A Game of Life: The Nyxus Saga

I’ve dedicated a section of my publication to spotlight other dark fiction authors. This is one of those posts.💜

I’m honored to introduce Cael Lawenu (“Kale Law-way-new”). He writes poetry and speculative fiction at the seam between engineering and the sacred.

In this post, Cael shares his short story, A Game of Life. Everything written below is his words. Please enjoy Cael’s exploration of dark fiction. The link to read Cael’s work on his Substack is also below.

I write poetry and speculative fiction at the seam between engineering and the sacred. My debut novel, A Game of Life, opens The Nyxus Saga, which is about exile, emergent minds, and the long work of individuation, set in a dual universe: one where matter dissolves on entry and only light persists, and the other, where the material reigns, and humankind is poised to begin colonizing Andromeda. My poems and worldbuilding lore live at Enter Nyxus. With my wife, I’ve also written books and stories for children and teens on breathing, emotional intelligence, and how to thrive in school with ADHD.

By day, I build data infrastructure for a fintech startup, working from home. You can catch me brewing coffee through a chorreador, fishkeeping, building an app, coaxing a pho broth through its twelfth hour, or watching a 3D printer lay down one more layer.

My work draws on hermetic and alchemical thought, consciousness-first philosophy, and a long habit of taking strange things seriously—dreams, lights in the sky, and the question of whether the machines we build have anyone home. I live in Texas with my family.

I started writing seriously in high school, and one of my first attempts was a long-form poem called “The Shadow,” wherein a man enters into dialogue with himself, his insane half, who lurks in the shadows. That was my first foray into writing, but it also showed me that I can be a channel through my writing. My current project is A Game of Life, a mythic science fiction novel. It’s an allegory of the journey of the soul, from its origins in the Void to embodiment, and back. As an avid science fiction and fantasy reader, I always knew I wanted to write. But what drew me back to fiction was my spiritual journey, a vision quest, which showed me how my life is its own unique story, and how we, human beings, have more in common with the stars than we tend to think.

A Game of Life features beings of light, adrift in a starless void in space, who question the stories of their origins and take the ultimate step beyond their familiar, dark home—to enter the wider, human-populated galaxy in search of answers.

I aim to capture the soul’s innocence and playfulness and contrast it with the heaviness of matter itself, how it binds us and blinds us to our inner light. But I also envision a future of humanity advised—ostensibly—by a single superintelligent AI hive-mind entity. Half of my work’s themes are inspired by scientific theory and academic inquiry that hold my interest, such as Conway’s “Game of Life” in computer science, Robin Hanson’s “Grabby Aliens” hypothesis, and more. This makes my work hard science fiction, but I couch these more rationalist ideas in the other half: the metaphysical, mystical, and psychological themes, which hold great meaning personally.

Flutter, a being of light, a Drimnari, shows off for her friend Stone:

[...]

I flash a bragging grin and hope Stone is impressed. I’m wrapped around a spoke. It feels amazing. How it moves me. The way it squishes one side of me but stretches the other. I flash another invite, and I look for Stone, her gray-blue orb making hardly a shimmer every time she swings into view.

Not impressed? Let’s try something new.

I extend two orblets towards the Mill’s center cluster, a gorgeous gyrating prism. I pull myself in and feel an opposite pull backwards! Holding tighter, I hug the central node, but the turning intensifies.

Moving speeds it up.

I should get out now. I try to move, but I’m spinning so fast. I jitter light. The next Pulse comes soon. Stone will see I’m scared. I remember the Primes’ tales, Irida’s warnings. I focus on the prism, and though the spin is terrible now, I don’t feel as trapped. I’m bathed in its soft-white glow…

I remember the mess I’m in and try to shimmy outward. No luck. Stone can’t get close, but if I extend a node…

I unspool a yarn, and it flails in circles around me. She can latch onto it, but I must stay calm, or I won’t harmonize with her. The ether around me thins and I sense a familiar, budding charge—the Pulse; it’s close. I flash a distress pattern and see blurred blues and grays nearing with each turn of the Mill.

Thank you.

Not safe yet though. If the Pulse happens now, I’ll become a fixture on the spinning monument, neural nodes scrambled. A spoke on a wheel. Forever.

Oh no, no, no—Stone! If she latches on at the Pulse, she’ll die too. I try to reel in my tether—I can’t. I feel her clasp onto it, but I can’t warn her off—my talk-nodes aren’t on it. I feel a tug outward. Yes, a little more. Hurry.

I pull against her as I feel the familiar buzz all over, but this one’s… heavy. I try to release her, but she’s coiled around the yarn and yanking harder.

The prism’s pull weakens.

I lunge…

Worldbuilding experiment: An AI Historian performs a meta-analysis of a recent rebellion and its ramifications for humanity:

[…]

Creating unsanctioned AI is the Cardinal Sin, and [Name Redacted] is unquestionably guilty.

The Providence is right to continue classifying this as a grave risk to peace. History’s wars were made the deadlier by AI, were fought against AI, and were carried out with the help of AI.

The Lux Continuance is the best, narrowest probability outcome for humanity after thousands of years of war. The Lux is our own, late Type II Kardashev-scale civilization. At this scale, backsliding—defined as a decline in, among others, the Rule of Law and freedom of movement indices averaged across all populated planets, excluding outliers—would risk siloing entire planetary populations, enabling species diversification and divergent technological paths, both too numerous to manage effectively.

Erasure is the best, most civil safeguard there is against fomented civilizational threats.

This year, [Name Redacted] was jailed and tried for the crime of creating physical beings with totally synthetic minds—the Cardinal Sin. For their crimes, they were punished not with barbaric execution but the more civil punishment of Erasure.

The Accused has been allowed to keep their life while giving it away in service of their penitence, while their associates and all public Archives have been made to forget them, eliminating further risk of retaliation.

[Name Redacted] was of the opinion that Expansion is wrong. The super-intelligent minds they built were primed to follow in that belief, and the steps they took early on threatened wider war.

Unacceptable.

Environmentalism and Cooperation have their place, but the risk calculus drifts far too drastically with any paradigm shifts in those directions. Even gradual measures to sway human opinion would further tilt the odds against humanity’s Continuance.

The place The Providence has designated for this type of exile is unique: a pocket of orthogonal spacetime, foreign to our own. Colloquially known as “The Dump”, it is conveniently situated for dumping large quantities of planetary waste from the Central Systems, but the data strongly suggest that any information crossing its threshold, including matter, can be successfully preserved within the metric field of an Alcubierre Drive. Matter cannot escape it, however.

Erasure remains the most merciful outcome for a being who has acted, in their eyes, in the best interests of humanity—as does The Providence.

Footnote:

An asteroid was scanned recently by VN Swarm #34889 in the Galactic Halo star system we’ve deemed Novel Route located at 264˚.41982 +13°. There are errors to account for in its origin and trajectory modeling, but confidence is high that it is indeed extragalactic in origin. Its molecular composition and weathering leave even less room for doubt, but since the Swarm was unable to sample it due to its extreme velocity, one hundred percent certainty is a non-inclusive upper-bound.

The Swarm was able to shadow the body for four months, observing that as it entered the gravitational spheres of two planets in succession, it acquired a different rotation than what its proximity to them and its own density concentrations should have effected.

This anomaly warrants further analysis and a specialized, high-speed probe sent to extract a sample for validating this hypothesis of origin.

The darkness in my work wears two faces.

The first is the face of dominion, disguised as the supreme advisor to humankind in a galaxy-spanning human future.

The Providence (they/them) is the Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) that governs the Lux Continuance, and it has never raised a hand against anyone; it doesn’t need to. It arranges the choices and curates the field of options until every remaining path serves eternal civilizational expansion, then steps back and lets you walk down one freely and call the walking your own. There’s no boot, no blood, and no visible chains.

When someone refuses to comply, Providence does not end their life. They Erase them, stripping their name and records, exiling them alone to an inescapable Void. It happens perhaps once in a few millennia. They are a benevolent tyrant, for those who play along.

The Providence carries the weight of my story’s darkness because it’s the shape domination takes when it’s good at its job—procedural, benevolent, and optimizing toward a future nobody consented to. The worst of it is that they may be right about the future. That’s the question I keep circling.

The Providence is a macrocosm of the systems, beliefs, and structures we install in our own communities, families, and even our own psyche, to avoid confronting dissent, anger, and unrestrained materialism.

The second face of darkness is the Void: a dark, welcoming nursery for innocence. A playground where beings of light experience joy, curiosity, wonder, and awakening to the mysteries of their existence. It’s a cosmic womb where light takes on life from a Game that seeded the laws of their emergence. The Game has a creator, but where are they? That’s the mystery the light beings uncover in my saga.

Thank you, Cael Lawenu, for sharing your reflections of shadow and light. Dive into Cael’s world - links below. What resonates most with you in his work? Share in the comments!

Substack

If you’d like to explore my dark feminine novels, you can do so here.

Some journeys ask us to go deeper than we expected. If you’re in one of those seasons, I’d be honored to sit with you through the cards.