Item #: Periapsis

Object Class: Sunrays, Muted

Special Containment Procedures: Intersection Events occur within Depth Zone 10 of the Marianas Trench, epicenter positioned in the peripheral vision of all personnel stationed at Outpost STYGIA. Any form of physical containment for the events or the Periapsis itself is existentially impossible. No timing is necessary for monitoring Intersections — the dates are simply Known.

On the arrival of the Periapsis, personnel may do as they wish. It does not impact us.

Description: The Periapsis is a semantically surreal hyperobject. In-depth description through the quantifiable is impossible — too many lights for any mind to keep track of. Significant details are only conveyed through the sensory imagery and synaptic confusion of individuals as they witness Periapsis.

Intersection Events are the hours when the Periapsis arrives. The object is perpetually skipped across the waters bounding physicality, tossed by a hand which withdrew before the concepts to describe its actions ever existed. Like clockwork the object's momentum declines, skipping at slower and slower paces until surface tension gives way and it drops into our murky reality. There it blooms. Vast, kaleidoscopic imagery, spreading outwards into cosmic petals that brush across our neurons and the extra senses we were never taught at birth. It paints rainbows over our memories.1

As soon as it begins to unfurl it leaves. Its downwards plunge resumes unimpeded, exiting and drifting out of our perception into layers of existence far below ours. It is lost.

We do not attempt to guess at what comes next. Layers of the universe exist which are beyond the tools we use to make sense of it, so far gone that attempting to analyze their events is like attempting to predict the weather on a planet galaxies away. There is only a single certainty: at the push of some ethereal force, some rushing current, the object is propelled back above the water. Momentum is imparted. It arcs through the air, glances against the surface, pushes off, and resumes it skipping motion. Like clockwork, the cycle repeats. Like clockwork, we witness it again.

Unlike objects native to our reality, the Periapsis lacks a coherent identity. Instead of being grounded to one being it is hundreds all at once, contradictory by our standards of existence but all glimpses of the same whole. These identities include:

A star that fell from someone else's constellation.

A chain of causality set off during the universe's birth, which will only conclude at its end.

A flowing tangle of limbs, waving in the deep sea waters, cracking at the joints to sprout new branches of arms and new stems of hands, all reaching out for a rare experience of physical contact.

A lost child, searching for its mother.

Vibrant chunks of flaked-off paint.

Interlocking cathedrals of scratched glasswork and singed paintings.

Slideshows of blurred, indistinct childhood memories, smoldering with the embers of a faded warmth.

A higher-dimensional storm formation that blows aimlessly through our existence. Lightning strikes at the waters of the Marianas as it passes.

100 polaroid photos of a dim hallway. Blurriness suggests rapid forwards movement but the position of the door at its end remains at a constant, fixed distance from the photographer.

The brightest burning plasma in the universe, dimming.

1,000 unanswered letters.

Galaxies and starfields which cascade into each other and collapse into a violent singularity.

Uncountable unanswered cries.

Skin shed by something greater.2

Nostalgia.

Longing.

God.3

All attempts at raising our voice to the object, ritual or otherwise, have failed; it is likely that none ever can. The Periapsis does not ask for attention. The Periapsis does not ask for worship. It asks for nothing; nothing but an implicit desire to be left alone. To be ignored.

With no power to interact, we reluctantly accept.

Footnotes

1. We never needed the old ones in the first place.

2. Notice from Outpost STYGIA Head Staff:

She's never coming back.

3. Unremarkably.