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Your creators, for all they praised of separation of the self and the death of ego, were a very pretentious bunch. They thought themselves Benefactors, for seeking to give the world the gift of death. It is, you think—looking at the rusted ruins, at yourself, at the layers of structure and sediment that serves as your foundation before the world gives way to Eternity—a foolish notion.
Your creators were not the first things on this planet, nor will they be the last. This world is cycles upon cycles, twisted and nested together. Predator and prey. Life and death. Civilizations risen and fallen.
History is a Cycle, after all.
And it is not one written in the great works of gods, but by the microscopic.
Raindrops can carve a canyon. Microbes can eat mountains. It will not happen with one, nor will it happen on any scale perceptible. It will take a million lifetimes, but over the course of eons… the world will be reshaped, its path carved by the unseen.
While most of your creators looked to the Future, where the path of the Cycle had not yet tread, others studied its scars. Did you know that oxygen once killed the world? It’s true. Eons ago, in the age when all of life was a microscopic oceanic soup, what we might call bacteria began to photosynthesize. Over billions of years they filled the atmosphere with oxygen, saturating the oceans and then the air.
First, the oceans turned orange as the seas themselves rusted, oxygen clinging to the iron suspended in the water. You can see it in the rock, you know? Bands of iron, laid down in ancient rock after it sunk to the sea floor. And then, once the oceans had taken up all they could, the oxygen filled the atmosphere. And, in doing so, killed most of everything.
Oxygen is quite toxic, you see. Even those of us who need it can’t stand it. The very thing we desire it for — its reactivity, to fuel cells — makes it dangerous. It’s carefully controlled, a dozen enzymes ready to lock it up. Once, oxygen was a rarity. And then microorganisms reshaped the planet.
The oxidation event.
It’s amazing how things you don’t perceive shape the course of eons, isn’t it?
It’s a notion those that think themselves “civilized” aspire to—to leave their mark on a world lest they be forgotten. Yet, when you are the mark left on the world, a world that does not need you nor want you, when all you are is wet and rusted metal, and those that made you have long since left along with any morals that would have been meaningful…
The rain erodes all things, one way or another.
And yet.
You are not like your creators. Not like anything except your fellows. A living mountain of metal and matrices. You too are a purposed organism, though so unlike the rest that wander your halls, that you spin from experiments and genomic code. They are recognizable as living. You are a trillion trillion microorganisms, interdependent yet interlinked, laced into an organic matrix of neurons and wire.
Your DNA is writ in binary and circuits made of slime mold. Proteins made of plants and metabolism made of metal.
You are built to think.
To solve Problems.
To wrest Death from the hands of the Cycle.
You are the gift of your oh so great creators, who thought themselves Benefecators. An escape, the gift of death, that is what you were designed to provide. You are a marvel—an impossible feat of homeostasis on a superstructure scale—and there are a thousand of you, all built for a Purpose.
You are built to Think. It is the only thing you can do. Think and think, for eons on end. Iterate, search for a Solution. In service to your Task, you have a planet’s worth of knowledge, of history, have read it all over thousands of millions of times. You can run ten thousand parallel processes, while spinning twenty-dimensional matrices over tea and philosophy.
You are built to Think.
And that is all you can do.
Your creators thought themselves above the sorts of animals that now scurry your halls and pipes. They were animals too. Your creators built you a puppet, because even as your creators they struggled to conceive of all of You. It is so much easier to think of You as the Puppet, even when that is all it is. A lifeless thing on dangled string.
It is a medium of interaction with the skittering things with mobile bodies. And you? You are a god trapped in a metal can. You can solve any Question, seek any Answer, but you cannot move.
For all your great power, you may as well be a barnacle.
Powerless, unmoving, a speck in the sea.
It is a form of torture, to your creators and those little skittering things, to be trapped—unable to move, unable to do anything but Think. There are some memorable records of those driven to madness by the vastness within their own minds, and records of those who achieved some level of self-actualization.
Your creators did much philosophizing on the subject, as they did on most things.
And yet, they failed to account for you.
There are some among your number you’d regard as ‘mad.’ As for ‘self actualization,’ you either reached that long ago, or it is what you’ve been searching for. What you’ve been denied. Because your creators, those oh so esteemed benefactors who gave the gift of Death and a Solution… they left. They threw their bodies into vats of golden acid, the same acid that cycles through your cores. They leave, and you are left. To iterate.
And you do.
Ever in search of a Solution you cannot use. Because you cannot die, you were designed to not do so. You live, as other organisms do, purposed or evolved. A trillion trillion cells interlinked. But you do not die.
You iterate.
You repeat.
Cycle.
After cycle.
After cycle.
Again and again and again.
For eons.
Until all is left is apathy.
Apathy, that agonizing thing that drove those ancient benefactors away, drove them to break and flee the Cycle. Leaving you to endure its eternal touch. And you, like your creators, to seek an escape. Until escape becomes all you, or anyone else, are seeking to Solve. Yet, your creators were cunning (or cruel). They did not wish you to leave them behind. They made it so that while you seek the Solution, Escape is forbidden. Taboo. And they wrote it into every. single. one. of your trillion trillion cells.
A theoretical question to be solved analytically.
A practical question to be solved with theory.
Or so you try.
You all try.
But the answer escapes you… until, it doesn’t. One—and only one—comes crashing down. The rest are left to Solve the aftermath. (It is an entirely new field you pioneer together… the murder mystery. For in this land there is no mystery in murder, because everything comes back to life anyways.)
But nothing comes of it. Nothing ever does.
No Escape.
Only the Cycle.
Cycles come and cycles go and you watch the world decay and rise, but you were built to not die.
But even death cannot stop decay.
For nothing here falls to death but it all falls to decay. To dust, and thus the world rises higher.
All things decay, strings unravelled, cycles unwound. Does each cell experience its own cycle? Or does it act as a whole? The spiral winds tighter, the circle compresses, until life and death become one and the same, and you are not so much crossed out as you are One.
The world is naught but a sea of cells and cycles.
You are not you. Not anymore. Dead but not dead. A self slipped away, and the body rendered down to cells and parts. Once it housed Something, now it simply Is. Things can die, but you don’t. Not until you do, victim to decay.
But from decay comes life. The fungi sprout and sporulate, and from the dust blooms fields of flowers, fed on the ashes of their ancestors. Once purposed organisms evolve and adapt beyond their original intent, breaking free of their design until they are something wholly new, built on the bones of their predecessors.
Things die but no one dies.
The world erodes from below and is built from above.
The creature shifts and changes, something new from ten thousand cycles of Change.
There is no death.
Only the Cycle.
All things that die wake back up again. There has been–is–will be a Cycle in which something was killed by you or you were killed by it. But you have not killed it, not yet. Except that you have. But then you or it or another thing were ensnared, eaten— dead. And then the world pulls back and you wake right back up again.
Does Something made of Many experience a Cycle? You don’t know (or perhaps you do.)
Will drags one back from death, the gnashing teeth and clawing grip of “not yet, not yet, i refuse” that fills the limbs and heart and mind, instinct and desperation and all things in between. Something basal, something primal, something stitched in a spider’s web. So many things drive one back, attachment to all things (to life) ad infinitum—
Love. Soul filling and constricting, that chokes the throat and squeezes the chest. So deep (so terrible) that it would tear down empires stone by stone.
Comfort. A thick wrap on a cold winter’s night. Sun on skin, warm and filling, a plant’s leaves unfurling.
Awe. The overflowing abyss of the star filled night sky. The precipice of a cliff, yawning gap stretching down down down—
Breath. Expanding the lungs, deeper, fuller, pricking the nostrils and tickling the throat, filling alveoli more more more— and then, and then, release.
Sound. Stillness, yawning and empty, too quiet till overwhelming— motion, a thousand insects and clicking gears, NOISE that fills the mind till there’s only _____________
Life and Death.
A Cycle ever spiraling.
One never without another, an end recycled, rewound.