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Vast civilizations lay within the mosaic of dirt: hymenopteran labyrinths, rodential panic rooms, life-giving airways sculpted by the traffic of worms, hopeful spiders’ hunting cabins, crash pads for nomadic beetles, trees shyly locking toes with one another.
“We don’t have to fall into the same category to be of equal value.”
“And machines only work because of numbers and logic.” “That’s how we function, not how we perceive.”
It’s incredibly logical—strict, as you say. Food good, other ants bad. But can an ant perceive beauty? Does an ant reflect on being an ant? Unlikely, but maybe. We can’t rule it out.
“Precisely. It ignores the greater meaning born out of the combination of those things.”
“I appreciate the intent. I really do. But if you don’t want to infringe upon my agency, let me have agency. I want to carry the tank.”
Its only legacy was to persist where it did not belong.
“All conscious things are. Why else do snakes bite? Why do birds fly away? But that’s part of the lesson too, I think. It’s very odd, isn’t it? The thing every being fears most is the only thing that’s for certain? It seems almost cruel, to have that so…”
“So, the paradox is that the ecosystem as a whole needs its participants to act with restraint in order to avoid collapse, but the participants themselves have no inbuilt mechanism to encourage such behavior.”
remnant. An evolutionary remnant trying to keep you from getting sick.”
“So, we’re smarter than our remnants, is what you’re saying.”
“It’s pretty here,” Dex said. “I wouldn’t have imagined I’d say that about a place like this, but—” “Yes, it is,” Mosscap said, as if making a decision within itself. “It is. Dying things often are.”
“I think there’s something beautiful about being lucky enough to witness a thing on its way out.”
The good intentions of a few individuals had not been enough, could never have been enough to upend a paradigm entirely. What the world had needed, in the end, was to change everything.
Without constructs, you will unravel few mysteries. Without knowledge of the mysteries, your constructs will fail. These pursuits are what make us, but without comfort, you will lack the strength to sustain either.’”
“You don’t, if you believe that. You’re an animal, Sibling Dex. You are not separate or other. You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is.
You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live. That is all most animals do.”
“And I’m saying that I think you are mistaking something learned for something instinctual.”
“Do you not find consciousness alone to be the most exhilarating thing? Here we are, in this incomprehensibly large universe, on this one tiny moon around this one incidental planet, and in all the time this entire scenario has existed, every component has been recycled over and over and over again into infinitely incredible configurations, and sometimes, those configurations are special enough to be able to see the world around them. You and I—we’re just atoms that arranged themselves the right way, and we can understand that about ourselves. Is that not amazing?”
“Your kind, you chose death. You didn’t have to. You could live forever. But you chose this. You chose to be impermanent. People didn’t, and we spend our whole lives trying to come to grips with that.”
“Then how,” Dex said, “how does the idea of maybe being meaningless sit well with you?” Mosscap considered. “Because I know that no matter what, I’m wonderful,”
