Pluto's Dream
Inspired by Plato's Dream, Voltaire
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Glittering beads woven across the intangible ceiling sky hung in eternal suspense with the light of birth, life and death forever travelling forward into the universe. Seasons were split by the congealing dripping atmosphere that demarcated summer from winter. Breath on this forbidden planet was the sign of summer, the mist lifting to form the atmosphere as the glare of the star finally warmed the quiet sun-side. No warmth came from within this planet, for all intents and purposes it was dead, a floating bone in the great expanse of hollowness.
No halo encircled blessed this cold rock a planet, with the myriad of weak watercolours contrasting to the unwritten birthmarks and great crevices that split the sides of frozen nitrogen surface to show an abyss below. Between sporadic regions of winter, Montes and Colles, mountains broke though the haze of the red Thelonian atmosphere, frozen steadfast through the elongated plutonian year.
In one such mountain was a castle within which lived a being. This world was his outpost, the land he fashioned for his present inhabitation, if such a word is appropriate. Hunger plagued not this sentient, nor emotion nor impulse. Purity of thought was his independence.
Far away his siblings took to creativity, with an ornamentation to their houses that this mind could not fathom.
"Why waste one moment of our infinity on inconsequential individuality?" he often reasoned to his view of the vibrant orbs in the universe far beyond his feeble masterpiece.
His siblings may not enjoy the person to which they depict, however they were not lesser types and so continued their portrayal.
The singsong one of heat and poison once counters his question with her own inquiry. "Why live with so thin an atmosphere and turn your mood from red to blue, instead focusing to see in a mountain of no view?"
Living within a tricky season,/ answered in a day of many, he came, "Simplicity is no fickle friend that strikes a bargain. The view is a tree of stable trunk, fortified shelter with giving seed."
Goldilocks smiled at that. "No tree blesses my eye in your garden. Do you thieve ideas for your analogy, forsaking your thoughts of independence?"
The sentient felt naught at her derision. "I delight in your creations and watch from afar, like an eagle in your realm of constant gifts. However, my sight is not swayed by the winds, and detect the weakness in your skin. Plus, I should need ideas to promulgate my perfect paradise, so what use is independence?"
The conversation span into uproar, for Goldilocks was venerated far beyond the Golden Halo, The Giant and even the Continuous Ocean.
"Independence is our duty before we return to right. Long ago did mine unfurl and yours too!" roared the Giant into his cyclones and anti-cyclones, spitting out rock in red fury.
"Distance has made you cold and dissociated," added the monotonous sibling.
"Dare you translate thought into reason?"
"Distance has no bearing on our sibling's temperament," said the side-stepping seventh sibling, distaste refluxing in his throat, "Nor heat upon reason."
Once again, the answer reached improper element in its following year, however his singsong sister replied before he could chance his voice. "Do not take offence, sister dear, for your misspoken epithet. You are colder than Golden Halo, for sure."
"The misprint in translation is as akin to me as creativity is your companion shadow," spoke the sentient, and that sister was not the only sibling who felt emotion.
"Riddles provide little information for a being whose thought is not its priority, sentient," offered the monotonous one. / continuous ocean. "Speak in the common tongue if health is your sin./greed."
"What mention of my skin causes you contention and what have you by way of my flaws?" Goldilocks cocked her head.
"One should not speak simply of flaws, but balance the scales for understanding's sake," the sentient spoke carefully, ensuring his response was not insidious as they orbited the middle-aged stellar. "So, here is my humble translation. Goldilocks, you have found the perfect moment to conduct you orchestra in our spiral galaxy. Yet that bountiful skin cracks and shifts with the tides/mood of your molten core, and your atmosphere shifts before your reigning survivors may adapt. The millions of species speak highly of your careful evolution, however it is surely now desensitized to the cycle of life and death; now races live on the rotting waste of the fittest of the past and in a prematurely changed environment, so before they can live they are but a smudge on a slate in an imperfect world. That paradox is not alone in your creation. Amongst the millions of species, you have gifted consciousness to humans though written in fine-print in their cells is the conflict of their two hungers that they cannot live without. Some sadistic pleasure it must give to see that when they transcend to archetypical realisation that they die of failing limb or revert for insisting kin. Where and when did or will your perfect creature begin, Goldilocks, or will you transfer to your prodigy your cruel indecisions?"
A year went past on Goldilock's earth before the sentient heard,
"You speak of translation," came Golden Halo. "So speak of the words of difference."
So far from his siblings was the sentient that his reply was given to him.
"Choice is an experiment driven by hope and fear. That life is a path, its finite nature a reminder of significance, a remembrance of the days of the past and the lessons never learnt by the people of the world. My gift was choice and realisation, sparing imposition and arrogant love."
His siblings laughed veritably at the sentient then, for his wayward translation and his silence.
"Hast your analysis changed your title from Purity?" came an insidious question.
"The beloved occupation of purity forfeits mammoth bone-headedness for a fantastical void of never truly understanding," replied the sentient Dwarf. "It is courage to walk off a precipice until you spy a winged creature lifting you high, and forget Icarus for his follies for he learnt first to fly."