“All that we are is a pattern of air flow.”¹

This story is about the end, about endings, about the beginning of an end or, much rather, it is about beginning(s). Determining a direction of reading Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation” evokes an old cliché, for perhaps this is, literally, all a matter of perspective. Oscillating between reading “Exhalation” as an aesthetic and poetics of finitude and impending end, and as a eulogy of open-ended possibility (both seem just as true) is to acknowledge the immense speculative thrust and narrative complexity of Ted Chiang’s (science) fiction. His work powerfully blends — or even establishes a continuity between — scientific speculation, philosophical inquiry, and fine-grained social analysis embedded into powerful literary thought experiments probing the imaginative space of the “what if.”² “Exhalation” was first published in 2008 in the science fiction and fantasy collection Eclipse Two, edited by John Strahan.³ For this paper, we use the 2019 reprint of “Exhalation,” published in Chiang’s short story collection by the same title. Seconding Gary K. Wolf’s assessment that “Exhalation” is perhaps one of “the most astonishing of Chiang’s stories,”⁴we unpack the “epistemological expedition” that Christine Lötscher sees as a hallmark of Chiang’s work generally.⁵We therefore discuss in which ways this particular narrative presents, in the words of Patrick Lohier, “a pocket-sized epic of scientific inquiry.”⁶

Chiang’s speculative stories “are ingenious experiments that integrate philosophy, semantics, physics, and religion into sprawling (albeit concisely rendered) meditations on epistemology and life.”⁷ In this paper, we trace the particular meditation, in “Exhalation,” on epistemologies of air. Air takes center stage in this story, functioning as a vehicle for intellectual and physical experimentation: to engage in literal introspection in the process of a transformative auto-dissection: “It has long been said that air (which others call argon) is the source of life. This is not in fact the case.”⁸ Alongside a reformulation of how the physical world works, “Exhalation” depicts a corresponding metaphysical challenge to emotionally respond and spiritually adapt to a cosmic-scale paradigm shift to (in Margaret Atwood’s terms) an “Everything Change.”⁹ At all stages, we argue, this is bound up with transformed epistemologies of air. This paper traces the centrality of air and a re-evaluated ethics of breathing, and explores the aesthetics and poetics of entropy within the story’s celebration of complexity in narrativizing the relationship of air, pressure differentials, cognition, and feeling.

So far, commentators on this short story have tended to focus on its world-building and the logics of its alternative cosmology.¹⁰ More recently, the story has been read as a parable for climate change and anthropogenesis at large.¹¹ Obviously, these foci have been employed for good and compelling reasons. However, rarely has air itself been read in much detail or theorized as a protagonist in its own right with regard to these central issues. In this paper, we provide a starting point for this part of the conversation, looking at how the literal inhalation and exhalation of air — rather than its pollution or exhaustion — cause an inevitable end of motion and thus of life. We also consider, therefore, how the story recontextualizes important questions about the cultural politics of resource extraction and greenhouse gas emissions. We foreground a reading of Chiang’s “Exhalation” that is attentive to the entanglements of air and its pressurizations, transformation, temporality, and non-linear exchanges between beginning and end. We argue that Chiang’s narrative thus engages — via the metaphor of air as a focal point — in the critical cultural practice of destabilizing essentialized epistemologies and frames of reference.

For this purpose, we first sketch out the overall narrative situation of “Exhalation,” as well as its essential storyline and formal properties, thereby paying particular attention to how air (and its entropic relationship with those who depend on it) causes a “fatal equilibrium.” We then explore how “Exhalation” reframes air against the grain of dominant cultural narratives, analyzing how air itself functions as a grand metaphor (of destruction, of renewal, of pressure and/or release, of discovery — the affective implications of insight) and how it thus enables thinking about literary-cultural responses to crisis. Zooming in on the story’s metaphoric and aesthetic of air pressure, we then turn to analyzing Chiang’s treatment of apocalypse in its literal signification as “revelation” of the formerly hidden. What is particularly interesting about this narrative, we suggest, is its refusal to morally evaluate the realization of impending end, an astonishing lack of affective charge. How, we ask, does “Exhalation” frame an apocalyptic moment in a curiously calm and self-reflexive way, giving rise to hope and anticipation?

“I had a different suspicion, a darker one that I dared not voice, but it decided my course of action; I would proceed with my experiment.”¹²

“Exhalation” commences with a grand inversion, beginning with a moment of foreshadowing: As the protagonist stresses, air is not actually the source of life: “For most of history, the proposition that we draw life from air was so obvious that there was no need to assert it.”¹³ This sets the narrative up as a reversal of established truths and prepares its agenda as one of grand-scale reformulation — in what the anonymous scientist protagonist experiences as a “cascade of insights”¹⁴ — of this fictional world’s physics, cosmology, and even history of ideas.

The story’s protagonist, a non-human, non-binary, mechanical scientist, is engraving into a copper plate the history of an everything-changing discovery: the gradual, ongoing transition of their chromium world into a fatal equilibrium, the end of life in the cessation of all motion. In an attempt to preserve their discovery for posterity, the protagonist is engraving “these words to describe how I came to understand the true source of life and, as a corollary, the means by which life one day will end.”¹⁵ The exposition thus already foreshadows how the narrative will later theorize the distinction between life and death: not in oppositional terms or along a dialectical logic of difference, but as physical properties of the pressure of air: life and death, the narrative suggests, are not at all mutually opposing (meta-)physical categories, but ‘simply’ functions or articulations of air pressure.

It all starts with a paradox, an intrusion of oddity into an otherwise perfectly organized cosmos, a temporal out-of-tact-ness at least theoretically impossible in what the chromium world’s inhabitants have always considered to be a physically open system: an infinitely expanding universe. There is a tradition, among the chromium world’s mechanical inhabitants, to recite a stretch of verse to inaugurate each new year. According to the protagonist, recitals have invariably taken precisely one hour. There are rumors about turret clocks striking the hour before the completion of recitals, coming from different districts, “something that had never happened before.”¹⁶ According to the protagonist’s engraved account, we read that accumulating confirmations of the phenomenon lead them to “a different suspicion” than sabotage, as they write, “a darker one I dared not voice.”¹⁷

The entire narrative then offers, in much procedural detail, the protagonist’s experimental and deductive process to prove this suspicion, conducting a revelatory examination which takes the form of an auto-craniectomy, in an attempt to study the inner workings of their brain. It is in the ensuing description of a mechanical cognition and model of consciousness that they note that “[a]ir is in fact the very medium of our thoughts. All we are is a pattern of air flow.”¹⁸ The image of setting up what they call a “solipsistic periscope,” forming “the basis of all that was to come,”¹⁹ frames literal and philosophical introspection as the only possible means to achieve much-needed insight into how, in the chromium world, air — that is, its patterns of air flow — determines physiology, consciousness, and life itself. From the premise that air is the substrate of existence, the protagonist concludes that “if the flow of air ever ceases, everything is lost.”²⁰

This cessation is, as it turns out, inevitable. The protagonist’s auto-craniectomy, aside from resolving this species’ long-standing philosophical preoccupation with the issue of cognition and theories of the mind, delivers the solution to the initial temporal conundrum: the clock anomaly. Their brain is a hyper-complex mechanical device of “tiny air capillaries” interwoven with “a latticework of wires on which gold leaves were hinged.”²¹

Because pressurized air pumped through these capillaries keeps this “microcosm of auric machinery,”²² of infinitesimally small and fine gold leaves, in constant motion, any change in air flow — a function of its pressurization — is of literally existential consequence. “Because my consciousness could be said to be encoded in the position of these tiny leaves,” the protagonist reasons as they operate on themselves, it would be “accurate to say that it was encoded in the ever-shifting pattern of air driving these leaves.”²³ As life and consciousness are bound up with, coded in, and therefore a function of air pressure, “our brains rely on the passage of air, and when that air flows more slowly, our thoughts slow down, making the clocks seem to us to run faster.”²⁴

For the protagonist, the logical conclusion here is that their species brains are in fact functioning with less speed, producing the illusion of a faster passage of time. The only possible explanation for this decrease in computational speed is “that the pressure of our surrounding atmosphere” must be “increasing.”²⁵It happens as a result of the protagonist and all other inhabitants of this world inhaling and exhaling, through their mechanical lungs (reusable pressure containers), air sourced from “the reservoir of air deep underground, the great lung of the world, the source of all our nourishment.”²⁶ This is the trigger for a series of cascading insights recounted by the protagonist. Here, the key discovery is that brains or “cognition engines”²⁷ depend on air flow, and that the speed of cognition is a function of its pressurization. Based on this, the remainder of the story’s plot is then dedicated to the protagonist’s radical rewriting of the chromium world’s cosmology, a scientific reconsideration of accepted truth, offered by the text in at least three interconnected layers of insight, condensing in a movement from macro- to microscale.

The first grand revision concerns the literal shape and form of the universe. If the pressure of the surrounding atmosphere is in fact increasing, effectively “pressing down” on the air flow keeping the chromium species’ cognition engines moving at speed, this means that:

our sky must not be infinite in height. Somewhere above the limits of our vision, the chromium walls surrounding our world must curve inward to form a dome; our universe is a sealed chamber rather than an open well. And air is gradually accumulating within that chamber, until it equals the pressure in the reservoir below.²⁸ Because the chromium universe is not an open but a closed system, entropy dictates that not air, but instead “a difference in air pressure, the flow of air from spaces where it is thick to those where it is thin,” controls all life.²⁹ The source of life is now understood as a pressure differential, precisely because the activity of “our brains, the motion of our bodies,” and the very action of every device operating in the chromium world “are driven by the movement of air.”³⁰ Therefore, “Exhalation” narrativizes a kind of scientific revolution; a central physical paradigm is being reformulated by the protagonist. Yet for the inhabitants of the chromium world this Copernican shift in understanding the universe is going to culminate in an understanding of an impending, however distant, end. Here, “Exhalation” offers a quasi-spiritual twist to and critical assessment of narratives of teleological advance and scientific progress. Ultimately, in this scenario, “discovery” is folding back onto itself in at least two ways: first, in revealing and laying bare the inevitability of certain death; second in rerouting the protagonist’s line of vision from their “object” of investigation (their mechanical brain and by extension the physical universe) towards their own subjectivity, the inevitably “solipsistic periscope.”³¹

The second grand revision concerns the very status and idea of air itself as a giver or source of life. Deducing from the cumulative results gained so far, the protagonist concludes that “[w]ith every movement of my body, I contribute to the equalization of pressure in our universe,” which means that, “[w]ith every thought that I have, I hasten the arrival of that fatal equilibrium.”³² This second revision is closely connected to a third insight, revising the chromium people’s understanding of their agency within their universe via a reinterpretation of bodily functions: “We are not really consuming air at all.” As the protagonist reasons: “The amount of air that I draw from each day’s new pair of lungs is exactly as much as seeps out through the joints of my limbs and the seams of my casing, exactly as much as I am adding to the atmosphere around me.”³³ Following this realization, the interplay of inhalation and exhalation is interpreted as the participation in atmospheric processes of compression and decompression: “all I am doing is converting air at high pressure to air at low.”³⁴

Using this abstract formalization as a literary device, “Exhalation” allows for a theorization of breathing as, primarily, an enactment of, in the words of Samantha Frost, embeddedness “in various ecologies and networks of relations” which acknowledges “physicality, dependence, and vulnerability.”³⁵ Through this literary device, “Exhalation” challenges the idea and grand metaphor of air and breathing as the unconditional source of all life. What this reformulated understanding of breathing brings to the fore, then, is an intimate sense of interconnectedness forging new “orientation[s] toward and modes of being in the world.”³⁶ For the inhabitants of the chromium world this “new orientation” has existential consequences and, extending beyond the confines of the narrative, opens up a space for the reversal of a central metaphor. Air is not without condition a giver of life; breathing is not under all circumstances the epitome of or synonymous with being. Breathing is predicated on and synonymous with extraction. Breathing, read in such a way, can cause the end of the world. Breathing can be apocalyptic.

This particular plot configuration, which carries the speculative thrust of “Exhalation,” is supported by a range of formal and structural properties, which we consider in the remainder of this section. Framed as a testimony or record for future readers who might find the copper document, the text itself is presented as the protagonist’s engraved account, which the reader is now studying. The text thus establishes a dialogical relationship with readers who are addressed by the protagonist as potential future visitors to this chromium world which, by the time of their reading, will have come to its predicted end. Enabled by an interplay of first and second person narrative perspectives, readers are put into the position of a future historian or future explorer who, as the scientist-protagonist hopes, will one day “wander our streets, see our frozen bodies ... and wonder about the lives we led. Which is why I have written this account. You, I hope, are one of those explorers.”³⁷

This frame narrative configuration carries significant political weight in inviting readers, as Essi Vatilo notes, “to consider how the mere act of living and breathing makes a world inhospitable for its inhabitants and how they react to the knowledge that they are the cause of their own demise.”³⁸ Chiang’s text presents (through the engraved account of its autodiegetic narrator) fiction as actual non-fiction (a report from an extra-dimensional past) and uses this literary familiarization and authentification strategy to convey a sense of calm, resolved urgency in the face of “that fatal equilibrium.”³⁹ Subjecting the present to heavy critique and interrogation via framing the familiar world as an account of a (distant) past, read from a privileged position of future knowledge, is a formal characteristic that “Exhalation” shares with, for example, Naomi Oreskes’ and Eric M. Conway’s The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future (2014) and Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ “Evidence” (2015) which both powerfully employ this play with perspective to emphasize the destructive reality of climate change and the colonial violence of Western, industrial capitalism.⁴⁰

In “Exhalation,” focalization and narrative perspective are core formal devices to establish intimacy and potential for identification between the protagonist, the chromium world at large, and its future-historian readers-as-explorers. As Vatilo has persuasively argued, the story naturalizes the fictional realm for readers navigating a complex interplay of the familiar and the utterly strange.⁴¹ The narrative does this, according to Vatilo, with the intention of “casting the familiar world in a new light,” with the potential to achieve “a shift in thought patterns through recontextualisation.”⁴² This analysis is essential to Vatilo’s reading of “Exhalation” as a story about anthropogenic climate change, a science fiction parable that might “translate into changed individuals who change the world.”⁴³ Vatilo’s reading of the story through its application to anthropogenic climate change is highly productive and convincing in light of the narrative’s inhalation/exhalation ‘anthropogenesis.’ From the point of view of Vatilo’s argument, the transformative potentiality of “Exhalation” generates further opportunities to theorize the literary-cultural activism of climate fiction.

We suggest, however, an additional direction in which “Exhalation,” through focalization and frame narrative configuration, enables a high degree of immersion into an entirely unfamiliar cosmology for the purpose of re-contextualizing ‘reality’. These devices carry speculation about the proposition that air is not unconditionally the source of life, that the world is a closed system subject to entropy, that therefore a certain kind of physical determinism is inescapable, and that the source of all life is a difference in air pressure. “Exhalation” offers a thought experiment on the onto-epistemological complexities of this idea. The narrative’s structural devices establish a discursive space which enables the story’s deductive argumentative structure. Further, on the level of plot, they sustain the gradual build-up towards “conceptual breakthrough” or “paradigm shift,” a classical trope of science fiction generally⁴⁴ that also characterizes Chiang’s work.⁴⁵

“Exhalation,” in its focus on entanglement, embeddedness, and interdependence, is a celebration of complexity. The scientist-protagonist’s discovery points to an entropic relationship between air and the entirety of the biosphere, and re-evaluates common epistemologies about air. They uncover that every single action (in fact every single mental operation) contributes to a process of equalization of pressure differentials between the underground reservoir and the surrounding atmosphere: based on the finding that this world is not an open, unending expanse of endless space, but a closed system subject to entropy, the protagonist understands that “in truth” — effectively revising their world’s canon of accepted knowledge — that life is in fact a function of air pressure differentials.

Following this insight, “Exhalation’s” protagonist gradually understands their world in terms of a highly “relational ontology.”⁴⁶ They derive a physical description of the world which can, in the context of this narrative, literally “no longer be categorically separated from its epistemological processes.”⁴⁷ They thus narrate a knowledge shift in which, to use Birgit M. Kaiser and Kathrin Thiele’s formula, “ontology and epistemology become inter-/intra-laced as onto-epistemology,”⁴⁸ privileging air as the onto-epistemological unit of analysis from which to “conside[r] agential forces (selves, cultures, objects etc.) as processually, relationally and asymmetrically produced (all at once).”⁴⁹ This “conceptual breakthrough” and essential paradigm shift mark a high point of the story’s plot, and on a structural level mark a decisive turning point. From here on, the protagonist moves away from narrating their journey of discovery and away from the deductive process towards pondering what it means, as they state, that “people contemplated for the first time that death was inevitable.”⁵⁰

Breath is the flow of air between life and death. In its life- as well as death-defining presence, air is regarded as more than an externalized object of scientific investigation, but as an intrinsic element of human (and, in the case of “Exhalation,” post- or more-than-human) civilization, human knowledge, and phenomenological experience. As Luce Irigaray suggests: “Is not air the whole of our habitation as mortals? Is there a dwelling more vast, more spacious, or even more generally peaceful than that of air? Can man live elsewhere than in air?”⁵¹ Eva Horn translates air’s hybrid dimension — between life and death — to additional spheres: air is “both global and local,” and it is “between human politics, scientific knowledge, and processes of nature.”⁵² Air is a “medium linking natural and social spheres.”⁵³ It is in this sense of linkedness that, as Eva Horn puts it, the “climate” (read air in application to Chiang’s narrative) must also always be read as a “cultural force.”⁵⁴ Reading air in its social dimension is to conceive of it not as an object distinct from its observer but as something in-between, connecting and encompassing, entering and exiting any living beings.⁵⁵ In this regard air can be read, in the words of Bruno Latour, as more than “a matter of fact,” but as a “matter of concern.”⁵⁶

Such an analysis of air rings particularly true in the case of “Exhalation.” Air defies its scientific “objectification” and is a matter so elusive that it refuses to be mere ‘matter’: “The air is unique among the elements in ... signifying the being of non-being, the matter of the immaterial.”⁵⁷ Air, therefore, can be explored as a metaphor of perception, of transformation and becoming, although paradoxically so by being weightless, invisible and imperceptible.⁵⁸ As soon as it steps into the foreground, as is the case for Chiang’s chromium world, life itself becomes conscious of air or it feels critically threatened by its contingent lack. Hence, literary explorations of air allow readings of life and death, of existence at large, on a global scale. It is therefore not surprising that air is an issue omnipresent in readings of climate change and ecological crisis:

Be it in the form of pollution or rising levels of greenhouse gases, the changing composition of air is also one of the biggest environmental problems we face — a “meta-problem,” as it were, composed of many changes and disruptions, such as rising levels of greenhouse gases, the acidification of the oceans, the ozonehole, and so on. As such, the air has become a “matter of concern”: a highly contentious object of political debate and human decision-making.⁵⁹

In this reading air is the “silent, imperceptible background [that] has come to the fore demanding attention and concern — scientific, social, and political.”⁶⁰ Viewed in this light and through the lens of Horn’s argument, the speculative plot of “Exhalation” can be read as a narrative mapping of air as an all-encompassing “meta-problem” giving rise to “much discussion over how we should spend the time that remains to us.”⁶¹

But what if air as a “matter of concern” is already solved and the ending of air as a life-sustaining “matter” is already determined? As Peter Nicholls has argued, theorizing conceptual breakthrough as a familiar trope of science fiction, “altered perception of the world, sometimes in terms of science and sometimes in terms of society, is what [science fiction] is most commonly about.”⁶² Chiang’s narrative also hinges on this trope of conceptual breakthrough, and we suggest that the carrier-wave of this genre device opens the story up to a critical re-reading of air as a grand metaphor, and to a reconsideration of air against the grain of received cultural narratives. “Exhalation” stands in the tradition of reading air as a metaphor to create attention for environmental ‘issues’ and puts emphasis on how air is surrounding and connecting, entering and exiting, all living and nonliving entities. Yet, in emphasizing the power of air, the story also alludes to its potentially destructive forces. Hence, air does by no means lose its central role as a metaphor of ecological crisis, yet is being opened up to a different response to, and alternative readings of, crisis. At all levels, “Exhalation” upholds the vital function of fictional engagements with catastrophe to “prompt us to consider our quickly evolving subject positions, characterized by oscillating feelings of agency and helplessness in the face of contemporary ecological traumas.”⁶³

“Our universe might have slid into equilibrium emitting nothing more than a quiet hiss. The fact that it spawned such plentitude is a miracle, one that is matched only by your universe giving rise to you.”⁶⁴

In its focus on the interplay of inhalation and exhalation, Chiang’s narrative tackles questions and issues of physical determinism and, thereby, joins a series of stories within the author’s larger body of work exploring forms and functions of determinism. For example, Chiang’s “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” narrativizes logical determinism through a focus on temporal paradoxes. “Story of your Life” (which has gained significant attention more than fifteen years after its first publication through Denis Villeneuve’s cinematic rendition in Arrival, 2016) explores semantic determinism in its narrative experimentation with the idea of linguistic relativity. “What is Expected of Us,” a short time travel narrative, probes the potentially destructive and psychologically damaging consequences of “the cognitive plague,” “the Lovecraftian horror,” or the “Gödel sentence,” which “crashes the human logical system” — the idea that there can be no free will.⁶⁵ “Exhalation,” however, especially in its opposition to “What is Expected of Us,” takes a peculiarly optimistic stance on the issue of determinism in order to explore how an apocalyptic recognition of a predetermined future gives rise to a space of opportunity. “Exhalation” is not alone in constructing speculative fiction via the trope and/or frame of the (futuristic) apocalypse. In fact, it is argued to be a trend for much speculative fiction, currently, to be written and used to address dreaded futures tied to “climate change” and “global ecological transformations.”⁶⁶ This trend manifests, arguably, in a great deal of scholarly conceptualizations of Climate Fiction (Cli-Fi), which posits, among other things, futurism and (post-)apocalyptic vistas as genre-defining markers.

Commonly in fictional scenarios, climate futures are dystopian times of rationing, government assistance, major extinctions, social unrest, drastic measures, and defaced landscapes.⁶⁷ According to Kyle P. Whyte, such inherently West- and white centric logics of apocalypse are present throughout discourses of climate change as “catastrophic” with growing reference to the idea that climate change is leading to the extinction of all humans. In thinking through the implications of unprecedentedness and urgency, climate change, as a concept, is a rhetorical device invoked in order to address crisis with a presentist orientation and the erasure of histories of colonial violence.⁶⁸ Imaginings of apocalypse, therefore, work to escape specific culpability and historical, ongoing responsibilities. “Epistemologies of crisis,” in Whyte’s words, “then mask numerous forms of power, including colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, patriarchy, and industrialization.”⁶⁹ Feelings of imminence that accompany presentism lead to an obscured and discursively overshadowed sense of how individual and collective actions relate to the persistence of different forms of power.⁷⁰

With this in mind — and returning to the initial observation that Chiang’s work offers what Lötscher calls “epistemological expeditions” — we conclude this paper by looking at how and to what end “Exhalation” mobilizes the trope of the apocalypse. Despite the scientist-protagonist’s apocalyptic prediction of an immutable, fatal equilibrium that will end all movement, “Exhalation” rejects popular discourses of apocalypse and catastrophe in that it lacks affects of urgency and panic, but rather captivates its readers through a calm resolve. Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation” unfolds its enormous critical potential in that it insists, via its narrative temporal frame, that once the story is read, the end of this universe has already happened. In a certain degree of contentment with and acceptance of a newly discovered determinism, the protagonist even images their own “lost” universe to be at once of use to another. This idea “cheers [them] to imagine”:

I fantasize that this neighboring universe has its own inhabitants... [W]hat if they were able to create a conduit between the two universes and install valves to release air from ours? They might use our universe as a reservoir, running dispensers with which they could fill their own lungs, and use our air as a way to drive their own civilization.⁷¹

At the same time, however, “Exhalation” narrates a hope for compassion, as well as a desire to govern the terms and conditions of such an encounter between future explorers (the individual reader) and what remains of the chromium world: “I hope that your expedition was more than a search for other universes to use as reservoirs. I hope that you were motivated by a desire for knowledge, a yearning to see what can arise from a universe’s exhalation.”⁷² In this regard, the narrative is not an apocalyptic projection of fear, but urges readers to rethink and take seriously the philosophical implications and social-political possibilities of the idea of inevitability, the “gradual exhalation of our universe.”⁷³

In its focus on the centrality of air and its visceral engagement with complex patterns of inhalation and exhalation, the narrative re-reads the idea of catastrophe and apocalypse and foregrounds their literal meanings of “total reversal” or “turn (around)” and/or “something coming around; coming down,” as well as “uncovering” and “revelation,” respectively. The protagonist’s very discovery of their chromium world’s ongoing movement towards pressure equilibrium is in this literal sense catastrophic and apocalyptic, as it marks an absolute, all-encompassing paradigm shift, conceptual breakthrough and “everything change” in the process of uncovering the chromium world’s laws of physics. What is uncovered is “the true source of life” alluded to by the protagonist in the beginning, and what they are coming to understand is the complex nature of air, air pressure, and the role of air in the chromium world’s physical determinism. In this way, “Exhalation” frames apocalypse as a form of recognition, because, in the words of Amitav Ghosh,

A moment of recognition occurs when a prior awareness flashes before us, effecting an instant change in our understanding of that which is beheld. Yet this flash cannot appear spontaneously; it cannot disclose itself except in the presence of its lost other. The knowledge that results from recognition, then, is not of the same kind as the discovery of something new: it arises rather from a renewed reckoning with a potentiality that lies within oneself.⁷⁴

It is precisely in this sense that the protagonist uses their engraving as a site to come to terms with the fact that the universe is finite, that the end of life (however distant) is inevitable, and that any attempt to reverse the equalization process only intensifies it. As they write, all ingenuity “did not reverse the process of equalization but, like everything else in the world, exacerbated it.”⁷⁵ The recording of the protagonist’s insight lacks, as suggested above, any affective charge and rejects the cosmic horror that popular catastrophe-imaginaries often mobilize as a narrative trope. Rather, the protagonist cherishes the “irony in the fact that a study of our brains revealed to us not the secrets of the past but what ultimately awaits us in the future.”⁷⁶ In the image of literal introspection, then, the narrative ponders an intriguing ambiguity inherent in the notion of apocalyptic discovery: the protagonist’s auto-craniectomy uncovers that air and a physically determined change in the pattern of air pressurization will have “fatal” consequences. Because there “is no source of power in the universe that does not ultimately derive from a difference in air pressure ... there can be no engine whose operation will not, on balance, reduce the difference.”⁷⁷ Yet where it reveals the finitude of the chromium cosmos, this apocalyptic discovery also entails and gives rise to an open, infinite space of intellectual opportunity, such as appreciating “that we have indeed learned something important about the past. The universe began as an enormous breath being held.”⁷⁸

There is calm resolve in understanding that this knowledge may be of use for surviving, interconnected universes in the future, even if it means the end for the protagonist’s own. By the same token, the narrative extends beyond its own spatial-temporal confines. One final time, it invokes the reader’s presence and participation as a future historian contemplating that, perhaps, “the same fate that befell me await[s] you?”⁷⁹— assuming that “one day your thoughts too will cease,” that “[y]our lives will end just as ours did, just as everyone’s must.” As the protagonist concludes: “the tendency toward equilibrium is not a trait peculiar to our universe but inherent in all universes.”⁸⁰