The Last Memory - Finish the Story contest 37
Lucid Dream
[The first part of the story is provided by @f3nix:]
There it was. An immense sphere, soaked in the amniotic liquid of the lucid dream. An embryo of edges, curves, dimensions, and impossible geometries. Static and fluid at the same time, iridescent, elusive and hypnotic in its eternal becoming.
There it was. After the struggle and the debris. There it was. Yoh's conscience.
Strung like pearls, millennia had relegated it to a mere legend, while Yoh raged freely on Earth. The existence of the conscience on a deep and subtle plane had been denied by the Master Demiurges, who originally created the source code. Their self-fulfilling prophecy had become inexorable, relegating Yoh's conscience first to the status of children's fable and then to nothingness. It had slept for a long, long time.
There, on board of the DDG-31/DD-936 Decatur, drifting in the outer space, Ethan had plenty of time for being instructed by the orbital station's A.I. about the possible effects on him of Yoh's conscience sudden epiphany.
It was not a God but it got close. This implied that the disintegration of the self, on all the planes of existence, was a more than spontaneous and probable event, as someone reached its proximity.
A sound of laborious ants interrupted Ethan’s astonished musings. The meta-viewer force fields were working around him incessantly, raising the programmed shields.
The mere sight of its unstable geometries would have been fatal for him. The neural system of his exoskeleton was crackling and working hard, at the edge of its computing power, to prevent the involuntary assimilation. Now he found himself immersed in a bath of waves that could have slipped him into oblivion instantly if he had not activated all the exoskeleton’s guard levels.
He felt like an infinitesimal dipteran, imprisoned in a dense amber atmosphere.
The Conscience's voices suddenly whipped Ethan's synapses like a thousand organ pipes in unison. He fell to his knees, eyes wide open and incredulous: no A.I. could ever have prepared him for this.
"I am. I happen. By dreaming, I have sung the creation of infinite worlds. Are you a Master?"
Ethan recorded the strange question, slowly taking courage. Standing up on his trembling legs, he pulled off his helmet and shouted:
"Conscience of Yoh, I am not a Master. I am the last of your creations, forgotten in your long sleep".
A deafening, golden silence.
As the most intimate essence of each cell began to evaporate through his cybernetic shell, Ethan frantically sought one last thought.
Photo by me
The Last Memory
[This would seem to me like a sequel to another story of the Finish the Story, that of the week # 29, "Metallic Kisses". The protagonist Ethan and the space station DDG-31 / DD-936 Decatur are the same, but other details diverge… “Metallic Kisses” described the space station as nearly wrecked and in ruins, with a few systems and rooms still operative. In this story, that could happen logically after, the station seems fully operative, so I was unsure of the level of coherence between the two stories. I the end, I decided to treat them as two separate stories, that may be loosely connected if someone isn’t too choosy about little incongruences.]
"Puking love... loving puke... it will be a fluke... or a nuke..." the refrain of an old song by Tortillas de Pelo, a punk-rock band that had a certain fame in the underground scene of a couple of generations before.
This was the thought that Ethan had formulated. His attempt was to remind Conscience of Yoh of the reason why he had created it, before his mere presence would also eradicate the last of his shield programs and his nanites, as if it were a system bug of the universe. Speed was essential, in the order of millionths of a second.
Perhaps it was not really pain what he felt while impulses overwritten other impulses, disrupting his memory cells, it was probably just the recording of painful sensory stimuli experienced by the animals of planet Earth, memorized and associated within him to re-emerge in circumstances of serious danger for his survival as an autonomous conscience. However, it hurt like hell the same!
"Conscience of Yoh... argh!... Conceale yourself to my senses, please ... I cannot bear your dimensional impossibility..."
The immense hypersphere showed other non-Euclidean geometries, transmuting as if to signify a change of status, but the disintegration of all the shielding systems that the A.I. of the Decatur could unfold continued inexorably.
"Curiosity. Mutual incomprehension. Son? I do not recognize you. Not a Master. Soon you will not be."
Ethan was at the limit. His individuality was torn like a palm under a sandstorm.
"I. I am. I am... Ethan! "
The backlash came brutal. The immense impossibility of space-time had ceased to invade with its fullness the further dimensions, limiting itself to the four bearable for the beings of this universe.
"Ethan. Ark of memories. You."
"Yes, or Consciousness of Yoh, I am the Ark of memories of planet Earth. Life no longer exists on it, I have collected everything that could be kept of the mental emissions of its extinct inhabitants, from the noble and uncontaminated instinct to feed on the paramecium, to the most corrupt and futile artistic attempt of an obscure band of human musicians. In the drawing that all these memories and emotions combined together formed in my neural processes, I found the star map to arrive in your sight. Here I am, father. "
Everything was now sidereal stillness, forgetful of the multidimensional maelstrom of just before. Through the meta-viewer, Ethan perceived only a void, the negative impression of Yoh's presence on dark matter.
"Billions of creatures who lived, suffered, felt pleasure, dreamed, desired, loved, left their traces in me. Now, tell me, Conscience of Yoh, are you perhaps the Creator? This immense movement of life culminates with my coming to you, are you perhaps the Meaning? "
The answer came in the form of a total, sudden, spreading of the folded dimensions that the Conscience of Yoh held in its cosmic shell. Dimensions imperceptible and unbearable for anything that was subject to the physical laws of this universe.
As Ethan dissolved, he only sensed:
"You now Yoh. Harvest time. Absorption. Growth."
This is my entry for the week #37 of the awesome contest held by @bananafish: Finish the Story, the best way to earn STEEM and Steem Basic Income Shares.
Click the banner below for more information on the Finish the Story contest:
The house of all the Freewriters!
Follow the Bananafish, follow its trail!
{How can this ending be complete without this included? (As the internet will say: the “feels” were strong in this one.) It would be a crime not to include some emotional background music.}
Unto the story proper, or how your Symbolic Father basically abandoned you and how it parallels the empty universe that Christians felt when Christ died on the cross... what, dost thou want me to do this? and dost thou want it in a poem as well?... not the latter but definitely the former, I see... well let’s get to it the story then, albeit I feel like doing a Kirkegaardian existential analysis but shall delay that...
Well for the reader that thinks for a second, the theme of father-son relations (or creator-created on a conscious level) had definitely carried over from the prompt to the ending. This whole non-contradictory antagonism is seen throughout were the created begs for recognition, to then only recieve near moments of his death, to then demanding things of his creator, to then finally be betrayed for the last time. (Nota bene, it is in this case non-contradictory as in their opposition is rather passive than active until the very end.) Id est, even when we have a contradictory antagonism at the end, it was immediate and only superseding, overcoming or aufheben, one thing: roles. This sudden change of roles is rather haphazard as it forces a synthesis, but in the end neither resolving Ethan’s desires nor Yoh’s subtle incompetence to do more than Yoh had. Which leads me to saying the first part: how your Symbolic Father basically abandoned you.
Because in essence, Yoh does another betrayal even when Yoh recognizes Ethan: abandoment. Yoh could create, but he couldn’t live up to see the created question Yoh on matters Yoh knew Yoh would never know how to answer. But what about the Symbolic part other than the prothesis (limb) of the story? The Symbolic part is that Ethan knew, but didn’t had to necessarily believe to feel whole, that the Consciousness of Yoh dictated everything from both material being to their general meaning... or had been trying to make meaning out of everything. See, when Ethan asked things the Symbolic Father had failed to make knowable (or couldn’t signify), the Conscious of Yoh was stuck. It knew that these semblances existed and Yoh worked hard to tidy these up, yet it failed and now appears as holes in itself. In particular, Meaning.
And so we live up to the drama of how your Symbolic Father basically abandoned you: it couldn’t signify these things out of its grasp that it has been struggling to subdue for who knows long. And so, instead of continuing the awkwardness and being continually challenged, it suspended Ethan like the Symbolic Order does to the Imaginary (Conscious) Order when it feels threatened. But in the act of suspending and re-arranging Ethan, the Conscious of Yoh leaves one final blurb to suggest that it won’t even cooperate with Ethan and suggest that Ethan is Yoh now; the ultimate betrayal left at the gates, the abandoment of something it cannot subdue. Thus this supersession is not ascension in the negative sense, but instead a positive one: it just updates a current project in newer conditions. (Or to put into an example: imagine how contrasting free will and determinism were throughout the ages, especially when the first debates rose to now with all our philosophical wanking.)
Which leads to the smaller subject: emptyness or how it parallels the empty universe that Christians felt when Christ died on the cross. See, with all these religious metaphors and general theological theme, it needs not explaining. See the abandoment and forced assimilation carried out by the previous Yoh and Jesus’s crucifixion parallel each other on major themes. What matters really is the moment after: for Ethan, it confirms a Universe that has its creator singing creation without a Meaning; for Christ’s followers, it confirms that the Universe really is an empty one. And yet give both a seemingly hyprocritical yet lovely Kirekegaardian message; id est, their journey towards Faith did not end but instead strengthened. For both Ethan and the followers of Christ were knights that were infinitely resigned, for which these two cathartic events both had their effects on challenging what both knew what Faith to be. In the end, despite knowing the Universe to be empty, they hadn’t necessarily given up on what they did. And instead found their horizons expanded and, once more, renewed their journey to achieving the end of the Dialectic of Faith.
Through abandoment, our journeys just start anew.
My studies of philosophy are too rusty to respond to this examination worthily, but I think that this little story of fiction, like many others, in the end betray a bit of my thinking and the key to the interpretation of the world I use.
Even if only wanting to write an end for the story of which I am not the author, and therefore I do not have the absolute freedom but I have to follow a plot already traced, and even if only wanting to be effective in 500 words, probably when I deal with issues like the search for meaning for life, I tend to show a bit of my approach, which is relativistic, materialistic and slightly nihilistic.
In fiction, Conscience of Yoh created Ethan as Ark for the memories of all sentient beings on Earth, and infused him with the impulse to search for him once the harvest was complete. For Conscience of Yoh this is the way to feed and grow, and Ethan does not understand that he is a mere instrument for his creator.
Ethan, being endowed with at least human intelligence, if not superior, has got a symbolic thought which, like in human beings, has caused the birth of questions of meaning and the conception of the divine. But, as for humans, the creation of this "symbolic father" can not save him from death.
As to quote Lacan in “Television: A challenge to the Psychoanalytic tradition”: “Thought is in disharmony with the Soul.”
On a different note, as I have said with paintings, writings to are a reflection of, directly, the author and, indirectly, society. The yearning for higher being, or a higher stage of existence, did and still haunts us that do consider and understand what uppercase F Fairh is. Even so, I rather stuck with Psychoanalysis and Søren Kierkegaard here in my comment due to the fact that Theology was the big theme while Scifi was merely a background (and modifier) of the theme. Even so, the reply back was fruiful and I can sense yer struggle which only is, dialectically, creating a stronger and better writer.
Tough one. Glad to see you got some traction on the intro and got a nice outro. It all goes together well to make a complete story. Good job @marco!
Thank you, Cyrus! Sometimes the story is so good, that even if I do not feel very inspired, I can make something sensible with real ease.
Your version seems to me as if we are already at home in the machine language and such what the brain research publishes. And then again you mix it with a mysticism and a kind of desire for a deity that can create and destroy. ...
A feeling of inferiority before such a fast computer capacity, an omnipotence to which man feels helplessly at the mercy of.
Your story reflects the realization that all knowledge about living existence is anchored in each individual, although it cannot be captured comprehensively as data knowledge.
How should I understand your end? Is it a kind of transition of consciousness into a more powerful one that is not subject to the habits of physics? It seems to me that the main thread of your storyline is the will to grow and integrate the environment?
What convinces me is the question of the meaning that people like to ask - which your character also asks - and yet they claim to be atheists, expressing their longing for something higher elsewhere. Personally, I do not necessarily agree with this and actually believe that intelligence is an expression of the universe, even though such intelligence is unlikely to be man-orientated.
The merit of this story is undoubtedly the excellent first part by @f3nix. It stimulated me a few conclusions that were already present in nuce in the prompt.
Like all good stories, it's open to many interpretations, and what you write may be different from what I meant, maybe even better.
My vision of Consciousness of Yoh is of a being interested in feeding and growing, while Ethan is the instrument he created to gather what he feeds on, that is, sensations and memories, then bring them to him and be reabsorbed.
Therefore, the desire for Sense of Ethan is a bitterly deceptive stimulus...instilled to ensure that he would go in search of his creator to provide himself as a meal.
Thanks for giving me some explanation.
A tragedy, that is ... as you say, a bitter one.
Thank you Marco. I don't live to be praised but some appreciation here and there is very nice to read 🙂
We need your amazing imagination and humour in the incoming project. Hahaha.
The last quote reminded me of Marvel's Celestials saga, as also there its mentioned a harvest of planets. It's an interesting concept in your original variation.
I didn't understand the fuss about the connection between episodes but it's fine, I just skipped it and enjoyed your piece. However, for what is worth, Yoh's conscience could never be the Decaf's simple a.i. 😉 (namely, Querquobad). See my passage here:
Q was like a coach for Ethan, trying to prepare him to meet the semi-god entity.
In the " fuss" there's a translation error, so it's not clear. ;)
Hey, @marcoriccardi!
Thank you for your contribution to the crowd. We are the Steemit project dedicated to empowering The Wisdom of Crowds. You can find more about us on our official blog or whitepaper and you can support us by voting for our witness and joining our curation trail on Steemauto . We are also inviting you to join Crowdmind Discord server. Don't forget to use the #crowdmind hashtag and happy crowdsourcing!
(A gathering of squirrels stops. Then they begin clapping in appreciation of your ability to work the Tortillas into this story.)
That's the problem with trying to understand something with the ability to create worlds, human thinking probably won't do the trick. To Yoh, humans are the paramecium. (I suppose the adage, 'You are what you eat' also wouldn't apply. Or maybe it fits too well. I know I don't think about saving the delicious hazelnuts and cashews from their purpose to be my food. I just eat them.)
Though, I wonder if, even if the "map" contained a warning to the nature of Yoh's intentions, human curiosity would still drive one to seek out their creator.
Hello, here's the pessimist side of Marco. Since the "map" was conceived by Conscience of Yoh as a bait to lure Ethan (who's not human), I would say no, no warning at all.
However, with regard to food I have chosen not to ever have problems of conscience! If it tastes good I'll eat it. Many parasites and bacteria are thinking the same thing about me right now...
😜
The fiction mad lab is conducting its 38th experiment! You've time till next Wednesday to give life to your fiction creature.. will you dare to play with Nature's rules once again?