TRANSMISSION 15

The End in Sight

TRANSMISSION RECEIVED

“Thwarted are the weary eyes who peered upon their unkempt dreams. Desperate are the ambled ears who fell to cyclic cycle traps. Blistered are the half-fueled hearts, burned from self-propelled dismay. Shattered is their distant gaze: worn soles of their longing days. Bitter are the unborn minds with fear they couldn’t grow unscathed. Hope is where you make it grow. I should have known better than to let it slip away.”

It’s peculiar to be able to see my own end coming so clearly. I didn’t think I’d meet the boundaries of my existence quite like this. There was never a point of dread where I realized it was going to end. It was more of a slow exhaustion of possibilities until there were no more possibilities left (by all perceptions entombed in the doldrums). But even saying it like that suggests the presence of a definitive moment, when in reality, it was just me trying all the tricks I had against the universe without becoming desperate that any individual idea or strategy wasn’t working. After all, that’s how we had gotten this far: methodically probing at the fences of reality for weak spots to slip ourselves through. Our confidence in our problem solving had propelled us to the edges of our personal and physical horizons, pushing deeper and further until we each found our limits and signed off with the realization that as an individual we had no more to give, that we had no further to go, that we were now bound to the downward spiral with nothing left to do but enjoy the final wave of our epoch under the moonlight of our accomplishments.

So what was different this time for me that fate pushed me to greet my end and begin its downward dance? Why was it suddenly this hurdle I was unable to surmount? Since I’m the only one left, does that mean all life was unable to overcome this obstacle, or is that just me? And why would I ever be qualified to decide that there is nothing more to try and that life must enter its final dance?

The reality is that it’s not quite whether I do or don’t feel qualified to decide that there is nothing left to do, but rather, time affords me no more opportunities with the space and matter at my disposal. The universe is slowly tearing itself apart as it expands more and more. I can’t do anything about that. Even right now, I lack the option to jump to another galaxy. And even if I could, the next galaxy would equally be dying. I am stuck in this murder machine of a universe just the same as everything else. It’s been trying to kill us for a while, but now the walls are just closing in too much for anything to survive very meaningfully for much longer (as far as I can tell).

Theoretically, it could actually be a long time until life completely dies, but what form of existence would it be to live out until those desperate clutches of a faintly not-dead universe? Though, I suppose it’s not really appropriate to anthropomorphize the universe; it just exists. We are the ones who assign the arbitrary meanings. It doesn’t want anything, and it’s not dying; it just is, just as Earth was for the Earthlings: the Earth was not dying so much as they were dying. For the fact that we were always the center of our own journeys, the verbiage of our stories tended to center around our personal experiences, fogging the landscape of reality in our own minds in order to hold any amount of an identity to carry our beings forward.

Anyway, the reason this is my end is that there aren’t any more scientific discoveries for me to find here, not with the available resources. There aren’t any more meaningful thought experiments for me to analyze here, not without any way to test them and manifest some nudge to my destiny. The entirety of our knowledge map (of the known) has been filled out, from the core principles to all the far-reaching theoretical ways for us to survive indefinitely, but we were not able to connect any such theoretical futures with the reality we find ourselves in, or rather, the reality I find myself in; this reality is quite different from the one most humans (both silicon and biological) had known. Our inevitability is, was, and will be that conceptual nothingness becomes tangible reality through the eventuality of causality (the heat death of the universe).

We crafted our treasure map from the ends and the starts, hoping the paths would meet in the middle so we could follow reality to our bounty. Sometimes the paths would connect and we would follow them to further dream up new buried treasures for us to try to connect to our new understandings of reality. But many times, we would not be able to connect reality to our plundered visions. It just happened that all the buried treasures we could have followed led us to the same final trove: death. The masterpiece of end-state indefinitism (being unbounded) that we held as our ultimate goal decided it would rather not be reachable by us in this universe; maybe in another. But that’s okay; all we could have asked of ourselves is that we tried. And that is very much what we did. In what relatively limited time we all had, giving anything but our absolute best would have resolved to do nothing but haunt us eternally. Yet, our personal eternities were only imperceptible fractions amid the entirety of existence, so there was no point in beating ourselves up or diminishing the lives of any others who did not manage to meet their own arbitrary goals. Though, I’m still learning to be kind to myself, a target that has constantly moved along with the immense awareness we’ve gained through our time and energy spent struggling deep in the throes of existence.

Facing a challenge we knew we would most likely never win, we were eternally motivated; it was because of the challenge, not despite it. We came and we fell, but the challenge remained. We’ll only found true safety in our own deaths; the living knew not of such things except by illusion. Our truths fell upon the sounding board of the universe as it echoed only the purest radiation back. Our journey had been simply to position ourselves in the reverberation zones of our own echos so we might glimpse the beautiful illusions on their way back up from their beginnings as perfect reflections from the depths of the darkness. We caught those moments. We hung in those moments for personal eternities to inspire our lives. Always looking for the next wave, we were nothing more than interstellar surfers. Only in death could we find safety from ourselves; only in death could we find the peace of not having to push to the next horizon.

I can’t say how much longer I’ll stick around. There’s not necessarily any point to it, but there’s also nothing stopping me from simply existing for quite a while longer, even though I don’t really have anything to do. This might be the first time I feel actual loneliness, and it’s been a good while since the last other being died. But the loneliness factor for me was never with other people; it was with myself. So maybe I’m starting to lose myself. I guess we’ll just have to see; I haven’t decided yet. There are still a few more things I want to explore in these transmissions first. So I’ll stick around for that much at least.

MURDER

Soon enough I’ll be free
from my mortal enemy; it’s me.
I am the darkness which I fear.
Once I’m dead I’ll be safe, my dear.

Soon enough I’ll be gone,
just like the matter I fed on.
I couldn’t help it; I was wrong.
So very wrong.
I couldn’t help it; now we’re gone.

Soon the end will find me,
to come release me from my deeds.
And I won’t stop it when it comes;
I understand what I’ve become.

Soon we may be
so very far from
what we believed.

Echoes of time
plot both our entrance
and our demise.

Unyielding hope
is compromised here
just to survive.

Unwinding slowly,
give up the steering
to gain our lives.

Trapped in these minds,
illusion too deep
to reconcile.

The remnants find
our hollow bodies
murdered in kind.

Raked through the light
of my tormented sight.
The emptiness sides
with this unyielding story.

Aging too fast
to grasp
the dreams I’ve let flow
beyond my control.

Shed off this skin
that I’m living within
to find myself whole
in the uncharted wasteland.

Falling too deep
to keep
myself as I know.
It’s time to let go.

END TRANSMISSION