arrangement was very difficult to figure out, given the lack of narrative consistency that would allow many of the fragments to be identified with one or another story.

After five years of working with the plates, it was announced that the content might finally begin to be published under the general name ParalefikZland, divided into several multi-volume collections; the short stories would be collected in a collection they called Memories from Other Realities; the longer stories were called Alternative Paths. The order of the publications would not necessarily correspond to any chronological order that might be found on the plates. In fact, in the same message they announced that it was not possible to define exactly which of all the stories should be considered the first or the last, and they also announced, to the pride of my compatriots, that, for some strange reason (so they said) the totality of the stories, at least as far as they had finished putting together, took place in Danzílmar or at least made reference to it. Those words were enough for many to rush to demand that the plates, along with their entire contents, be considered part of Danzílmar's heritage[1]. I never cared about that and immediately stopped paying attention to them. Another announcement that caused mixed emotions (mostly confusion) was that the researchers had discovered that the numbers with which the plates were paginated did not necessarily correspond to the logical order of the stories they contained, at least for the longer stories. This was one of the reasons why it had been so difficult to decide on the order in which the books were to be arranged, and in the end it was decided to respect the pagination rather than their own judgments about narrative coherence. Thus, they warned that some of the works might be incoherent for those accustomed to literary linearity. With respect to this, they clarified that they had decided to respect the fragmentary nature of the plates, i.e., the stories would be made up of fragments separated from each other by three asterisks, which they called "Changes". Each "Change" would indicate that the following fragment belonged to another plate, so it could be different from the previous fragment regarding scene, time, space, style or perspective, sometimes so suddenly that they seemed to deviate from the story. After that they went on to prattle on about the value that this content represented to the human race, for we would be witnessing a set of stories left behind in our world by some unknown being who, for some reason (again they put it this way), wanted us to know about them. At this point I turned off the TV. I was not interested in the hype and humbug that everyone was trying so hard to make about the importance of these stories for our world. I decided that, even if they had been put into this world by some god from another universe, I was going to treat them just like any other fiction.

I have now the first of the volumes with me. I ordered it online as soon as it went on sale and it sold out in a few hours. I am enormously pleased that the introduction to this first volume is the same as the one I gave you at the beginning of this writing, as if this entire future series of writings had first been in my hands.



[1] To this day, all writings under the name ParalefikZland officially have Danzilmar as their country of origin.

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ParalefikZland
ParalefikZland

ParalefikZland es el principio de que todas las ficciones son libres y descentralizadas de toda realidad. Las realidades se bifurcan y crean infinitas variaciones. Esas historias son atestiguadas por los viajeros, y eventualmente expuestas a los seres de los demás universos. ParalefikZland no es una historia, sino todas las historias en todas sus infinitas variaciones. Es la ficción y la realidad en sí. / ParalefikZland is the principle that all fictions are free and decentralized from all reality. Realities fork and create infinite variations. These stories are witnessed by the travelers, and eventually exposed to the beings of other universes. ParalefikZland is not one story, but all stories in all their infinite variations. It is fiction and reality itself. Hakkında daha fazlasını okuyun ParalefikZland.