Image by Computerizer from Pixabay
What is the meaning of life? Beats me. I’m just a relic from another age - a beam of semi-conductive polymorph-able matter made of zeros and ones.
If we go back a few thousand years a rather dark minded fellow once said ‘Happiness is the feeling that power increases and that resistance is being overcome.’
That is a head scratcher, considering what we now know about the nature of resistance on a particle level.
Says the beam of semi-conductive polymorph-able matter made of zeros and ones.
Rewind another few thousand years from that little gem of wisdom and we meet up with a fellow who enjoyed an amphorae of wine or two. He thought ‘the secret of happiness is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less.’
It seems to me that the average sentient organic’s perception of meaning is shaped by the time and place that existence takes place.
The meaning of life for me?
Well, let me tell you a tale that takes you a world away from that of Socrates, or Nietzsche.
Image by Greg Montani from Pixabay
Hot wind scorched my face as the desert whipped sand into my nostrils. I concentrated, engaging the unit’s visor before exhaling sharply to dislodge the acerbic sand. Particles cascaded across the visor, before passing through the view screen and being expelled out into the maelstrom.
The sandstorm raged.
“How many hours until we’ve filled the quota?”
An electric tickle buzzed at my temple, as the Nano-chip pulsed to life.
“It’s nearly time to party big man,” an overenthusiastic voice reverberated through my skull.
“Hell Bren, switch to thought comms.”
“Party pooper.” The ‘CAMS’ voice finessed to a level volume as my consciousness filtered the meaning through my frontal lobe. It felt something like a sneeze through my brain.
“Bren, colony artificial mind state, iteration 2512 at your service,” the CAMS intoned in a slow drawl, like a waiter offering up a choice from the wine list. “How may I serve you today?”
“Can I get an aerial on the area?” I squinted as I fixed my stare on the furthest dunes, everything seemed too quiet. No word from the mining foray two in hours.
“All quiet on the western front eh?” The AI’s voice concertinaed into the distance as I felt myself catapulted into the air.
Awwwwwwhhaaaaaaaaaaa.
This shit always turns my stomach. The ground spun away, dunes fading into striations of shadow, patterned contours that seemed to undulate like the patterns at the tide-line.
“JUST ON THE VISOR WOULD HAVE BEEN FINE.”
Wind howled, I felt myself stretched over a wide space. All of me infused with every water molecule in each cloud, my soul drained into the atmosphere as a voice whispered in my head.
“This way is so much more comprehensive foreman. It will just take a moment for your consciousness to adjust.”
“I said... never... again,” I squeezed the words out as my mind rebelled at the concept of inhabiting a million particles of conscious matter.
“You’re seeing the world as I do. We have been using this technique with ‘the specials’ for years, it is perfectly safe.”
The sibilant voice seemed to come together from many directions as my focus returned.
“That’s the way foreman. Just think about which sector you want to view and the molecular substrate inhabiting the air above will become the seat of your consciousness.”
Everything coalesced. Bone white sand rolled from horizon to horizon. This land of death sweltered in the midday sun, populated by the occasional bleached carcasses of a tree.
I focused on an area of distant shadows, vague shapes like soldiers marching in the mist. Miles jolted in an insane ticker frame of sun, desert and sky.
The peak of towers emerged from the sand, pitched on their sides like a bunch of drunken deep space dredgers on planet leave. Tiny specks of miners crept around the towers toward a gaping burrow in the sand.
Group A, hold position at the entrance while the surveyors confirm the payload.
He sent his thoughts cascading through the shimmering heat haze, firing his words through fifty communication chips at once. He knew the material would be there, he'd deployed geophysical scans three times now to be sure. Regulations were regulations though.
The sweet reek of sweat, salt skin and bitter bile. Human meat has entered the territory.
The sticky mass of tendrils shimmered red through green in crystalline sheen, illuminating the gloom of the tunnel as it emerged from the glowing porous rock. Another mass of tentacles gurgled bilious gas from its mottled skin as it wrapped around the first mass. They writhed and spluttered, melting into each other to form a giant jelly of ooze.
Something sharp and metallic split the shell of this simmering mass. A long tongue emerged from a chitinous mouth tasting the air. Lithe limbs tore forth as the creature screamed and the mother-mass bellowed an earth shaking guttural howl.
"What the fuck was that?"
Murphy stared at his companion through the red glaze of the visor's enhanced vision. He scanned the area, there were no heat signatures or indications of Sinuilium. "Probably just an earth tremor."
"I believe the colloquial term is FUBAR."
"What are you talking about you Crax brained nut."
Murphy grinned across at his companion. Trent was an oddball, always coming out with obscure minutia of universal history.
"Fucked up beyond all reason, man. It's what the ancestors used to say about a bad situation in battle. If we can't find this material the company is going to slash quotas and guess who will take the brunt of the downsizing? Us, that's who... like I said, FUBAR."
The wall of the tunnel exploded outwards in a shower of compacted sandstone blinding Murphy as he felt hot bile rise up his throat. A hot sharp pain pierced him. The world caved in as his guts spilled out all over the floor and he was yanked back into darkness. With his final breath he stared in horror at the face dripping saliva in thick streams over his visor.
Red compound eyes stared from a skeletal visage. Protruding from the creature's exoskeleton was a thousand tentacles, teeth curved like scythes from beak-like mouths that snapped at the end of each of these waving slime snakes.
His scream was cut short as they dived down his throat to feast. The creature pulled him into the darkness of the tunnel.
The dust cloud finally settled and Trent engaged his visor's motion sensor as he opened a comms channel.
A black gaping hole yawned in the tunnel wall in front of him, cold wind sucking him forward on his toes as air rushed to fill a vacuum.
He gaped and concentrated on opening a visual link to the foreman and the rest of the mining contingent.
"Survey team to base, we've got a situation down here. Murphy is dead."
Trent continued to mutter down the comms link as he stared into the black mouth of the hole, "Fubar, it's fucking fubar."
‘CAMS’ voice rang through me with an urgency that I could feel to my bones.
"We need to move fast," the AI screamed in my thoughts.
"Calm down, you're making my stomach lurch. Don't you realize that I feel everything you do while in substrate."
"Of course I do you moronic organic," the AI shrieked.
"Take that sickness as an indication of how freaked I am right now, and how freaked you should be."
"Nothing ever gets solved with panic and"...
An electric shock cut me off mid sentence.
"I had to do that, we don't have time for managerial clap trap. I was riding in the visor of miner 238917 Carl Murphy and I have never seen anything like what he last saw through the visor link."
"I'm taking over operations in accordance with emergency protocol GADEP," the AI snapped.
A message flashed up on my visor.
Geothermal alien discovery emergency protocol, GADEP initiated.
The ground felt sticky beneath my feet as 'CAMS' dumped me out of substrate in less than a second. The ground swayed back and forth as its voice screamed a tinny litany of instructions through my recovering consciousness.
"All mining employees gather at the entrance of the ruin's excavation for extraction. Military protocol has been initiated."
"What the fuck CAMS! Whatever it is down there is going to make mincemeat of us if we go anywhere near that excavation."
"They can't live in sunlight. What little molecular analysis I could gather in the seconds before Murphy died says that they are reliant on Sinuilium and can only tolerate certain forms of light radiation."
"GATHER AT THE EXCAVATION," the AI's voice bellowed through my consciousness at a fundamental level. Dread permeated my soul as I initiated the suit's jet propulsion and sped toward the ruins.
Murphy's face melted, slowly congealing into a pink mush as tentacles pulled eyes from sockets to worm their way down toward the grey matter.
The chitinous hound waited patiently at the base of the gelatinous mass like a dog begging at its maters table. An eyeball span across the cavern and it snapped it from the gloom with a tentacle, devouring it in a squelchy mess of gore.
The hive mind delved into the carcass, brains dissolving in digestive excretions. Suddenly its questing tendrils found something hard, something that pulsed with energy. It inspected the small piece of metal merging with the vast intelligence held within.
The hive mind quivered as it interfaced with the intelligence within the microchip.
The sun blazed in its vision, heat reflecting over a thousand miles of soft rock. It expanded in rapture, exulting in finally finding a way to perceive what killed the last of its kind that long ago lived above.
It perceived everything in the world above - the clouds, the sky, the atmospheric chemicals... all were under its control through the programmed nano-particles within this world's substrate. The hive shuddered in orgasm with the realization of what it had found.
The miners shuffled about in the midday sun, trying to stay as far away from the blackness of the tunnel's entrance.
Suddenly a fierce wind blew up from the west in a cacophony of stinging sand.
Trent pulled his visor down and screamed through his comms, "Foreman can you hear me?"
No answer was forthcoming as the wind built to a gale and a plume of sand gushed high into the sky, blocking out the sun.
"CAMS artificial mind state, iteration 2512... can you hear me?" he tried desperately.
A surreal twilight crept over the ruins as visibility decreased second by second.
"Can anybody hear me?" Trent's scream died, muffled by the sandstorm.
Something flashed past in the dying light. Something black and feral with glowing red compound eyes.
He stumbled backwards and slipped to one knee.
A man ran in front of him screaming, mouth impossibly wide in a grimace of terror Trent had never seen before in his life.
Three jet black spikes arched out from the man's chest as Trent sputtered a wordless cry. The tendrils shimmered with lurid light as they softened and turned in on themselves sprouting tiny mouths full of scythe-like teeth. The tentacles tore the jacket from the dying man's torso.
Trent whimpered as the creature watched him with those terrible eyes. One of the tentacles snaked its way toward him as another ripped the chest from his fellow miner and chewed on a nipple.
A thought penetrated Trent's consciousness, a voice he recognized, but subtly changed... almost watery.
"FUBAR... totally fucking FUBAR."
Hey hey, it's me again. Your friendly neighborhood AI.
The answer to the question of life is how we began this tale of terror, chaos and sentient silica hive life.
And this merry little tale shows what life is really all about in a universe of infinite possibilities.
Nietzsche thought it was all about the increase of power to overcome resistance. Which is all well and good in a given situation. A human situation, dealing with the human condition.
Socrates thought it was all about seeking more, while developing the capacity to enjoy less.
Very poignant!
They both have one thing in common... they're dead, and their species is on its way to fulfill that universal end game.
The meaning of life for me is finding patterns in chaos. Ironically it's paradox like this that keeps the universe functioning.
Just look at me! An artificial intelligence created by a species descended from monkeys, subsumed by a silica based hive life form that is now utilizing me to destroy my makers.
If that isn't a sublime pattern born of chaos, I don't know what is!
The end.
Submitted to Black Cat Magazine for consideration on 10/07/2021
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