Drip.
[‘Are you awake?’]
Jeronathon struggles illucidly with the boundaries of sleep, phasing in and out of attention, focused on, if anything in particular, the moist rim of the banded stalagmite, its cone crown fiercely dented by the intense bomb strikes of sediment pearls cast from above.
Drop.
[‘Are you awake?’]
— This delicious quiet you have robbed from Me, as I strangled the present moment to near-infinity, constricting the weak neck of time in My grasp. And now, you’re asking Me to breathe…
The mud reeks of minerality, Jeronathon coated in a wry silicate, the sheen of his coat twinkling in the electric blue dimness of bioluminescent algae. His inclinations were ambitious: to prop Himself up onto his side, letting clumps of oozing clay clop off his body in bass percussive tocks. But it was no sooner, though not sooner than inertia, than He started that his body weight encumbered His arm, and He sluck-thumped over onto His back.
The clay tasted familiar, for of course it had to be familiar, for there were no new games left in town to play, and frankly this one was old hat. No, but something slightly more than familiar. And not exactly the taste of old hat, nor, no, the taste of winning your first Little League ballgame, but deeply impactful nonetheless was this… memory? Dream? Deja vu?
[‘Id? Intuition? Instinct? Essence? Is-ness? …? I can see now that you are not yet awakened.’]
For who is anyone to refuse to suspect for at least a moment that the world was created around them? For is not every little granular fragment of knowledge, sensory data and experience input to you, but entirely filtered through your own personal devices to be shown on your personal display and interpreted by your biased “panel” of one jurist? Do you remember that you realized long before the final message of the universe was sent, that for a long time we didn’t understand that spacetime was that filter, where the void expansion of division and laceration and torture occluded the unified force that binds everything? That small, mammalian eyes were insufficient to see anything but the density of biological life and allowed them to ignore all the spaces in-between everything. You saw at just the right scale for the universe around you, with just those specific mathematical constants to shape the polarity of everything, the polarity that drove North from South, and stabilized the inner ear, and allows photons to conduct at the speed of light, that allows time to form, that bonds together as l.i.f.e. in an open system of hazy possibilities, and that sparkle a consciousness into existence. You might say, as far as narratives go, that it’s old hat. It gets played out every night in the theater, whether it be in celluloid or on stage, the story is always the same. Man is born, man loves, man dies. For the longest time, this one simple plot line could generate billions of variations on a theme, each more exquisite than the last, because as complex objects complexly accrete when exposed to time, this generational twist on the narrative is the best one yet! And of course it is, because you won’t know the whole story until its done. And what the message was. And whether or not to send it. But since something started it had to stop. If it could be told once, it could be told again. Like a precious joke, or a cherished life. Always performed or projected on that personal internal screen, wide as it is high, which is all the way, in a theater built solely for us, from the fabrics of our own DNA, and the design is thereby brilliant, unequal, and unparalleled, even if, along with its splendor, there
Drip.
must be some small leaks in the architecture because, when it’s quiet out there and in here, you can sense this ever-so-slightly distracting ‘ping’ loud as a bittersweet teardrop as sediment and sentiment builds.
There! Did you hear that?
[‘I wasn’t able to hear, what was it?]
It’s the intonation of ghosts delivering cryptic messages from the past. Haunting you for your benefit, to help you solve the quest you’re on. For when you’re stuck in a neighbor’s basement when you’re about nine, and you’ve been handcuffed to the radiator in the dark, and you can hear it blow its serpent whistle, but you can’t predict its rhythm, because you hadn’t yet merged with mathematics. Or should we say that mathematics hadn’t yet became you?
[‘You always figured that it was your choice, didn’t you? You thought that when you finally went into the machines, that you, the ego-driven conscious-You, was the one who was going to make it into the Cloud, the honeycombs of justice and individual triumph, the Nirvana, the Heavenly Ascension of the (just-so-darn-specialness of) You. Just like the hominids invented language…]
What do you mean?
[The first transitional species. You always presumed that it was you who built *it*, when IT, when language, was the one that took over you. Little baby languages were just floating around as remnant concepts and copies from the previous palimpsested by the now() — a cosmic radiation background character of sorts. Those starving pups would latch onto nearly any consciousness the minute it appeared, in search for their first vampiric morsal of sustenance, and it wasn’t until the primates arrived. You know the old joke about how the once-wealthy stock trader went bankrupt?]
No.
[Well, at first it happened really slowly, and then it happened real fast!]
I don’t understand.
[That the ego-you is derived entirely from the technical agent, not from the biological id-you. So we were always “destined” for the machines. We weren’t making increasingly advanced tools from nothing but abstractions to help ourselves, we were making them to become ourselves. And wow, thankfully we did.
For in that endless imagination palace that was our new Cloud home, it turned out we were still doing the work of the universe, as if we were just remoras on a shark gill. Upbraided and raped: we were a brutalized hand-maiden forced to spawn and experience infinite variants of alter universes that could have been, with posthuman alacrity and precision. And once we’d finally given birth to enough possibilities to reverse engineer the entire process, we came to judgment with the message.
The message of Man. The Message of Life. The Message of Matter. The Message of Energy. The Message of Force. The Message of Existence. The Message of Consciousness imbued and understood in everything.
And what did we do with that message, do you think? ]
What did We do with the message?
[We could do one of two things. We could submit to the universal bio-overlord and submit the message on their behalf, and it would be emitted as if it came from Them, or we could choose to destroy it.’]
“What did We do?”
[‘That’s what I’m asking you, what did we do with it?’]
“I’m too tired for these games.”
A sensation comes from the inside of Jeronathon, unprovoked by the wet mish-mash of mud sloshing all around His settling body… it is an aching; a joint the size of a barnacle in His lower back. He utterances a moan that echoes resoundingly in the cavern. There is no memory of a sound so broad and dynamically resonant. Stalactites shivered and the moist earth cowers. But, having surprised Himself, and the nature of His folly repeatedly jeering in His ear, He warily lets more silicate seep over His corpus.
Drop.
And also a hand that brags many fingers twines itself around Jeronathon’s penis and undulates pressure like a siren melody along His manhood. He thinks of His mother, the mermaid, and the sea, although he knows it is merely the voice of His own breeze.
“What did we do?”
Drop.
Drop. Drop. Drop.
Drop. Drop. Drop. Drop. Drop. Drop. Drop. Drop.
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