I have no choice but to write small, smaller, smaller still. It is not enough for my words to fit on tissue paper or discarded pottery shards; they must fit on the black, where solid things become waves forming the atmosphere in which immaterial things float. It is these things, this peculiar form of life, about which I will write. A white square gets smaller in the black void. It gets smaller forever, without a frame of reference.

Shapes swim in the black. Entities best described as circles, triangles, squares, and further polygons, because they are in form nothing more than moving shapes, the atoms of Democritus which attach and reattach to each other. I will not describe them making contact, bouncing off or sticking to one another. This dance is played out on the scale of billions. Each is unique in position and shape. Each is a crystal with a hopelessly precise pattern, micro-perturbations which define them as unique figures. To unveil a new plan in their crystallography is to find a fourth, a fifth, a sixth fold of hidden symmetry. They do not glitter like snowflakes; they are too demure. They are simple white constructions against the black. When they are thickening together en masse, however, their appearance is that of TV static, or of a dimensional snow enveloping the void. They are, in truth, angels.

A being made of slim girders, arranged in an asymmetrical chassis, supported by two black wheels. His name is Macket. Macket rolls along, his wheels (which he uses rather like legs) are a bit darker than the black. His wheels creak as he walks. He is able to walk over the void and the white crystals. He is not a snowflake nor an angel, but a machine. He picks up white shapes with two girders like arms, raises them with a motion like a toy forklift, and dashes them against the void until they shatter. With various pieces left about, lines and vertices, he assembles new angels, more complex than before. One is a white triangle, bearing millions of micro-perturbations from being dashed and reassembled. Atop this thin triangle is a circle, put together out of spare mashed lines, a bauble atop a tree, or a head atop a dress.

Can Macket be called in love? He is only a little machine. His actions are miniscule and exactly as described. There is no room for representation here, which requires a certain majesty of form, great interlocking parts of meaning. Here, everything is so small that each thing only represents itself. So, we shall not import any allegorical dimensions. Neither can his actions be called hate, even if he rips things to pieces. He both destroys and creates, and both these actions are conducted neutrally, with viciousness. Macket is a machine which forms connections with more simple entities and in doing so destroys or recreates them according to himself. But a particular shape may appreciate even being destroyed, because this hateful relation is the only way to sustain a connection. Where there is no hope of friendly or neutral intercourse, when two beings are mutually repulsed, the only option left is hatred, which is in truth a means of preserving an otherwise unsustainable connection. In this sense, a shape may well be able to hate.