Magog. Haxmjolk. OP and the phantom band. Groep Ohm Skokian. Aardvarks. Atrium Color Seed. St Erhart paprika. Everybody's own hand.

The story goes like this. Somewhere sits the man who has almost everything. He spent years since the beginning collecting gems, since the dawn of mp3s and napster, the commonest through to the rarest. In a few years, he will have them all. Only a few remain elusive but thanks to the stupendous set he has assembled he's confident he’ll get the last remaining private pressings, even one-off albums like a legendary cassette or acetate recorded by a completely unknown yet brilliant band in the seventies, through trades and diligent searching. He is aided by a set of far-flung henchmen-- obscure toilers who purchase the records and rip them, then trade them, all unaware of the enormity of their task, like the Mesopotamian scribes who each knew only a part of the text they were working on. He is financed by a wealthy venture capitalist who is equally obsessed but more limited in time than money, to whom hundreds of dollars for one rarity are nothing in pursuit of the shared dream of owning all the historical progressive albums in the entire world-- which obviously constitute a mathematically finite set-- although approaching the exact number requires a calculus which should approach an asymptote, or limit, perhaps around an order of magnitude ten to the power 4, possibly 5, depending on definitions. Day by day he amasses more through the work of all, until one day he has everything-- though no one knows he has this power, this uniqueness in a world of almost seven billion humans. To be alone in such a possession is unusual, it is as special as being the richest man in the world. What does it mean if everyone is unaware? We are all alone in our own consciousnesses. Picture him working in the depths of a hospital by day, in the evening coming home to a package-- the last gem left to listen to. Surrounded by the discs of sound he is complete at least, task finished.

In quantum mechanics we speak of the wave function (which governs all subatomic entities and by extension all reality) 'collapsing' due to interaction with other processes. The elucidation of this collapse to this day is one of the mystifying aspects of the standard model. There is no complete theory to explain it, though many philosophical interpretations. Some, perhaps most physicists, believe that each event, governed by a certain probability, splits into a separate parallel universe. Thus the world and the future are indeterministic in a very deep and decisive manner. At that time the LHC in Europe, through a freak extremely improbable hadron beam black hole creation event, leads to a vacuum instability that is lower in energy than our current universe. The result (as was warned before many times before the accelerator came on line) is that at the speed of light a wavefront destroys the current structure of the universe and drops it to a lower energy vacuum of obliteration. Utterly lost in a millisecond are the man who has everything and his collection of everything.

But, in another earlier split parallel universe, the man who has everything sits back and relaxes after acquiring the last progressive album from Germany and picks up a book on the suggestion of a friend: Sir Martin Rees' "Our Final Hour." He reads about the doomsday argument-- the argument that we are all born, here and now today, because it is the statistically likeliest time for a human to be born (10 percent of all humans who ever lived are alive today), or to put it differently, the population is about to crash suddenly: we are in the middle of a bell curve-- and he's jolted into the chilled realization that humanity is in peril, time is short... He can't sleep anymore, it hits him over the head like a hammer. Of course, it's obvious, there is no future of traveling the stars and exploring galaxies, the population curve is about to negative slope soon... So he starts a blog and dedicates himself to sharing all his tens of thousands of hoarded gems with all the fans who can appreciate them, few as they are proportionately under the integral of that gaussian. He has just started, having shared Anubis (Fra 1984), when the aforementioned LHC vacuum instability wipes him out and all the other fans, atomizing and quantumly randomizing all the culture and progressive music humanity has ever created as well as that great record collection.

Addendum: the parable is not about me!!!!!!

Magog - Lock...
Häxmjölk - Eskimo Heat ...
O.P. & The Phantom Band....
Groep Ohm - Skokian...
Aardvarks - Aardvakistan...
Atrium - Vierwetterhaus...
St-Erhart - Cuando se come aqui...
Hand - Everybody's Own Hand...