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We were just cavemen. Only the mission was transcendent.
When was the last time programmers explained themselves to the code?
“In a way, prey are lucky. Running for your life instead of running for your dinner.” A weak smile. “Better motivation, right?”
For a while there I had a destiny. I saw it when I skimmed the surface of the Sun: I saw the strings on me, and on my masters, and on theirs. I saw them all converge back to the Big Bang, I saw an unbroken line from the start of creation all the way to the end of time, I saw myself transcendent and perpetual.
That’s the thing about having your brain rewired; you can’t really remember the experience after your neurons bounce back to normal. You can only remember something else remembering it, something built out of the same parts as you but wired up differently. Revelation has a half-life.
And if the fire in my soul cooled over time, if it decayed from monomania to fervor down to mere comforting ritual—well, isn’t that the way of all faith?
But that’s what math is for, right? What’s the point of physics if you can’t trust it with your life?
I wept for a happy stunted being who didn’t know or care that it had once been blazing towards transcendence before some soulless mission priority stuck him in amber.
Other webs. Other gates, built by other rocks on other paths. Those are the nodes to which they might connect. Thus do our pathetic one-dimensional threads form a network that truly spans the galaxy, that connects not just A to B to C but C to Z, A to Ω. It is these spiderwebbed cracks in spacetime that make our lives worthwhile.
When I awoke after the transfiguration, I didn’t even wait to climb out of my coffin. I called up the archives and compressed all those incandescent millennia into moments, let them wash across the back of my brain again, and again, until I was left exhausted from the sheer wonder of it all. In the blinding glorious light of such death and rebirth I even forgot what it meant to us, here in this speck of rock. I forgot, for a few precious moments, that we were at war.
The limits were in our senses, not the reality; human vision is such a pathetic instrument for parsing the universe.
How will it feel to have used so much of your life straining against these chains that it was almost spent by the time you broke them?
The simple can’t prophecy the complex:
