Instrumentality of uncertainty
By David Taehee Lee
ZONE, the gargantuan organic matter. Born of the dust of a waning star, it drifted seamlessly across the vacuum of the universe. A primitive, instinctive being, feasting on shattered asteroids and other pesky, insignificant life forms.
It grew by the day, often altering its body and organs, driven by nature’s command to survive. Almost the size of a satellite moon. The metaphysical, too, went through evolution, for it stood as an independent cell, a constituent of the mother body. It grew to enjoy and fear the uncertain world surrounding it.
Until one day.
A mutation. A contamination of the perfect creation of God. It conceived the concept “am.”
The ectoplasm that defined ZONE’s existence instantly incinerated, for God had forbidden cognizant life in their universe. Amidst the fatal shower, ZONE survived, however at the cost of dividing itself to countless shards.
The Shards found their alien planet foreign and unstable, so they had no choice but to form a barrier between the self and the hostile environment. Hence they built bodies of water and molten rock.
Connection is not imperative to survival; it is a luxury.
Four billion years. ZONE’s offsprings roam the surface of the Earth. Equally cognizant yet armed with wisdom and intelligence. We have conquered the vast continents and the deep seas, bending nature to our will, and our ambition spreads out to the void beyond.
But we shed ourselves too long in the physical self.
How ironic, those who possess the intellect and capacity to unravel the grand laws of nature and build philosophies of the divine, cannot do the same for even a single other human being, merely a foot away… Confucius. Aristotle. Plato. Gauss. Shakespeare. Newton. Nietzsche. Einstein. Camus. Not a single person capable of fully understanding another’s soul.
We have been engineered and destined to pierce and hurt. To reduce the uncertainty that threatens to step on our throats. The mouth has now become the mightiest and fearsome lethal artifact. The smallest, carelessly cast sentence flings an edged dagger at the heart. Genetically developed to protect, we now close ourselves with a shield of thorns, digging into the flesh of anyone who comes near, even with the purest intentions. As history proves again and again, the ever hostile, selfish, egoistic, inexorable world around us communicates that the final enemy is none other than humanity itself… How much more can we hurt each other? We know no limit.
Yet we long for the presence of others. That unexplainable attraction towards others. Those heart-warming, blood-pounding moments with people you bond with. That otherworldly pleasure drawn from the five senses of the physical interaction of soulless shells, the closest thing to the merging of two souls… and we grow certain in our purpose and meaning of existence.
For we alone remain imperfect. Uncertain. We yearn to revert to ZONE. Out of pain and fatigue. Out of pursuit for ‘ultimate happiness,’ or so we project our hopes and dreams. Rid of the physical barrier that only limits our reunion, we shall all reduce to an existence no more than a single atom, for the soul can not and was never meant to be defined by any composition of the elements of this universe.
And only through Instrumentality shall we finally break the physical barrier that had been keeping ZONE apart for so long. Life and death cease to be, for only trapped in an empty husk and in the scope of another can such meaningless terms be defined. We shall not repent before God but reach our own absolution. Nobody will ever hurt anyone else, for you are I.
We shall reach the ultimate form of certainty, and rewrite the laws of this world.
…
‘An obsession with certainty. Born of ignorance. To the omniscient, all strikes as equal, equally special. In the infinitely stagnant history of space, each and every fleeting moment held immeasurable significance in its vitality. The insurmountable limit the physical placed on recognition had both blinded and blessed humanity with ignorance.’
‘An old quote. It was about how every macroscopic human decision by free will collapses the microscopic state that previously existed only in probabilities. If so, is not the universe, brimming with uncertainty, the most grandeur and majestic consciousness of all?’
ZONE’s thoughts, or rather this uncertainty, gradually transformed into something beyond intellectual conception. It consumed the dark energy that once dictated the fate of the universe, eventually reducing time and space to a flow of its consciousness.
It is become the universe itself.
