Seeker

by Douglas E. Richards

CRISPR stood for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, and Cas for CRISPR-associated genes.

Crispr

“If nothing exists outside of yourself, if you inhabit the entire universe, if you are all there is—in all of time and space—then what do you have to compare yourself to? If you’re the only being in existence, you’re the strongest being there is, but also the weakest. The biggest, and also the smallest. Without contrast, nothing has scale. You’re everything, but also nothing. Worse still, you’re destined to go through infinity and eternity with no external stimulation of any kind.”

Existent

Seeker paused. “One of your authors, Isaac Asimov, wrote a story about an eternal being, call it God, who creates an eternal afterlife for the best minds in the universe. As much as the owners of these minds might want to end the tedium of eternal existence, perhaps after a few billion long years have passed, God won’t let them. Eventually, they decide that the only way they can die in peace is to kill God first, which they set out to try to do. The twist is that this is the very reason God selected them, and is keeping them alive, in the first place. So they can find a way to, mercifully, end its existence—which is the only thing God is unable to do.”

“And there can be no triumph without the possibility of defeat. No joy without sorrow. Evolutionary struggle not only pushes individuals and species to new heights, it also provides contrast, placing the highs and lows of existence in stark relief.”

conflict