Long before the rise of the age of humanity, reality was something different. The plants, animals, and chemicals on Earth—the many heaps of rocks and burning gas and plasma beyond it—even the ever-feeding black holes of deep space — were a single entity. A conceptual superorganism.

So it remained until humans emerged with a new tool. Humans were not the first beings to develop tools — far from it. That particular achievement occurred eons before the first inklings of humanity — and belongs to the fiyabetta, a type of tropical fish only found on the sunny side of a dwarf planet located on the Neverwest end of the Universe. The first and only tool developed by the fiyabetta was a kind of stone hook that allowed them to latch onto the flesh of chemical eels to absorb a compound that got the fiyabetta mind-blowingly high. As a result, the fiyabetta had no need to develop other tools, as they spent the rest of their existence as a species zonked out of their damn minds.

Humans, however, were not so bright. Instead of chasing new ways to have fun, humanity decided, hey, why not take the whole of everything and divide it into miserable little pieces?

And so they did. It was such a popular idea that prototypes of this Great Divider were developed all across the world without any consensus of how it should work. Many of these first prototypes made only small cracks and fragments. Over time it became more efficient. Humans began to break down everything they could observe again and again into smaller and smaller fragments. The same tool was then used to meticulously organize these fragments however the humans using them agreed they ought to be categorized. Bewilderingly, the Great Divider came to be used for a new purpose—to put the pieces back together in new ways, and more often than not, break them back down in new ways again.

Unlike the unique and wildly successful invention of the fiyabetta, which never came to be known by any name, the ultimate and terribly destructive invention of the humans came to be known by many names. One of these names was Language.

The majority of things in the universe are closer in nature to the fiyabetta than to the humans. This is, perhaps, due to the fact that the majority of things in the universe are inanimate, and are therefore equally incapable of thinking or interpreting much of anything at all. This works out very well for the majority of all things because there is no way for anything to go wrong when there is no way of determining what “wrong” means. Humans, in their thirst for making things right, first had to come up with the idea that some things were wrong. As a result, humans have been doing things wrong ever since.

The Law of Conservation of Mass, before it came to be known as such, came from the philosophy that “nothing comes from nothing.” Ironically, before humans came along with their strange ideas, there was no nothing. In a universe sans-language, everything simply is. So it must be. So it was for all of time before "time". Then, one day humans came about with their strange vendetta against simplicity and decided that, actually, some things just aren’t.

In doing so, humans fundamentally altered the fabric of reality. Everything that had been, still was, but now there was something new—something that had never been. That something was Nothing. Thus, humanity created a great deal of paradoxes and ambiguous inventions — things and not-things alike. To claim that nothing comes from nothing is to be entirely wrong on two accounts: Firstly, “nothing” came from something—humanity. Secondly, a frankly incredible amount of things, not-things, and maybe-things came from that “nothing.”

One side effect of the paradoxical existence of Nothing was that every thing was now also a potentially infinite number of not-things and maybe-things. A chair, for example, can be a number of different things in different contexts, but there are infinitely many more things a chair is not. And yet somehow the fact that everything is now simultaneously an infinite number of not-things is one of the simplest paradoxes humans have come to live with. Look at what they've done to gods! They personified concepts—gave them names and histories and immortality, only to strike them down and tear them apart.

Gods do not die; they are dismantled—torn limb from limb and stripped of their former identities. Gods are living concepts. Every human is a philosopher—born to further tear apart the gods and spirits they once would have worshiped. But enough about the gods.

The whole universe—and everything that now nonexists beyond it—is in pain.