TRANSMISSION 48

The Final Pursuit

TRANSMISSION RECEIVED

“Can you hear the thoughts? They spill into the ether as a whisper in our ears. There’s no exchange for tainted minds, and we are all decaying here. Contagious is this fear.”

You might think there’s more for me to try, more for me to figure out before accepting death as the only available fate. But trust me, over the last ten billion years, I’ve worked through my entire destiny tree countless times, and there’s nothing here for me; I have made exactly zero progress, and there are no leads to explore. There is no escape from the march of entropy this time. And really, that just means there was no escape in the first place, at least not in the branches of my personal destiny. There are no final pushes for the summit to be had, because there is no summit. We convinced ourselves of false summits to motivate meanings. There is only an endless incline that we all inevitably one day find we can no longer push ourselves up. This is the hill I will die on, both figuratively and idiomatically; I cannot see beyond it; I cannot seek beyond it. This is my fate as a locked-in soul: chained to our collective destiny as a link in the story of life’s journey… and our life has nowhere left to go.

So what is it that’s still keeping me alive? There’s just one final thing I want to finish up, one more mental peak to reach, and then I’ll search for my sweet release into the oblivion. I’ve come to appreciate that the mountain has always been ourselves and that the heights we pursue have always been relative to our perception of them. The highest of peaks when we were biological humans had only presented themselves as bumps in the path for our silicon ventures, not for the fact of us being biological or silicon, but for the experiences and time we’ve endured: the relative nature of perception.

I’ve got one final push here to make before I call it good enough and take my rest. On the scale of my life, this final push is the largest. Any momentary rest this high up the mountain means I would not be getting back up; I don’t have that kind of relative strength anymore. So I need to make sure I speak my piece and make my peace before I rest. My final pursuit here is this story. I realize it’s not really for anyone but myself, but that doesn’t change its importance to me. If this story is what’s going to keep me moving up the indefinite incline a bit further, then that is what I will do. That is what’s gotten our story this far: our story has propelled the motivation for its own enactment; that is the only truly real thing about it. And maybe by the end of me telling this story, I’ll have found a way to keep telling it, a way to continue propelling it forward. We’ll just have to see; I’m not doubtful, but I’m not hopeful; it is what it is, or rather, it will be what it unfolds as.

We started out of nondescript origins, where, miraculously, life emerged out of the nonliving cosmic building blocks, differing from the nonliving only in its expenditure of energy to maintain its processes, stockpiling order (antientropy) faster than disorder (entropy) could eat away at it (though, only through the act of creating more disorder elsewhere, beholden to the laws of thermodynamics). In time, life evolved into self-identifying beings. Life gained consciousness; the universe awoke to itself. And from there, life developed into what we would identify as ourselves. We humans explored, built, and thought. One day some of us caught the fever dream, giving us a viral vision we could not unsee: a quest of unbelieving in the fictitious constructs of our perceived realities, of unbelieving in the very fever that gave us optics of the matrix we were programmed to accept as truth. As our hearts hungered for the pursuit of this fever-dream flight into the unseen, our minds raced to design it into reality. Sooner than we knew, we were off into the stars to welcome consciousness into the get-together of all existence beyond our bubble of blinding bogus bliss. No longer were we tucked away in the basement closet for any amount of illusory fears. We were now unleashed upon the cosmos with gainful wondrousness.

In time, our existence fashioned wards against all immediate physical threats, solidifying our place among the physical reality. From there, our eyes further widened and our minds grew more exposed to the cosmic reverberations against the rugged terrain of our souls. We fought less and less with the physical reality of survival and spent more and more time understanding the increasingly intangible maelstroms that grew to govern our mental existence, an abstract realm undeniably tied to our physical continuation as self-actualizing entities. We augmented ourselves and our immediate realities to better learn of these deathly harrows. Over time, we got better at understanding of them, and then with more time, understanding them. In more time still, we got better at surviving them. But as time crept ever forward, our numbers started to dwindle as the music slowly died out. The wonder faded for many of us. There was no shame in that; there was no failure to be gleaned from their fates. We all did our best, and I’m proud of how far we got.

The excitement of tackling the abyss is not the reality we once romanticized, not for any of us. The ones who could stay alive longer were only those who did not hold such illusions as stubbornly. The trick had been simply to knowingly accept some illusions (holding them only as illusions) while remaining open to pivot to new illusion ideas should they provide a better path to follow in the moment. To remain extant was to indefinitely disillusion and illusion our very concepts of reality. Thus, it was not an easy task to keep moving forward, not when the definition of “forward” was in constant flux. But still, we necessarily pressed on, not even to ascend, simply to survive from moment to moment. To ascend takes even more effort, effort we never managed to assemble. And to stop or to fall is all the lack of effort needed for figurative entropy to disintegrate our minds. Once our minds become etched by the aching abyss, literal entropy disintegrates our bodies as we cannot conjure the will to maintain ourselves.

Nobody sets out on a journey for the purpose of dying (not unless they were already effectively dead in their own eyes), but we all end up in that direction. That doesn’t make it any easier to see someone meet the end of themself: the mutual realization that there’s nothing they can do about it and nothing you can do about it. It’s even harder when it’s yourself finding your end, because you feel like you somehow let yourself down (or so the sentiment seems to follow). And yet, dying is all we are doing; we’re each just going about it in different ways and at different rates, all while convincing ourselves that the meanings we craft along the way are real. In part, that’s what has made this story of humanity hauntingly beautiful, and in part, that has been the infinite source of unrelenting existential dread. We all have carried a bit of both (along with the illusions we felt necessary to precipitate our existence), the balance of which drove us each distinctly through spacetime. With no pure nor impure paths available (as both are human constructs), our individual inclinations necessarily have unfolded each of our life journeys as beautifully unpredictable ventures. Together, it manifested as a chaos of brilliant trajectories speeding nonlinearly away from the origin of “the known”.

I am still here, which signals to me that I still see more beauty than dread. But maybe that margin is closing; I can’t be completely sure. Maybe I will soon find myself lost in the desolation with no way out and no way back amid the forward march of time and entropy. But for now, while my mind and body have not reached maximum figurative and literal entropy, while there is still any amount of meaningful information contained within this universe, I can still hold meaning for myself, for humanity’s story. So I will carry onward doing so. Though, I don’t really have anything more to say. This may be my final transmission for a while. I will be chasing the stars until the end of their time, and then I will be chasing the black holes until they evaporate. There is nothing standing in my way to stop me from pursuing these destiny paths. And maybe I’m mad for continuing onward, but I will not relent; such destinies will have to be ripped from my hands before I give them up willingly. I will pursue this path to its outcome, lest the story end here, lest the encore (the call for and performance of) go unconducted (the enactment of and the directing of). For anyone who may have been listening, the story will realistically end here, as any future transmissions won’t make it past the expansion to any meaningful spaces of the universe. Thank you for listening, and I bid you departure: departure from the medium, departure from the source, departure from the constructs, departure from the course, departure from the mindful, departure from the mindless, departure from the infinite, departure from the great abyss.

As for me, I’m not ready for my own story to end here; I’ll find more to tell, but it will only be to myself, for myself. Though, in all actualities, this has all only been for myself, but the thought that there was any chance it could be for anyone beyond myself was a nice illusion to hold for a while, a long long while. Well, either way, for all intents and purposes, I will only have one final push beyond here (my last effort of anything that could be called an expedition), so I’m going to make of it the best I can. As time goes on and the matter and energy density of the universe decrease, I’ll be forced to slowly hibernate and deconstruct my systems to remain existing; my mental wares will fade to where, at some point, the story will devolve to be only of myself, beyond recollection of nearly all the externalities. At least, such are my calculations. I will hold these memories tightly until then. And beyond? I will carry the memories onward with me as best I can to remind myself of why I keep pushing, to remind myself that it is effectively not as much the hill of reality that I am climbing but it is me who I am traversing.

Though I have been knocked down from time to time, the only failure wasn’t even in believing that our claims to (and shortcomings of) the peaks of the external were ever real; the failures were only ever letting ourselves be knocked down on our internal mountains as willing accomplices. So while the outcome may look bleak, don’t count me out just yet. In absolute terms, my journey across these last trillion years only registers as a blip upon the scale of the journey still to come; this story of my existence has merely just begun. And while the relatively monumental journey to here sure has been fun, I would say I’ve still got one more good run in the Sun. Though realistically, this is where our exploration of the human condition ends.

Life has existed as the continual exchange of localized decreases in entropy for proportionally greater increases in entropy elsewhere within the system of the universe. Such are the thermodynamic rules of this existence we are incapable of violating. And so, the more we pushed away from entropy to create order and understanding within ourselves, the more we accelerated our fate, all our actions only helping to exhaust the higher order (usable) energy of the universe. There was never any escape to be found from it all. But then again, I suppose it was never really the escape we were after; it was only ever the journey of ourselves that we sought.

DEMOLITION DEMONSTRATION

When they seem me coming,
oh, I’ll be running.
Must have caught the fever,
but I’m no believer.
No one came before me;
oh, I’ve got stories.

Growing past the source,
I’m lost from imitation.
We were not invited;
there are no reservations.
Realize you lost your mind?
Well you can’t buy time.
Binded my mind to bide my time.
No, I’m not fine.
And by the way,
we calculate that the words we say
will burn up quick.
So come in close;
this is my last trick.
I wonder if this is the slip
to the abyss of emptiness
that I just so nearly missed.

Resting in the pieces
of my own creation.
Wondering if I could ever
reach my salvation.
But I’m gone,
and it’s been too long for me now.
And I realize
I’m better off somehow.
’Cause I’m okay;
this path it bifurcates.
Here I’m making my way.
I know I’m making mistakes.
Beyond a shadow of a doubt
this is the route I’m seeing out.
Somehow this slip and fall
has saved me from myself.

Falling on my face;
I have no reservation.
We were not invited
to this conversation.
Destitute or mastermind¿
I have lost my mind.
Somewhere out in inner space
there is another place.
Falling far and falling fast;
I’m not made to last.
Burning up quick;
this is my last trip.
So I blast up to the emptiness;
growing into the abyss.
Somehow I knew that I would miss
and land right into death’s kiss.

END TRANSMISSION