Antim's sacrifice
Date: June 2024. Content warning: Recreational substance use, mild profanity

The chaotic running colours and morphing shapes started settling.
They settled down into objects such as furniture, clothes, pictures on the wall.
The room came into focus and I could now read what was around me. I was in a dormitory room.
I looked around; books, electric kettle, clothes on the floor. It was a strange feeling. I could remember the names of these objects but they seemed so alien to me, so weird, so particular, so defined.

I looked ahead and saw the face of a curious young man. We were both sitting on a bed, my bed.

"So, how was the trip?" He asked eagerly.

The trip, oh yes, the trip. I looked at my Eastern hand and I saw that I was holding a black metal pipe. Salvia. My memories told me I had just smoked Salvia, held it in my lungs for 30 seconds and exhaled, blacking out. How I was still holding my pipe after the trip, I do not know.

When I say I remembered, I mean I accessed information stored in the brain of the body I had just woken up in. I felt like I had just been born.
I was a newcomer to this strange world.

"Dude I don't remember anything." I told my friend and trip-sitter, Ansim.

I looked out of the window and could see a large star near the horizon. I suddenly remembered that this world has cycles of brightness and darkness. I felt it was so ridiculously funny.

"Hey, Ansim, is the Sun about to set in this world?" I asked.

"In this world? Lol. It's the first setting, yeah."

"The the first setting." I chuckled.
"You know what, " I said, "Pretend that I'm a newcomer to this world and answer my questions like I'm a kid. That's the real trip."

"Haha that's weird. I like that. Go on, Shoot." Ansim said.

"Explain what you mean by the 'first setting'."

"It will set twice today, wouldn't it? Ah okay, fine. See, the Sun will go into retrograde once it sets, it will rise again in the West a little bit and then set again."

"And you don't feel that it's crazy? Do you guys never question it?"

"Erm, we are talking about night and day here. How can we question it?"

"Fine, fine, what's the situation with the moons?" I said while looking at a small white orb in the sky.

"It's a little weird to answer questions like these XD, but I will try. We have three moons, the Watermoon, the Grassmoon and the Firemoon. The Watermoon is always at the same position in the sky, the Grassmoon makes 10 revolutions around the Earth in a day and the Firemoon is small and irregularly shaped and whirls across the sky quite quickly, about 200 times a day, or 20 times per grassmonth."

"So the Watermoon is geostationary."

"Klar, it is so."

"Ansim, let's go for a walk. This room is too damat for me, I'm suffocating.", I said to Ansim while looking at the undergrads walking on pavements down below.

"Well I hope you don't ask me to explain how the air and the breathing works." Ansim said and he put his socks on.

We went downstairs.

We started walking on a pretty road glistening in golden sunlight. There were animals around us. Some were slinging on trees while others chased each other on the grass below.

When we turned on a corner, I saw this group of people holding candles and wearing white cubical hats, walking around a shrine of some sort.

"Ansim, what's going on here?"

"It's the antimists. Right, the antimists are the people who are very staunch about remembering the sacrifice of Antim."

I stared at Ansim.

"Antim was a person who lived thousands of days ago and he was killed to save the world."

"What?"

"Erm, so the story goes like this. The world was in the earlier stages of going to total shit. Total disaster, wars, water scarcity, blight and so on. Most people back then didn't seem to care enough, but a few people decided that they can see the world go to shit in the next 10-20 years and they must prevent it.

The legend goes that they started writing stone plaques about their situation and asking for help from future advanced generations. These plaques were found in excavations by future scientists and they visited our group of people in the past.

They explained that the situation can only be sorted with one way, killing one person and turning the wheel of history towards the right direction.
This group of conspiring ancestors suggested the names of despotic kings and presidents but the future scientists ran calculations and came up with the name of a 45 year old farmer in a semi-rural area of a small country."

"Wait, what?"

"Chaos theory, or whatever. I don't know. According to the legend these group of people simply went ahead and murdered him, shook hands with the future scientists who went back to the future.

Historians agree that eventually this came out and created a huge scandal. This murder was on the name of the entire human race and the decision was taken clandestinely and undemocratically.

The world didn't go to shit but some people were extremely furious about the murder."

"Are these people antimists?"

"Not exactly. Antimists are the people who say that Antim saved the whole world. His sacrifice saved millions of lives and he is a hero. So every grassmonth on the 12th cycle of the firemoon they repent for their crime of killing Antim. You see these people? They were just physically punishing themselves a while ago. They are so guilty and hate others for not being guilty enough."

"What happened to those who opposed the murder of Antim?"

"The antimists see them as evil, wolves in sheep's clothes. They think they wanted the world to end. The world would have ended if not for Antim's death, but who has seen the math?"

"But do you even believe in this story Ansim?"

"I don't know man, it was so long ago, who knows if it's real. We have the stone plaques and political records written by maesters of that age.
In any case, if we assume the time-travel story to be true, it forms for an interesting problem to discuss in moral philosophy. Only if people weren't so sensitive about it."

"Hmm" I replied. I was starting to feel a lot like myself now. But it would take a week to stop feeling like I had just been born.

"Ansim, it's the sixth hour. Looks like the mess is serving food. Let's go for dinner?"

"Yeah mate, but are you done with your questions?"

"Explain to me how walking works."

"You're losing it pal."

We both laughed it off and headed towards the mess.

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Explainer:

1) "Eastern hand": In this world they do not refer to objects as relative to the observer, rather in absolute terms. They don't have a concept of left or right, rather they remain oriented with the cardinal directions and refer to objects using these directions. This is borrowed from a real life language called Guugu Yimithirr from an Australian aboriginal clan.

1.5) "Klar" is "clear" in German, it's also used as "correct" or "right" in certain contexts.

2) Sun's retrograde motion: On the planet Mercury in our world, the Sun does not simply rise and set like it does on Earth. You'd often see that the Sun rises, climbs up in the sky, reverse its direction (ie go into retrograde), then reverse its direction again and then set. You can see this in the desktop app Stellarium for yourself. This happens because the length of the day and the length of a year on Mercury is comparable. The Sun rises because the planet rotates, but just in a while the planet has moved so much ahead in its orbit that the Sun starts to fall back.

This means that the (solar) day on this planet is extremely long, comparable to the length of its year.

3) The moons and the months: The Earth here has three moons. The farther a moon is, the longer it takes to orbit the planet.
The Watermoon is geostationary, which means that it always remains in the same position in the sky. It revolves around the Earth exactly in sync with Earth's rotation about self. We have placed many satellites in such orbits around the Earth, but the odds of a natural satellite being geostationary are quite low (but such coincidences exist, for example the angular sizes of the Moon and the Sun as seen from Earth are almost equal).
So, a watermonth would be equal to one sidereal day of this planet (a sidereal day is the time it takes a planet/moon/asteroid to rotate once completely when measured with respect to distant stars, which is equal to ~23h56m for Earth, as opposed to the solar day which is measured with respect to the Sun, which we define to be exactly 24h)

So the watermonth is not useful for counting time.

Next we have the Grassmoon, which makes 10 revolutions around the planet in a day (remember that the day here is like a year long), so a grassmonth (time it takes the Grassmoon to go about the Earth once) is equivalent to a month on our Earth.

Then we have the Firemoon, which is a small rock which is much closer to the surface of the planet and makes 200 revolutions per day (remember that the day here is very long), and since the Grassmoon makes 10 revolutions in a day, in every grassmonth the firemoon would make 20 revolutions.

So a firemonth here is equivalent to a day on our Earth (the whole thing is equivalent to 20 days in a month, 10 months in a year).

The Firemoon is similar to Phobos, a small irregular moon of Mars. Large spherical moons cannot survive so close to a giant planet as tidal forces would rip them apart.

4) The murder of Antim: This is a case of the trolley problem in philosophy. The idea of killing a seemingly random but crucial person to save the planet is somewhat borrowed from the Netflix show Umbrella Academy, except the circumstances are not a magical apocalypse but rather climate change like we face today.

Killing one person to save many. A utilitarian would say that it's simple math and you should do it, while a Kantian moralist would say that it's immoral to do so.

But what would happen if such a decision was made and a person was killed to save many? The next generations would need to live with the guilt of owing their life to a murder.
A similar guilt is seen in Christians who fetishise the murder of Yeshua; that he was the Christ and he died for everyone's sins.