Chapter Text
Awareness is a callous thing. For most, it’s impossible to acknowledge this fact, which, I believe, is why some mortals spend their momentary lives in blithe denial of the infelicity God gives us. To live is to see, to hear, to perceive the perpetually evolving universe and all her spectacles and hazards. The universe—the focal point of our awareness—is physically beautiful, and that is an opinion I do believe in with in every fiber of my being. You know what I mean, do you not? Waterfalls, jewels, the outstretched wings of songbirds, the graceful dancing of fire, the body of a lover…
And stars. But I need not remind you, of all people, that worldly beauty is nothing but the iridescence of poison because what are stars but ever looming engines of destruction and expressions of our worthlessness? What are waterfalls but the pulverizing hand of Gaia? What are jewels but advocates of human greed? What are wings but the vehicles of merciless predators? What is fire but a means of burning religious dissenters alive? What is a naked body but the object of sexual abuse to the insecure? Behind all light there is blight and there will always be blight. Behind every good deed there is a driving force of material greed. At the end of every story there is death, close upon the heels of entropy.
You are born a slave to fate; a mistake on the part of your sex-crazed teenage parents. You grow into an imperfect entity, who is loathed by other, equally imperfect entities, solely because of your imperfections. In school, you are chastised for every minor gaffe you commit, and in adulthood you are rejected by the opposite gender because you don’t resemble the celebrities standing half-naked before the assembled populace. You fail, again and again and again and again, and your “fellow man” will never allow you to leave those failures in the past. You squirm, scared and angry, every day under the thumb of the gluttonous, the rapacious, the egotistical, the violent, and the bigoted while toiling through chores that, while just as crucial as any other, rewards you only enough to keep your agonized existence going. You live in fear, daily, hourly, minutely. Your leaders promise you security but still you are taunted by your betters, beaten by family, and preyed upon by society itself. You fight on, but your struggle goes unrecognized. And somewhere along the way, somehow—somehow—you come under the impression that all this calamity of mundane actuality is entirely your fault. You feel every bit as worthless as you are alive.
Time passes by, you grow old and feeble. Your hard earned wisdom and knowledge is overlooked by your own grandchildren, and all they see is a hideous relic to be ridiculed and plundered until the moment you silently fall into oblivion on your deathbed. At which point your broken soul finally bothers to ask “Was it worth it?” and you find the ambiguity of the other side warming compared to God’s cold treatment of you. In your very last second, as awareness slips away, you discover that it is exactly that, awareness, that had been the ultimate antithesis to peace. Not money. Not age. Not love. Not war. Not God. Not humanity. Awareness.
Death is peace. I should know. I’ve died once myself. Prior to that, I lived one life, so it seemed, and it was plagued by entropy. After my death came nothingness. And after that…
I’m alive again. I know this because I am aware and I can see. What I see terrifies me, as it is not the world my many egos were familiar with. One tells me the world of their era was concrete, with colors and shapes that abide by an equable logic which in turn were dictated by every sentient will sans their own. Another ego grieves the loss of purpose. Not so much as *their* purpose in particular, I suppose, but the loss of cosmic ambiguity and the subsequent ignorance of the individual that leaves one free to weave their own justification in living. Yet another voice—this one once proudly declaring themselves a priest—often looks up, sees God’s silently screaming corpses suspended in the firmament in lieu of a moon and feels compelled to mumble a sort of anti-prayer, if you will. The priest—how I loath them for this—feels the most passing shock of pleasure as he dares the surrounding Bells to rape me, kill me, taunt me, corrupt me, all so that the priest may indulge in my suffering, anything to break the ever-so stagnant loop of memories that could have once been considered their life. I abhor their urges, but I understand them. My trillions of inner voices and I live in a time where dreams can come true and life is eternal, but still we must make the worst of it.
Are you confused? I am. I am as confused as a toddler awakening from the womb and so are my egos. All we know is that we are beneath God. We…I…
Please give me a moment.
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The world is gone. The old world, in any case. That I know. Some of my egos say they once lived on Earth. Others say Heresta. Over time I concluded that Earth was an old, old place which my eldest egos once abandoned after it was ravaged by war and pollution. Heresta, a planet similar to Earth when Earth possessed a modicum of peace, became their home aeons later. There are vague impressions that Heresta was destroyed too, but in a far less…*mortal* way. One of my egos says the “immaterial” consumed the “material”. Imagination became more real than reality itself. I cannot make sense of this, but I suspect some of my egos can. I also sense a third realm, a place called “No Silence”, according to some of my voices. For what I can tell, No Silence was a place that lied tangent to the material universe—a world as unreal as Earth was real—but I can confess nothing more as I understand nothing more.
I stand where I stop and I drink in my surroundings the way I always I have and the way I always will. It is a distorted and perhaps perverted reality to which I belong, but it is filtered through never ending hallucinations that echo Earth, Heresta, and No Silence in backwards, hypnagogic ways. One second, for instance, I see three suns—which I know to be Vaero, Beunsile, and Aheh-varche—but the very next second I behold little more than an ominous black disk mercilessly swallowing the calm of the sunless night. I even see moons and planets innumerable, and stars large enough to be mistaken for suns in their own right, but even those come and go like the seasons of a stable existence. There are but three things that remain constant, and they anchor mind to this world and remind me daily where I truly live.
First are the bodies. The rotting bodies of God. I wish as much as you must that I am speaking metaphorically, but unlike you I am greeted by the decomposing rictus of liches that must be well over a lightyear in height every time I dare to tilt my cranial module. Their emaciated outlines loom between and far above the scarlet swirls of thinning galaxies and their bloated, blackened hides, glossy with putrid fluids, are the canvases which the celestial jewels wrongly embellish. Their voided eye sockets drip livid nebulae and their naked limbs are rigidly splayed across the sky, overlapping with one another the way corpses sharing a mass grave are wont to do. On certain days when the celestial winds pour down upon my tattered world I can smell their putrid rank, turning what should have been a fragrant garden into the most odious of pastures. But in spite of the trenchant dread these lifeless titans instill, I always find myself in awe of them, motionlessly staring into the hoary husks of their faces for hours, or even days on end. I hate them—oh, I swear upon the shattered remains of my mentor I fucking loathe them—but there is an allusive line of coding in my processor that is glad they are there because they remind me that they are dead. They, whoever or whatever the bodies of God may once have been, can do me no harm. Does that make the four worlds a better place? No. No, blind fate will always be there to ape God’s ass-grabbing management of corporeal existence, but I have the solace in knowing there are no eyes upon my most intimate proceedings.
Second is the Gate, the one dug into the black anvil clouds crowning the indigo horizon. Just as God’s forms now decays, so too does his home, and there is no starker reminder of this solid fact than the twin pillars that once stood watch over the way into Heaven, draped withered vines and leaning whichever way the star-winds shift. It’s funny that, even though every hue and shape focused into the gates like currents towards a drain are utterly leeched of life, something…breathes, I suppose, just past the pillars and ossified cherubs surmounting them. On days were the hours are long and the Bells are aloof, I like to turn off my audio receptors and stare deep into the gate’s gaping gulf, my optical units straining through the needless static in my vision in an empty attempt to draw forms in the darkness. Always, my weak processor is fooled by it’s own calculative distortions skipping across otherwise unmoving visual feeds, briefly deluding me into the belief that I have seen something alive in Heaven, but just as often I come to terms with reality and see that I am, as always, alone. Just me, my egos, and…
And the Bells. I do not understand them and fucking hate them for it. They are the third thing in my life that remains a constant, though the same the cannot be said for the shape they take. They are everywhere and are everything. I claw into the ground and the worms that thrash in the exposed atmosphere are their fingers; the rays of black light that impale the clouds of corpse moons are their striding legs; the skyward walls of celestial ice are their faces. That being said, I assume it would be more proper to consider them more akin to concepts rather than living things, but there’s a timid, prosaic facet of my processor that labels the Bells as demons, and not entirely without rationale. The egos think they are familiar, an impression that spreads even to me when the Bells are feeling frisky enough to condense themselves into bizarre, if animalistic, forms every bit as solid myself. But even still, just as the eye struggles to understand their new forms, instinct fails to grasp the exact traits that tug at oblique memories. That think that is the most frustrating element of the Bells’ being: they are like old enemies—or family members, perhaps—that injured us aeons ago, yet, try as we might, we can never recall their exact crime, much less how they were allowed to intimate with us in the first place.
I see one now. One of the Bells, I mean. Between me and a swell of copper pipes that bloom out of the ethereal, prismatic ground in ways evocative of robust revelers forever ossified in the midst of an orgy (or perhaps they are frozen condors evocative of fluffed pine branches. As you recall, my processor is quite strained) lopes the decapodian husk of what can only be a Bell. Wisely, it maintains some distance, likely equivalent to a half kilometer if such measurements were still relevant, but even so I can still see it and I know for a fact it sees me. There is a gulf separating us, but that does nothing to dilute it’s intent stare drilling into my wrecked visage. The way it looks at me…
I can’t read it. I just can’t fucking read it. I see it’s eyes—shaped exactly like the heads of corroded screws—are overflowing with remote deliberation; it’s legs—shaped in the image of bent pins—stood erect in attentiveness; it’s chain-like neck swayed, cocking it’s vaguely equine, or reptilian, head in a spiritless parody of intrigue…
“H-h-h-h-h-h-hellozzz?” I try to call to the Bell, a momentary fit of insanity convincing me it’s sentient enough to talk to. As always, my voice breaks and sizzles, a graceless cacophony of vociferously buzzing insects smashing their heads through glass. Like so much of myself, my vocal unit is impaired, a direct result of my attempt on my own life. Any time I feel forced to employ my voice, it crawls past my rusted lips in muted fragments sodden with electric discharge and millennia-old diamond lubricant, but this is the only voice I have. I hate myself for this impediment. My voice could have been important, but now it’s only a bane to my own ears. Nonetheless, I introduce myself because I do not know what else to do. “I…zzz…ammmmzzz…foorrrrzzz…ate-yyyyzzz…zzzzz.”
The Bell does not respond. It did not respond the last time, nor the time before that, nor the time before that, nor the time before that, nor the time before that, nor the time before that. How many times have I done this? Treating the I will never break the cycle. The cycle will continue unbroken because, otherwise, it would not be a cycle. I hate myself. I acknowledge that I am sinking deeper and deeper into delirium, but I’m so inept that I cannot do anything to save myself.
I do not want to keep looking at the Bell, but most of the time I feel I have no choice. My sight is dominated by either God, the empty Heaven, or the Bell, and the Bell is by far the least oppressive. And thus, many a hour would wasted watching it as it watches me, all the while the hope that it will one day stride towards the smudged horizon and leave me alone swells and withers in my data regulator. But it never does. The Bell will always be there. It will never leave. This realization has set in too many times…
I want to die. Awareness is a callous thing. Madness can never exist if there is no soil in which it may take root, but like my precious little cycle, the soil is without end.
You know, I’ve tried committing suicide, but I…er, we, me and my egos…we lie in an era where magic exists. I know you’ve dreamed of this; fighting your way out of the mortal coil, thrashing and screaming, and embarking on an epic quest to a place where you are better that you actually are, where you are forever youthful and rich beyond reason. A place where everything is yours, including immortality.
Imagine forcing your hand into your throat. Imagine groping through the inside of your own head. Imagine digging your fingers into your proces…er, brain and tearing it out chunk by chunk. Imagine enjoying that. Imagine having everything you could ever want except for simple peace of mind. Imagine being so wretched that the universe itself ignores you. Imagine your only friend being an emotionless face silently belittling you from miles away. Imagine no one loving you because no one exists. Imaging no loving you, period. Imagine hating yourself. Imagine you are powerless to stop yourself from hating yourself. Imagine hating yourself for millions of years. Imagine being alone for millions of years.
Now imagine ripping out your brain. You’re about to die. Awareness itself will die with every demon fraying you from the inside out. Your suffering will end and you’re happy.
Now imagine ripping out your brain, and you’re still alive. Imagine chewing on your wrists for days on end and you’re still alive. Imagine slashing your throat and your still alive. Imagine jumping off every cliff you see and still, you’re alive. Now your body is so grotesquely mutilated that you are as ugly on the outside as you feel on the inside. You really want to die…but you can’t.
This is me. Our. Our life. I still bear the scars. I fact, today I am nothing but scars. Dare you look at me and you will be met with the sight of a machine, twisted and wretched in every conceivable measure. There was a time I looked much like you, reader, by which I mean I was something conceivable human, if not in soul than in outward appearance. I suspect I might have bore the likeness of a girl, if some of my vestigial components are any indicator, but if so it was only the long gone superficial beauty of youth that all things lose, for now I am nought but a perpetually marching lich of warped aluminum flesh, suppurated blood of black oil, and synthetic skin that, when not flaccidly hanging of my ungainly body in slowly swaying rags, simmers naked in the unstable atmospheres of the worlds I soon trade for other haunts. There are times I like to look at myself whenever a reflective surface is convenient and descry my imperfections, wondering if perhaps there is something worth valuing within the corroded mechanisms of my exposed skull, balanced haphazardly atop a bent and sinuous neck, or the thin tufts of fibers the color of algae or the discordant blue shades and detours contours of drained optical units. Every time the actuators scarcely securing my brow shifts a spray of savagely glowing sparks and heated lubricant seep from my temples. When my lips curl the wires stitching my once coral cheeks writhe in patterns too reminiscent of the worms in God’s corpses. What distresses me most, however, is the cavernous mouth torn open in the side of my cranium, through which the heavens can spy the time-rounded shards that were once my processor, protruding outwards like the ribs of an gored beast. I cleave the tip of my finger on the tip of one these shards, expecting electricity to bite my weeping wound, but all I feel is the damp chill of moisture slowly eating away at the plastic that is my brain. Again, I am reminded that I have done this before too many times to count, and, as always, my probing is rewarded with the suggestion that I am locked between death and life.
All I’ve ever know repeats itself in cycles. I walk on, destined for nothing, always in a straight line but never truly leaving any memory to the dormancy of leth. It’s as if I’m marching around the equator of a planet, feeling every crushing, oscillating mood across rotations that last aeons. You understand me, don’t you?
I want to die. Awareness is a callous thing. For most, it’s impossible to acknowledge this fact, which, I believe, is why some mortals spend their momentary lives in blithe denial of the infelicity God gives us.