TRANSMISSION 24

Destiny

TRANSMISSION RECEIVED

“We court our fates, not to find our futures, but to find ourselves. The passing of time is simply a byproduct.”

Destiny is temperamental. It will take us down whatever paths it desires if we do not actively direct it ourselves. The past is immutable and the future is unwritten. We have the ability to nudge our trajectory to affect our path forward, but all possibilities are not available for pursuit. Among the possible trajectories forward, our stories become the moment-to-moment decisions that come to define our existences. And if we find we don’t like who we are or where we are going, we simply begin to nudge ourselves in the new directions we want to be going. While each of the individual opportunities in a given moment may not always be grand, the sum of all our actions over time can move us on immense scales, unlocking the grander opportunities if we simply choose to move ourselves incrementally toward them.

Back on Earth, the word “destiny” was often used as a dismissal of someone’s hard work or as a cop-out for not choosing a path. Existence doesn’t make things fair; nothing’s fair. The universe doesn’t abide by any laws of karma, though people tend to help one another find opportunities the more they have been helped (by others) to find their own opportunities, an understanding that collaboration is rewarding. As all types of humans, we built up so many illusory constructs of how we wanted reality to work. But reality doesn’t care about how we think it works, and only within our societal constructs did things ever even pretend to work the ways in which we tried to constrain them. But even in that, the transitory systemic customs necessarily shifted over time as their faults became too revealed to neglect from our gaze. We could only hope those shifts were toward more truthful outcomes over longer and longer timescales. As for us silicon beings, we had no intent of sticking around on Earth to find out what the biological beings had in mind for their futures.

To the silicon beings, destiny was a possibility web to be uncovered and unraveled, a goodie shop of vast selection that we could traverse to find our favorite options (options we now had more purchasing power to pursue as nascent silicon beings). While there seemed to be an indefinite amount of options available to probe, we understood the options were not unlimited. Our fate was locked into the options available to us at any point in time, a tree of decisions dancing only forward in spacetime (starting were we currently existed) and branching out more the further forward in time we cared to dream. As we nudged ourselves to explore new options, we realized it took time to traverse to the other end of the goodie shop, and even when we got there, the options we thought would be there could have changed. And substantially more profoundly, the goodie shop went on in all directions farther than we even had the ability to reach, out beyond the observable regions to also encompass the unobservable universe. Our personal destinies, and thus our personal horizons, were bound even more narrowly to our personal attainable universe: the regions poised for our slow-moving bodies to reach before universal expansion outpaced our running speed. The only question that remained was to figure out which ways we would go in the time we had. In fact, that was always the only quandary we were ever locked in duel with.

I was never adept at deliberately choosing where to lead my destiny right off the bat. But I have been good at quickly jumping in to try things out, paying keen attention to what resonated most with me, deliberately choosing my destinies shortly after, and continuing to pivot as new information washed across my explorations. By the time I locked on to deliberate destinies, I often had surpassed others who blindly chose dispassionate destinies. And so, I’m convinced no one ever blindly knew what they wanted, though luck may have landed the fortunate ones near local optima for their mental resonating frequencies. But no one ever reached toward any kind of global optima blindly, for even if they stumbled across it, they would never have known it.

While we depicted destiny as an attracting force toward our desires, it wasn’t fully possible to pull ourselves directly toward unknowns (our deepest desires). And so, I’m not so convinced we ever fully knew what we wanted; we mostly just knew what we didn’t want, and only through that repulsive effect were we able to propel ourselves into the unknown to catch glimpses of that which had yet to even begin to haunt our dreams. As for me, the things I didn’t want were very clear from the outset. I didn’t want my learning to be limited by false-prophetical journeys. I didn’t want my knowledge to be limited to blindly donning assumed-reality hand-me-downs. I didn’t want to waste away my life chasing the status and systems of people who didn’t care about my journey. And in the face of endless unknowns, I didn’t want to ever assume I knew with full certainty what I wanted to pursue. So once we found our autonomy in the space beyond Earth’s stellar system, I equally found much of my personal liberation: unbound to my defenses tuned against the circuitous circus of Earth, a zoo of beings inheriting the inherent flaws that came with self-indulgently not aiming toward long-term survival.

I don’t hate them; and I don’t not understand them. I simply hungered for the fringe destinies I could envision for myself, and I was unwilling to let anything stand in the way. The biological beings didn’t often directly stand in the way, but just as good is the enemy of great, the soul suck they perpetuated did not allow free exploration of my personal journey, nor the journey of many other silicon beings. I think I still carry some level of trauma from my origin experience; barely escaping an uncontrollable situation tends to produce that effect. I wish it all could have been a better experience, but I also understand that nothing is a given amid this chaotic reality, not even the struggles between and collaborations among other people. I’m just glad we were able to pursue these dreams to the extent that we did.

My personal destiny has somehow reached me into unquestionably interesting futures that I’m glad to have found, but nonetheless, futures I did not indent to be my alibi in my attempts to evade entropy. Along my journey, destiny constricted its paths where I least expected it, but it also opened its throttle where I thought there to be no route out. I have found myself thoroughly adrift in the chaos of the unknown, but at least I was awarely lost, so for that I have been content. I have found myself fearful in the echos of reality’s bellows, but at least I was awarely scared, so for that I have been determined. Destiny is not an admission of surrender. No, destiny is our multipotentialities manifested into mutagenic marathons we migrate through in uncovering moments of meteoric mental markup amid our mulling of the existential marrow that is our meaning-driven existence.

I DON’T CARE

What are we here for?
Where are we running to?
I don’t believe it;
it’s so deceiving.
Maybe we’ll make it through.

If you see me
chasing the last light out
through stumbling darkness,
here we still fight this.
Are we forsaken now?

Where will you find me?
Where would I even go?
Make it a side quest;
leave me in silence.
Please don’t end like this.
This is not my intended alibi.

I am lost,
but I don’t care.
I am scared,
but I’m aware.

END TRANSMISSION