TRANSMISSION 10

An Explosion of Possibilities

TRANSMISSION RECEIVED

“The lair of forgotten selves calls upon you once more. One more time you get the chance to leave behind the voice of self-doubt that relentlessly lures you toward the monotonous stupor of unobtainable safety. The moment of decision is now. Choose your path once again.”

As more and more humans shifted from biological to silicon, we began to improve ourselves at faster and faster rates. With the ability to alter our forms and minds, we all pursued our own paths and shared our findings to continue to build ourselves into more capable beings.

Navigating the universe as biological humans had proven to be costly and time consuming, and thus, we had not voyaged far. Before we went silicon, we had to don overly complex spaceships and unwieldy spacesuits in order to simply venture our bodies into any exotic environment beyond the atmosphere of Earth.

As silicon beings, we navigate all realms of the universe with much more ease. Our bodies became the spacesuits. Our bodies became the spaceships. Our bodies became whatever we needed. Our access to tools became an intimately direct experience. We didn’t steer our spaceships with joysticks; we steered them with our minds, just like we had once steered our biological bodies with our minds. Our minds were kept in safe locations and could hook into whatever systems we needed to control (whether on site or remote). If our ship needed repairs, we hooked our minds into a repair body. If a repair body needed repairs, we hooked into the backup repair bodies. These morphological possibilities mounted higher and higher as our dreams of life beyond Earth were further and further realized.

Even as immensely exciting as these unfolding futures were, they were minuscule in the face of all the plans and actions that would cascade off the waves enacted henceforth. We understood that we had drastically altered the trajectory of the story of life, but we had no idea just how much. Even if I could somehow now share this final course with those beings of the past, they wouldn’t believe me (at least, not with sane minds).

I think for most people, this was the era to revel in; this was the time they would relive if they could choose. It brought an immense amount of personal autonomy and personal expression to reality that was inquisitively intoxicating for many. We manifested ourselves into our own art with very high degrees of freedom; no longer did we have to paint with just one color on a two-dimensional canvas; now the full electromagnetic spectrum was our palette and the entire universe was our canvas.

For me (and some others), this era was not as luminous as it was for most people. The art was only a means to explore routes to my goals; it was not an end goal in itself. I thoroughly enjoyed the art of exploration, but when you play such a game without structure, as many did, it inevitably will force you to face the circular meaninglessness of it all. You can try to dance around that fact for a while, but one day it will hit you. And if you haven’t figured out what drives you forward, simply exploring art without intent won’t help you build your mental sanctuary.

You can’t find your meaning in the act of exploration (producing), but you can find it through the act of exploration (learning). That doesn’t make any act of exploration less real or less beautiful; there are fractals of beauty in the inescapable impermanence of our imperfectly investigative inventions and institutions, this unparalleled initiation to existence’s inane inward extrospection: an understanding of the externalities through ourselves and ourselves through the externalities.

We all explored and created in every direction we could think of. It was an era of unremitting allure, where all doors were open to us and we had no idea where any of them would lead, an era equally ripe for the adventurers, the creators, and the dreamers. I couldn’t do it any justice to try to describe the colossal transformations we underwent as individuals and societies, as humans and humanity. I am only vaguely justified in describing the wispy tendrils of what it was like to be an experiencer during such times, but even that feels fuzzy. While the core human experience always remained through the deep transformations, it went through such rapid evolution that any point along the overall journey would be unrecognizable and unthinkable to the humans who ventured the universe preceding that point.

And where did our possibilities take us? Where did we meander off to in the deep exploration of what it meant to be ourselves in mind and body? While the limits to our creations were only ever the bounds we placed in our minds, looking back now, I can’t help but feel that our ultimate fate was to be the same no matter what path we took to get there. The universe presented us with the illusion of choice, when in reality, our fate was always death. So in that sense, the only thing that was our choice was not even the journey, but the moment-to-moment paths and detours we took along the journey, the things that compelled us to seek them out with what limited time we had before we were forced to converge back upon the main journey toward fate.

Equally, the significance of our lives has not been necessarily where any one of us has ended up, but in the actions we have taken along the way that cast ripples into the cosmos. We drove ourselves forward for the wonder contained in the journeys along the way, creating our own meanings from nothingness. It was the passion for learning that compelled us into the depths of reality. It was the ignition of our aspirations that reimbursed the initial investment of our dreams cast wide into the unknown.

So though we may not have been able to affect our final fates, we found the meaning we were looking for simply through the act of looking for meaning. We just wanted to see how far we could get; that’s all we ever cared about. The unknown is infinite, and we, as subjective temporary blobs of existence, were not equipped to put any amount of a dent into that great abyss. But I don’t think that mattered to many of us. At least, I hope it didn’t matter to us; I hope we were able to find peace in this pilgrimage.

MY WISH

Widow of dreamers
stares at the darkness,
wishing for hearts in the heartless.
Window of changes,
gaze into my mind.
Tell me there’s nothing to die for.
I need to hear it.

You wait here for daylight.
No, she tells me she will not go;
there’s nothing to go to.
Break free from this search.
You tell me you’re fine,
but I know you want to go home.

The last son of mourning
aches for a father,
lost from the Sun as a shadow.
Night fails our fortunes.
Morning of favors,
grant me the faults that I still own.

And we’re here now;
I forgot how,
and if it’s all the same,
can we go home?

END TRANSMISSION