Unmaking

I have learned to think backwards. Not metaphorically, as one might when solving a puzzle, but rather literally. My thoughts now flow from consequence to cause, from ending to beginning. It is the only way to survive on Oros. Unconventional. Unintuitive. Obtuse.

I remember when Oros was not our first research choice. Each experiment yielded unexpected results, fuelling fierce arguments about the dangers of exploring an incomprehensible planet. Yet, where communications faltered, a xenolinguist like me found appeal. Those days are gone.

We arrived here forty-four days ago, though “arrived” feels wrong. On Oros, one doesn’t arrive; one un-leaves. The planet taught us this distinction immediately. As our shuttle descended through amber clouds, we watched a forest below us unburning. Blackened stumps sprouting bark, leaves unfurling from ash, smoke condensing into wood. Captain Nii vomited. Profound. Expected.

The first week, we clung to our forward-thinking habits. We wrote in logs, recorded observations, and marked calendars. But Oros resisted. Ink faded upward from the page. Recordings garbled, words reversed mid-sentence into nonsense. Even thoughts tangled; morning plans forgotten by evening, or rather, evening plans remembered by morning. We were not blinking in confusion, but un-blinking as we tried to make sense of it.

“The only constant is entropy reversal, Dr Aria.” Kame, our physicist, announced on day twelve, his voice tight with the effort of maintaining coherence. “Everything here flows toward order, not away from it.”

But I sensed something deeper. Language is time’s truest map. On Oros, the map changed. The ruins, actively un-ruining, stood at the valley’s heart. Daily, walls rose from the rubble, cracks sealed, the weather reversed, and rain poured to the sky. Sounds teased; whispers from nowhere, syllables fading before words, a constant stream of almost-meaning. Haunting. Taunting.

I began recording everything, playing it backwards. This is when I first heard them truly speak. The voices were crystalline in reverse. Structured. Deliberate. They spoke of concepts I could barely grasp. Words existed for the feeling of watching something unbreak, for the memory of things that hadn’t happened yet, for the profound sorrow of knowing that all creation here was actually un-destruction.

On day twenty-eight, we found the first artifact that responded to our touch, a sphere of impossible geometry that unshattered in my hands. Fragments of it flowing together like mercury finding its form. As it completed itself, I heard it “speak”, a pulse of sound that meant nothing until I reversed it. It was my voice. Speaking words I had never said. Warning of choices I had not yet made.

“The creatures remember you,” the recording of my future self said. “They remember because you un-killed them. You gave them back their deaths. Time to end this for once and forever.”

That night, Kame’s entropy-reversal device succeeded for the first time. We aimed it at a cluster of crystallized remains. They were bones mostly, frozen in fractured beauty. The process was horrifying in its grace. Death peeled away like old paint. Tissues rewove. Eyes opened, already knowing.

The creature, bipedal, graceful, with eyes like starred opals, looked at me and spoke. Backwards, of course, but I had learned by then to hear in reverse. It said: “Again, you come. Again, you choose.”

“I don’t understand,” I replied, but even as the words left my mouth, I felt them reversing, felt my meaning flowing backward into intention, intention into possibility. Familiar yet strange.

“Understanding is unmaking,” it said, and walked backward into the ruins. Each step preceded the one before, until it disappeared into a doorway that sealed itself behind or before it.

The linguistics consumed me. I discovered that Orosian language didn’t reflect their reverse causality, it embodied it. Every sentence began with its conclusion. Every story starts with its ending. To speak their language truly, one had to know what one would say before thinking it, had to arrive at questions by way of their answers.

On day thirty-nine, I made the breakthrough. Not by study, but by giving up. I stopped trying to translate and began to pre-member, to remember forward. The words of undoing came to me then as my lingua franca. Perfect. Terrible.

A phrase that existed in the space between meaning and unmeaning. I wondered openly about possibilities where meanings didn’t need words and actions operated without thoughts. But words of undoing weren’t that. In a place that lacked a positive direction, these words meant a consequence. I instinctively rationalised this, in forward and in reverse.

“You’re talking about erasing us,” Nii said when I explained. “If you speak those words, if you complete their cycle, we cease to exist here. We never existed here.”

“No,” I said. “We become part of the cycle, don’t you see? We were and always are a part of it.”

I was fairly certain that the evidence was turning undeniable. Our presence was accelerating the un-destruction. The more we observed, the faster the ruins rebuilt. The more creatures emerged from death, the more the planet moved toward some primordial state of un-beginning.

On day forty-four, I stood in the fully restored city, surrounded by the voices of the not-yet-dead. The creatures watched us with patient, knowing eyes. They remembered us from before, from the last cycle, or rather from the next cycle.

My recorder is in my hand. When I play it backward now, I hear not just my voice but theirs, a chorus of warnings and welcomes, of endings that are beginnings. They tell me what I already know: that discovery here is always un-discovery, that to learn is to unlearn, that to understand Oros truly is to accept one’s place in its endless recursion. But why wouldn’t they stop me from saying what I was about to say? Were they hoping this charade would end? Not for me, it doesn’t.

I speak the words of undoing.

They sound like silence playing backward, like the space between heartbeats, like the pause before birth and after death. As they leave my mouth, I feel time fold, feel our presence here becoming un-presence, feel our discoveries reverting to mystery.

We are leaving Oros. We have always been leaving. We will always be arriving.

In my final recording, or my first recording, I hear my voice saying what I now know: “We are the next layer of myth. We are the previous truth. On Oros, these are the same things.”

The forest burns backward into green. The city crumbles into completion.

We unmake ourselves into legends, which here, perhaps, is the only way to exist.

Thinking forwards. Living backwards.

Unmade. Undone.